jul 1, 1836 - A Life for the Tsar

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Opera by Mikhail Glinka, the first great Russian composer.

Because of its musical continuity and its large-scale virtuoso vocal numbers, its multipart ensembles, and monumental finales, A Life for teh Tsar demonstrated Glinka's assimilation of the sophisticated Italian conventions most associated at the time with Rossini. But the opera also had French infleunces in its liberal use of recurring themes, ample choruses, popular tone, and even a giganti second-act ballet, just as could be seen at teh Paris Opera. Finally the work had German traits in its harmonic and contrapuntal complexity and in the prominence accorded its rich, colorful orchestra. It had both French spectacle and German greatness stamped all over it.

Glinka's nationalism was therefore paradoxically proven by his cosmopolitan eclecticism. But this seems more paradoxical to us than it did to the composer's contemporaries. Combining or uniting the best of the West--or, more generally, the best of the rest---was one highly preferred way of asserting Russianness for members of Glinka's generation. It affirmed the universality of Russian culture, hence its superiority to other cultures. Neverov praised Glinka's recitatives as teh wrold's finest, bnecause "they unite the expressivity and dramatic flexibility of the German with the melodiousness of the Italian."Russians drew an ever sharper and trhe "sensuality"of Italian opera. German music in Russian eyes was all brains without beauty; Italian music was all beauty without brains. Glinka resolved that his Russian music would uniquely have both brains and beauty.

The opera was actually named by Tsar Nicholas--originally it was to just have been named "Ïvan Susanin"

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