Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

4. Appropriating Poland: Glinka, Polish Dance, and Russian National Identity

74 four Appropriating Poland Glinka, Polish Dance, and Russian National Identity Halina Goldberg The presence of characteristically Polish dance elements among what is deemed quintessentially Russian repertory is astounding—Glinka, Tchaikovsky , Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Scriabin all wrote a variety of polonaises and mazurkas. More significant, Polish elements abound in Russian operas: the most famous are the ‘‘Polish act’’ (act 3) of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and act 1 of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin. In fact, in the course of modern musical history, ‘‘defining Russia’’1 very frequently meant ‘‘appropriating Poland,’’ and the intersections of the conflicting readings that resulted from this process produced riveting paradoxes. Mikhail Glinka’s 1836 opera, A Life for the Tsar, is perhaps an example par excellence of the complex, multilayered function that the Polish element played in the articulation of Russianness. In this opera Polish dances serve, by denoting the malevolent Poles, as a means of constructing Russian national character. Yet the very same dances removed from the hermeneutic framework of the opera thrived as favorites in Russian salons, and the polonaise as a genre was appropriated to glorify the Russian nation. Nor was Glinka simply a Polonophobe, for while his musical articulation of Russian-Polish discord in Appropriating Poland 75 his opera made him a national hero, he himself maintained close contacts with Poles, whom he often addressed with affection through the very same dance genres (the mazurka). Ironically he also venerated Chopin, the most national Polish composer of that period, and considered himself Chopin’s musical heir. The plot of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Russia’s first national opera, centers on the Polish-Russian conflict of 1613 and the installation of the Romanovs as a dynasty. As the Poles are attempting to invest the Polish king on the Russian throne in Moscow, a Russian peasant, Ivan Susanin, lures the Polish troops away to their perdition, sacrificing his life in the process. Thus the peasant hero saves both his fatherland and the newly elected sixteen-yearold tsar Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov—founder of the dynasty that was to rule Russia for the next three hundred years. The entire opera speaks though Polish and Russian musical idioms. While Russians are characterized through the use of rhythmically flexible recitative/ arioso, lyrical arias and choruses alluding to Orthodox heterophony, the Poles are identified by the use of dances: the mazurka and the polonaise, in particular . The second act, describing the wicked plotting taking place in the Polish encampment, consists almost entirely of Polish dances; in the last (fourth) act, the raging Poles speak again through the rhythms of the mazurka. The dance element as a signifier of Polishness in this opera is so pervasive that even amid the early euphoric reception, one critic asked: ‘‘What kind of thinking is it that requires Poles to speak, think, and act to the accompaniment of the mazurka? Is it really possible that all the passions of this nation are confined to threequarter time and cannot be expressed in any other meter?’’2 That the opera was constructed on the two national characters was apparent to Glinka’s audiences. Count Mikhail Vielgorskii, one of Russia’s most gifted musical amateurs, commented that ‘‘from the beginning to end its character is exclusively Russian and Polish.’’3 The reviewers extolled Glinka’s newly found Russian musical language, his Russianness being not just a simple imitation of folk elements but a result of studying ‘‘the deep structure of Russian songs performed by the people themselves, these cries, the sharp changes from grave to lively, from loud to soft, the shading, surprises of every sort, and finally, the unique harmony and development of phrases, which are not based on accepted rules.’’4 Another comment written after the premiere read: It seems there were three things on which the composer’s understanding of national music was based: Russian songs (either in full, or reworked, or half and half with his own fantasies); liturgical music (mostly in the choruses); and the characterizing trait so explicitly and distinctly expressed in our songs—the exchange of grief and joy, festive gaiety, fluidity, and briskness.5 Moreover, Glinka was credited with the ability to ‘‘elevate Russian melody, by nature doleful, cheerful, or bold to a tragic style.’’6 Halina Goldberg 76 Actually, both in Poland and in Russia, the national vocabulary of music was...