During the three decades before the Revolution, Russian music was part of a flourishing cultural world that was deeply entwined with wider European culture, particularly that of France. The term “Silver Age” is used mainly to describe Russian poetry of the time, but unlike the “Golden Age” in which Pushkin forged the Russian language into its literary form, the Silver Age was a time when music, dance and the visual arts were as glittering as the poetry, and artists thrived on collaborations across genres. When the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent civil war smashed through Russian society a hundred years ago, the close links between Russian and European music, and between Russian art, music and literature were shattered, and a new artistic world had to be built on what was left.
The defining force of the Silver Age was Symbolism, a reaction against the deterministic materialism of the industrialising world and the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century. The Russian Symbolists, like others across Europe, used art to search for and express deeper meanings behind the superficialities of the modern world, testing and breaking moral and spiritual boundaries in the process. Decadent poets like Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Gippius explored the ideas of theosophy, a mystical philosophy whose adherents sought to know God through spiritual ecstasy. Alongside them, Alexander Scriabin was developing these ideas in music, using chords and intervals as symbolic expressions. Scriabin’s Seventh Piano Sonata, “White Mass”, is awash with bells and incense, and explodes at the end in a blaze of light, whilst the Ninth, the “Black Mass” is a descent into a demonic vortex and, like all Scriabin’s later sonatas, they are marked by atonal dissonance and rhythmic complexity; absorbing, beautiful and absolutely terrifying – and that’s just for the listener.
As the symbolist movement matured, the everyday world and the gritty reality of life in big industrialised cities superimposed itself on the mysticism. One symbolic idea that found its way into all art forms was that of the puppet booth, and the poets Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely drew heavily on the commedia dell’arte figures of Harlequin, Columbine and Pierrot (reflecting their own love-triangle with Blok’s wife Lyuba). The most famous incarnation of the puppet booth love-triangle though is Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, a piece that demonstrates perfectly the fertile collaborations that existed across artistic genres, and one that for me, more than any other artistic work symbolises the febrile atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg.
Petrushka was the second of three ballets that Stravinsky wrote for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and, like The Firebird and the Rite of Spring, it draws heavily on Russian folk culture, this time with an overlay of urban grit. Diaghilev himself was the spider at the heart of the web of Russian Symbolism, energetically immersed in every aspect of Russian art, and through his aptly named Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement, he had exhibited artists and published poets. At one stage he had wanted to become a professional singer, and he had studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov: this musical background, combined with his fascination with the stage, led to Diaghilev founding the Ballets Russes in Paris, a dance company that broke away from the formalities of classical ballet, and put emphasis on natural, flowing movements. The vividly beautiful sets and costumes for The Firebird and Petrushka were designed by Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, two of the leading artists of the symbolist movement – their designs stand as works of art in their own right.
Benois asked Stravinsky to write a “symphony of the street” for Petrushka, and that is a perfect description of restless, fizzing energy of the ballet. It’s set in a puppet booth at maslenitsa, the Shrovetide fair, an event which in Russians allow themselves a brief moment of respite from their harsh winter. The maslenitsa of Petrushka seems much like one I went to once in Moscow: it’s not a pretty, bucolic occasion, but a grotesque urban carnival, marked by dirty snow, pushing crowds, tawdry entertainments and too much vodka; an outlet for all the tensions that would eventually lead to revolution.
By 1917, Stravinsky was already spending most of his time in Europe, and Sergei Rachmaninov, whose music was a continuation of the Romantic tradition, left Russia after the revolution when the regime seized his beloved country estate, Ivanovka. From the start, Sergei Prokofiev had a more complicated relationship with the Bolsheviks. He left Russia in 1918, but with in possession of a Soviet passport, and with the blessing of the Commissar for Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and he returned to live permanently in Russia in 1936. Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, written just before he left mirrored a trend in poetry led by Anna Akhmatova that turned away from decadence towards simplicity and grace, but Prokofiev is never easy to pin down, for in the same year wrote the cantata Seven, they are Seven, a demonic explosion of noise and energy that sets a text by the symbolist poet Konstantin Bal’mont based on a cuneiform inscription from Mesopotamia.