Tchaikovsky’s operas were not in the Italian tradition so despised by Stasov and others. He himself called “Evgenii Onegin” “lyric scenes” rather than an opera as it was a series of scenes strung together by the story, something Stasov should have liked but characteristically found reason to fault anyway. His operas used libretti based on Russian literature rather than folklore, and thus were “national” as well, but again in ways quite different from what Stasov advocated. They had none of the reflections on Russian history that prompted Mussorgsky and Rimskii-Korsakov to write, and by the late 1870s Tchaikovsky was politically quite conservative. In his correspondence he made fun of the idea of government without a strong tsar.
In some respects Tchaikovsky’s ballets were even more important, for they were not only great pieces of music, but the first native compositions of importance for the St. Petersburg ballet under Marius Petipa (1818–1910). Petipa came to Russia in 1847 as a dancer and by 1862 had become the principal choreographer at the Imperial Theater, the Mariinskii. Himself a product of the French ballet of the first half of the nineteenth century, he was the creator of ballet in Russia as we know it. From Petipa come not only a whole series of ballets now still in repertory but many of the now standard Russian practices, including the strong male roles that were unusual in the mid-nineteenth century. The ballet, even more than the opera, retained its ties to the court and had a predominantly aristocratic audience: a number of the ballerinas were also mistresses of the Grand Dukes and great aristocrats. As the ballet was directly subordinate to the Ministry of the Court, it was provided with lavish subsidies for the productions and support for Petipa until nearly the end of his life. As George Balanchine later put it, “St. Petersburg was now the ballet capital of the world.”
Russian music came to maturity in a relatively short period of time, the result of both state and private patronage. The continuation of the state theater system was a great boon to ballet, less so to opera, but by the 1890s operas could be staged by private companies subsidized by the Moscow industrialists. Rubinstein founded the Imperial Russian Music Society with court patronage to provide symphony concerts as early as the 1860s. Stasov and the Balakirev circle were particularly concerned to bring music to a larger public, founding a Free (not for payment) Music School and giving many semi-amateur concerts of choral music. At first the audiences were sparse, but by the 1890s St. Petersburg and Moscow boasted a number of concert series and private theaters and orchestras with growing and enthusiastic audiences. In the provinces small, mostly private music schools sprang up, creating music far from the capitals and producing many great musicians. The institutional basis of Russian music reflected the changing society of the time, combining as it did state subsidy and control, private patronage from the new class of industrialists, and intelligentsia activism. On this basis the composers and musicians were able to create and perform some of the world’s greatest music.
THE VISUAL ARTS
For Russia’s painters the most important event was the resignation of thirteen students from the Academy of Art in 1863. The students, led by the most talented of the group, Ivan Kramskoi, objected to the traditional conditions of the annual Gold Medal competition at the Academy. For these competitions the students were assigned a historical, mythological, or biblical subject for their painting, and the specific theme that year was “Odin in the Hall of Valhalla.” The winner received not just a medal but also a trip to Europe and the right to sell the painting from the Academy but Kramskoi and his colleagues would not accept the assigned subject. Instead they chose to resign from the Academy, thus forfeiting their chances to win, and formed a “Free Association of Artists.”
The Academy rebels were not alone in wanting to reject the academic models. Both the artistic conventions and the subject matter seemed to most younger artists to be old-fashioned and foreign, having nothing to do with the Russian reality changing so swiftly around them in the 1860s. Insofar as any of them had European models, they were Courbet and some of the German realist painters, but mostly the Russian painting that emerged in the decade had native roots in the genre painting of the 1850s and to some extent in Alexander Ivanov. The new painting was to be realist, and it was to depict the life of the Russian people in its fullest extent. Not surprisingly, the self-appointed spokesman of the new trend was once again Vladimir Stasov.
The association of the Academy rebels soon fell apart from internal squabbles, but in 1870 Kramskoi came up with the idea of the “Itinerant Association of Russian Artists,” designed to put on exhibits of their work not just in the capitals but in a variety of Russian cities. The idea was an immediate success, and many artists joined. The new association came to encompass virtually all Russian artists other than the privileged academicians. It found a new public beyond the St. Petersburg elites, bringing the work of its members to provincial audiences, to the intelligentsia and also to the emerging middle class. The exhibitions also brought the artists in contact with wealthy businessmen, the most important being the Moscow textile millionaires. Pavel Tretyakov had been collecting since 1856 and made his private collection available to the public from early on. He thus was able to support the artists by buying their work and also making it better known. In 1881 he opened the collection to the general public. Petersburg had no equivalent, though Tsar Alexander III did purchase many paintings, including the work of the Itinerants. Supposedly it was one of Repin’s religious paintings which Alexander bought at the Itinerant exhibition in 1889 that gave him the idea for establishing a museum of Russian art in St. Petersburg. It opened only in 1895, after Alexander’s death, in the Michael palace, the old residence of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna.
The Itinerants chose as their subject matter Russian landscape, genre scenes of life in the countryside, and portraits of the writers and artists of the day, as well as of the businessmen who served as their patrons. The most important was Ilya Repin, who made a sensation in 1873 with a simple depiction of workmen hauling a barge on the Volga. Though Repin’s sympathies were with the Itinerants, he was an Academy student and made use of its stipend to spend several years in Paris. Though he intensely admired the French painters of the time including Manet, and improved his technical skills, he remained true to the ideals of his Russian mentors and colleagues. His most famous paintings were the work of the 1880s, monumental canvasses depicting a religious procession in Kursk province, the return of a political prisoner to his family, and other subjects that implied mild criticism of the existing order. Repin also tried historical subjects, the most powerful being his painting of Ivan the Terrible in the moment after killing his son. Repin saw this work not as an unambiguous condemnation of despotism but as a tragedy of crime and repentance, though many among the public took it in a more political sense.
Repin was only the best known of many painters of the time. Vasilii Vereshchagin’s horrifying pictures of the wars in Turkestan and the Balkans were a sensation for their realistic depictions of the aftermath of battle. The Siberian Vasilii Surikov’s huge historical paintings, showing Peter the Great’s execution of the musketeers, the imprisonment of the Old Believer martyr Morozova, and the conquest of Siberia, formed Russia’s visual conception of its past for decades. The landscape painters, Ivan Shishkin with his forests and Isaak Levitan with his many elegiac rivers and fields with their churches conveyed the vastness and humble beauty of the Russian countryside. Most of these painters were pupils or friends of Repin, for St. Petersburg’s artistic life changed rapidly. The Academy was less of a threat as salons and studios appeared, as did new patrons. Tsar Alexander III was deeply impressed by Repin, bought more and more of the Itinerant paintings, and eventually the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg provided the city with its first museum devoted exclusively to Russian art. The rebels had found a supporter where they least expected it.