César Cui (1835-1918)
César Antonovich Cui (1835-1918) is a rather unusual and contradictory figure in the history of Russian music. One of the earliest members of the "Mighty Handful", he was never quite able to shake off the influence of his first mentor, the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-72), and assimilate the elements of the "new Russian school of music". The author of a considerable number of operas (mostly on non-Russian subjects), romances, orchestral suites, and even works of chamber music, as a composer Cui lacked that special force of talent and originality which his colleagues in the Balakirev circle were so richly endowed with [1]. Born to a Lithuanian mother and a Frenchman who had stayed behind in Russia after the retreat of Napoléon's Grande Armée, he was, together with Stasov—and sometimes even surpassing him in polemic ardour—the principal spokesman of the kuchka in the Russian press, and as music critic of the widely-read Saint Petersburg Gazette he lost no opportunity to attack the "stuffy Germanism" which prevailed in the city's conservatory. Although he had written enthusiastically about the three scenes from Boris Godunov which were staged in 1873, when the whole opera was finally staged in the Mariinsky Theatre the following year, Cui published a crushing review which greatly hurt Musorgsky and the other members of the kuchka. Only a few years later, however, in his well-known book La musique en Russie (published in Paris in 1880), he would praise Musorgsky's opera as one of the most original ever written, and in 1883, together with Rimsky-Korsakov, he resigned from the Imperial Opera Committee after the majority of its members voted against a staging of Khovanschina. A fervent supporter of the musical realism proclaimed by Dargomyzhsky in The Stone Guest, he nevertheless demanded beauty and imagination from works of music....
Despite all these contradictions, Turgenev for his part had no doubts as to what to make of Cui. In his view, the music critic of the Saint Petersburg Gazette was a reckless iconoclast who had the impudence to rubbish the greatest works of Mozart (including The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni), as well as of other European masters of the past, calling their music hopelessly "antiquated" and "boring"! Quite apart from the special love which he had always felt for Mozart's music, Turgenev must have seen in Cui's articles of the 1860s and 70s yet another manifestation of the radical "nihilism" which he had taken issue with in his most famous novel, Fathers and Children (1862). There, Bazarov's friend Arkady defines this new tendency in Russian society as follows:
"A nihilist is someone who does not bow down before any authorities, who does not take any principle for granted, however much that principle may be held in reverence." (Ch. V)
However, Cui, as the herald of the "new Russian school"'s most extreme aesthetic ideas, not only did not bow down before the authority of such masters as Mozart, Bach, and Haydn, but also wanted to overthrow them from their pedestals through his articles, which were always full of aggressive irony. It was precisely after reading one of these articles (in which Cui had called The Marriage of Figaro "decrepit") that Turgenev, in a letter to a friend in 1868, gave vent to his indignation:
"...For his foul words about Mozart, Mr Cui really ought to be killed, to have his empty head smashed in with a dirty stone and then to be thrown into a pit together with all these... But I'd better stop, as I'm feeling a rush of bile coming up from my stomach" [2]
As is well-known, the figure of the "all-Russian critic and enthusiast" Skoropikhin who appears briefly in the novel Virgin Soil (1876) was meant by Turgenev to be a caricature of Stasov, but in the way he is described there are also certain traits which bring to mind Cui. Thus, another character in the novel says of him:
"According to Skoropikhin every ancient work of art is worth absolutely nothing precisely because it is old..." (Ch. II)
The very name "Skoropikhin" (made up from the adverb skoro = "quick" and the verb pikhat' = "to elbow aside") vividly conveys the alacrity with which Russian "nihilists" like Cui or Stasov liked to dismiss established authorities [3].
The actress Maria Savina as Verochka
in the famous staging of Turgenev's A Month
in the Country at the Alexandrinsky Theatre
in Saint Petersburg in 1879.
A further reason for the animosity which Turgenev felt towards Cui was the fact that the latter had severely criticized the album of Russian songs by Pauline Viardot (to texts by Lermontov and Turgenev himself) which appeared in Saint Petersburg in early 1869 [4]. Turgenev counter-attacked in the article which he published in the Saint Petersburg Gazette later that year regarding the première of Mme Viardot's operetta Le dernier sorcier (to a French libretto by Turgenev) in Weimar. In this article he observed that Mme Viardot, given her outstanding musicality, had a greater right to attempt to compose Russian songs than "all those shoddy retired staff-captains and faded society ladies who supply our musical market, and who piece their little romances together by ear, tapping the piano with one finger" [5]. The reference to "shoddy staff-captains" may well have been a jibe at Cui, who was a military fortifications engineer by profession (eventually rising to the rank of general in 1906), and whose many popular romances were composed in his spare time.
When the actress Maria Savina (1854-1915)—who had given a remarkable performance as Verochka in the 1879 revival of Turgenev's comedy A Month in the Country—suggested to Cui in 1904 that he compose an opera based on Turgenev's novel A Nest of the Gentry (1858), he refused, arguing that there was too little action in the novel for it to be effectively adapted for the stage. At the same time, though, he admitted that it contained many highly musical and poetic scenes [6]. An opera based on this novel—in which music features so prominently through the figure of the old German music-teacher Herr Lemm—would eventually be created in 1916, by the talented, but now forgotten Russian composer Vladimir Rebikov (1866-1920).
Notes:
-
In his memoirs the composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935) noted how Cui altogether lacked the gift of orchestration, and how he was successful only in his romances and the melodious passages of his operas. See: M. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov, 50 let russkoi muzyki v moikh vospominaniakh (Moscow, 1934), p. 103 [back]
-
Letter to Varvara Kartashevskaya, 16/28 February 1868. See: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols (Leningrad, 1961-68), Pis'ma, vii, p. 66 [back]
-
Interestingly, a variant of the name "Skoropikhin" appears in the preliminary sketches for Fathers and Children which Turgenev drew up while on holiday on the Isle of Wight in August 1860, and which were first brought to light by Patrick Waddington in 1984. The plan for the epilogue mentions, alongside Sitnikov, a certain Skoropikhov, who is also supposed to be one of Bazarov's disciples, but in reality has none of the latter's spiritual greatness. These sketches, which are invaluable for comparison with the actual novel, have been incorporated into the second Academy edition of Turgenev's Complete Works: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow, 1978-), Sochineniia, xii (1986), p. 563-576. They are also included as an appendix in Richard Freeborn's translation of the novel for the Oxford World's Classics series: Fathers and Sons (1991, reprinted many times) [back]
-
See: April FitzLyon, The Price of Genius: A Life of Pauline Viardot (London, 1964), p. 411 [back]
-
From Turgenev's article 'The first performance of Mme Viardot's opera in Weimar' (1869). See: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols (Leningrad, 1961-68), Sochineniia, xiv, p. 296 [back]
-
See Cui's letter of 8/20 February 1904 to M. S. Kerzina, in: Ts. A. Kiui, Izbrannye pis'ma (Leningrad, 1955), p. 316 [back]