Russian music obviously responds to the circumstances of this nation.
VALERY GERGIEV Conductor Russian music as Russian country as a whole
can be big, dangerous spectacular, never boring.
'You cannot understand Russia with the mind,' said the romantic poet Tutchev
'The only way to grasp it is to believe in it.'
In this series of films, we try to grasp the history
and culture of this vast and remarkable nation through its music.
Our companions on the journey are Valery Gergiev
and the Kirov Orchestra, Opera and Ballet company.
Based at the historic Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg,
they are acknowledged as one of the greatest companies in the world.
The Little Birch Tree
This first programme looks at the land itself
and charts how the village and countryside
have moulded Russia's history, character and music.
Russian composers were attracted to simple people
'narod ' as we say the people.
All the traditional rituals for example, wedding
you can't imagine without music.
The village was the soul of Russia.
The land fed us spiritual nourishment,
SERGEl STAROSTIN Singer and Vusician and gave us all Russia's musical styles.
The village was a world within a world.
The village had everything the city had.
It was a parallel world.
Before revolution, St Petersburg consisted mostly from peasants.
Eighty percent of the population were born in the village.
So it was half a big village, half city.
They tried to survive in the city in the way
LEV LURYE Historian in which they were living in the village.
It was greatest frustration, greatest shock to the majority of them
never having seen big buildings from stone, trams, trains, electricity
and the relationship between city and country still is very strong.
Almost every Russian family has a house in the country,
or relatives who live outside the town.
VASCHA VESCHERSKY Petersburg resident There we grow all sorts of things, vegetables, fruits and berries.
These berries grow in a forest or marsh.
They are cranberries.
Because winters in Russia are very cold,
it's pricey and hard to buy fresh produce.
All these things preserve the nutrition of the warm summer.
The Russian village lived a yearly cycle.
There were defined stages which repeated.
STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring
In ancient Russia the year began with Spring.
In Spring work on the land started the main agricultural work was done.
The rituals and songs which greeted the Spring conditioned the year's success.
The Russians, like any rural people were linked to this natural progression.
The change of seasons is very clear.
The different colours of Winter, Spring, and Summer are clearly defined.
All this is reflected in Russian music.
Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' was first performed in 1913.
His theme was ancient, pagan Russia and the elemental power of the land itself.
'The violent Russian spring,' he described it,
'that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.'
Stravinsky somehow caught this feeling
it seems to be like the wakening of the world.
There are still people who remember the way their grandfathers,
grandmothers were singing sixty, seventy years ago.
It was Glinka who was saying that music is created by the people,
we composers just arrange it.
We think of Glinka as a father of Russian music.
GLINKA A Life for the Tsar
'Life for the Tsar' many, many things happened for the first time in Russian history.
There was first grand big opera composed by a Russian composer.
At the same time, the wedding chorus is a traditional ritual song,
the first folk element put into Russian opera.
The Khorovod is a circle dance.
It's linked to the movement of the sun. It's an element of ancient eastern Slav ritual.
Here in western Russia, and all over the country.
NINA SAVELIVA Folklorist the khorovod is one of the most widespread and ancient forms of dancing with singing.
This khorovod is part of ritual celebrations
in the village of Vereshaki in the far west of Russia.
It takes place each year, six weeks after Easter.
Even folklorists didn't know about this ritual until recently.
The Soviets didn't like the link to the church calendar.
They even gave an order not to celebrate it.
But the tradition was so strong they celebrated all the same.
Let the cornfield sprout.
Let the grains grow.
God! If it's in your power, give us health, long life and much happiness.
The ritual comes from our great grandmothers, it dispels evil and gives us crops.
BABA NINA Villager Stops lightening killing people.
At Ascension we bury the evil force here.
GLINKA Kamarinskaya
On this simple shepherd's flute,
I played the well-known Kamarinskaya tune.
It was popular in central and western Russia.
It's a ritual dance melody.
Glinka was the first Russian composer to use folk tunes in his work.
His Kamarinskaya was written in 1848.
There are two main themes.
The second theme reflects Russian soulfulness.
The expanse of Russia.
Most themes we think of as typically Russian...
Have two intervals related to Russian speech the fourth and the fifth.
The melody comes from the contour of the words.
It's a typical Russian melody.
BALAKIREV Overture on Russian Themes
It must be varied Clarinets, oboes and flutes play,
Grandpa Balakirev doesn't want it all beautiful.
Play it more interestingly.
An accent in the second bar.
In the mid-19th century, a group of composers
made a conscious attempt to form a Russian school.
Balakirev, their ideological leader, said that by using folk music
'composers voiced the musical treasures of the nation'.
In his overture he quotes a popular song of the time, 'The Little Birch Tree'.
Everyone is playing...
Everyone is playing the same rhythm.
Give it the character of a folk dance.
If you come to a birch grove,
you can feel what the birch means for Russians.
VITALY FEDKO Folklorist It's a special sensation no other tree gives something clean, lofty, ideal.
I'd say it's the essence of the Russian soul.
That's why Balakirev and Tchaikovsky both used the melody.
Tchaikovsky used it in his 4th Symphony.
Yes, maybe he was thinking of Russia and birch trees,
one of those symbols of his country.
And it's also a very very nice melody.
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony NO.4
It's very simple in a way primitive, like the birch tree itself.
The tune isn't very old.
It probably comes from the 18th or 19th century.
It's a dance melody used for khorovods inside the house in Winter.
BALAKIREV Overture on Russian Themes
VALENTIN VORONOVSKY Farmer I was born and raised on a collective farm.
Recently I retired.
I have three hectares of land.
I cultivate it and keep cattle.
I work with my wife and family.
Maybe life will get better, maybe worse.
He who's born on the land must die on the land.
If you don't work, you get nothing.
The type of Russian peasant formed by the country life,
which was loved both by Dostoevsky and by Tolstoy,
is based on idea of working hard, thinking about kids,
dying and the kids will live by the same life.
It's like a part of nature.
Probably this life formed the Russian political system
which is based, as village life, on authority.
So the Russian history in 19th
and specially in the 20th century is a life of authoritarian state.
The peasants, they have to be authoritarian.
I think we can see it not only in Russia but in a lot of rural countries.
'When I'm sad,' wrote Balakirev, 'I look at the silvery colour of the Volga,'
'and around the fires of the barge-haulers I listen to the Volga's songs.'
In 1860 he made a trip along the river
and was the first major Russian composer to collect folk music in the field.
From three tunes he collected, he composed his symphonic poem, 'Rus'.
BALAKIREV Overture on Russian Themes
When serfdom was abolished in 1861.
Artists became interested in folk motifs.
IRINA SHUVALOVA Russian Vuseum The life of ordinary people their suffering, their pride, their hopes.
Painters, composers and writers,
Russian artists were united in their interest in the peasants.
The people rise before me, in all their reality,
huge, unvarnished with no tinsel trappings!
So wrote Mussorgsky to Repin, the leader of the 'ltinerant' painters.
The wide Volga was a symbol of the motherland.
On the Volga a gang of barge-haulers.
Repin admired these people.
He painted their individual characteristics.
Repin depicted everyday life in a new way.
The 'ltinerant' artists were very musical.
They went to concerts, met composers.
When the 'ltinerants' opened their exhibitions,
they would get together to sing folksongs.
Songs like 'To the Volga' and 'The Volga Boatmen'.
That famous song was nearly always sung.
In the 1870s peasant protests started.
The intelligentsia felt the strength of the people.
And their importance in the social fabric.
Repin wrote: 'Now the peasant is the judge... You've got to depict his aspirations'.
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony NO.4
Some composers found the peasant unrest and aspirations unsettling.
Tchaikovsky described such socialist ideals as 'a senseless utopia',
and 'discordant with the natural qualities of human nature'.
Tchaikovsky, Balakirev and Stravinsky used the same melodies.
Stravinsky really grasped the essence of folk music.
His music contains that wild energy.
STRAVINSKY Petrushka
I remember the first time I heard a real village accordionist.
It was pure Stravinsky.
He took chords and moved them around.
He played with tonalities and rhythms.
I'm sure Stravinsky had heard this. That's the secret of his style.
Russian folklore is our musical wealth.
I think Stravinsky really made the best use of what was available there
to go to the top and become a Tsar, you know, of the music.
And 'Le Sacre' was the best army he led.
STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring
'Pictures of Pagan Russia' is how Stravinsky described.
'The Rite of Spring' - a solemn, pagan rite.
Elders seated in a circle watching a young girl dance herself to death.
The Kostroma ritual, which still survives in parts of Russia,
could have its roots in something similar.
There's a doll which represents a person.
Everyone blesses it, loves it, exalts it.
Then they tear it apart or drown it. It's a sacrifice.
This is an eternal doll.
We bid farewell to Spring and throw it into the harvest.
BABA LENA Villager We rip it to pieces and then begin work.
We carry it to the rye field and rip it there.
In the Russian village there was no private property.
The majority of the arable land belonged to the peasant commune.
So the October Revolution was a natural result of Russian history.
The idea of equality, which was laying in the principles of Socialism,
was very popular in Russia always
and I should say, still is among millions of Russians.
There was a big difference between collective farms and peasant communes.
But the collective farms were collective in the sense
that the vast majority of the peasants were equal in their poverty
and equal in the hard labour.
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony NO.3 "May Day"
We're not so impressed with this 3rd Symphony of Shostakovich.
It was expected that he will be part of the machine, state machine, iron rules.
I have to say that it is not the most honest document from Dmitri Shostakovich
unless you think that he maybe wanted to compose something
ugly and something distorted.
Like life.
MYASKOVSKY Symphony NO.6
Myaskovsky wrote his 6th Symphony in the 1920s.
There had been a change of a way of life that had existed for centuries.
It was a farewell to a world that had long mesmerised Russian music,
Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Musorgsky, Stravinsky.
Your hear the folk laments of central Russia.
I hear great sadness and a farewell.
The countryside was in a disastrous state.
For urban people, it was necessary to rehabilitate the idea of the countryside.
That's why they created epic films.
There was a wonderful film, The Kuban Cossacks.
It was a fictional Soviet view of the countryside.
They attempted to replace traditional culture with state culture.
Things like the famous Russian state ensembles.
They had no connection to Russian tradition.
Russian dolls and so on, these things are well-known to tourists in Russia.
But few know there's real traditional culture.
It has survived despite the cultural politics.
Autumn is very different from Summer.
It's the beautiful dying of nature.
Autumn is less reflected in Russian traditions.
Because people were busy with the harvest.
The beginning of Autumn is a beautiful time.
The forest is still warm and light.
And mushrooms appear.
Mushrooms are like a safety valve for every Russian.
A chance to leave work and go the forest,
IRINA SOBOLEVA Pianist join with nature and gather mushrooms. It's a pleasant occupation everyone enjoys.
When you find the brown caps of boletus,
When you take home a basket full of mushrooms,
It's a beautiful sight.
MUSORGSKY Collecting Mushrooms
Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms
I am young and I collect them quickly
For my father in law and mother in law Who are always complaining
For you, my old husband
A basket of poisonous mushrooms
He eats them and chokes
But for you, my fair-haired lover
I'll make a soft grass bed
On this beautiful bed
We'll have a special night
Under a canopy of leaves
You'll sleep with a happy widow
The most prominent element of the social life of Russia
in the 20th century is the process of urbanisation.
In the beginning of the 20th century there was,
as Marx put it, rural over-population in Russia.
Eighty seven percent of the population
were living in the village and only thirteen in cities.
At the end of the 20th century,
something like eighty percent of the population were born in the city.
Only 20 percent live in the country.
And now, in the beginning of the new millennium,
the village is a country of drunkenness and poverty.
There is a lot of old women, very few young people.
So, in the beginning of the 20th century,
it was one country and in the end it is another country.
MUSORGSKY Songs and Dances of Death
A child moans
Rocking the cradle all night The mother hasn't slept
Early in the morning Creeping to the door
Death knocks
The mother shudders and glances around
Don't be frightened, my friend!
What is happening in the villages is frightening.
VALERY KONAVALOV Izvestia Journalist The consequence is no one to work on the land.
Now we can see before us.
Ruined houses.
Overgrown fields.
People leaving.
And the trend will continue unless something is done about it.
I bring peaceful sleep
Hushaby baby!
I spoke recently to Mikhail Gobachev.
He thinks his biggest mistake in perestroika,
was not to pay enough attention to village life.
The reforms didn't touch the countryside.
It stayed in the poor state it's always been in.
Europe is a country of stone, Russia is a country of wood.
In Europe from the beginning, from Rome, it was a country of cities.
So now Russia also is a country of cities
and more or less, in Russia we have free-market and some democracy.
So these give us, those who want democracy and free-market,
these give us a hope a country of citizens
who probably wouldn't go back to authoritarian regime.
There is the possibility of a rural revival.
A spiritual revival has started,
churches are re-opening.
If laws to make agricultural work profitable were enforced.
It would keep young people in the villages.
And it would bring back those who've gone to the cities.
Russians have a special link with the land. It's part of our national heritage.
MARTYNOV Night in Galicia
Moscow's Pokrovsky Ensemble was the first to go out
and re-connect with the real music of the countryside.
They perform both traditional Russian folk music
and new music that is still inspired by the country's rural traditions.
Martynov has been on expeditions.
He's heard the music and how it's performed.
In Martynov's music there's the incredible energy of folk music.
OLGA YUKYECHEVA Pokrovsky Ensemble Just as there is in Stravinsky.
'Night in Galicia' grows like a snowball.
It's not pure folk music, it is contemporary.
The richness of our universe and our planet and our world culture is - keep it your way:
You, keep it your way: And you, don't lose it either.
Once we start to lose it we will be all in trouble.
That's why I so welcome, when I hear there is some display of national culture.
It's not nationalism, it's not fascism, it's not arrogance, it's not over ambitious.
People have to remember who they are.
Tchaikovsky happened to be Russian.
Great poets and great artists and great composers
they were given this power: To hear, to document and to pass to others.