HOLY MOTHER RUSSIA
ARVO P�RT Tabula Rasa
My generation didn't sense that the religious culture could be so big and powerful.
VALERY GERGIEV Conductor It was only when I was sixteen or seventeen
I started to just learn, sense again that there was something very big.
Something which no regime can destroy.
They couldn't make people forget who they are.
Most people come to the conviction
TATIANA VIKHAILOVNA that they are moving towards God that their life is bound up with Him...
Belief in God is the foundation of life
It is necessary to know and feel God
Sooner or later most people come to God
In his notes to his novel 'The Devils',
Dostoevsky wrote: Russia is great and wonderful because it believes
and because it has Orthodoxy.
If Orthodoxy is everything, then Russia, too, is everything.
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Easter Festival Overture
This film is about faith
and its survival in Russian life and culture despite every attempt to crush it.
The most vivid evocation of a religious festival in Russian music
is by the agnostic Rimsky Korsakov.
Although he described his Easter Festival Overture
as 'a reminiscence of the ancient prophesy and a general picture of the Easter service',
it was the echoes of paganism beneath the Christian ritual which fascinated him.
'Do not the flowing beards of the priests', Rimsky wrote
'and the sextons in their white surplices, take one's imagination back to pagan times? '
Amazingly, there are certain habits and certain beliefs,
certain thinking which has survived this two or more thousand years.
People were thinking of fire, hunt, rain, water, thunder
they would also think of maybe of harvest because it was crucially important.
Then you think of different gods.
In areas of practising Pagans
VITALY FEDKO Folklorist when you hear these sounds
like...
I'd never heard such things, particularly with my cultural background.
Naturally, as soon as you heard these songs you understood they were in some way
connected to a very deep spiritual life to an ancient tradition
I still think there is nothing wrong, being, even now, a pagan.
Musically you can be,
you can insist that you love Mozart,
than you easily can insist that you also love Stravinsky.
STRAVINSKY Rite of Spring - The Sacrifice
The young Stravinsky, brought up in the Orthodox faith,
immersed himself in pre-Christian culture when he was conceiving the 'Rite of Spring'.
Stravinsky, of course, was Orthodox Russian,
so he wanted to take this journey
into the world of culture, into the world of philosophy,
spirit and to understand.
'I wish to express the sublime upsurge of self renewing nature,' he said,
the total pantheistic upsurge of the universal sap
the annual cycle of forces that are reborn
is consummated in its fundamental rhythms.
STRAVINSKY Rite of Spring - The Dance of the Earth
Every culture, even in the ten thousand miles distance one from another,
all share certain images, certain powerful, very powerful images,
we call it 'shaman'.
They perform a ritual, which is known to their people
and even now it still stays in the memory of in each family, in each tribe.
It still immediately evokes some mystical power
not many people joke with it.
MUSSORGSKY Khovanshchina
In his opera 'Khovanshchina', Mussorgsky showed a Christian priestess dabbling in Shamanis.
When Marfa tells Prince Golitsyn's fortune,
a fellow composer described her as
a somewhat fantastic, magic, even prophetic character,
utterly foreign to traditional Christianity.
'Khovanshchina' is a very mystical opera.
When Marfa comes to Prince Golitsyn she says.
'All secret forces. The force of mystery'.
Mysterious forces, great powers.
Souls departed to the unknown world
To you I call!
It really starts to feel like she brings it immediately into the room.
And Golitsyn is taken and he is full of fear.
Iost souls who know the secrets of the depths
Are you there?
To the noble Prince worn with fears
the secret of his fate hidden in darkness
will you now reveal?
All is quiet and clear in the heavens
In the towns, the Orthodox priests actively resisted Paganism.
In the countryside nevertheless, people managed to find a balance
...between the old spirituality and Christianity.
It was a thousand years before Christianity finally took root in Russia.
Medieval monks from Byzantium established themselves in the caves
beneath the ancient city of Kiev.
As a 12th century chronicler wrote:
Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ, who loved his new people the Kingdom of Rus
and illuminated it with holy baptism.
The foundation of Russian Christianity is described in the Kiev Paterikon:
It was pleasing to God to manifest a luminary of the church and a teacher of monks.
Father Anthony went into the hills and the desolate places
and here he found a cave, and lived in great moderation.
TRADITIONAL 11TH CENTURY CHANTING
The scholar Fedotov described the impact of early Kievan Christianity
on all Russian Culture:
The memory of Kievan Rus has never diminished.
In the pure fountain of her literary works and her art,
anyone who wishes can quench his religious thirst.
It has the same value for the Russian religious mind
as Pushkin for the Russian artistic sensibility.
In his operatic setting of Pushkin's drama 'Boris Godunov',
Mussorgsky makes the monk chronicler Pimen the moral witness of Russia's tragedy.
MUSSORGSKY Boris Godunov
Just one more story, and my chronicle will be completed
I shall have completed the task that God assigned to me, a sinner
Pimen is a voice of history, the voice of conscience.
So the role of Pimen is to give us a truth,
to give us a document, to give us a feeling
that nothing will be forgiven.
A sin is a sin, the truth is the truth
and even if you think there is no way to prove
there is something, there is somewhere, somebody
watching, listening, hearing, seeing it comes out.
God did not appoint me as a witness for so many years in vain
One day an industrious brother may discover my anonymous work
Like myself, he will light his lamp
and brush the dust from an old manuscript, to copy the truthful tale
Future generations of true Christians will learn the history of their country
By the 14th Century, Saint Sergius had brought the faith to within a hundred miles of Moscow.
Here in what is now called Sergeyev Passad
he founded Russia's most important monastery complex.
Today and every day of the year, round the clock, people pray for his soul.
With the Western church under attack from Islam,
Russia now saw itself as the protector of the Christian spirit.
The monk Hilarion wrote that the gracious God no longer neglects us.
It is his desire to save us and lead us to reason
and another scholar added:
The doors of Byzantium the Second Rome
were smashed open by Islam.
But now the Holy Apostolic Church of the Third New Rome
shines forth brighter than the sun in all the ends of the earth.
But no sooner had the Third Rome been established in Moscow
than the Russian monarchy shifted the centre of power five hundred miles to the North.
BORTNYANSKY Sacred Concertos No.3 - Hail to the King
In St Petersburg a very different city,
a very different church and a very different Western-orientated culture
was established by Peter the Great.
His affection to Dutch, or British, or Austrian, or German, you know,
whatever good was there, you know,
was built in five hundred years before, thousand years before
he would catch it like this and says 'hmmm, we take it! '
FATHER AVVROISEY Vusicologist During this period, Italian musicians were invited to Russia.
All compositions were written in pure Italian spirit...
They were Italian in form, intonation and harmony.
In fact they were Italian in every aspect.
Peter's love affair with the West affected more than the architecture.
The whole political structure of Christianity was remoulded in Western style.
One hard-core group of Orthodox Christians dug their heels in and resisted Peter's reforms.
They were known as the Old Believers and they are still around today.
In the 17th century there were reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church...
FATHER ALEXI RIABATSEV similar to the ones in England during the Reformation.
The dogmas of the Orthodox Church were changed.
A Tsar became it's head.
But there were many believers who rejected it.
Leaders of the Old Believers like Protopop Avaakum were arrested.
First they were exiled, then executed.
Avaakum was burnt at the stake on Good Friday.
After that, mass burnings were carried out all over the country.
Peter's ruthless suppression of the Old Believers
and their leader Dosifey is dramatised in Mussorgsky's opera 'Khovanshchina'.
This is the most depressive fact about the grandness of Peter the Great.
That he had to kill. Old Believers do not want Peter the Great.
They do not want Europe. They think it's all devil,
they don't want all these democracies,
all this, you know, new news from Europe.
They want to stay old fashioned way.
MUSSORGSKY Khovanshchina
Lord ever glorious! Grant that we may behold Thee in Thy might
Brethren! May we be uplifted!
We shall see the radiance of Divine truth and love
May the carnal snares of Hell vanish before the bright face of truth and love
They are fanatically organised, very strong and they prove it.
They go and burn themselves in fire.
Our faith is in the truth of God
Nothing can deprive us of it
In the fire, which I personally choose to end this opera with,
you hear both end and continuation
The Romanovs established a partnership between the might of the Tsars
and the power of the Orthodox Church.
As Dostoevsky said,
'We take our religion from politics. Orthodox discipline must prevail. '
Russian artists were encouraged to develop an aesthetic,
which bound art and religion together.
Even a late-Romantic composer like Rachmaninov saw himself as part of this movement.
RACHMANINOV Vespers - Serene Light
Throughout the 19th century, there was a search for a national harmony,
a search for the rebirth of a national music.
The Rachmaninov Vespers were a development of the Russian musical 'idea'.
The 'idea' was based on a gathering of material from a variety of sources.
In the first place, Folklore material from the people.
Secondly, ancient church chants, and thirdly, Folk Polyphony.
We sing to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Thou art worthy at all times
to be praised in joyful song
Son of God, giver of life
Despite seventy years of atheistic communism,
the domestic traditions of Easter are still practised in Moscow today,
much as Rimsky recollected them.
The Easter service with its pagan merry-making,
the Easter loaves and twists and all those Easter eggs and burning candles.
The celebration of the Resurrection is at the core of Russian Christianity.
This is how Dostoevsky's old monk Zosima describes his childhood experience of Easter:
My mother took me alone to morning mass.
I remember now how the incense rose from the censor and flowed slowly upwards.
I felt deeply moved and for the first time in my life
I consciously received the first seed of the words of God in my soul.
Christ is risen! Is truly risen!
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Easter Festival Overture
Christ is risen! Is truly risen!
OLGA ALEXANDROVNA Not a single year went by without us celebrating Easter...
bake an Easter cake and paint eggs
We celebrated Easter even though it was banned
While Moscow's Church of the Resurrection was being reborn,
Sophia Gubaidulina was commissioned to write a St John Passion
and Gergiev was asked to give the world premiere.
I hear in this composition,
a fantastic concentration and God-given power, which some of us lose.
And I think Gubaidulina, like maybe, very, very few composers
in the last twenty, twenty-five years,
has the unique quality to hear her own world and to protect it.
SOPHIA GUBAIDULINA St John Passion
Perhaps the State might be interested in helping us restore all this!
FATHER SERGIE LISURENKO We have some of the original frescos left. But it will take a lot of money.
If you look over there you can see, there's a bit they're repainting.
It's not finished but you get the general idea
During the Soviet period the church purified itself of rubbish,
FATHER ALEXI RIABATSEV because through this hell only true believers passed unscathed.
But now that the doors are open once more...
the rubbish of superficial decoration is piling up.
SVIRIDOV Glory and Allelulia
I don't think that the very fact that there are churches renewed or restored
brings back the feeling that the people in Russia are settled.
I think the values are so chaotically changed and there are monuments,
which were there forever and they are now in ruins.
And there are new, if not new Gods.
I wouldn't say that but there are new characters in action,
some of them extremely aggressive.
One had to perceive all this positively.
There are people who criticise the situation in the church.
But I think the most important thing is that young people are coming to believe in God.
I believe that this return to God is a return to the Russian spirit.
VLADIMIR MARTYNOV The Beatitudes
VLADIVIR VARTYNOV Composer In the 1970s I felt that Western culture had come to a dead end.
At that point, I had the good fortune to discover early Russian music
from well before the 17th century.
But the most important thing I want to say is that
ancient Russian music is a lighthouse for me and should be for all musicians.
I think Russian culture is waiting for renaissance in a way.
And in the last twenty years,
the sad thing about cultural life in Russia was loss of confidence.
I don't think we need a new Dosifey today, who would tell people
'Let's burn ourselves since the things are not that good'.
I don't think so, but we need Dosifeys today
who have this kind of depth of spiritual voice.
These kind of people are needed today in Russia.