In Bohemia. Symphonic Poem Studyscore - Mili Alexjewisch Balakirev
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Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev
(b. Nizhny-Novgorod, 2 January 1837 - d. St. Petersburg, 29 May 1910)
In Bohemia
Symphonic poem for full orchestra (1866-1906)
Preface
The genesis of Balakirev’s symphonic poem In Bohemia spans a total of forty years (1866-1906) - a remarkable length of time for a work lasting barely a quarter of an hour, and one which only becomes understandable when we examine the unusual circumstances of its origin and the life of its composer.
In 1866 Balakirev was at the zenith of his professional career. Four years earlier he and Gavriil Lomakin had founded the “Free Music School” in St. Petersburg, where every student could receive, free of charge, a solid musical education with a national alignment and a nonacademic curriculum deliberately contrasting with the western-oriented Conservatory. Balakirev, who came from a humble background and had to acquire many musical skills through self-instruction in his youth, was highly regarded for his abilities as a music teacher. He also became something akin to the mentor of the so-called “Mighty Handful,” a group of five age mates consisting of, besides himself, his musically untutored “pupils” Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Cui. One idol of this circle was unquestionably the composer Mikhail Glinka, the creator of Russia’s national music, who had died in 1857. It therefore comes as no surprise to discover that Balakirev, in June 1866, readily agreed when Glinka’s sister Ludmilla Shestokova asked him to travel to Prague. In his luggage were Glinka’s opera scores, which the enterprising composer was meant to promote in the Czech capital. But the journey turned out far differently from what he expected.
Hardly had he arrived in Prague than Balakirev was obliged to leave the city immediately. The Austro-Prussia War had just erupted, and Prussian troops stood before the city gates. Balakirev precipitously fled to Vienna and resolved to return to St. Petersburg via Leipzig. But the troops advanced so rapidly that this itinerary too had to be abandoned. After an exciting odyssey through southern Germany he finally returned to Vienna empty-handed.
Balakirev took advantage of his forced stay in Vienna to visit the great Public Library (now the Wiener Stadtbibliothek), where he stumbled upon a book by the Czech savant Beneš Metod Kulda (1820-1903) entitled Svadba v národe Česko-slovanském (“The Marriage of the Czecho-Slovakian Peoples”; Olomouc, 1858). The book contains a collection of many Czech folk tunes, of which nos. 57, 56 and 17 caught Balakirev’s imagination to such a degree that he wrote them down and used them (in the above-mentioned order) as the basis of the work in the present volume, to which he gave the provisional title Overture on Three Czech Themes.
Putting up with another lengthy detour via Hungary, Balakirev finally left Vienna and, after traveling for days on end, succeeded in returning home. By July 1866 he was already at work on the overture, but he only managed to complete the continuity draft in January 1867. By then he had returned to Prague; the war was over and he could now carry out his original plan.
According to the date on the manuscript, the complete orchestral score was finally fi-nished on 2 May 1867. Time was of the essence, for the première had to take place in the Free Music School two weeks later so that it could be witnessed by a Czech delegation stopping in St. Petersburg en route to an ethnological exhibition in Moscow.
After its première the new work initially vanished without a trace. The fact that it resurfaced at all was basically due to Glinka’s above-named sister. In 1873 Ludmilla Shesto-kova asked Balakirev to entrust all his existing manuscripts to her for safekeeping. She had good reasons for doing so, for beginning in 1869 the composer’s circumstances had changed dramatically. This was due to several factors. For one, Balakirev’s comrades-in-arms increasingly distanced themselves from their former mentor, having long outgrown their status as “pupils” and feeling increasingly patronized by his advice. For another, the Free Music School encountered financial difficulties, not least owing to Balakirev’s clumsiness in dealing with other people in general and the institution’s patrons in particular. Lastly, his father died in 1869, and he was forced to assume responsibility for the care of his younger sisters. Unequal to these tasks, Balakirev was plunged into a profound personal crisis. He dropped all his musical positions, completely lost interest in his compositions, accepted various forms of casual employment (including a job with the Warsaw Railway), and fled into a rigidly orthodox religious sect.
After granting himself a roughly five-year “break” from the music scene, Balakirev surprisingly returned. Beginning in 1876 he again had composition students, and in 1881 he even became director of his own music school. Acting from respect and perhaps from pity, the same comrades-in-arms that he had spurned years before now gave him a helping hand.
Thanks to Ludmilla Shestokova’s far-sightedness, Balakirev was even able to return to past compositions that he had abandoned or only temporarily completed. He continued work on them without the slightest evidence of a break in stylistic continuity.
It was only in a letter of 1902 that Balakirev first recalled his overture on the three Czech themes, and the plan to revise the work was not carried out until 1905. His revisions are mainly limited to the orchestration that he had produced in such haste. From then on he referred to the work as a symphonic poem entitled In Bohemia in order, as he claimed in a letter, to “lend more weight to the work’s serious character.” It bears a dedication to Josef Kolar (1830-1910), who had come to Balakirev’s aid in Prague years before by translating Glinka’s librettos into Czech. The score first appeared in print in 1906, when it was issued by J. H. Zimmermann in Leipzig. With this the work’s troubled gestation came to an end. In 1960 the score was also published by the Russian State Publishing House.
Balakirev’s clever orchestration, typically concise formal design, and adroit manipulation of motifs from the three themes (a technique reminiscent of western classical music) are reasons enough to give this work a more frequent hearing. The present study score is intended to serve that purpose.
Translation: Bradford Robinson
For performance material please contact Zimmerman, Frankfurt.
Score No., 925
Edition, Repertoire Explorer
Genre, Orchestra
Pages, 82
Size, 160 x 240 mm
Printing, Reprint
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Componist(en):
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Uitgavenummer:
925
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934167
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