Patrick Bade
Ivan the Terrible: Monster and Hero as Celebrated in Russian Music

Patrick Bade | Ivan the Terrible Monster and Hero as Celebrated in Russian Music | 05.11.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Well, what you see on the screen is a 19th-century imaginary portrait of Ivan the Terrible. In fact, we really don’t know what he looked like because in 16th-century Russia, the genre of portrait painting, as we understand it, as a likeness of an individual, didn’t exist. And we don’t really know what any tsar looked like until Peter the Great 150 years later. Now, I hope you all heard William’s absolutely brilliant talk on Ivan the Terrible on Monday. That was really revelatory. It explained so much about the later development of Russia and indeed even what is happening today. So Ivan the Terrible reigned from 1533 to 1584. He was declared the first tsar of Russia in 1547. And he is, of course, notorious for his incredible brutality, events like the Sack of Novgorod in 1570, which William described very vividly. And he became the model for future Russian leaders particularly brutal tsars like Peter the Great, top left, Alexander III, who was, of course, responsible for persecution of Jews in 19th-century Russia, Nicholas I, Stalin, and Mr. Putin.

So this is perhaps the most famous image of Ivan the Terrible. It’s also a 19th-century picture, and it’s by Ilya Repin. And it depicts one of the most notorious incidents in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It’s curious that these megalomaniacs, these very brutal men, like Ivan the Terrible, like Stalin, and Hitler, all three were curiously prudish in sexual matters. And Ivan the Terrible was apparently outraged by a somewhat revealing dress worn by his daughter-in-law. And he beat her up so badly that she miscarried her baby and her husband, his favourite son, Ivan, who was to be his successor, was naturally very angry and protested. And Ivan was not used to anybody standing up against him. And he hit his son over the head with the sceptre and killed him in a fit of rage. And that’s what we see in this very famous picture. And not everything about Ivan the Terrible is terrible.

He introduced the first printing presses to Russia. He commissioned the famous Basil’s Cathedral, which is certainly one of the most recognisable and maybe one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. And for good or bad, of course, he laid the foundations of the Russian state and the expansion of the Russian empire. And so what we find, and today I’m going to give you a musical portrait of him, how he is depicted in various musical ways. And it’s an ambivalent portrait that we get. He’s often truly celebrated. You may remember if you heard my last lecture, I was talking about “Boris Godunov” and there is a character in that opera called Varlaam who sings a very rollicking, jaunty song celebrating the destruction of the city of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible. And in that opera, that is based on folk songs such as the one I’m going to play you now, which is a traditional Russian folk song. And it’s here sang once again by the great Feodor Chaliapin.

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I imagine Mr. Putin was hoping to do something similar with the city of Kyiv. Now, in the 1860s, when Mussorgsky was composing “Boris Godunov,” he was sharing a flat with Rimsky-Korsakov. I can’t actually think that must have been a very comfortable situation for Rimsky-Korsakov. I don’t think Mussorgsky would’ve been the ideal flatmate, but they shared a piano and Mussorgsky had a part-time job as a civil servant. So he would be out during the afternoon, and they took it in turns at the piano with Mussorgsky playing in the morning, Rimsky using it in the afternoon. And then the evening they came to an arrangement and they alternated which composer was going to have it.

So while Mussorgsky was writing “Boris Godunov,” Rimsky-Korsakov was writing his opera, “The Maid of Pskov.” And it’s an opera of, it’s also of course a historical subject. And it concerns Ivan the Terrible. In fact, it was later renamed “Ivan the Terrible” mainly I think to promote it as a vehicle for Chaliapin in Paris and Western Europe. But there are many parallels between the two operas, a huge epic scale and the rather episodic nature of the plot. And we can hear echoes of Mussorgsky’s music also in Rimsky’s, particularly his evocation of bells. Bells are so important in Russia and they’re really in the DNA of Russian culture. I’m going to start off with an excerpt where the bells of the city of Pskov are rung to warn the citizens that Ivan the Terrible is approaching. Sorry.

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At one of “The Maid of Pskov,” we meet Tucha. He’s a hotheaded young man. He’s a kind of freedom fighter. He’s a bit anachronistic. I feel he’s a rather 19th-century character, like all the revolutionaries that were out and about in Europe in the mid-19th century. And he and Olga have fallen in love with one another. Olga, she doesn’t know it, of course, but she is the mislaid daughter, illegitimate daughter of Ivan the Terrible. This is a common situation in 19th-century opera. If you remember from Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra.” You could say that Ivan the Terrible had a little bit more excuse than most for mislaying a child as he was married eight times and had numerous mistresses. Anyway, in this opera, Olga is the daughter of a woman who has married somebody else that Ivan the Terrible had a very passionate affair with. So my next excerpt is a very lyrical, beautiful loved duet between Tucha and Olga.

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Now, after the bells were tolled, the citizens of the Pskov gather in front of the cathedral, and of course they’re terrified. They’ve heard what has happened to Novgorod and they’re expecting to receive that the same kind of treatment from Ivan the Terrible and his appalling troops.

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So Tucha addresses the crowd and he exhorts them to resist. And we feel very much this is the voice of a 19th-century freedom fighter. This is the voice of the oppressed peoples of Europe, of the Italians, of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, who at this time are occupied by foreign power. It could be the voice of Zelenskyy today. ♪ Music plays ♪

I suspect actually that is also the voice of Rimsky-Korsakov. He was a man of liberal, even left-wing sympathies. And in 1905, he was sacked from his position as head of the conservatoire in Saint Petersburg for siding with the students, the protesting students, during the abortive 1905 revolution. Well, Olga has overheard a conversation and has learned that she is not the daughter of the man who she takes as her father and that she is illegitimate. And she’s very distressed by this. And she goes to talk to her nanny. Now this is a very Russian thing, of course. I think this is something that crops up so often in Russian literature, Russian opera, so in Russian culture, is that the closeness of aristocratic children are often much closer to their nanny than to their actual mother, their nurse rather than their mother. Oops, let’s go back again. So here is Olga lamenting to a nurse.

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Lovely plaintive quality to that music. So Ivan arrives and is initially wary and angry and everybody’s very nervous about what he’s going to do. And Olga, the beautiful Olga, is delegated to bring him his drink, presumably that mead or the strong beer we’ve already heard about. And he is struck by her beauty and he’s struck by how much she looks like the woman who he thinks of as the great love of his life, who is actually her mother. And he soon comes to the conclusion that she is, yes, she is his daughter. And that softens him, it mollifies him, and he decides not to exact terrible vengeance on the city of Pskov. And in the next scene, he ruminates on this and he has a great monologue.

Of course, this was a wonderful scene for Chaliapin after Chaliapin’s initial huge success in Paris in 1980. He really took Paris by storm with “Boris Godunov.” And Diaghilev wanted to present him again the next year in 1909. And he thought, “Hmm, what can I follow up ‘Boris Godunov’ with?” And he repackaged this opera and he renamed it “Ivan The Terrible” to showcase the importance of Chaliapin, although in fact it’s not a very big role in the opera. Now, like “Boris Godunov,” there are different versions. And these are down to actually to Rimsky himself. He tinkered with the school, he changed it over the years. I’ve got three versions on CD and I had a bit of a dilemma so I’m not quite sure what it is I’m going to present to you next because the text comes from the CD version, the latest one, which is conducted by Gergiev.

But the version I wanted to play you is by the bass who, I think, is number two in the Russian repertoire to Chaliapin. This is Mark Reizen, and I played you some of his recordings before. It’s a wonderful, dark voice. He has an extraordinary presence even on record. You sense the power of his personality. But my problem was that the music he sings is actually quite different from the music in the Gergiev version. And as you know from my mispronunciations, I’m not actually a Russian speaker so I’m crossing my fingers. I’m sure there are plenty of Russian speakers out there who are going to listen to this. And you can let me know afterwards if what he sings is actually what I’m presenting to you here. But it’s a very interesting text.

You know, as I said, I feel that Rimsky-Korsakov, ‘cause he was a liberal and he was basically on the left, that his sympathies are with Tucha. But we get the whole picture here, we get the other side of the picture. In a way, this is Ivan justifying himself as an autocratic leader. So if you look at the words here, it says “It’s clear a kingdom is only strong, firm, and mighty where the people all know well that they have one supreme ruler.” Well, Peter the Great would’ve said the same. Stalin would’ve said that, and I’m sure Mr. Putin would say the same.

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Olga decides to flee with Tucha. But she’s captured by Ivan’s bodyguard. And she’s brought back and she has a scene where she pleads for Tucha, but Ivan won’t forgive him, won’t allow them to marry. Tucha then comes with his men trying to rescue Olga. And she hears this and she runs, she rushes to be reunited with him, but is shot down by Ivan’s bodyguard. And the opera ends with his grief. And you can see this is a modern production from the Mariinsky. And you can see that they very clearly echoed the image of Ilya Repin’s famous painting of Ivan with his murdered son. And the opera ends really on a downbeat with a beautiful consolatory chorus.

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Now Rimsky wrote another opera in which Ivan the Terrible figures, largely, at least his shadow looms over the whole action of the opera. But he doesn’t actually appear on stage in a singing role. And this is the much later “Tsar’s Bride,” which was premiered in 1899. This is a set design for the original production, but the main character is a very nasty piece of work is called Grigory. And he’s one of these terrible oprichnik, these sadistic, thuggish bodyguards that William describes so vividly in his lecture on Monday. And he has become bored with his lover, Lyubasha. I mean, he previously kidnapped her and raped her, but she’s now, as far as he’s concerned, past her sell-by date. And he has instead fallen in love with a beautiful and younger Marfa. But shock-horror, he actually proposes marriage to her and she has rejected him. And this provokes a kind of male midlife crisis, which he expresses in this aria sung here very splendidly, of course, by Dmitriy Yankovskiy.

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So he’s basically regretting that he’s no longer just a rapist who can just force himself on any woman he fancies. In fact, Marfa is in love with her childhood sweetheart, Likov, Ivan Sergeyevich Likov, we hear more about that in a minute. But Lyubasha is consumed with bitterness and jealousy and she understands that Grigory is no longer interested in her and that he prefers the younger, prettier Marfa. Now Marfa is engaged to Likov and there are celebrations and Lyubasha is asked to sing to entertain the guests. And she sings this beautiful folk song completely unaccompanied by orchestra. The orchestra stops. But it’s, of course, it’s a very sad song that’s actually expressing her own feelings in this scene.

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Now here is the cheerful, chirpy Marfa expressing her love for Likov and she talks about their childhood love for one another. Now I’m going to play you this aria in a historic recording that has great interest. Now usually as you know, I try to choose the most beautiful version that I know. This is far from the most beautiful version of this quite well known aria. But it’s interesting, for one reason: the singer, Shpiller, Natalia Shpiller, was the favourite singer of Stalin and widely believed to be his long-term mistress. So there’s a certain irony here in this opera. She’s singing a character who attracts, as we shall see, attracts the eye of Ivan the Terrible. She certainly attracted the eye of Stalin. I mean, she’s not terrible. She’s okay, she’s a bit squawky, a bit squally as a lot of the sopranos seem to have been in Russia during the Soviet period. But it’s an attractive arias you’ll see.

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Now Lyubasha and Grigory are both up to no good. And they go to visit a rather sinister German doctor called Bomelius. And each wants from him a magic potion. Grigory wants a love potion that will make Marfa fall in love with him. And Lyubasha wants a potion that will destroy the beauty of the young girl. So they each bribe Bomelius and he gives them both the potions. But of course, as we shall see, Lyubasha substitutes her potion, which is actually a poison for the love potion of Grigory with terrible consequences. But you have this scene with the three of them together, which is really quite unusual in a Russian opera of this type. It’s almost viridian. You’ve got a viridian ensemble of the three singers, each with very different emotions and very different feelings and the three vocal lines being intertwined with one another.

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Ivan passes by and he’s on the lookout for a new bride and he catches sight of Marfa and he takes a fancy to her and he orders that she be sent to Moscow to take part in a bridal context. He will choose the one that he wants and shock-horror, he chooses her and he declares that she must marry him. Well, no sooner is this done, then she, of course, she’s taken the poison, which comes from Lyubasha but which has actually been given to her by Grigory. And she sickens and people realise she’s being poisoned and her fiance is accused of poisoning her. And he is executed. And when she hears this, she goes mad as one does in 19th-century opera. And she has a very beautiful mad scene that ends the opera. Here, I need to make no apologies 'cause this is the most, it’s a lovely piece of music, and it’s the most exquisite performance by, in fact, by a white Russian singer called Natalia Wechor who left Russia at the time of the revolution and carried on her career in Paris. She imagines that Grigory is her lover, and she addresses him as though he is.

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Absolutely exquisite the way she shakes the melody. And particularly at that final note with a little swollen diminuendo, really perfect singing. Now, David is going to talk to you later in the week about Sergei Eisenstein and his great film or films of “Ivan the Terrible.” So I’m not going to say much about the film itself. I’m going to finish with an excerpt from the musical score by Prokofiev, the film commissioned during the Second World War by Stalin who identified very strongly with Ivan the Terrible. And the first part of the film issued in 1944 pleased everybody and is an extraordinary visual feast. Every shot is composed like a painting. It’s a truly amazing film from a visual point of view.

Part two was finished in 1946 but it became evident even to Stalin that Eisenstein’s depiction of Ivan the Terrible as paranoid and sadistic and crazy was getting very close to the knuckle. And the film was not issued until, in fact, until after Stalin’s death. Part three, which apparently, had been largely shot, was confiscated and destroyed. This is a still from the later part of part two where suddenly the film bursts into colour. The reason for that is that the Russians had managed to capture Agfacolor film from the Germans after the capture of Stalingrad. So I’m going to finish with a short excerpt from Prokofiev’s thrilling score of course in the film in a way I suppose you should never be too aware of a musical score in a film. It’s all part of the whole thing, but it’s such powerful piece that it is actually quite often performed independently as a concert piece.

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So echoes there, I think of Rimsky and Mussorgsky in the co-writing. So let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments

Mention of bread and salt. Welcome. Yes, indeed. It must be biblical, isn’t it? Bread and salt? Yes. Can you imagine having to, in the Russian, well, I suppose usually opera was done in the winter rather than the summer, but having to wear those heavy costumes on stage must have been very uncomfortable.

Oh yes, it’s true because there is the Bizet, Ivan opera, although it’s not complete, isn’t it? I think it’s a fragment and certainly as David is going to talk about the Eisenstein movie. Bread and salt is a tradition in many Slavic cultures to greet guests. You can see it even nowadays when foreign dignitaries or presidents are visiting, girls dressed in folk, very colourful dresses.

Thank you. That song was definitely sung in Russian. I do have the Russian text for that. Although, as I said, I’m not a Russian speaker myself. It’s on your list.

Q: What’s her name? A: It’s a very, very fine Russian, Olga Borodina. I dunno if she’s still around. It was a very sumptuous voice indeed, isn’t it? Olga Borodina.

Mark Reizen. I’ve never heard his songs that would interest me very much. And yes, there’s actually, I think you can see it on the internet this film of him singing in his 90s. And as I said, it’s a really impressive voice. Thank you very much, Susan.

Q: Do I think the greatest composer of the 20th century were Russian? A: No, I don’t, but that’s a personal taste. Shostakovich is a sort of blank spot for me. I do admire Prokofiev very, very much indeed. I have a bit of a blind spot, I think, for Shostakovich.

Q: So who are the greatest composers of the 20th century? A: Well, that’s a difficult question. I’d have to think about that, but I wouldn’t necessarily say they were Russian.

And that seems to be it for today. So I’m going to change back. I’m going to put my other hat on and talk about art on Sunday. I’m going to be talking about Russian portraiture mainly in the late 19th, early 20th century.

Thank you everybody. Thanks for listening. Thanks for your comments.