Visiting Composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka
Novospasskoye
Every nation in one field of art or another has its own genius, who embodied in his works of art spiritual powers of his people in the fullest and brightest way. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka became such a genius composer in Russia. He combined in his work the richness of folklore melodies and the highest achievements of professional mastership of European musical schools.
As we visited Smolensk this summer our friends, Pavel Timoshenko’s family, suggested that my friend Alexander Ishutin and I take a trip to Novospasskoye, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s motherland.
Having set off from Alexin on the road heading south, we passed by Yelnya – motherland of Soviet Guard – and came to an old manor, Novospasskoye, located off the old Smolensk road. This is an ancestral property of one of the branches of Glinkas. Here in the morning, at the break of day on May 20, 1804, in an old manor house great Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was born.
Mikhail Ivanovich was a second child in a big family of Ivan Nikolaevich Glinka and his wife Yevgenia Andreyevna. All biographers and Glinka himself note that atmosphere of love and friendliness reigned in their house. The parents of the would-be composer were smart and well-educated by the measures of those times people having a fine aesthetic taste. Glinka’s nanny Avdotya Ivanovna influenced the child very much. She sang Russian folk songs and told amazing fairy tales to the boy and was able to foster love in him for national folklore. In those years Novospasskoye and the surrounding villages were famous for art of singing. “And, maybe, those songs I heard when I was a boy were the first reason of my later developing mainly Russian music,” many years later Glinka recollected. Another vivid impression of his early childhood was chiming of his ancestral church’s bells. Small Glinka not only ecstatically listened to the bells ringing but also tried to reproduce it at home with the help of brass basins. It is very important that this passion begotten in childhood helped him in future years to brilliantly apply ringing of bells in the final of his opera “Ivan Susanin.”
In August of 1812, Napoleon’s army invaded Smolensk region. The enemies’ coming to native Novospasskoye, stories about the feats of a local priest – Glinka’s first teacher and other local fellow-men forever sank deep into the young heart of the future composer. “Unforgettable time! Time of delight and glory! How strong was the throbbing of Russian heart at the word Fatherland,” in this way A. S. Pushkin expressed the general attitude of those times. And the inspiration, with which Glinka wrote his immortal opera “Ivan Susanin”, running ahead of the text, undoubtedly, sprang up from his childhood’s impressions.
The composer spent in Novospasskoye all his childhood years until he entered a school for noble men in Saint Petersburg where he studied from 1817 until 1822 and which he finished summa cum laude.
As an adult Glinka would come to his ancestral property for six months, sometimes for only a few days. Spending most of his time traveling Mikhail Ivanovich obtained here rest and family comfort that he missed. He loved to repeat “Novospasskoye is heaven on earth.” It is true that Glinka’s estate was a pattern of noblemen’s manor of the last quarter of XIX century. After the war of 1812, the composer’s father Ivan Nikolaevich Glinka on the site of the old grandfather’s house built a new two-storied house with a portico and columns. According to L. E. Shestakova’s description, the ceilings of front parlors were painted; the walls were draped with velvet wall-papers. The furniture was made only of special wood. Mirrors, parquet, chandeliers, lamps were everywhere. There were two grand pianos and a piano in the house. “Right from the balcony a big slanting meadow started towards the river… A huge garden was all planted with flowers; fountains, cascades, little islands… with various exotic little bridges. They lived in Novospasskoye in an old fashion in full prosperity…, weaved carpets, wove laces, made different embroideries; they had their own tailors, shoemakers, painters, locksmiths and carpenters…” The big landlord’s house was the center of the manor: wing houses, greenhouses, orchard houses, locksmiths’ and carpenters’ workshops, carriage pavilions. In the orchard houses rare to Smolensk land lemons, apricots, peaches and even pineapples were cultivated.
In the end of XVIII – beginning of XIX centuries the fame of the manor’s park in Novospasskoye was all-Russia wide. Its main growth consisted of lime trees, oaks, elms, maples, ash trees, part of which remain to this day. A passionate lover of all the beautiful things, Ivan Nikolaevich Glinka, the composer’s father, did not spare money for his park’s decoration and subscribed seeds and saplings of rare plants.
There was no place on the earth for Glinka lovelier and dearer than Novospasskoye. He worked and rested here with ease; his dear and near ones loved him and waited for him here. In Novospasskoye the composer wrote a number of scenes from “Ivan Susanin,” contemplated on fragments from opera “Ruslan and Ludmila,” composed many romances and piano plays. In the village he heard a magnificent wedding song “From behind the Mountains, Mountains very High,” the tune of which famous “Kamarinskaya” begins with.
In the park not far from the house an ancient giant oak with a spreading crown remained. They say that Glinka loved to listen to the noise of the wind in its mighty foliage. It awakened music in him.
A riffle at a curve of the Desna River was another favorite place. There were many pebbles and the water flowing around them rang in fine melodies. Mikhail Ivanovich loved singing birds that surrounded him from childhood until the last days. (He had “Bird Establishments” not only in Novospasskoye but also in Petersburg, Paris, Seville, Warsaw and Berlin). Many events in Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s life had to do with governor’s town Smolensk. He stayed in the house of his relatives there more than once. Twice the composer lived in Smolensk a long time: in the winter of 1826 and in the autumn and winter of 1847-48. In 1826, Glinka lived in the house of his remote relative R. Ushakov for one month and a half. Related to his last visit of the place, we know that in the beginning of September of 1847 Glinka left Novospasskoye together with his sister Ludmila Ivanovna and at first again stayed in the house of Ushakov in Smolensk but then moved to a small house at the Nickolskie gates. “I sat at home all the time and composed…” – the composer wrote later. He gave to two piano plays “Recollection of Mazurka” and “Barcarolla” he wrote at that Smolensk period a second name – “Hello to Fatherland.” During his stay in Smolensk the composer wrote apart from the above mentioned plays also several works among which are romances: “Poor Singer,” “Comfort,” “My Little Dear One,” “You will Forget Me Soon,” piano plays, “Prayer,” “Variations on the Scottish Theme” as well as piano variations on Italian romance “Be Blessed, Mother” (1826) – the first published work by Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka.
In January of 1848, in Smolensk in the hall of the noble men’s assembly (now a concert hall of the region’s Philharmonic) a meeting in honor of Glinka was held. The composer was grandly welcomed. The orchestra played the Polonaise from the “Ivan Susanin” opera; speeches were spoken and bouquets of flowers were presented. Mikhail Ivanovich was very touched by the words of his old acquaintance, an amateur musician, who said, “Please, receive regards from me on behalf of compatriots and your country men, who are proud of the fact that you are Russian; that you are a Smolensk native.”
The composer died in Berlin on February 15 of 1857. His ashes were later brought to Saint Petersburg and buried in Alexandro-Nevskaya Lavra.
The Novospasskoye manor is now a museum. The church of the Lord’s Transfiguration (Tikhvinskaya) erected back in 1786, in the Baroque style on means of retired major, the composer’s granddad, once again started to function. This is the only building of the manor that survived until the second half of the XX century. Near the temple there is a family cemetery where Mikhail Ivanovich’s relatives rest.
Tombstones to the composer’s parents remain – to Mikhail Nikolaevich Glinka (1777-1834) and Yevgenia Andreyevna Glinka (1783-1851), his uncle L. Glinka and sister P. I. Sobolevskaya (1805-1828).
In 1879, the manor after the composer’s death owned by his sisters consecutively was purchased by a merchant F. T. Rybakov. In 1872, the new owner disassembled the house and adjacent buildings, brought them to Kolomna and built of this material barracks for workers. Soon after that they burned. A significant damage was done to the Novospasskoye architectural-park ensemble during the WWII.
In early 1980s, restorers studied documental evidence with description of the Novospasskoye manor and restored the building of the landlord’s house and two wing-buildings on their old foundations. In 1982, a museum was opened here dedicated to the Great Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka.
Tickets to the museum will cost you 20 rubles per person; pensioners and “pioneers,” as usual, have discounts. An excursion with a guide will cost you 300 rubles. It is, of course, better to order an excursion because local tour guides in a very interesting way and with much love will tell you about Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka and Novospasskoye. On the manor’s territory there is a spring and a big apple garden. In Novospasskoye birds are singing everywhere; in the park around the manor and even in the owner’s house in a specially made aviary. And the spring of the Desna River with its hardly to be heard prattle really performs Glinka’s works (if one, of course, listens with a special creative attitude). And the oak spoken of above by its rustling still plays melodies from the “Ruslan and Ludmila” opera.
The Novospasskoye manor heartily welcomed us, gave us shelter from summer heat and gave us refreshing water to drink; fed us fragrant apples and also pleased our hearing with the works of its owner – the Great Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka!