While small segments of the Russian Orthodox Church have continued to use only traditional Byzantine chants in their worship, the larger portions of the church have allowed music that is a hybrid between traditional liturgical chants and the popular art music of a given historical period. This music has remained distinctively liturgical and Russian but has led many to lament the loss of traditional forms.
The history of Christianity in Russia began properly with the baptism of Vladimir, Emperor of Kiev, into the Orthodox Christian faith in 988. As did the Roman Emperor Constantine long before him, he proclaimed: “Whosoever he be, who will not come to the river tomorrow to be baptized, be he rich or poor, will fall into disgrace with me” (N. Zernov, Eastern Christendom [London, 1961], 112). In the following year, he married the Byzantine emperor’s sister, cementing a relationship with the empire at the height of its power.
The History
For some time the metropolitans of the Russian church were mostly Greeks appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople. Only in the fifteenth century did the Russian church begin to make decisions for itself.
By this time, the Byzantine liturgy was firmly established with little alteration except for its translation into Slavonic, which is the language still used by the Russian Orthodox Church today.
During the period of the Tartar occupation of Russia (1240–1461) Christianity survived. In 1272 the Tartars had embraced the Islamic faith, but—like the Turks who later occupied Byzantium—they were tolerant of Christian “People of the Book” (the Old Testament). A century after the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire, the Russians appointed their first patriarch in Moscow in 1589.
From that time the Russian church had to face constant difficulties. Among them was the Time of Troubles, a civil war that followed the death of Emperor Boris Godunov in 1605. Worse, perhaps, were the failed ambitions of Nikon (patriarch from 1652-66) for the supremacy of the church over the state, resulting in the Great Schism and leaving the church under the thumb of Tsarist rule.
The most recent catastrophe was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The long history of the church’s allegiance to the Tsar inevitably marked it out for special treatment by the Bolsheviks, who worked hard to diminish the church’s authority as much as possible. Sadly, they were assisted by some church leaders prepared to further the Communist cause.
The patriarch Tikhon was arrested in 1923, and determined attempts were made to undermine the church economically (church valuables and buildings were confiscated by the state) and spiritually (monasteries were dissolved, restrictions were placed on religious gatherings, religious teaching in schools was forbidden, and more than a thousand priests were martyred in the first years of the Revolution).
The Second World War gave the Communists a short-lived awareness of how the church could be used to stir up patriotism, but the Khrushchev era renewed the pressures and penalties on those who openly confessed the Christian faith. In spite of the constant oppression, the recent collapse of Communism has revealed the churches of Russia and Eastern Europe to be very much alive and rejoicing in new-found freedom of worship.
The Music of the Russian Orthodox Church
The liturgy of Russian Orthodoxy is very closely allied to that of the Byzantine church; many of the general remarks made about the worship of Greek Orthodox Christians in the previous article apply equally to the Russians.
The music, however, is very noticeably different. The reasons often cited include the loss or corruption of early chants and the church’s current perception of traditional or “canonical” music, as it is termed.
The ancient chant of the Russian church, like the Greek, was written down in a notation similar in principle to the Byzantine, and manuscripts go back as far as the eleventh century. From these it is clear that the chant was a single melody just like Gregorian or Byzantine chant, and to begin with (according to the scholar Preobrazhensky) the melodies were Byzantine, too. The translation of the Greek liturgy into the Slavonic language and its transplantation into a different culture rapidly changed its music to something unlike any other tradition. The name given to this collection of chant was znamenny raspev (chanting by signs), now known simply as znamenny.
Although the old books still exist in great numbers, the symbols used in the notation are ambiguous, and the earliest versions of these ancient melodies cannot yet be sung with accuracy. During the seventeenth century, the now-familiar Western notation was brought to Russia (together with many other Western innovations) and a few of the traditional melodies were copied out. Unfortunately, the incentive at the time was for drastic reform, imposed by the Patriarch Nikon.
The changes included the adoption of a new Western-style of music, sung in a Baroque harmonic style. This so incensed a number of Christians that they separated themselves from the church altogether in order to continue the old traditions. (The transition to the new music during the seventeenth century is well-documented in A. J. Swan, Russian Music and Its Sources in Chant and Folksong [London, 1973], 48ff. For a study of znammenny, see J. Gardner, Russian Church Singing [New York, 1980], and J. L. Roccasalvo, The Plainchant Tradition of Southwestern Rus’ [New York, 1986].)
Miraculously, adherents to the old way are still worshiping today and are known as the Old Believers. They have no priests but worship together in isolated parts of the Ural mountains and in Siberia. They have also emigrated to Canada and the United States and continue their worship there.
The Old Believers are the only Christians who still sing the znamenny chant in anything like its true form. Another type of chant, now even less accessible than znamenny, was demestvenny, a highly decorative chant for solo voice used for special feast days. In its elaboration it paralleled the kalophonic chant of the Byzantine church.
From the seventeenth century on, Russian church music is much more akin to the West than the East. Nikolai Diletsky (about 1630-90) was a musician from Kiev who had studied in Poland (where Italian music was well known). He promoted Western styles of church music through his own compositions and text books.
The following generation of Diletsky’s pupils included Kalashnikov, who wrote sumptuous settings of texts for Vespers which he called Sacred Concertos. These are pieces for up to four choirs and in as many as twenty-four parts; their imitative effects are reminiscent of the polychoral music of Gabrieli and Monteverdi in Venice a century earlier. In such pieces, all connection with the tradition of znamenny chant was lost.
By the close of the eighteenth-century Italian opera had been firmly established in Russia with its consequent importation of skilled and professional foreign musicians. Conversely, Russian musicians of the Court Chapel such as Berezovsky (1745-77) and Bortniansky (1751–1825) had the opportunity to study in Italy. While they did not use Italian operatic styles in their Christian music, they nonetheless brought the technical skills of counterpoint and harmony to bear on it. Many of their works are settings of psalm texts and are masterpieces of concentrated economy and intensity in choral writing.
But the character of Russian church music today owes more to the nineteenth century than to any other period. It was dominated by Fyodor L’vov and his son Alexy (1798–1870 and musical director of the Court Chapel for twenty-five years), Pyotor Turchaninov, and many others. They created the sonorous and sometimes sentimental style of singing associated with Russian liturgical music, sometimes dubbed the “St. Petersburg style.”
The chants used in the Court Chapel were simplified and shortened versions of traditional melodies and these romantic and rhetorical harmonizations of them were published in an edition of the obikhod (Canticles of the Ordinary) in 1848. They were thus disseminated throughout Russia and are still the basis of Russian Orthodox music today. It is most unfortunate that the Russian church has come to identify its musical traditions so closely with these chants (and, even worse, with the wooden and uninspiring contributions of Bakhmetyev).
At that time Russian art music was beginning a most exciting period of natural development, beginning with Glinka and culminating in the music of the Russian Five—Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Cui, Balakirev, and Mussorgsky. Tragically, none of these composers made any impact on the music of their national church.
The difference between the sentimental harmonies of L’vov and the spectacular world of Russian symphonies and ballets must have seemed an unbridgeable gap. Only one great composer of that time made a serious and single-minded contribution to Orthodox church music, and he was taken to court for doing so.
Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy
On 30 April 1878, Tchaikovsky wrote to his confidante Nadejda von Meck: If the favourable mood lasts long enough, I want to do something in the way of church music. A vast and almost untrodden field of activity lies open to composers here. I appreciate certain merits in Bortiansky, Berezovsky and others; but how little their music is in keeping with the Byzantine architecture, the ikons, and the whole spirit of the Orthodox liturgy! … It is not improbable that I shall decide to set the entire liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. (R. Newmarch, ed., The Life and Letters of P. I. Tchaikovsky [London, 1906], 298-299)
The Court Chapel held a monopoly on the publication of all church music (a fact that contributed greatly to its musical sterility) so, having gained approval from the Ecclesiastical Censors of his new setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Tchaikovsky published abroad. Bakhmetyev, the director of music of the Court Chapel, immediately protested and the publisher Jurgenson was taken to court. After two years, Tchaikovsky and his publisher won the case and litigation finally forced Bakhmetyev to resign.
Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy is a work of simplicity and restraint, artistically far in advance of anything of which the Chapel composers were capable. At the same time, it takes no imaginative steps outside the conventionally rhetorical world of diatonic harmony nor does anything distinctive “in keeping with the Byzantine architecture.” Certainly, Tchaikovsky used none of the old znamenny chant, nor showed that he was aware of its true nature.
Rachmaninoff’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and All-Night Vigil
Only one composer of the following generation and of similar stature to Tchaikovsky in the world of art-music made musical settings of the Orthodox liturgy—Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943). This might come as a surprise, not least because his legendary reputation as a pianist and the popularity of his own music for the instrument has given a distorted impression of the breadth of his talent.
Although Rachmaninoff had expressed an interest in setting the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in 1897, it was not until 1910 that he composed his Liturgy, opus 31. He too was deeply attracted to the traditions and the music of Russian Orthodox worship, a sympathy which spills over into his music for the concert hall. Like Tchaikovsky, he wanted to write music specifically for use in worship. His setting of the Liturgy accordingly sets all the required passages and makes due allowances for the cantillation of readings and prayers.
Like Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy, though, the music has been ill-fated, and for similar reasons. Unaccompanied choral music lacks the dramatic rhetoric that concert-hall audiences expect and is a taste they are rarely encouraged to acquire. On the other hand, the Orthodox church found the music too compelling, too reminiscent of opera. Early concert-hall performances of the music generated considerable enthusiasm, but for one perceptive observer of the time, the music was “absolutely wonderful, even too beautiful, but with such music, it would be difficult to pray; it is not church music” (quoted in B. Martyn, Rachmaninoff [Aldershot, Hants, 1990], 222).
Rachmaninoff seems to have recognized these unsolved (and perhaps insoluble) difficulties but was drawn once more to the liturgy, this time that of Vespers and Matins—known collectively as the All-Night Vigil, as they run together as a preparation for Divine Liturgy the following day. His profound respect for the old znamenny chant prompted him to use a number of ancient melodies as the basis for his settings and they give a unique character to the music, a flexibility that is hard to describe.
Rachmaninoff must have realized that liturgical use of his music was unlikely (it seems that the Liturgy was never used in worship) and perhaps wrote his All Night Vigil (opus 37) more as an expression of personal faith. This puts the work (apart from extracts like Nyne Otpushchayeshi, the Nunc Dimittis) into the category of art-music. For some, its restraint effaces the composer’s public identity (a hindrance to an artist in an age of individualism) and as a result, its extraordinary beauties are only now beginning to be discovered.
The first performances of the All-Night Vigil took place in 1915, only two years before the Russian Revolution completely overturned the world of the arts (Rachmaninoff was among many artists forced to flee to the West). As the church was forced into hiding, Christian music could no longer enjoy any creative life.