- Glinka composed this piece in Warsaw in 1848. He was actually trying to visit Paris at the time, but got stuck in Warsaw because he didn’t have a passport.
- Glinka was inspired to compose this piece when he discerned the melodic similarity between two Russian folksongs (one called Kamarinskaya) and decided they’d be perfect companions to explore together in a symphonic work.
“By chance I discovered a relationship between the wedding song ‘From behind the mountains, the high mountains’, which I had heard in the country [and had used in Svadebnaya pesnya (‘Wedding Song’)], and the dance tune, Kamarinskaya, which everyone knows. And suddenly my fantasy ran high, and instead of a piano piece I wrote an orchestral piece called ‘Wedding Tune and Dance Tune’.”
MIkhail Glinka
- Kamarinskaya was innovative because Glinka piece’s form on the variations used in this type of Russian folk dance (called a naigrïsh) rather than relying on Western musical forms.
- Tchaikovsky felt that this piece was the source of Romantic Russian symphonic music.
[Russian classical music] “is all in Kamarinskaya, just as the whole oak is in the acorn.”
Tchaikovsky, 1888 diary entry1
Sources
- Stuart Campbell, “Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 10, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000011279.
Cut IDs
41607, 42284