Vladimir Glinka’s Kamarinskaya: Plagiarism or Genius
If a composer takes someone else’s melody, is it plagiarism or genius? In Kamarinskaya Mikhail Glinka took two Russian folk songs, a wedding song and a dance song, and arranged them for orchestra. The result is a fantasy in which one song weeps with beauty while the other breaks into dance, and both sound as if they had been composed for orchestra.
The full title is Kamarinskaya, a fantasy on the themes of two Russian songs: the wedding song “From Beyond the Mountains, the High Mountains” and the dance song “Kamarinskaya.” It needs a special ensemble: nearly full brass and paired woodwinds, so that each theme gets its own timbre and the listener follows it like a hero in a play.
Two songs, one story
- An unhurried introduction. The orchestra leads us beautifully into the atmosphere, and already on the second page of the score the wedding song “From Beyond the Mountains, the High Mountains” appears.
- A drawn-out melody. First the strings sing it: long, beautiful, unhurried. Then the melody passes to the woodwinds: flute, clarinet, a light pastoral quality. The strings return to them, the double basses join, and together with the trombone the winds enter.
- The dance accelerates. The second theme, Allegro moderato, appears in the first violins. Then the second violins, violas and cellos take it up: the theme develops, gathers speed, and the composer squeezes everything out of it.
- A recapitulation with a Russian sound. The introduction sounds again and again leads us to the wedding theme. But now instead of the first violin it is led by the clarinet, with that pastoral quality and beautiful Russian sound that cannot be mistaken for anything else. The oboe and bassoon join it, then the strings, and all this turns into a dance at a fast tempo.
- The finale. The composer concludes with a beautiful fifth: air, a column of beauty. Then he once more slowly presents the theme and ends with unrestrained merriment.
What remains
Glinka did not invent these songs; they were sung long before him. He did something else: he heard a whole orchestra in folk melodies and showed what they can do when flute, clarinet, violins and brass take them up. It is no accident that Tchaikovsky wrote that the entire Russian symphonic school is in Kamarinskaya, as the oak is in the acorn. Listen to how it sounds live, and decide for yourself: plagiarism or genius?
