Gran Sestetto originale in E flat [1832]

The modestly titled Gran Sestetto originale was one of the last works of Glinka the dilettante, the talented but essentially amateur young composer enchanted by what was most fashionable in Western Europe - Field and Hummel, Bellini and Donizetti - and little interested in the music of his native Russia. He was in Italy at the time and would soon begin to understand, as he wrote in his Memoirs, that he “could not sincerely be an Italian” and that he should be “composing in a Russian manner.” Within a year he would be on his way home, stopping off in Berlin for five months to undertake, at the age of twenty-nine, his first serious and consistent study of composition. He started work on A Life for the Tsar a year later and on Ruslan and Ludmila not long after that.

For the present, however, Glinka was living near Lake Maggiore and was in love with the married daughter of the doctor appointed to look after his always delicate health. It was for her that he wrote his Sextet although, for the sake of propriety, he had to dedicate it to one of her friends, the also modestly titled Sofia Medici di Marchesi di Marignani. It is elegantly written, in the manner of the more sophisticated salons of the day, with a piano part clearly designed to flatter the keyboard accomplishment of Dr Fillipi’s beautiful daughter and nothing to betray its composer’s Russian origins.

The opening Allegro, the most substantial of the three movements, is sustained by a kind of motto theme emphatically pronounced at the start by the piano. The charming first subject, also introduced by the piano, might not be derived from it but the cello’s no less charming second subject clearly is. All three themes are thoroughly developed and, by recapitulating the second subject in the wrong key, Glinka is able to extend the construction with a coda featuring brilliant passage work for the piano and a heroic role for the motto. The Andante, a sensitively scored nocturne with a central episode for gypsy violin, leads directly into the Allegro con spirito. Some commentators have been able to discover a Russian element in the dance tunes of this last movement but, if there is such a thing, it is nothing so idiomatic as to seem at all outlandish in an artistic Italian drawing room at the time.