Roads that move - Rivers: A Very Short Introduction - page 58

Serious appreciation of the rural landscape in Russian art has been traced back to 1838,
when two brothers, Grigory and Nikanor Chernetsov, were dispatched by the Ministry of
the Imperial Palace under Tsar Nicholas I to travel the length of the Volga from Rybinsk
to Astrakhan on a 'voyage of discovery', commissioned to draw panoramic views of 'the
beautiful places on both banks of the Volga'. The result was a cyclorama some 600 metres
long that was put on display in St Petersburg, in a room decorated to resemble a ship's
cabin and equipped with sound effects to simulate the river journey. Sadly, the epic work
did not survive the numerous unwindings of these viewings, but the Chernetsovs' journals
and travel notes remain, along with some of their working sketches and oil paintings.
On film, a classic movie from the Soviet era is the musical comedy Volga, Volga , said to
have been a favourite of the leader Joseph Stalin. The film tells the story of a talented folk
singer who overcomes petty bureaucrats to travel to Moscow for a music contest and is
set largely on a Volga steamboat named The Josef Stalin . First released in 1938, its light-
hearted escapism stood in stark contrast to the economic hardships and political purges oc-
curring in the Soviet Union at the time.
Music
Three water nymphs from the River Rhine are central characters in the monumental four-
opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (usually known in English simply as the Ring Cycle)
by Richard Wagner. The Rhine maidens (nixie borrowed from Germanic folklore - see
Chapter 2 ) , are guardians of the Rheingold , a treasure hidden in the river which is stolen
and turned into the ring at the centre of the mid-19th-century epic. They appear in the first
and last scenes, eventually rising from the waters of the Rhine to reclaim the ring from the
ashes of Brünnhilde's funeral pyre.
The charm and romance of the Danube is evoked in The Waves of the Danube , a waltz com-
posed in 1880 by the Romanian Ion Ivanovici, but the waltz written 14 years earlier by the
Austrian conductor and composer Johann Strauss the Younger is more widely acclaimed.
An der schönen blauen Donau , better known in English as the Blue Danube , has been one
of the most consistently popular pieces of classical music ever since.
Johann Strauss lived and worked in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire, a centre of high culture and classical music. In Bohemia, at the time part of the em-
pire, the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana wrote a cycle of nationalistic symphonic poems
entitled Ma vlast (My Country), of which his portrait of the Vltava River remains the most