* The Musorgsky family owned 110,000 hectares - eighteen villages - with a total population of 400 serfs prior to the emancipation of 1861 (C. Emerson, The Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge, 1999), p. 37).
+ In Russian fairy rales the witch Baba Yagfl lives deep in the woods in a hut whose legs allow it to rotate to face each unfortunate new visitor.
musical expression, one entirely free from the sonata form of European music, if they were to be redrawn in sound; and this is what Musorg-sky's Pictures did. They created a new Russian language in music.
'To you, Generalissimo, sponsor of the Gartman Exhibition, in remembrance of our dear Viktor, 27 June, '74.' Thus Musorgsky dedicated Pictures to Vladimir Stasov, the critic, scholar and self-appointed champion of the national school in all the Russian arts. Stasov was a huge figure, one might say a tyrant, in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian cultural milieu. He discovered a large number of its greatest talents (Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Repin, Kramskoi, Vasnetsov and Antokolsky); he inspired many of their works (Borodin's Prince Igor, Musorgsky's Khovansh-cbina, Balakirev's King Lear and Rimsky's Sadko and Scheherazade); and he fought their battles in countless thunderous articles and letters to the press. Stasov had a reputation as a brilliant dogmatist. Turgenev carried on a lifelong argument with 'our great all-Russian critic', whom he caricatured in the figure Skoropikhin in his 1877 novel Virgin Soil ('He is always foaming and frothing over like a bottle of sour kvas'). He also wrote a famous ditty about him:
Argue with someone more intelligent than you:
He will defeat you.
But from your defeat you will learn something useful.
Argue with someone of equal intelligence:
Neither will be victorious.
And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.
Argue with someone less intelligent:
Not from a desire for victory
But because you may be of use to him.
Argue even with a fool: You will not gain glory But sometimes it is fun.
Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.65
Stasov wanted Russian art to liberate itself from Europe's hold. By copying the West, the Russians could be at best second-rate; but by borrowing from their own native traditions they might create a truly national art that matched Europe's with its high artistic standards and originality. 'Looking at these paintings', Stasov wrote of the Academy Exhibition of 1861, 'it is difficult to guess without a signature or label that they have been done by Russians in Russia. All are exact copies of foreign works.'66 In his view, art should be 'national' in the sense that it portrayed the people's daily lives, was meaningful to them, and taught them how to live.
Stasov was a towering figure in Musorgsky's life. They first met in 1857, when Stasov was the champion of the Balakirev circle in its revolt against the Petersburg Conservatory. Founded by the pianist Anton Rubinstein in 1861, the Conservatory was dominated by the German conventions of composition developed in the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Its patron was the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, a German by origin and proselytizer of her nation's cultural cause, who secured the court's support after Rubinstein had failed to raise public finance for the Conservatory. Rubinstein was contemptuous of the amateurism of musical life in Russia (he called Glinka a dilettante) and he set about promoting music education on Germanic lines. Russian national music, Rubinstein maintained, was of only 'ethnographic interest', quaint but without artistic value in itself. Balakirev and Stasov were incensed. While they recognized that a standard had been set by the German tradition, as nationalists they worshipped what they perceived as Glinka's 'purely Russian' music (in fact it is steeped in Italian and German influences)67 and retaliated by accusing Rubinstein of denigrating Russia from the heights of what they called his 'European conservatorial grandeur'.68 There was an element of xenophobia, even anti-Semitism, in their battles against Rubinstein. They called him 'Tupinstein' ('dull'), 'Dubinstein' ('dumbhead') and 'Grubinstein' ('crude'). But they were afraid that German principles would stifle Russian forms and their fear gave way to foreigner-baiting. In 1862 they established the Free Music School as a direct rival to the Conservatory, setting it the task of cultivating native talent. In Stasov's phrase, it was time for the 'hoopskirts and tailcoats' of the Petersburg elites to make way for the 'long Russian coats' of the
provinces.69 The School became the stronghold of the so-called 'Mighty Five', the kuchka, who pioneered the Russian musical style.
The kuchkist composers were all young men in 1862. Balakirev was twenty-five, Cui twenty-seven, Musorgsky twenty-three, Borodin the old man at twenty-eight, and Rimsky-Korsakov the baby of them all at just eighteen. All of them were self-trained amateurs. Borodin combined composing with a career as a chemist. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer (his First Symphony was written on a ship). Musorgsky had been in the Guards and then the civil service before taking up music, and even after that, at the height of his success in the 1870s, he was forced by the expense of his drinking habit to hold down a full-time job in the State Forestry Department. In contrast, moreover, to the elite status and court connections of Conservatory composers such as Tchaikovsky, the kuchkists, by and large, were from the minor gentry of the provinces. So to some degree their esprit de corps depended on the myth, which they themselves created, of a movement that was more 'authentically Russian', in the sense that it was closer to the native soil, than the classical academy.70
But there was nothing mythical about the musical language they developed, which set them poles apart from the conventions of the Conservatory. This self-conscious Russian styling was based on two elements. First they tried to incorporate in their music what they heard in village songs, in Cossack and Caucasian dances, in church chants and (cliched though it soon became) the tolling of church bells.* 'Once again the sound of bells!' Rimsky once exclaimed after a performance of Boris Godunov. He too had often reproduced the sound, in The Maid of Pskov (1873),the Easter Overture (1888), and his orchestra-lions of Borodin's Prince Igor and Musorsgky's Khovanshckina.71 Kuchkist music was filled with imitative sounds of Russian life. It tried to reproduce what Glinka had once called 'the soul of Russian music'
*Russian church bells have a special musicality which is unlike the sound of any other bells. The Russian technique of bell-chiming is for the ringers to strike the different bells directly with hammers, or by using short cords attached to the clappers. This encourages a form of counterpoint - albeit with the dissonances which result from the resounding echoes of the bells. The Western technique of ringing bells by swinging them with long ropes from the ground makes such synchronization all but impossible to achieve.
– the long-drawn, lyrical and melismatic song of the Russian peasantry. Balakirev made this possible with his study of the folk songs of the Volga region in the 1860s (the heyday of populism in the arts). More than any previous anthology, his transcriptions artfully preserved the distinctive aspects of Russian folk music:
– its 'tonal mutability': a tune seems to shift quite naturally from one tonic centre to another, often ending up in a different key (usually a second lower or higher) from the one in which the piece began. The effect is to produce a feeling of elusiveness, a lack of definition or of logical progression in the harmony, which even in its stylized kuchkist form makes Russian music sound very different from the tonal structures of the West.
– its heterophony: a melody divides into several dissonant voices, each with its own variation of the theme, which is improvised by the individual singers until the end, when the song reverts to a single line.
– its use of parallel fifths, fourths and thirds. The effect is to give to Russian music a quality of raw sonority that is entirely missing in the polished harmonies of Western music.
Secondly the kuchkists invented a series of harmonic devices to create a distinct 'Russian' style and colour that was different from the music of the West. This 'exotic' styling of 'Russia' was no
t just self-conscious but entirely invented - for none of these devices was actually employed in Russian folk or church music:
– the whole-tone scale (C-D-E-F sharp-G sharp-A sharp-C): invented by Glinka and used for the first time in the march of Chernomor, the sorcerer in his opera Ruslan and Liudmila (1842), this became the 'Russian' sound of spookiness and evil. It was used by all the major composers from Tchaikovsky (for the apparition of the Countess's ghost in The Queen of Spades in 1890) to Rimsky-Korsakov (in all his magic-story operas, Sadko (1897), Kashchei the Immortal (1902) and Kitezh (1907)). The scale is also heard in the music of Debussy, who took it (and much else) from Musorgsky. Later it became a standard device in horror-movie scores.
– the octatonic scale, consisting of a whole tone followed by a semi-tone (C-D-E flat-F-G flat-A flat-B double flat-C double
flat): used for the first time by Rimsky-Korsakov in his Sadko symphonic suite of 1867, it became a sort of Russian calling card, a leitmotif of magic and menace that was used not just by Rimsky but by all his followers, above all Stravinsky in his three great Russian ballets, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). - the modular rotation in sequences of thirds: a device of Liszt's which the Russians made their own as the basis of their loose symphonic-poem type of structure that avoids the rigid (German) laws of modulation in sonata form. Instead of the usual progression to the relative minor in the development section of the sonata form (e.g. C major to A minor), the Russians established a tonic centre in the opening section (say, C major) and then progressed through sequences of thirds (A flat major, F major, D flat major, and so on) in subsequent sections. The effect is to break away from the Western laws of development, enabling the form of a composition to be shaped entirely by the 'content' of the music (its programmatic statements and visual descriptions) rather than by formal laws of symmetry. This loose structure was especially important in Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a work that probably did more than any other to define the Russian style. Musorgsky was the most original of the kuchkist composers. This was partly because he was the least schooled in European rules of composition. But the main reason was that he consciously rejected the European school and, more than any of the other nationalists, looked to the traditions of the Russian folk as a means of overturning it. There is a sense in which this very Russian figure (lazy, slovenly and heavy-drinking, full of swagger and explosive energy) played the Holy Fool in relation to the West. He rejected out of hand the received conventions of composition drawn up from the music of Bach, Mozart and Haydn. 'Symphonic development, technically understood, is developed by the German, just as his philosophy is', Musorgsky wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1868. 'The German when he thinks first theorises at length and then proves; our Russian brother proves first and then amuses himself with theory.'72
Musorgsky's direct approach to life is reflected in his Pictures. The suite is a loosely structured series of musical portraits, a gentle amble through a picture gallery, without any sign of the formal ('German') rules of elaboration or development, and little evidence of the Western conventions of musical grammar. At its heart is the magic reach and power of the Russian folk imagination. The opening 'Promenade (in mode russico)' is a folk-inspired tune with a metric flexibility, sudden tonal shifts, open fifths and octaves, and a choral heterophony echoing the patterns of the village song. The grotesque and tempestuous 'Baba Yaga' shifts violently between keys, persistently returning to the key of G in that static manner of the Russian peasant song (nepodvizbnost') which, in a musical revolution yet to come, Stravinsky would deploy with such explosive force in The Rite of Spring. Musorgsky's final picture, the glorious 'Kiev Gate', religiously uplifting, beautiful and tender, takes its cue from an ancient Russian hymn, the chant of Znamenny, originating from Byzantium and heard here, in the awesome closing moments, resounding to the clangour of the heavy bells. It is a wonderfully expressive moment, a picture of all Russia drawn in sound, and a moving tribute by Musorgsky to his friend.
5
Alongside their interest in its 'Russian style', writers, artists and composers developed an obsession with Moscow's history. One only has to list the great historical operas (from Glinka's A Life for the Tsar to Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov and Musorgsky's Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina), the history plays and novels (from Pushkin's Boris Godunov to Alexei Tolstoy's trilogy beginning with The Death of Ivan the Terrible), the huge proliferation of poetic works on historical themes and the epic history paintings of Surikov and Repin, or Vasnetsov and Vrubel, to see the importance of Moscow's history to the cultural quest for 'Russia' in the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that nearly all these works concerned the final years of Ivan the Terrible and the so-called 'Time of Troubles' between the reign of Boris Godunov and the foundation of the Romanov dynasty. History was regarded as a battlefield for competing views of Russia
and its destiny, and these fifty years were seen as a crucial period in Russia's past. They were a time when everything was up for grabs and the nation was confronted by fundamental questions of identity. Was it to be governed by elected rulers or by Tsars? Was it to be part of Europe or remain outside of it? The same questions were being asked by thinking Russians in the nineteenth century.
Boris Godunov was a vital figure in this national debate. The histories, plays and operas that were written about him were also a discourse on Russia's destiny. The Godunov we know from Pushkin and Musorgsky appeared first in Karamzin's History. Karamzin portrayed Godunov as a tragic figure, a progressive ruler who was haunted by the past, a man of immense power and yet human frailty who was undone by the gap between political necessity and his own conscience. But in order to make the medieval Tsar the subject of a modern psychological drama, Karamzin had to invent much of his history.
Boris, in real life, was the orphaned son of an old boyar family who had been raised at the Muscovite court as a ward of the Tsar, Ivan the Terrible. The Godunovs became intimate with the Royal Family at a time when noble lineage was viewed as potentially seditious by the Tsar. Engaged in a protracted struggle with noble boyar clans, Ivan made a point of promoting loyal servicemen from humble origins like the Godunovs. Boris's sister, Irina Godunova, married Fedor, the Tsar's weak and feeble-minded son. Shortly after, Ivan struck down and killed his eldest son, Ivan the Tsarevich, an episode which gripped the nineteenth-century imagination through Repin's famous painting of the scene, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581(1885). Dmitry, Ivan's other son, was just two years old when Ivan died in 1584, and his claim to the succession was tenuous at best. He was the child of the Tsar's seventh marriage, but Church law permitted only three. So Fedor was crowned when Ivan died. The practical affairs of government were taken over by Boris Godunov - addressed in official documents as 'the great sovereign's Brother-in-Law, Ruler of the Russian lands'. Boris made a notable success of government. He secured Russia's borders in the Baltic lands, kept in check the Tatar raids from the southern steppe, strengthened ties with Europe and, to secure a stable labour force for the gentry, he laid down the administrative framework of serfdom - a measure which was deeply unpopular with
the peasantry. In 1598 Fedor died. Irina refused the crown and went into a convent, overcome with grief at her failure to produce an heir. At the zemskii sobor, or 'Assembly of the Land', the Moscow boyars voted for Boris to become Tsar - the first elected Tsar in Russian history.
The early years of the Godunov reign were prosperous and peaceful. In many ways Boris was an enlightened monarch - a man ahead of his own time. He was interested in Western medicine, book printing and education, and he even dreamed of founding a Russian university on the European model. But in 1601-3 things went badly wrong. A series of harvest failures led to the starvation of about one-quarter of the peasantry in Muscovy, and since the crisis was made worse by the new laws of serfdom which took away the peasants' rights of movement, the rural protests were aimed against the Tsar. The old princely clans took advantage
of the famine crisis to renew their plots against the upstart elected Tsar whose power was a threat to their noble privilege. Boris stepped up his police surveillance of the noble families (especially the Romanovs) and banished many of them to Siberia or to monasteries in the Russian north on charges of treason. Then, in the middle of this political crisis, a young pretender to the Russian throne appeared with an army from Poland - a country always ready to exploit divisions within Russia for territorial gain. The pretender was Grigory Otrepev, a runaway monk who had been at one time in the service of the Romanovs, and he was probably approached by them before his escapade. He claimed to be the Tsarevich Dmitry, Ivan's youngest son. Dmitry had been found with his throat cut in 1591; he was an epileptic and at the time it was established that he had stabbed himself in a fit. But Godunov's opponents always claimed that he had killed the boy to clear his own passage to the Russian throne. The 'False Dmitry' played upon these doubts, claiming he had escaped the plot to murder him. It enabled him to rally supporters against the 'usurper Tsar' among disgruntled peasants and Cossacks on his march towards Moscow. Godunov died suddenly in 1605, as the pretender's forces approached Moscow. According to Karamzin, he died of the 'inner agitation of the soul which is inescapable for a criminal'.7'
The evidence implicating Godunov in the murder of Dmitry had been fabricated by the Romanovs, whose own claims to the throne had rested on their election by the boyars' assembly to restore Russia's
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