Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Stasov’s meeting with Balakirev in Glinka’s drawing room a few weeks before that departure was to prove a profoundly symbolic moment for Russian music. Whatever might be thought of Glinka in world terms (and Stasov was a qualified admirer), he was indisputably the first native Russian composer whose work could be offered in all seriousness as worthy of the attention of foreign musicians. Berlioz had written of Ruslan and Lyudmila that its composer might “with good reason claim a place among the outstanding composers of his time.”17 Liszt regarded Ruslan as a masterpiece. Now here together at its composer’s fireside were two of the most alert musical and artistic minds of their generation in Russia, thinkers and doers in sharp contrast with the dilettante atmosphere that had hitherto reigned in even the best St. Petersburg musical circles. Stasov, though in no sense a professional musician, brought to music, alongside a burning passion, a deep knowledge not only of the repertoire as understood at the time but also of the historical evolution of the art form, information he had picked up as a kind of spin-off from his scholarly and professional study of the history of art. Probably no practicing musician of his day would have got as much as he did out of his visit to Abbé Santini in Rome. According to Gerald Abraham, he paid from his own pocket to have some four hundred of the manuscripts in Santini’s collection hand copied, with a view not to performance but to study.18 He was well informed about folk music, plainchant, and the music of the Orthodox Church, was musician enough to discuss these things on a technical level, and historian enough to locate them in their aesthetic and historical context. He also knew how to advocate their incorporation in modern art music. He was a born systematizer and a natural taxonomist; he had as well, it must be admitted, the dogmatic cast of mind to go with those talents. He had read everything of importance on the philosophy of art, and was gradually, if tortuously, evolving in his own mind a philosophy of Russian music adapted mutatis mutandis from the recent literary theories of nonmusicians such as Belinsky. He was politically just leftist enough to see art in the progressive, sociological light that seemed to be demanded by the spirit of the times, but not leftist enough to find himself being transported—like so many of his predecessors and contemporaries—to Siberia or the Caucasus.

  Balakirev was his perfect foil. A performer of consummate brilliance who disliked performing, he had to turn his musical energies in other directions. One of them would be composition. But this, too, would only partly satisfy him; and instead, in order to fill the creative gap, he would turn himself into a mentor of other composers, even though he quite lacked the technical knowledge (lacked it, indeed, more than Stasov) to teach them in any conventional meaning of the term. But this, too, may have been fortuitous, since, lacking the expertise himself, he was in no position to force it on others. Thus the character of what emerged from this conjunction of strong personalities was something very different from anything that might have been preconceived as the necessary environment for the creation of a new Russian music. It subsisted, to put it crudely, on talent and on ancestor worship, backed up by philosophy. We should hardly be surprised if the results had little in common with the academic tradition of Western music.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Officer and the Doctor

  One day in the early autumn of 1856 two young men, a guards officer and a house surgeon, found themselves on duty together in the orderly room of the Second Army Hospital in St. Petersburg. The officer was seventeen years old, of medium height and somewhat plain looking, but very proud of himself in his new dark-green Preobrazhensky Regiment uniform, his hair waved and pomaded, his hands manicured, a picture of slightly exaggerated elegance and refinement. The medical orderly’s dress and manner were more relaxed and matter-of-fact. He was five or six years older than the officer, tall and slim, already a graduate with distinction from the Medical-Surgical Academy, and he observed his colleague’s teenage posturing with a certain amused detachment.

  They were both bored by the duty routine, which demanded their presence but for the most part gave them nothing to do with it, and they quickly fell into conversation. It soon turned out that they had more in common than appearances might have suggested. Above all, they were both passionate musicians, pianists; and it transpired that they would be meeting again that very evening at the house of the hospital’s chief medical officer, who was in the habit of arranging soirées for his daughter. In the evening the medical orderly observed his young colleague more critically: his “refined, aristocratic manners, conversation the same, speaking somewhat through his teeth: interspersed with French phrases, rather flowery Some traces of foppishness, but very moderate. Unusually polite and well-bred. The ladies made a fuss of him. He sat down at the piano and, raising his hands coquettishly, played excerpts from Trovatore, Traviata, etc., very sweetly, gracefully, and so forth, while around him buzzed a chorus of ‘charmant, délicieux.’ ”1

  This young dandy with the smart uniform and the courtly manners was Modest Petrovich Musorgsky. His medical colleague was Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin. Musorgsky was the younger son of the owner of a large estate at Karevo, in the province of Pskov, 250 miles to the south of St. Petersburg, where Modest had been born on 9 March 1839. When he was ten, his parents had brought him and his older brother, Filaret, to the capital and enrolled them in the Petropavlovsk secondary school, from where they had passed, after a year in the Komarov preparatory school, into the Cadet School of Guards Ensigns. At the time of his meeting with Borodin, Modest had recently graduated from the Cadet School to the Preobrazhensky reserves, but was transferred back when the reserves were disbanded in October. The Cadet School could hardly have been more unlike the School of Jurisprudence. There was a rigid hierarchy among the cadets, comparable to the fagging system that survived in English schools well into the twentieth century. Junior cadets were routinely subjected to brutal humiliations of one kind and another by their seniors, and were flogged if they fell short of requirements. The senior cadets spent much of their leisure time in hard drinking and womanizing, activities that were regarded as an essential part of the formation of a proper guards officer. The cultivation of intellectual or artistic pursuits was definitely not on their agenda. Modest’s predilection for history and philosophy is supposed to have prompted the school’s director, General Alexander Sutgof, to inquire: “What kind of an officer will you turn out to be, mon cher?”

  To some extent, no doubt, this philistinism was a pose. Sutgof was himself well educated, a decent linguist and historian, and at least respectful of art. Ever since his arrival in St. Petersburg, Musorgsky had taken piano lessons with Anton Herke, a pupil of Stasov’s teacher Henselt; but Sutgof’s daughter also took lessons with Herke, which Musorgsky himself—according to his brother—attended and sometimes participated in. In any case a good pianist is a useful adjunct to a dancing, drinking culture, and a musician who is prepared to sit down and play or sing on demand will always be popular with even the rowdiest—perhaps especially with the rowdiest—revellers. As a young teenager Musorgsky was already showing a talent for quick adaptation to the musical needs of those around him, a talent that would soon stand him in good stead in social circles very different from those of the Preobrazhensky Guards. But facility can be a dangerous gift; it encourages people to use you for their own ends, and at the same time discourages hard learning and application. And Musorgsky was unquestionably facile. He could play at sight or by ear; he could transpose into different keys; he could sing well to his own accompaniment, without, perhaps, a voice of any great distinction but with a gift for characterization and mimicry that more than made up for the lack of particular vocal beauty or bravura. He was fond of improvising at the keyboard and could do so in a variety of styles, like an accomplished café pianist. But he had actually composed, in the sense of writing down on paper, practically nothing. Of all the polkas and waltzes he must have bashed out for the delectation of his fellow cadets, only one survives, the mysteriously titled “Porte-Enseigne” Polka, which we possess becau
se it was published, in 1852, when Musorgsky was thirteen, apparently on his father’s initiative. But this piece, though faceless, is so polished in execution as to be mildly suspect. It must surely have been tidied up and written down either by his father or by Herke, even if we need not take literally Nikolay Kompaneysky’s memory that the young Modest had not “the slightest idea of how to put down his thoughts on paper or of the most elementary rules of music.”2

  It is hard to see through these various poses and disputed memories in order to form a reliable picture of this unusual guards officer’s character. Reminiscences of famous people tend to be colored by the memoirist’s knowledge of their mature achievements and of how they were subsequently regarded. Musorgsky himself reports having been well enough taught the piano by his mother at Karevo to be able to play short pieces by Liszt when he was seven and a concerto by John Field by the time he was nine. Herke, according to Kompaneysky, insisted on an exclusively German repertoire, which at that time was hardly a serious limitation, even if it excluded everything Russian—of which, after all, there was little of significance outside opera and song. Musorgsky tells us that his first piano improvisations were inspired by the Russian fairy tales told him by his nyanya at Karevo, a suitable enough inspiration for the later dedicated nationalist. But in the main, the young man’s intellectual orientation was probably German, not only in music but also in philosophy. Like many Russian children of his class, Musorgsky had had a German governess and could read and speak German well; at the Petropavlovsk school, too, the teachers were predominantly German, and lessons were in that language. So it was natural that if drawn to philosophy, he would read mainly the German idealists whose work had dominated Russian thought since the 1820s, and he would read them in the original. What he read, specifically, we do not know, but we can speculate that it would have included Schelling, probably Fichte, perhaps also Hegel, because these were the writers fashionable in Russian intellectual circles. Whether he derived anything from them at that time, beyond the sense of being in the intellectual swim, is questionable. By the time he was himself producing work detectably related to particular intellectual tendencies, they were of a diametrically opposite thrust. But insofar as the creative impulse was beginning to stir in him, the philosophy of art implicit in the work of Herder or Schelling would have led him toward a concept of individualism, the original, the eccentric, even the disagreeable, that in a sense fitted in with something of which, it’s true, no German pedagogue could possibly have approved: the rejection of conventional schooling.

  The truth about the young officer with whom Borodin shared a hospital orderly room that autumn day of 1856 is that he was as yet an inchoate personality, not fully formed, and still essentially unsure of himself. The posturing and polished manners, the affected speech and the litter of French phrases, were a mask concealing something more awkward, less approachable. His music making at this time, too, was a kind of uniform: insider wear for an outsider personality. At the time Borodin saw only the surface; and for many people Musorgsky would remain a superficial, or at best enigmatic, character, too easily influenced by other, more forceful minds, too weakly rooted in his own. If his music would in due course prove this view profoundly false, his life would lend it all too much support.

  Apart from their shared musical enthusiasm, he and Borodin will have found little immediately in common. Or perhaps their personalities complemented one another. Where Musorgsky made a somewhat immature, self-conscious impression, the five-years-older Borodin seemed an altogether more integrated, mature, well-adjusted personality. Where Musorgsky had no clear vocation, Borodin could have laid claim to two. As a musician he was not only a decent pianist and a passable cellist, but already a talented composer with a variety of works to his credit. Admittedly, they were a curious miscellany: a handful of songs in the lyrical, sentimental manner of the Russian romance composers, Alyabyev and Gurilyov, but with accompaniments that included a part for cello; three or four chamber works in the style of Haydn or Mendelssohn; and some juvenilia for piano. Several of these works were incomplete, partly no doubt because Borodin was writing in a purely amateur environment with no particular compulsion toward performance, but above all for a reason that would plague his music for the rest of his life: the overpowering demands of his other, entirely professional vocation, that of a research chemist and university teacher. He had already, in his early teens, set up a miniature laboratory in his room at home, and by the time he met Musorgsky he had completed a six-year course in natural science, anatomy, and chemistry at the Medical-Surgical Academy and was about to embark on a doctoral dissertation with the pithy title: On the Analogy of Arsenic Acid with Phosphoric Acid in Chemical and Toxicological Behavior.

  At that time their meeting had every appearance of a passing encounter, repeated two or three times, then terminated by a parting of their ways. Borodin went abroad for several months as part of his doctoral research, and when he returned to Russia in late 1857 he was for a time preoccupied with his dissertation and his work as assistant professor at the academy. They met again only toward the end of 1859, in the house of a colleague of Borodin’s, by which time Musorgsky had resigned from the guards in order to dedicate himself entirely to music. He was now moving in quite new musical circles, and his views were beginning to reflect these new influences. There was a dogmatic force to his opinions that particularly struck Borodin. Mendelssohn, still to some extent Borodin’s hero, was to be regarded with condescension. When their host invited them to play Mendelssohn’s A-minor symphony in a four-hand piano arrangement, Musorgsky made a show of reluctance before agreeing on condition that he “be spared the andante, which is not at all symphonic, but one of the Lieder ohne Worte arranged for orchestra, or something of the kind.”3 On the other hand, he talked enthusiastically about Schumann, a composer new to Borodin, and played some extracts from the Third Symphony, after which he played a scherzo of his own with what he called an “Oriental” trio section (probably his orchestral scherzo in B-flat, composed the previous year, whose middle section has a drone bass somewhat in Glinka’s Ruslan style). All this had a great effect on the impressionable Borodin. “I was dreadfully astonished,” he recorded much later, “at what were, for me, unheard-of new elements in the music. I won’t say that they even particularly pleased me at first; rather they somewhat puzzled me by their novelty. But after listening for a while more attentively, I began gradually to savour it.”4

  Soon after this second encounter, Borodin again went abroad to pursue his scientific research, basing himself in Heidelberg, but working also in Rotterdam, Paris, and, eventually, Pisa. Musorgsky’s own life in the months that followed their first meeting was listless and unfocused. He performed his duties as a guards officer conscientiously, but—by his own admission when applying for his discharge in 1858—had no special commissions, undertook nothing on his own initiative, and gained no particular merit.5 Military service simply did not interest him. In the summer of 1857 he took four months’ extended leave in the country, probably at Karevo, no doubt on the pretext of family business. His musical activities seem to have been equally desultory. He tinkered with one or two brief compositions. There is a song, “Where Art Thou, Little Star?”, composed in April and once regarded as a prophetic treatment of the ornate Russian folk style known as protyazhnaya—the “drawn out” style—until it was proved by Richard Taruskin that the supposed original was in fact a later revision of a more conventional setting in the manner of Gurilyov or Alyabyev.6 Six months later Musorgsky wrote a short piano piece enigmatically titled “Souvenir d’enfance,” perhaps based on something he had composed as a child, but otherwise devoid of obviously infantile features. The suave melody is vaguely suggestive of Glinka’s “Oriental” manner (as in the Persian chorus of Ruslan), with the same sense of going nowhere in particular. Musorgsky underpins it for much of the time with a bass pedal, an unvarying low B which clashes with the changing harmonies in the right hand, a favorite and convenient dev
ice that he probably took over from his piano improvisations.7

  Two years later he described himself as having been, at this time, “under the weight of a severe illness, which came on with great force during my time in the country. This was mysticism—mixed up with cynical thoughts about the Deity.”8 What on earth did he mean? A glimmer of light dawns in a reminiscence of a few months later. Here he describes his previous condition as nervous irritation, brought on only partly, he claims without a flicker of embarrassment, by masturbation, “but chiefly this: youth, excessive enthusiasm, a terrible, irresistible desire for omniscience, exaggerated critical and idealistic introspection that amounted to the embodiment of a dream in images and actions.”9 Almost as striking as the symptoms is his willingness to analyze them in such candid and painful detail. A problem with introspection can be the anxiety it creates about the validity of one’s own existence. Is this “I” that I observe a possible, plausible concept compared with the well-formed, well-motivated, well-adjusted individuals whom I meet every day, with their settled functions and useful talents, whether they be peasants going about their rural tasks, or clever intellectuals thinking lucid, humane thoughts, or artists or politicians, or just ordinary, friendly people who relate so well to one another and into whose presence I intrude like a two-headed monster or a bearded lady? On the other hand there is that nagging consciousness that I am in fact a special individual with something unusual to contribute, which, however, I am signally, emphatically, not contributing. This condition, intensely characteristic of Russians of the minor aristocracy in the early-to-middle decades of the nineteenth century, had been named and brilliantly described only a few years earlier by Turgenev in his “Diary of a Superfluous Man.” “During the course of my life,” the superfluous man, Chulkaturin, laments,