Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done. I was apprehensive, reserved, and irritable, like all sickly people. Moreover, probably owing to excessive self-consciousness, perhaps as the result of the generally unfortunate cast of my personality, there existed between my thoughts and feelings, and the expression of those feelings and thoughts, a sort of inexplicable, irrational, and utterly insuperable barrier; and whenever I made up my mind to overcome this obstacle by force, to break down this barrier, my gestures, the expression of my face, my whole being, took on an appearance of painful constraint. I not only seemed, I positively became unnatural and affected. I was conscious of this myself, and hastened to shrink back into myself. Then a terrible commotion was set up within me. I analysed myself to the last thread, compared myself with others, recalled the slightest glances, smiles, words of the people to whom I had tried to open myself out, put the worst construction on everything, laughed vindictively at my own pretensions to “be like every one else,”—and suddenly, in the midst of my laughter, collapsed utterly into gloom, sank into absurd dejection, and then began again as before—went round and round, in fact, like a squirrel on its wheel. Whole days were spent in this harassing, fruitless exercise. Well now, tell me, if you please, to whom and for what is such a man of use? Why did this happen to me? what was the reason of this trivial fretting at myself?—who knows? who can tell?10

  Chulkaturin has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, so writes about himself in the past tense. Musorgsky is merely facing a blank future, without purpose or ambition. He returns from the country to his military duties in October and his condition worsens. He becomes morbidly oversensitive and touchy in his relations with other people, and broods on death and the afterlife. As the younger son, he has nothing to do with the family estates, yet the Russian system offers him no alternatives outside the army, the church, or the civil service. Unlike Stasov, he has no driving enthusiasm that marks out an unconventional alternative route. At the age of eighteen, his world is adrift.

  At this low point in his young existence, Musorgsky made an acquaintance that would change his entire life. Through one of his musical Preobrazhensky friends, Fyodor Vanlyarsky, he met the composer Alexander Dargomïzhsky, and was invited to attend musical soirées at his apartment. At that precise moment, the autumn of 1857, Dargomïzhsky was perhaps the most prominent living Russian composer. Glinka had been dead nine months;11 Alexey Verstovsky’s opera Gromoboy had recently been staged in Moscow, but nothing new by the composer of Askold’s Tomb had been heard in St. Petersburg for almost two decades; Alexander Gurilyov had composed some excellent songs, but little else. Dargomïzhsky was also the composer of many fine and interesting songs; but most importantly he had written two operas, of which the second, Rusalka, premiered with modest success in St. Petersburg in May 1856, but assumed an almost iconic significance in the critical press, particularly thanks to a huge, admiring ten-part review by Stasov’s old school friend Serov in the Muzïkal’nïy i teatral’nïy vestnik.

  On the face of it, Rusalka was a conventional romantic-folk opera about a miller’s daughter who turns into a mermaid and drags her unfaithful lover to the bottom of the river Dnieper. Much of the music was cast in the standard operatic genre forms of chorus, aria, duet, trio, with simple, charming melodies, uncomplicated rhythms, and plain, effective scoring. What excited Serov was something else of which, it seems, Dargomïzhsky was only half aware: the unusually close relationship between his music and the text of Pushkin’s verse play. Of course he realized that in adapting the play as a libretto, he had stayed as close as possible to the original text, sometimes even setting Pushkin’s exact lines. What he seems not to have grasped was the comparative novelty of his own technique at those points where the original verse was set to a kind of free-flowing dramatic recitative in which the music shaped itself round the natural declamation of the words as if the singer were—albeit in a heightened style—actually speaking the play. Serov had been reading the operatic treatises of Wagner (though he had not yet seen any of his operas), and had absorbed his theories about fluid word setting and the derivation of the musical ideas from the vocal-poetic line. Oddly enough, Serov was skeptical about Wagner’s insistence that music, poetry, and stage setting should be on an equal footing; and yet he now praises precisely those parts of Rusalka where the music is most subservient to the text. He enthuses about the scene in which the Miller, driven mad by the loss of his daughter and believing himself to be a raven, encounters her lover, the Prince, on the river bank and demands her restitution. The conversational nature of the discourse is reflected in an informal succession of orchestral ideas, sometimes doubling the words, sometimes picking up their intonation, but hardly proceeding thematically at all. None of this is exactly revolutionary; but it does introduce to Russian music a technique that would in due course have consequences unforeseen and unforeseeable at the time. Not the least remarkable thing about it is Serov’s influence in drawing Dargomïzhsky’s attention to his own achievement. “Late last night,” the composer wrote to the critic, “I read your analysis of the duet between the miller and the prince. I thank you with all my heart not so much for your praise as for the uncommonly deep penetration of my innermost and even unconscious thoughts. In truth I had never thought that my duet was so successful …”12

  Whether or not Musorgsky saw Rusalka during its run of performances in 1856 we don’t know. Stasov says not: Glinka’s two operas and Rusalka, he assures us, were unknown to the young guards officer.13 Yet if Musorgsky had entered Dargomïzhsky’s home in November or December 1857 unable to discuss—and preferably praise—his host’s latest opera, he could well have been poorly received, since Dargomïzhsky was profoundly aggrieved at what he saw as the work’s inadequate reception and extremely touchy about Glinka’s (as he considered it) inflated reputation. He would grumble incessantly at the injustices to which he was subjected. Had not the most important critic in Russia praised Rusalka to the skies? Had he not identified in it progressive elements that even the great Glinka had not thought of? But where was the official recognition? Rusalka received a handful of performances but was soon withdrawn. Nobody but Serov seemed aware of its significance. Well, he, Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomïzhsky, would soldier on nonetheless. “I do not deceive myself,” he wrote to the singer Lyubov Karmalina just at the time of Musorgsky’s appearance in his circle, “my artistic situation in Petersburg is unenviable. The majority of our music-lovers and newspaper hacks do not recognize any inspiration in me. Their routine attitude looks for melodies that flatter the ear, which I do not seek out. I have no intention of lowering music to a pastime for their sake. I want sound to express the word directly. I want truth.”14

  Regardless of official St. Petersburg, Dargomïzhsky had assumed the mantle of chief musical progressive from the composer of Ruslan and Lyudmila. His soirées were dominated by excerpts from the Glinka operas and from Rusalka, especially, no doubt, the famous Miller’s song, the Prince’s lyrical cavatina from the third act, and perhaps also the “realist” dialogue discussed by Serov, all of which Dargomïzhsky himself would sing and accompany, not beautifully but to vivid dramatic effect. It was Musorgsky’s first experience of an environment in which music was taken seriously, not just as a vehicle for entertainment or display, but as a subject for debate and the airing of ideas. One of the regular guests was Mily Balakirev, a mere two years older than Musorgsky, not only a spectacularly gifted pianist but a talkative young man with strong opinions about music which he was prepared to back up with arguments. Another was César Cui, the young engineering graduate from Vilnius whom Balakirev had met at Glinka’s with Ulïbïshev. Cui, like Musorgsky, was an army officer, a military engineer. But he was a composer as well. He had already written a handful of songs and piano pieces, and was now starting an opera based on Pushkin’s narrative poem Kavkazskiy Plennik’ (A Prisoner of the Caucasus).

  The mere attempt at such
a project with no expertise beyond a familiarity with fortifications and high explosives must have struck Musorgsky, who had written nothing more than three minutes long, as impressively, absurdly ambitious. Even Balakirev, who in musical accomplishment was far above either of them, was working on nothing more pretentious than an orchestral overture on three Russian folk songs; and it may have been as part of a discussion of the problems involved in writing even a short work for orchestra that Balakirev offered to give Musorgsky informal instruction in composition. He will have explained—as he did later to Stasov—that he was not competent to teach Musorgsky music theory; that his teaching would take the form of practical demonstration and explanation through a close study of great works. On this basis the two young musicians began meeting frequently almost at once, early in December 1857.

  Balakirev had now been in St. Petersburg for two years, but, though chronically short of money, he had made no serious attempt to secure pupils, and his sessions with Musorgsky—who was by no means without resources—were always given without payment. The arrangement reflected Balakirev’s purity of soul at least as much as any lack of qualification, though in truth the one kind of teaching for which he certainly was qualified—piano lessons—was probably the one kind Musorgsky neither needed nor wanted. From the start the basis of Balakirev’s pedagogy was an overpowering confidence in the rightness of his own musical judgment. To put it bluntly, he was bossy and intolerant; he had the power of instant opinion, what he decided was to be regarded as absolute truth, and from such positions he rarely if ever deviated. He was, admittedly, often right. In the deeply provincial atmosphere of fifties St. Petersburg, with its dominant Italian opera and a local musical culture mainly centered on vaudeville (ballad opera) and private soirées, Balakirev’s insistence on the study of great works, his ruthless rejection of the tawdry and second-rate, his intensely critical attitude to what went on in Petersburg music, were vastly stimulating as attitudes even if the judgments they led to were sometimes quirky or frankly prejudiced.

  They met initially, it seems, at Balakirev’s apartment. But one of the first instructions he issued was that Musorgsky, who was living with his mother and brother, should acquire a decent piano of his own; and a new Becker was duly delivered to the apartment in Grebetsky Ulitsa, beyond the Fontanka, a few days before Christmas. Subsequent lessons were often at the Musorgsky apartment. They were frequent but sometimes had to be cancelled because of Musorgsky’s guard duties, a situation that no doubt brought to a head his growing sense that music and soldiering didn’t mix and led directly to his application for discharge in the spring of 1858. By early July, when the discharge came through, and Balakirev departed to spend the summer in Nizhny-Novgorod, they had established a firm way of working. They would play through four-hand piano versions of works by the great classical composers, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert; older masters such as Bach and Handel, and, where available, recent works by Berlioz, Liszt, and Schumann. According to a much later recollection of Balakirev’s, Musorgsky was by this time familiar with the important works of Glinka and Dargomïzhsky (presumably thanks to their prominent role in the Dargomïzhsky evenings).15 So these were passed by. We know that at one of their early lessons they played Beethoven’s Second Symphony. Later Balakirev introduced Musorgsky to the symphonies of Schumann; in one of Modest’s first letters to Nizhny-Novgorod in July he reports that he and his brother have been playing the first two symphonies, and, as we saw, he would later regale Borodin with the Third Symphony, a work at that time less than ten years old. We can take it, finally, that his condescending attitude to Mendelssohn on that occasion was likewise a deep bow in the direction of Balakirev.

  These so-called lessons must have been astonishing sessions from a musical point of view. Musorgsky, we know, was a talented pianist and an excellent sight reader; Balakirev was an authentic virtuoso. It was just at this time, in February 1858, that he played Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto for Tsar Alexander II and his brother Grand Duke Constantine at the so-called Petersburg Concert Society. But as to what Balakirev said about the music, we are reduced to speculation. His teaching method is described somewhat satirically by Rimsky-Korsakov in his memoirs (we have to bear in mind that by this time Rimsky-Korsakov had himself been a conservatory professor for more than thirty-five years):

  At that time, under the influence of Schumann’s works, the gift for melody was in disfavour.… Nearly all the basic ideas of Beethoven’s symphonies were considered weak; Chopin’s melodies, sweet and lady-like; Mendelssohn’s, sour and bourgeois. However, the themes of Bach’s fugues were undoubtedly respected.… In the majority of cases a piece was judged by its separate elements: it would be said: the first four bars were excellent, the next eight weak, the ensuing melody good for nothing, the transition from it to the next phrase beautiful, and so on. A work was never considered as a whole in its aesthetic significance.16

  Balakirev himself later told Calvocoressi that he “explained to [Musorgsky] the various forms of composition.” But this would have been strictly impossible without the theoretical knowledge he denied possessing. Classical form depends on a subtle and complex interaction between harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, and phrase structure. It cannot simply be described in terms of this brick, then that brick, as one might describe a wall while ignoring the gravitational mechanics that hold it together or push it apart. Balakirev may have pointed out thematic connections; or he may simply have drawn attention to remarkable details and tried to explain why they were remarkable. Why is the E-flat-major chord that opens the “Emperor” Concerto different from the E-flat chords that open the “Eroica” Symphony or the ones that introduce Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony? Fussing about such details can seem terribly pedantic to the layman in search of a quick program-note; but it lies at the core of the process whereby the genius constantly renews a seemingly outworn musical language. Or did Balakirev justify his prejudices on the basis of generalities? Beethoven: a revolutionary in the scale and grandeur of his writing; Mendelssohn: weak, effeminate, academic; Berlioz: uninhibited by textbook rules; Liszt: empty bravura but an instinctive innovator; Wagner: a German gasbag. His teaching seems to have been a strange blend of pedantry and sweeping generalization, leavened, one might suppose, with sharp perceptions of the sort that only the intensely musical mind is capable of making.

  The pedantry comes out in the tasks he sets Musorgsky by way of homework. First of all he has to compose an allegro, presumably for piano two or four hands, and evidently in sonata form. This is a project not at all to Musorgsky’s liking, and by the end of February he is in open revolt and talking about “this allegro that’s boring me sick.” Later, Balakirev sets him to arrange the Persian chorus from act 3 of Ruslan and Lyudmila for piano duet. This takes him four or five days, after which he spends a couple of days orchestrating his own song “Where Art Thou, Little Star?” In between he thinks of writing incidental music for Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and by early July has actually composed all or part of an overture. Yet there remains something desultory about these projects. César Cui, who, having finished his first opera, is already planning his second, jokes to Balakirev that “Modest probably, as usual, thinks for half the day about what he will do tomorrow and the other half about what he did yesterday.”17 Modest’s own word for this tendency is “distractedness” (rasseyannost’)—an inability to concentrate on one thing at a time.18 With Mily out of the way in Moscow and Nizhny-Novgorod, he writes two more songs in the romance style of Gurilyov: “Tell Me Why, Dearest Maiden” (“Otchego, skazhi, dusha devitsa”) and “The Heart’s Desire” (“Zhelaniye serdtsa”—a Russian setting of Heine’s poem “Meines Herzens Sehnsucht”); he starts, and perhaps completes, a piano sonata in E-flat, and starts, but probably does not complete, another in F-sharp minor. Not a scrap of either sonata survives (unless, of course, they were plundered for subsequent works), apart from three themes of the E-flat that Musorgsky wrote into his August letter to Balakirev.
Finally, in the autumn, he composes two more scherzos, one (in B-flat) for orchestra, the other (in C-sharp minor) for piano, and makes a transcription of Glinka’s Souvenir d’une nuit d’été à Madrid for piano duet.

  These works, such as survive, show talent but little individuality. The series of scherzos (there was one in the E-flat sonata as well) suggests that Balakirev was urging him to write quick music, or at least music with a consistent impulse. The songs are restrained in tempo but are kept moving by rhythmic ostinatos: “Tell Me Why” is a slow waltz with a running quaver accompaniment; “The Heart’s Desire” is in duple time, also with even quavers, but with a middle section in the style of a slow pavane. One might suppose that Balakirev gave him models. “Tell Me Why,” as Taruskin has pointed out, is probably modelled on a song by Gurilyov, “A Maiden’s Sorrow” (“Grust’ devushki”), which starts with the same words and is also a slowish waltz. The C-sharp-minor scherzo, likewise, sounds like a take on Schubert’s F-minor Moment musical. Balakirev probably made more specific contributions as well. The C-sharp-minor piece exists in two versions, both dated 1858, the second of which looks very much like a piano arrangement of an orchestral score. So Balakirev perhaps instructed Musorgsky to orchestrate the original, and at the same time indicated the need for revisions, including notably the addition of a coda based on the music of the middle section. Balakirev’s biographer Edward Garden has suggested that the master himself may have written all or some of this coda himself. In any case, the revision certainly reflects his sense of formal balance and growth. In the first version the A-B-A form ends crudely with an exact replica of the first A section; the second version modifies the repeat and then adds the slow coda, which clinches the piece in an unexpected but organic way. The thinking is classical, of course, and Musorgsky never organized his mature forms in anything like this fashion. But he did learn the lesson that good form is not something preplanned but an end product: a result, not an ingredient.