Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Perhaps it was some such impulse that sent Balakirev along the Volga from Nizhny-Novgorod in May 1860, the first of several summer trips that led eventually to the publication of a collection of folk-song arrangements in 1866. We know very little about this Volga journey, because his letters have all disappeared. But his descriptions of later (noncollecting) trips up the Don from Rostov (1862) and to the Caucasus (1863) suggest that he not only persuaded the locals to sing to him, but took a general interest in their way of life. “I went to the bazaar,” he wrote to his friend Alexander Arseniev from Rostov, “sought out Ukrainians and chatted with them … I tried hard to find out about their lives; in general I wanted to get inside them and discover what this people is like.”7 One pictures the young composer, notebook in hand, asking fashionable sixties questions about the local produce, agricultural methods and forms of distribution, the types of local government, the means of transport. This would obviously have called for a friendly, open manner. But privately Balakirev regarded a lot of what he saw with a certain metropolitan distaste. “What a shame,” he tells Stasov, “that this huge expanse of the very best soil, with the Don, belongs to such abominations as the Don Cossacks, the nastiest of the Great Russian tribes.” “They are even,” he adds provocatively, “mostly Old Believers.” He compares the “bright, healthy minds” of the Russians, their “multi-talentedness” and “sense of honor” with the laziness and stupidity of the Ukrainians.8 It was a judgment all too easily reversed. A year or two later the Russians have become “inept (if clever), ugly, dishonorable, even base.” “I looked at them,” he admits, “through rose-tinted spectacles.”9 But in truth Balakirev was not a natural lover of humanity, and the liberal, man-of-the-sixties image very soon fell away.

  Balakirev was by no means the first collector to sally forth into the Russian countryside, note down rustic songs from the mouths of the peasantry, and publish the result in a performable edition with piano accompaniment. In fact the melodies in his Overture on Three Russian Themes had all been taken from published collections, only one of them recent. In this respect, of course, the Russians were not essentially different from Western collectors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who published so-called folk songs in the form of drawing-room songs which combined the ethnic characteristics of the original tunes with elements of contemporary urban high-art style. Recent scholarship has shown how this style sometimes fed back into folk practice, to the extent that the ethnic and the urban became almost impossible to disentangle.10 In the 1860s, however, such transcriptions were starting to be regarded as corruptions of the “pure” music of the ancient Russian peasantry, and it may well be that Balakirev, fresh from his experience of old Moscow and his reading of Solovyov, went collecting at least partly with the idea of rediscovering the “natural” idiom of this music. As we shall see, his own method of transcription certainly suggests some such intention, however remote the settings may still be from anything that could be called authentic folk music.

  Neither Balakirev’s nor, for that matter, Stasov’s enthusiasm for the music and mythology of old Russia had much to do with liberal politics, though the two were easily confused. The Slavophiles had also been interested in such things, and their politics were in most respects profoundly conservative.11 They had rejected the rationalism and individualism of the West, which, they argued, had undermined the spiritual integrity of society, damaged Russia (through the Petrine reforms), and broken the connection between modern life and native culture and tradition. They despised the Roman Catholic Church for what they saw as its argumentative, syllogistic character and the constant upheavals this engendered; and they cleaved to the Orthodox Church as a guarantor of moral, spiritual, and intellectual stability within an autocratic monarchy. Of course there was a good deal of fantasy in all this. They managed to overlook the repressive aspects of such a society, even though they were surrounded and occasionally victimized by them. They talked about the “natural, untrammelled development of Russian society under the aegis of the Orthodox Church,”12 and they ventilated their ideas about the empire’s administrative structure by dividing it notionally between what they called “state business” (gosudarego delo) and “land business” (zemskoye delo).

  It was at this point that they in some measure dovetailed with liberal thinking. The agency for zemskoye delo was the obshchina, the ancient institution of the village commune, which acted as a local collective, organizing the distribution of land, the payment of taxes, and other essential matters of village administration. While the Slavophiles loved the obshchina as a symbol of Russian social stability and its unbroken connection with the soil, the liberals and proto-socialists from the Westernizing side were also drawn to it as a model for collective landholding which cut out the bourgeois concept of private ownership and profit. The most trenchant expression of this overlap was given by Alexander Herzen, an early socialist thinker twice exiled for his political views and eventually self-exiled to Paris and then (from 1852) London, where he founded and edited a left-wing journal called The Bell (Kolokol). Of all Russian socialists, Herzen was the most humane and the most critical, in the best sense, in his thinking. He had been on friendly terms with Slavophiles like Khomyakov and Konstantin Aksakov, but he was uncompromising in his analysis of their philosophy. As he wrote in his autobiography:

  They took the return to the people in a very crude sense … accepting the people as something complete and finished. They supposed that sharing the prejudices of the people meant being at one with them, that it was a great act of humility to sacrifice their own reason instead of developing reason in the people … To go back to the village, to the workmen’s guild, to the meeting of the mir [obshchina], to the Cossack system is a different matter; but we must return to them not in order that they may be fixed fast in immovable Asiatic crystallisations, but to develop and set free the elements on which they were founded, to purify them from all that is extraneous and distorting, from the proud flesh with which they are overgrown.

  “The Novgorod bell,” he added, “which used to call the citizens to their ancient moot was merely melted into a cannon by Peter but had been taken down from the belfry by Ivan III; serfdom was only confirmed by the census under Peter but had been introduced by Boris Godunov …”13 Not all these distortions of the spirit were the fault of Peter the Great.

  Stasov was and remained an admirer of Herzen, a fact that argues—without quite proving—watertight liberal credentials. The difficulty here, once more, is the Soviet habit of exaggerating the socialist leanings of its cultural heroes, together with a not unnatural tendency of the aging Stasov to play up his past relations with great men. So, for instance, A. K. Lebedev and A. V. Solodovnikov, writing in the 1970s, lay some emphasis on the mutual regard of the two writers at the time of their meeting in London in 1862, whereas Stasov’s niece Varvara Komarova-Stasova, in the long and detailed biography of her uncle that she published under the nom de plume Vladimir Karenin in 1927, before Stalin got his claws into Russian intellectual life, mentions Herzen only in passing.14 Arriving in London in early August, Stasov wrote to Herzen proposing to call on him, and Herzen replied, warmly inviting him, but warning that he and therefore his visitors were under tsarist surveillance. Stasov nevertheless visited Herzen on two or three occasions, they talked about art and society, and on his way back to St. Petersburg Stasov was duly searched at the Russian border and his books and papers confiscated. “At that time,” he told his niece, “I was as good as in love with him … [and] Herzen was also very fond of me and told me that he valued me highly.”15 Yet one searches Herzen’s collected writings in vain for significant references to Stasov, and he is not mentioned at all in the seven volumes of Herzen’s autobiography. “The friendship,” the Herzen scholar Aileen Kelly suggested to me, “seems to have been largely in Stasov’s mind.”16

  Slavophiles and Westernizers alike, though for different reasons, yearned for the abolition of serfdom, and at last, on 19 February
1861, it came. For landless gentry such as Stasov, Balakirev, and Cui, the practical consequences of emancipation, in the short term at least, were negligible; it merely pleased them on emotional and intellectual grounds. But for Modest Musorgsky the effects were more serious. His father had died in 1853, but his mother was still living on the family estate at Karevo, and he and his brother were entirely dependent on the income it produced. By the emancipation decree, all serfs were immediately freed from the authority of their landlords, which meant that they could no longer be forced to work the land, two-thirds of which remained the property of the estate, while the remaining third was made available to the former serfs for purchase backed by government mortgages of eighty percent of the value. As regards ready money, this was all very well. But from the point of view of management it was nothing short of a disaster. Henceforth all labor had to be paid for and all rents accounted for. The kinds of bookkeeping chaos satirized by Gogol in Dead Souls would from now on lead to actual destitution, and yet many—perhaps most—landlords had not the slightest idea how to organize such matters on a coherent basis. And it seems unlikely that the peasantry did much to help by, for instance, volunteering prompt payment or efficient, productive labor.

  Musorgsky’s life suddenly became a round of meetings to do with the need to put Karevo on a sound business footing. The summer of 1861 was almost certainly spent there. On several occasions in the spring and autumn, he was forced to cancel social plans because of what he called “our business.” Most of the donkey work was done by his elder brother, but Modest was unable to escape altogether, as is apparent from his letters of two summers later from the nearby city of Toropetz, where he was helping in the final settlement at the end of the two-year transition period. “I had thought to busy myself with worthwhile things,” he writes to Cui,

  but here one conducts investigations, makes enquiries, and trails around various police and nonpolice authorities … And what landowners we have here or in our place! what planters! They’re happy at the opening of a club in town, and practically every day they assemble there to make a racket. It starts with speeches, statements to the Gentlemen of the Nobility, and nearly always ends practically in blows, with the police called … And all this happens at assemblies of gentry, and you meet these people every day, and every day they pester you with tears in their eyes about their lost rights, their utter ruin … moanings and groanings and scandal!17

  Meanwhile, he informs Balakirev that “the peasants are much more capable than the landlords in the running of self-government—at meetings they bring their business straight to the point, and in their own way discuss their interests efficiently; but the landowners quarrel at their meetings, and take offence—and the purpose and business of the meeting go out of the window.”18

  Filaret Musorgsky was not one of the quarrelsome landlords, but seems to have acted in a calm and fair-minded way toward his former serfs. Even before emancipation he and Modest had freed one of their house serfs, with his entire family, and given them twenty-two desyatin (about sixty acres) of good quality land rent-free.19 Filaret was clearly a good manager, but even so it was almost impossible for him and his brother to obey the law and emerge with sufficient means to maintain themselves and their mother in the kind of comfort previously taken for granted by landowning gentry of their class. “My affairs are bad,” Modest wrote to Balakirev from Toropetz, “very bad!”

  I, great sinner that I am, run around the estates, and come gradually to the conclusion that it’s impossible to live on the income from those people, and that one must definitely enter on a career in the service, in order to feed and pamper my delicate body. This I shall do in Peter[sburg], that is, I’ll enter the service.20

  Early in December 1863 he duly started work as a clerk in the Central Engineering Department of the Ministry of Communications, with the civil rank of kollezhskiy sekretar’ (collegiate secretary); and for the rest of his life, with brief interruptions, until his final dismissal from the service sixteen years later, the composer of Boris Godunov occupied a more or less lowly desk in this or that ministry department, filling in forms, checking inventories, filing documents, writing out reports. Admittedly the civil-service regime was reasonably relaxed, partly no doubt because, since the centralized imperial system offered few if any alternative outlets for intelligent enterprise, it was heavily overstaffed with indigent intellectuals and dispossessed landowners like Musorgsky himself. Such individuals were not expected to show initiative or enterprise, but had merely to put in a daily appearance, maneuver a pen around pieces of paper for a set number of hours, and resist the temptation to make themselves disagreeable. Curiously enough, Musorgsky seems to have managed this deadening combination fairly well, perhaps aided by the goodwill of superiors aware of his unusual talent. But it certainly did not help him in the troublesome task of composing music with a still undeveloped technique, and it did not protect him from the ravages of a temperament too easily distracted—as he himself had admitted—from the lonely terrors of creative work by night.

  One Sunday evening in the autumn of 1861 a seventeen-year-old naval cadet appeared for the first time at a soirée in Balakirev’s apartment, introduced by his piano teacher, the French pianist Théodore Canille. The cadet’s name was Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and he brought with him—apparently on Canille’s insistence—some pieces of music he himself had composed. There were piano pieces, a scherzo and a nocturne, and there was something else that aroused Balakirev’s pedagogical enthusiasm: fragments of a symphony in E-flat minor that Rimsky-Korsakov had been writing under Canille’s tutelage. About the piano pieces we know nothing; they have not survived. But the symphony exists, and thanks to Rimsky-Korsakov’s own memoirs we know quite a lot about its origins and how it evolved from the fragments that the young composer took with him to the Balakirev soirée. The key itself is puzzling. Why compose your first orchestral work in so remote a key, a key with six flats, hard for most instruments to play, hard to write, hard to read? The curious thing is that it was Balakirev who liked extreme flat-side and sharp-side keys and urged them on his pupils. Both his own piano sonatas are in B-flat minor (five flats), and a disproportionate number of his smaller piano pieces inhabit remote tonalities at one or other end of the spectrum. On the other hand, perhaps significantly, his own First Symphony, composed in the mid-sixties, is in C major (no flats or sharps) and his (late) Second Symphony is in D minor (one flat). As a brilliant pianist, Balakirev could feel the “color” of the black notes under his fingers, but he was enough of a practical musician not to wish such preferences onto an orchestra.

  The young cadet was neither a brilliant pianist nor an experienced practical musician. We have his own word for this. Under Canille his keyboard technique had advanced only somewhat laboriously, and as for any compositional method, that was a complete blank. “I had no idea about counterpoint; in harmony I did not even know the fundamental rule of leading the seventh downward, did not know the names of the chords. Gathering a few fragments from the Glinka, Beethoven, and Schumann that I played, I concocted, with considerable labor, something thin and elementary.”21 Undeterred by such trivial considerations, Balakirev at once set him to composing his symphony in an orderly fashion, starting with the first movement, then proceeding to the scherzo and finale. At the soirées, meanwhile, he imbibed Balakirev’s authoritative, if sometimes surprising, opinions on the music of composers whose work he had just been starting to get to know in the months before his introduction to the circle. He observed with some astonishment Balakirev’s idiosyncratic method of critical analysis. “A work was never considered as a whole in its aesthetic significance,” he reports:

  The new compositions with which Balakirev acquainted his circle were invariably played by him in fragments, bar by bar, and even piecemeal: first the end, then the beginning, which usually produced a strange impression on an outside listener who happened to find himself in the circle. A pupil like me had to show Balakirev the plan of a composition
in its embryo, if only in the shape of its first four or eight bars. Balakirev would quickly make corrections, indicating how such an embryo had to be remade; he would criticize it, would praise and extol the first two bars, but would abuse the next two, make fun of them, and try to make the author disgusted with them.22

  In this way the first movement of the symphony got written, partly in response to suggestions by Balakirev, partly no doubt with his direct participation. Rimsky-Korsakov had little idea how to orchestrate what he had composed, but Balakirev helped him with that, too, and soon Rimsky-Korsakov was handling this mysterious discipline with some ease. “In the opinion of Balakirev and others,” he tells us, “I proved to have a gift for instrumentation.”23

  Nothing in the boy’s background had prepared him for the intensely artistic yet wayward atmosphere at Balakirev’s Saturdays. His father was a retired civil governor living in the town of Tikhvin, a hundred miles or so to the east of St. Petersburg. His mother came from a family of landowners in Oryol, south of Moscow, the region of Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches. They were elderly parents (Nikolay had a brother twenty-two years his senior). And on the whole they were conventional, “people of the 1820s,” Nikolay calls them, “who rarely came into contact with the literary and artistic life of those times.”24 Music played a part in their lives, but was not regarded as a suitable or secure profession—quite rightly, of course, at least in Russia at that time. Something, however, was necessary, as Rimsky-Korsakov senior had been impoverished, his son informs us, by “crooked friends who traded estates with him to their advantage, borrowed money from him, and so forth.”25 It so happened that an uncle, Nikolay Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov, had been a distinguished naval commander and that young Nikolay’s elder brother, Voyin, had followed his uncle into the navy and become an excellent sailor in his own right. So what more natural than that Nikolay should go to sea in his turn? At the time of his meeting with Balakirev he was about to graduate from the Naval School as midshipman, after which he would set off on what was called a “practice” cruise: a long practice, though, lasting between two and three years. Given the choice, Nikolay would have forgone this pleasure, and with it any prospect of a naval career. But his brother would not hear of it. What evidence was there, in his mediocre piano playing and the one or two insignificant compositions, of any conceivable career in music—a career that, in any case, was scarcely on offer in St. Petersburg? And Nikolay never afterward held this against his brother. He admitted to Voyin that “Mama very much dislikes this career, and it’s the same with my associating with Balakirev and the others.”26 And later he wrote that Voyin “was a thousand times right to regard me as a dilettante: I was one.”27