Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The young midshipman sailed away on his world cruise in the middle of October 1862, less than a year after joining the Balakirev circle. But no sooner was one lost than another was found. In September Musorgsky’s old medical acquaintance Alexander Borodin at last returned from his foreign travels, and in December he accepted a full-time academic post as adjunct professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Physicians. From his time in Germany and Italy, Borodin brought back several new instrumental works (again mostly incomplete) and a wife, a pianist by the name of Yekaterina Sergeyevna, née Protopopova. Yekaterina was a beautiful woman and an excellent musician (Borodin had been astonished to discover that she had perfect pitch); but she was to prove a difficult wife—what amounted to a third vocation for the already hard-pressed chemist-composer. She not only suffered from tuberculosis and chronic asthma, which eventually compelled her to live for half of every year in the drier climate of her native Moscow, but she was also an incurable insomniac with neurotic tendencies that required her loving husband to share her sleepless nights. In these circumstances her extended absences were something of a relief for him in his already doubly charged existence; and since he wrote to her in Moscow every two or three days—long, newsy, candid, sharply observant letters, which survive and have been published in extenso—they were also hugely valuable to historians of this period in Russian life and music.

  Borodin was already twenty-nine, three years older than Balakirev, when they met in the apartment of Balakirev’s doctor, Sergey Botkin, an old cello-playing friend of Borodin’s. On discovering that Borodin was himself a musician, Balakirev naturally invited him to his next soirée, and there Borodin once again ran into Musorgsky, as well as presumably meeting Cui and Stasov for the first time. As usual there was a great deal of music. Musorgsky and Balakirev played the finale of Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphony, and Borodin “was struck by the brilliance, the intelligence and energy of the performance, as well as by the beauty of the piece.” No doubt they astonished him by informing him that its composer was an eighteen-year-old midshipman at that moment afloat somewhere on the North Sea. “And do you by any chance write music?” Musorgsky perhaps asked, recalling their earlier discussions about other people’s music. Borodin must have confessed that he did, then found himself nervously backpedaling when pressed to go to the piano and play something of his own. “I was terribly ashamed,” he later recalled, “and flatly refused.”28

  What might he have played them? There was in fact plenty of choice, since, although the majority of his instrumental works were in one way or another incomplete, it was in most cases whole movements, or at least sections, rather than parts or endings, that were missing. Borodin had not had Balakirev’s habit of sketching out movements which he then played from memory and which remained unwritten, often for decades. A few weeks before, Balakirev had played his three-movement E-flat piano concerto to Rimsky-Korsakov, who had banged his fist on the table and confidently asserted that it was “better than Lear.”29 But only the first movement existed on paper; the other two were preserved, if at all, only in their composer’s head, from which they may or may not have emerged in the same form whenever he sat down to play them.30 Borodin, by contrast, had at his disposal, and written down, most of a four-movement string quintet in F minor, composed when he was twenty, two movements of a string trio in G (for two violins and cello), three whole movements of a D-major piano trio, a couple of movements for string sextet, a recent piano quintet in C minor, and much of a three-movement cello sonata in B minor, as well as several attractive songs. Unlike his new Balakirev friends, he had played chamber music all his adult life, and had even learned the cello in order to participate in string groups. The string quintet, for instance, has two cello parts (like Schubert’s quintet and unlike Mozart’s) and even some solo writing for cello. The songs also have parts for cello as well as piano. In Heidelberg, Borodin soon took up with chamber-music-loving friends, and wrote more for their use. But he was lazy about dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s; after all, nobody else was going to play his music, still less publish it. And he had many other things on his mind. So neither trio ever acquired a finale, and the sextet lacked both a finale and probably the final section of its slow movement. The piano quintet, composed during the summer (and possibly intended as an orchestral work),31 was supposedly complete, though its three movements were strangely balanced: a folksy andante and scherzo, with a finale longer than the other two movements combined. What survived of most of these scores, in any case, was fully performable. Only the cello sonata was to some extent fragmentary.

  Taken as a whole, these scores are the work of an intensely gifted “natural,” apparently able to write beautifully in the received style of the classical and early romantic music that he and his friends played, week in, week out, in their private sessions. The hand of Mendelssohn lies over them, but lightly, without any sense of facile imitation. On the contrary, an individual voice can often be heard, in the form of a gift for melody neither quite Germanic nor yet identifiably Russian, but easy and personal. For instance, the odd idea of basing his cello sonata on the fugue theme from Bach’s G-minor solo-violin sonata (overheard from the next-door flat in Heidelberg) is that of a composer both conscious of tradition and uninhibited by it; in fact, of all these early chamber works, it is the sonata that contains the most Borodinesque tunes.32 There is also, in the ensemble pieces, a feeling for instrumental writing due surely to the experience of playing masterpieces of the genre, whether well or badly, evening after evening. What perhaps comes less readily at this stage is the concept of organic design: the idea of sonata forms that work through harmonic tension and release. Borodin’s forms are well enough made but stereotyped, pattern-based—hardly surprising in a composer who had never studied, never worked at composition under critical scrutiny. Yet his music always moves, dances, seldom lingers or gets stuck in musical blind alleyways. Only in a country like 1850s Russia, where the very idea of native instrumental music was like palm trees in Greenland, could so talented a composer have reached his late twenties without, it seems, ever seriously considering a career in music.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wagner and His Acolyte

  A few days before Christmas 1862 Mily Balakirev celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. There was a good deal to celebrate. In the past year he had collected two new acolytes and had set them to work, in his inimitable fashion, composing symphonies. Under his tutelage young Rimsky-Korsakov had composed most of three movements of his E-flat-minor symphony before sailing off on his world cruise, and was now battling with a slow movement based on a Russian folk song called “The Tartar Captivity,” given him by Balakirev. Borodin, having previously written nothing but songs and chamber music, had embarked on a symphony in E-flat major, and by the end of the year had already composed enough of the first movement to be able to play it to his wife in Moscow. Meanwhile, Musorgsky struggled on with the D-major symphony he supposedly had been writing for two whole years, to the exclusion of everything else apart from orchestration exercises and piano transcriptions of Beethoven string quartets.

  At this stage of their careers, these symphony projects might have seemed like a high wall between the composers and their future. Rimsky-Korsakov’s would be four years in the writing, Borodin’s five, and during this time they composed practically nothing else. Musorgsky’s symphony was soon abandoned altogether, and he never thereafter attempted anything remotely classical in form or genre. Instead, some time early in 1863, he composed a mildly eccentric piano piece which he christened, perhaps ironically, “Intermezzo in modo classico.” Years later he told Stasov that the title reflected his “musical preoccupations at that time,” referring presumably to his attempts at composing a symphony.1 In fact there are grounds for speculating that the intermezzo may have been a product of those attempts. Cui wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov that “Modinka has uttered some kind of musical monster—supposedly a trio to his scherzo … Liturgical chants of interminable length and the
usual Modinka pedals etc., all unclear, strange, clumsy and in no way a trio.”2 This could well be a description of the intermezzo, whose main theme, many times repeated, is a chantlike unison melody somewhat in the style of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” and which certainly does use pedal effects, so far as is possible on the piano. A few weeks later Musorgsky himself told Balakirev that he planned to orchestrate the intermezzo “and leave it as a separate piece.” It would have made an odd trio in its original form; but then Musorgsky would probably have written an odd symphony if he had ever got round to finishing one.

  He did eventually orchestrate the intermezzo in 1867, greatly extending it and providing it with a trio section of its own. At the same time (or so one suspects) he supplied Stasov with an account of the work’s origins which seems to apply to the extended form more than to the original—a fact that obviously calls in question its strict accuracy. In the winter of 1861, Stasov reported, Musorgsky had been in the country with his mother:

  And one beautiful, sunny winter day—a holiday—he saw a whole crowd of peasants crossing the fields and plunging heavily through the snowdrifts; many of them fell down in the snow and then extricated themselves with some difficulty. “This,” said Mussorgsky, “was at one and the same time beautiful and picturesque and serious and amusing. And suddenly in the distance appeared a crowd of young women, coming with songs and laughter along a level pathway. This picture flashed into my head in a musical form and unexpectedly there shaped itself the first ‘stepping up and down’ melody à la Bach; the jolly, laughing women presented themselves to me in the shape of a melody from which I then made the middle part or Trio.”3

  This incident, if it really happened, probably took place in March 1862, and not at Karevo, but at the village of Volok, several miles to the north of Toropetz, where Musorgsky was staying with his distant cousin Natalya Kushelova. He was there for his health, and was taken for sturdy walks through waist-deep snowdrifts by the German tutor of his hostess’s children, who considered that Musorgsky’s “semi-stupor,” as he called it, was “due to bad circulation” and that his organism needed “constant stimuli until it gets stronger.”4 Perhaps the more detailed picture he painted for Stasov’s benefit was an embroidered memory of these walks. In any case its scenic character is noteworthy, and of course makes a jest of the “in modo classico” (which may be why he changed the “classico” to “antico” for the orchestral version). Rather, it looks forward to the vivid sketches in Pictures from an Exhibition, composed more than a decade later. Even the piano writing anticipates that work: heavy and slightly awkward, like that of “Bydlo” or “The Old Castle.” Musorgsky was an accomplished pianist, so his sometimes antipianistic way of writing for the instrument must have been conscious, a way perhaps of bypassing “automatic” keyboard technique in pursuit of the strong visual image. This assumes, of course, that he had a picture in his mind when he first composed the piece as opposed to when he revised it, which is by no means certain.5

  The chief musical excitement in St. Petersburg in the late winter of 1863 was the arrival of Richard Wagner in February to conduct a series of concerts of his own music, together with four symphonies by Beethoven. Between mid-February and early April he gave no less than six concerts in the capital, plus three in Moscow, with programs made up of excerpts from all his mature operas thus far, apart from Das Rheingold.6 Wagner’s music was scarcely known at all in Russia; not one of his operas had been staged there, and only a few excerpts had figured on concert programs. But he was notorious for his involvement in the Dresden rising of 1849 and, among thinking, German-speaking musicians, for his theoretical essays on opera The Artwork of the Future, and Opera and Drama, and for the connection of the theatre with revolutionary politics.

  All this meant, needless to say, that he arrived in St. Petersburg as something of a celebrity; but it also meant that battle lines tended to be drawn up around him on any basis except that of his music. Among the prominent musicians in St. Petersburg in 1863, only Anton Rubinstein and Alexander Serov could be said to have had sufficient knowledge of Wagner’s operas to express an informed opinion, and even they knew next to nothing of the music dramas that, so to speak, explained the theories, for the good reason that not one of them had yet been staged. Rubinstein, in any case, was broadly hostile to such of Wagner’s music as he knew. Serov, on the other hand, had become a fervent Wagnerite after hearing a run of performances of Tannhäuser in Germany in 1858 and a single Lohengrin in Weimar in 1859. But Serov’s advocacy was a mixed blessing in St. Petersburg in the early 1860s, and for the Balakirev circle, in particular, it confirmed their worst fears about Wagner, whom they already instinctively disliked for his theorizing and his Germanness. They made studiously little of his concerts. Cui and Balakirev attended the first one and Cui reported to Rimsky-Korsakov that Wagner was “a marvellous conductor” and that Balakirev had become a better conductor for having heard him.7 Cui also wrote a review of the concert, his first essay at criticism, but it was not published and has not survived.8 Neither Musorgsky nor Borodin seems to have attended any of the concerts; at least their respective correspondence is silent on the subject. As for Stasov, it’s hard to believe he will have stayed away completely from an event that he must have known to be of importance, whatever his views on Wagner’s music, of which he had some knowledge, having heard Lohengrin in Vienna in 1854. A month or so after Wagner’s departure he expressed the opinion, in a letter to Balakirev, that “Wagner hasn’t the slightest gift for recitative,” but that he was “a purely orchestral, symphonic composer, in the fullest sense of the word. He doesn’t know about voices, and doesn’t want to know. To him they’re just a flavoring and a pretext.”9 He would hardly have written in such terms without having taken the opportunity to hear Wagner’s recent music. But the letter in question was mainly an attack on Serov, in the person of his opera Judith, which had just had its premiere at the Maryinsky. And for Stasov, above all, Serov had become a major obstacle to balanced judgment on anything to do with contemporary music in general and Russian music in particular.

  The whole background to the relations between Serov, Stasov, and the Balakirev circle is complicated by personal factors which are now hard to disentangle and still harder to understand. Serov and Stasov had been fellow pupils and intimate friends with many musical tastes in common. Until the late fifties they remained on good terms, and Serov was often at musical evenings attended by Stasov, Cui, and Balakirev, and to all appearances shared their views on Russian music, the relative merits of the classical and early romantic masters, and the desirability or otherwise of formal teaching. The first sign of a rift came after Glinka’s death in 1857, when Stasov published a long obituary article in the Russkiy vestnik including a virulent attack on A Life for the Tsar and a profoundly tendentious defense of Ruslan and Lyudmila, in conscious rejection of the standard opinion that A Life for the Tsar was a masterpiece of national art and Ruslan an unfortunate digression.10 Eighteen months later, Ruslan was at last revived after an absence from the stage of fifteen years, and Serov seized the opportunity to reverse Stasov’s judgment and ostentatiously praise A Life for the Tsar at the expense of Ruslan, which he called “a conglomeration of individual strokes of genius and brilliant, profound musical beauties, somehow strung upon one of the most pitiful libretti in the world.”11 In his turn, Stasov soon responded in a long letter to the Russkiy vestnik with a fresh assault on A Life for the Tsar.12 And so it went on, into the 1860s, with Serov ridiculing Stasov and his friends as “Ruslanists,” and on beyond Serov’s death in 1871, with Stasov, who outlived Serov by thirty-five years, continuing to offer posterity his personal opinion of his former friend and enemy, couched in terms that assured the reader that he was giving his victim the benefit of every possible doubt, but could not in the end, and in all conscience, help denouncing him. Serov, he wrote,

  was a composer but also a music critic. In both spheres he displayed considerable gifts, wide learning, maturity, for
ce, and brilliance. But in both he lacked the most important, highest qualities. His compositional gift was second-rate and lacked an individual character; his critical gift was devoid of all depth and solidity: his chief trait was a perpetual instability and changeability in his convictions. As a result neither his musical nor his critical works have left any strong trace, and they cannot have any influence on the future destiny of Russian music. They did, on the other hand, exert an especially strong influence in their day.13

  Russian musical society was by no means alone in nineteenth-century Europe in mapping its artistic judgments onto its personal or intellectual vendettas. But it was certainly an extreme case. One has to remember what a small place St. Petersburg was musically in the 1850s and ’60s, and how little it offered the aspiring composer or would-be critic. Every scrap of recognition had to be fought over like dead mice in an alley of starving cats. Add to this the desperate need of Russian musicians to assert their existence at the heart of a community that for a century and a half had taken it for granted that foreign music was the only sort worth considering, and it is hardly surprising that their quarrels sometimes grew vicious and their disagreements absolute. One thinks of Herzen’s description of Belinsky, how