Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  when he felt stung, when his cherished convictions were called in question, when the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice to burst out: then he was worth seeing: he pounced upon his opponent like a panther, he tore him to pieces, made him a ridiculous, a piteous object, and incidentally developed his own thought with unusual power and poetry. The dispute would often end in blood, which flowed from the sick man’s throat; pale, gasping, with his eyes fixed on the man with whom he was speaking, he would lift his handkerchief to his mouth with shaking hand and stop—deeply mortified, crushed by his physical weakness.14

  In Serov’s case, no doubt, the blood was metaphorical. But metaphorically, it flowed.

  By any standards, Serov was a difficult, quarrelsome man with an unhappy tendency to antagonize those with whom he came into close contact. Stasov, on the other hand, could be obstinate and contrary, only too ready to fight his corner no matter how irrational or untenable his position. It was an unfortunate match. The Glinka quarrel was typical of their relish for controversy for its own sake, but it need not have been terminal. Even Serov’s conversion to the Wagner cause in 1858 and his passionate Wagnerism thereafter might not have wrecked their personal friendship had it not been for two incidents, one musical, the other apparently not, which drove an immovable stake into its heart.

  About the (presumably) nonmusical incident, only vague, uncertain details are known. There are tantalizing hints in Stasov’s letters. Early in May 1858 he sent Balakirev a note that “on Thursday, while I was at your place, Alex Nikol [Serov] did something as a result of which Mitya [Dmitry Stasov] has broken with him conclusively, and with the rest of his family, who were also apparently involved. How loathesome and disagreeable this all is! Maybe you too will cease to be pure, bright, beautiful and noble.”15 And almost two years later: “Serov has sent another disgusting letter, not mentioning me personally, but clearly with the aim of abusing Mitya … To think that the first cause of all this nastiness is Sophia Nik[olayevna Serova] and that without her everything could have been different and Al Nik’s becoming a complete scoundrel might even have been put off for a long time.”16 Sophia was Serov’s sister, a former mistress of Vladimir Stasov and the mother of his daughter, Nadezhda. But that was long ago. Whatever it was that the Serovs had said or done, Balakirev naturally sided with Stasov, and when Serov nevertheless showed him the first act of his new opera in 1861, he made only dismissive comments on the orchestration and an offhand compliment on the act’s soft, quiet ending, one of Serov’s subtlest touches. For Serov this was the last straw, as Balakirev no doubt intended it to be, and from that time on the die was cast. It was Stasov, though, who was the more implacable of the two former friends. At the funeral of Serov’s mother in 1865, Serov offered Stasov his hand and asked for their former good relations to be restored. Stasov refused.

  Under these circumstances, it was hardly likely that the Balakirev circle would greet Judith with anything but ostentatious contempt. Who, after all, was this composer? Nothing but a jumped-up music critic, and a Wagnerite to boot, an apostle, therefore, of German music and the much-heralded, much-ridiculed Music of the Future—the Zukunftsmusik. He was something far worse than a Ruslanist: he was a Zukunftist, and an inept and insincere one at that, as was very clear to the young masters of the Balakirev salon. “This Wagners Kindchen in all its five-act life,” Musorgsky reported to Balakirev, who was away in the Caucasus and had missed the premiere, “doesn’t offer a single place that touches you deeply, nor one scenic episode that gives pause for thought. What’s more the libretto is extremely bad, the declamation pitiful, un-Russian; only the orchestration is interesting in places, though sometimes too complicated.”17 To Stasov, it seemed that Serov’s was “the consciously constructed nature of a man in whom nothing is genuine, but in whom each thread is bent to the taste of the masses.” He was “some kind of unusual glove that fits absolutely any hand.”18

  Genuine or not, Serov was not quite entirely new to composition. For a long time he had cherished an ambition to write operas, and had in fact pondered a number of subjects and even composed substantial chunks of music, but had apparently destroyed virtually everything, including “almost three acts” of an opera on Gogol’s story “May Night” (“Mayskaya noch’ ”). It seems clear that the basic problem with his previous works had been what Taruskin calls “his utter lack of practical skill.”19 As for May Night, Serov was “dissatisfied with his work from the point of view of its style, in which the influence, now of Glinka, now of the German classical models, was too noticeable.”20 Later his work as a music critic took him away from composition for several years. But the desire never left him, and evidently his Damascene conversion to Wagner in 1858 merely intensified it. He again began looking for suitable subjects, and late in 1860 he found one, in the unlikely shape of an Italian play, by Paolo Giacometti, on the Apocryphal story of Judith and Holofernes.

  Serov had been writing about issues connected with musical drama for some time even before he had read Wagner’s theories, let alone seen or heard any of his operas. In 1851 he had used a long and profoundly hostile obituary essay on Gaspare Spontini as the pretext for a lengthy disquisition on the proper relationship between music and the other elements of opera, especially the libretto. “In initiating musical drama,” he asserted, “Gluck was the first to grasp that its main principles were the same as spoken drama, that musical drama must above all be drama.”21 But in practice Gluck had been trapped by the conventions of the eighteenth century, things like the deus ex machina, Greek heroes in powdered wigs, and so forth, and since then opera had become a slave to public taste. In Paris, supposedly the world center of musical drama, every opera had to have a ballet, irrespective of its subject; even Weber’s Der Freischütz was provided with a ballet when it was staged in the French capital. As for the so-called grand opera (works like Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète or Auber’s L’Enfant prodigue), these were merely an excuse for the kind of noisy bacchanalia beloved of the unmusical French, five acts of allsorts, with dancing, horses, camels, and spectacular effects like the electrically lit sun in Le Prophète. For Serov, the true province of music for the stage lay not in such things, “but in deep psychology, in conversation between the hearts of the dramatis personae and the hearts of the audience, in emotion, in uprushes of feeling, now passionate, now tender, in a word, in everything that makes up the life of the heart.”22

  When he read Wagner’s Oper und Drama soon afterward, he must quickly have realized that they differed on the question of the relation between words and music, since the implication of Serov’s view is that the text must in the end defer to the dramatic needs and pace of the music, whereas for the Wagner of the theoretical writings text and music were on an absolutely equal footing. When Serov discovered that Wagner solved this problem by invariably writing his own libretti, he was impressed, but recognized that for him this would never be possible, since he completely lacked the power of versification. For Judith, he initially planned to stick to the language of the play, with the help of an Italian librettist, then changed his mind and wrote a detailed prose draft of his own in Russian, partly based on the German play by Christian Friedrich Hebbel, which he then instructed a new librettist, D. I. Lobanov, to turn into verse. Meanwhile, he was composing the music on the basis of nothing more specific than his own prose scenario, hence without the text to which it would eventually be sung. As Taruskin points out, this was near enough to what Glinka had done with Ruslan, a work Serov himself had excoriated not least for the shambles of its libretto.23

  In all these circumstances, the astonishing thing about Judith is not that it got past the fussy and conservative selection committees of the Imperial Theatres, but that having done so, it turned out to be such a fine and interesting piece of work. This was recognized at the time, but then for some reason forgotten to the point where it became acceptable to dismiss Serov as a figure of purely historical significance without troubling to acquaint oneself with his work�
�which admittedly was not easy, as the music was long out of print, performances nonexistent, and recordings nearly so. Audiences, of course, react to what they hear, historians rather to what they read. So Judith has tended to be thought of as an inferior example of sub-Wagneriana, though it resembles Wagner’s pre-Ring operas only in certain general aspects, most notably its vocal writing and orchestration, and some details of harmony. Its more superficially obvious ancestors are precisely the works that Serov had attacked in his Spontini obituary: the five-act grand operas, with dancing (Serov has ballets in both his third and his fourth acts), camels on the stage, noisy, spectacular choruses, and, of course, a happy ending with at least implied divine intervention. “So you see,” he wrote to a friend, “it has come to five acts—grand opéra en forme en 5 actes, avec deux divertissements!!—by Robert-le-Diable’s recipe, or La Juive’s or the Huguenots’!! Precisely: whatever you mock the most you end up doing yourself!”24

  To some extent this is unjust. Judith does go in for mass effects, but they are by no means entirely meretricious. The largely choral, oratorio-like first act has authentic power and moments of genuine solemnity, notably in the hymnlike passage in which the renegade Assyrian Achior describes to the besieged Jews how he tried to explain their God to the Assyrian commander, Holofernes (Judith repeats this music when she talks to Holofernes about Achior in act 3). The solo scenes are also musically impressive, even if the actual characterization is rudimentary and the word setting—unsurprisingly in view of Serov’s method of composition—clumsy at best. Above all, Serov’s musical idiom owes much less to the Paris school than might be supposed from a description of the type of work Judith is. Meyerbeer, though a German from Berlin, derived his vocal style from Italian bel canto, translated into the picturesque idiom that was the postrevolutionary version of the French ballet de cour. Serov’s writing for voice is closer to German romantic opera, a mixture of expressive arioso and long-line lyricism, much like Weber’s Der Freischütz and Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which, as we saw, Serov had recently heard several times in Germany. The general discourse, too, is Germanic, through-composed up to a point, but with the movement breaks still showing (which is also partly true of Tannhäuser), and with some touches that a German composer might not have imagined, such as the quiet ending of the first act, a detail of which Serov was proud and which the Balakirev circle admired, and the slightly wan Orientalism of the Assyrian dances and coarse splendor of Holofernes’s march, all too obviously indebted to the Glinka of Ruslan and Lyudmila.

  Two things stand out about Judith. On the one hand it is a predictable kind of opera for its time and place, a Russification of an up-to-date operatic genre handled with some expertise by a composer who had spent a lot of time in the theatre and understood its needs. On the other hand its power is crude, partly perhaps deliberately so, partly no doubt as a result of Serov’s lack of experience and learned technique. Like Cui, he at times lapses into a metric word-setting that maps the music onto a foursquare poetic scansion: a kind of musical doggerel. His orchestration, too, is rough, primitive, but often effective; in particular his writing for brass has a boldness that again suggests Wagner, but also occasionally recalls his own complaint against Spontini’s “weakness for brass instruments.”25 One thing Judith is not is a “dialogue” opera, like those parts of Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka Serov had raved about a mere four years before starting work on his own opera. There is recitative of every kind: unaccompanied, secco (with orchestral chords), accompanied, arioso (like the Dutchman’s monologue in Wagner’s opera, or Tannhäuser’s Rome Narration). But there is hardly any attempt at musical prose—at folding the music round the natural contours of the words. Serov, of course, disagreed with Wagner about the equal status of music and text. But in any case the way Judith was composed—the music often before the text—ruled that kind of matchmaking out. All of which only goes to remind us of the gulf between theory and practice; even Wagner, in some ways the most theoretical composer of all, rarely sticks to his own prescriptions in practice. Serov, a critic more than a theorist, hardly seems to have tried.

  Whatever its faults, Judith was a huge event in the generally featureless operatic life of early-sixties St. Petersburg. Musorgsky went to the premiere on May 16 with Vladimir Stasov, and reported to Balakirev—away in the Caucasus—that “Judith is the first seriously worked-out opera on the Russian stage since Rusalka.” In fact his account (June 10) is so long and detailed, and with such relatively precise musical quotations, that it looks as if he heard the work several times before writing. His report, it’s true, is largely, studiously negative. The overture is “uninteresting, chaotic, but with intentions not, however, fulfilled”; the declamation is “laughable”; Avra’s duet with Judith, imploring her “not to go to Holofernes,” is “of extremely poor quality”; Holofernes’s first scene with Judith is “so bad and untalented that it’s not worth expanding on,” and so forth. But between the lines are some intriguing positives. Musorgsky praises the orchestration in a number of passages, and admits to finding the quiet end of act 1 beautiful and truthful. The scene of Holofernes’s decapitation is “melodramatic, but very effective.” And Serov’s musical dramaturgy excites his professional interest. Quoting the start of act 1—a somber phrase in E minor “which depicts the state of the people lying exhausted on the stage”—he criticizes Serov’s failure to develop the theme:

  I would have carried it on, I would have added some juice [a favourite image of Musorgsky’s] and on the development, on the motions of this phrase, I would have built the elder’s recitative.—One mustn’t forget what’s onstage: exhausted by thirst, the Jews lie there in silent disarray, and Serov has forgotten to think about them—he needed the people later for some kind of superbly rubbishy fugato. The concept of having the chorus stay silent is truthful, but Serov hasn’t controlled it. The idea of the people gets lost in the orchestra, but if he had managed it differently—it would have turned out new and interesting.26

  Later he muses on the scene of Holofernes’s drunken delirium and his attempted seduction of Judith. “The third and fourth acts,” he grumbles, “show Serov’s complete lack of talent and passion.… Holofernes is as drunk as the devil and starts hallucinating … What a broad field for a musician, a carousing sensualist-despot,—how interesting it could have been to set the hallucination scene in the orchestra.—There’s nothing of this,—only a banal French melodrama with howling Wagnerian violins.”

  Musorgsky must have kept quiet about these matters at the first performance, to judge by Stasov’s remarks about him to Balakirev in a letter written the next morning. Stasov is desperate to discuss the new opera with Balakirev, but has to put it all into long letters, this one and the next, two months later. And why is this such an obsession? Because he, too, recognizes that, however hateful Serov might be personally to him and however suspect his talent, there are qualities in Judith that can’t be denied and that turn him from a mere poseur into an issue. It shows talent, after all, to be able to hold the attention of a diffuse and indifferent public for five long acts on an unfashionable subject. Of course, it’s all effects, like Meyerbeer, all external, nothing inward. But that’s precisely what’s so worrying. Serov will have influence, where (the no less hated) Wagner will not. Yet Musorgsky, while seeming to agree, expressed “not a single thought, not one word out of a genuine depth of understanding, or a deeply excited, agitated heart. With him everything was flabby, colorless. It seems to me he’s a complete idiot.”27 The other possible explanation—that Musorgsky thought better of the work than he dared admit—seems not to have occurred to Stasov.

  Balakirev responded in kind from Pyatigorsk.28 He remembered the first act of Judith from the time Serov had sent it to him, and even remembered some of the themes well enough to quote them back to Stasov. It was more like an oratorio than an opera, he recalled, and all very derivative: he mentions Berlioz, Méhul, Cherubini, even Handel—a fine assortment to add to Stasov’s pet hates, Meyerbeer a
nd Halévy. Balakirev himself was far away from such concerns. He had been travelling through Georgia in the company of Old Believers, finding nourishment in “the many-talented, generous nature of our muzhiks and the fine, honest faces of the Circassians,” and enjoying the sight of Mount Elbrus, “the brilliant stars, the cliffs and crags, the snowy mountains and grandiose precipices of the Caucasus—this is what I’m living for at present.” He had watched Circassian dancing to a kind of balalaika music that reminded him of Russian and Spanish folk song. And probably—though he doesn’t mention it—he had been listening to what Pushkin had called “the sad songs of Georgia,” with their strange ornamental melodies and their suggestion of an Oriental languor. Either while still in the Caucasus or soon after his return to St. Petersburg at the end of the summer, he composed his own setting of Pushkin’s famous poem, which had actually been written to fit a Georgian folk tune sung to him by a pupil of Glinka’s. Balakirev’s “Georgian Song” (“Gruzinskaya pesnya”) is an exquisite, perhaps idealized lament in his favorite B-flat minor, full of decorative roulades in the piano accompaniment and free-flowing melismas with alternately flattened and sharpened sevenths in the voice: a kind of blueprint, as it turned out, for the “Oriental” style soon to be cultivated by the circle as a whole.

  The contrast between this minor masterpiece and the bland, syllabic little songs Balakirev was otherwise mostly writing is startling to say the least. Lermontov settings such as “Why?” (“Otchego?”) and “If I Hear Your Voice” (“Slïshu li golos tvoy”) are still like piano miniatures with added voice. For Lermontov’s version of Byron’s Hebrew melody “My Soul Is Dark” he found a dramatic gesture for the poem’s “Oh! quickly string the harp / I yet can brook to hear,” very different from the somewhat impassive Schumann setting (which he surely knew), yet curiously Schumannesque in style overall. By far his best Lermontov song is the sinister “Song of the Golden Fish” (“Pesnya zolotoy rïbki”), in which a mermaid lures a child to the bottom of the sea with a lullaby of haunting, ineffable beauty. Here Balakirev has clearly been inspired by the concept of the voice, this expressive weapon that can convey two or three meanings at once—the plain sense of the words, the loving tone of the voice, and the hint of evil or at least coercion that can lie in this or that inflection, this or that harmony. Balakirev’s biographer Edward Garden regards this, with only mild exaggeration, as “among the world’s greatest songs”; it would surely be much better known if it weren’t for the impenetrability, for most singers, of the Russian language and especially the Cyrillic script.