Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Neither of these pieces helped in the least solve the crucial problem of Salammbô as an operatic subject: how to animate the crowd and battle sequences as a context for the rather thin love story at its center. They were detachable items, not entwined with the drama in any way. Musorgsky later included the Balearic song in the collection of his early songs under the title Youthful Years (Yunïye godï), the bound autograph manuscript of which turned up in Paris around 1908.3 As for the “War Song,” this was subjected to a series of revisions and expansions, the last of them as late as 1877 and under a completely different title, Jesus Navin, by which time it existed purely as a concert piece for solo voice, chorus, and orchestra. Meanwhile he made serious assaults on two complete scenes of his putative scenario: the scene in the Temple of Moloch after the theft of the veil, the priests and people calling on the god to avenge them but fearful of his anger against them, the brief thunderstorm that confirms at first their fears and then their hopes, and Salammbô’s resolve to go to Mathô’s tent and steal back the veil (Musorgsky labelled this act 3, scene 1); and a scene for Mathô in prison before his torture and execution (act 4, scene 1), an episode entirely invented by Musorgsky.

  These are substantial stretches of continuous music, a good three-quarters of an hour in total, and much of it so good that Musorgsky later found it worthwhile to adapt it—sometimes without substantial alteration—for an opera with an utterly different plot and setting, Boris Godunov. In the temple scene, the people’s lamentations are set as a kind of Orthodox hymn in block harmony, while the Chief Priest bemoans the fate of Carthage to music that will later describe Boris’s guilty fear of the “right hand of the dread judge on the criminal soul.”4 One can suggest that this whole situation has its origins in the Hebrew scenes of Judith. One can point out that Musorgsky’s grumbles to Balakirev about the lack of action in those scenes, and about Serov’s use of Christian musical idioms for Jewish prayers (“It’s about time to stop converting Jews to Christianity or Catholicizing them”),5 could just as well be levelled at Salammbô, which converts bloody, child-sacrificing pagans to Russian Orthodoxy and is also distinctly short on action. But the fact remains that Musorgsky’s music for this scene explores territory unsuspected by Serov, territory outside the normal boundaries of harmonic and textural good behavior that even Serov, despite his lack of formal training, knew how to respect, but did not know how to disrespect.

  Musorgsky’s style here can be traced back, somewhat speculatively, to certain primary ingredients that seem to have struck deep into his imagination. Some of them have already been mentioned: Orthodox chant as a way of thinking about melody; modal harmony, which “traps” the harmony within specific fields out of which it has to be “forced” into new fields, without the smooth grammar that regulates conventional modulation from key to key. Curiously enough, this approach to harmony, though restrictive in some ways, is liberating in others. It allows dissonance to be treated as a modal element, part of the field, rather than as some kind of deviance that has to be justified and corrected (“prepared and resolved,” in textbook parlance). It doesn’t encourage the kind of rich contrapuntal developments of the German classical tradition from Bach to Beethoven (and on, eventually, to the as yet inadequately known Wagner), which, like long sentences and paragraphs in a written or spoken language, depend on a complex grammar for their coherence; it does encourage vivid dramatic and poetic contrasts, a quality of ritual, powerful effects of mass, a sense of the roughness and color of life. One symptom of this approach is the prominence of unison writing and parallel chords, not only in the chorus, but also in the accompaniment (Musorgsky did not orchestrate this scene); another is the bursts of temper, as when the people take up the priests’ “Smite our insolent enemies with thunderbolts of deadly arrows” or in the ensuing thunderstorm, where the intervention of supernatural forces is marked by violent whole-tone harmonies (as in the abduction scene of Ruslan and Lyudmila) and rushing chromatic scales.

  So much of this music is striking and individual that its lack of real dramatic effect is at first puzzling. The explanation probably lies in Musorgsky’s failure to vary the pace of the scene, which crawls along, more or less in the querulous vein of the opening, and mostly in slow or moderate tempo, with a single burst of allegro for Salammbô’s decision to retrieve the veil and the chorus’s brief attempt to dissuade her. The other obvious failure is Salammbô herself: ever the stately mezzo-soprano priestess, never the vulnerable, sensuous, but inexperienced girl who will later (in a scene Musorgsky did not set) succumb to Mathô in his tent, not entirely in the calculating spirit of Judith. The treatment of Mathô himself, in the prison scene, is superficially more ambitious. Musorgsky gives him a long monologue which amounts to a summary of all the events in the novel that he had presumably by this time (November 1864) despaired of ever including in a stageable opera. Once again the writing is highly unconventional and individual, and once again it fails to catch fire. Mathô, like Ruslan, is a rather ponderous bass, far from the image of the dashing commander who, with the stolen veil in his hands, risks capture for the look in Salammbô’s eyes and the touch of her sweet lips. Worse, we know nothing about his mind, because his actions, like Salammbô’s, have no context. He remains a wooden statue in a dungeon, like Florestan without the advantage of Beethoven. Musorgsky could perhaps have remedied this by composing the necessary earlier scenes, better still by composing them first. In fact he never composed them at all.

  By the end of 1864 he must have realized Salammbô was going nowhere. He wrote only one more scene—another set piece—a chorus of priestesses before Salammbô’s death from grief at the sight of Mathô’s horrible torture and death: another invention of his. That was in February 1866; soon afterward he revised and orchestrated the “War Song,” and he also at some point orchestrated the Balearic song and the prison scene. After that, the work went into a drawer, to be plundered as necessary for future scores. Occasionally he would play excerpts at Balakirev’s or Cui’s evenings. “These fragments,” Rimsky-Korsakov tells us, “prompted on the one hand the highest approval for the beauty of their themes and ideas, on the other hand the most severe reproof for disorderliness and muddle.”6 But Musorgsky must long have known that Salammbô was a wrong direction for him; that, as he told Nikolay Kompaneysky, “there is enough of the East in Judith. Art is no game. Time is valuable.”7 He had in fact already begun to explore a landscape much nearer home.

  During the previous winter, Balakirev had composed a Second Overture on Russian Themes, basing himself this time mainly on tunes from his own as yet unpublished collection of Russian National Songs (there are three tunes from the collection; a fourth appears to be original). This is a more sophisticated piece than its predecessor, though it suffers, like most quasi-symphonic treatments of folk tunes, from the too obvious boundary between the actual melodies and the working to which they are subjected. Above all, it goes beyond the simple repetitive design of Glinka’s Kamarinskaya or Balakirev’s own first overture. It was performed almost immediately, in a Free Music School concert on 6 April 1864, conducted by Balakirev himself, and again four weeks later in an RMS concert under Rubinstein, and Musorgsky must surely have attended both. In any case, he will certainly have been aware of Balakirev’s collection and probably knew some of the arrangements. In setting them for voice and piano, Balakirev had gone out of his way to respect the tunes’ modal character, keeping the accompaniments mostly spare and unobtrusive, rather than dressing them up as richly textured and harmonized salon romances. He had also paid attention to their occasionally freewheeling metric and decorative patterns, and avoided routinely cramming them into rigid three- or four-beat bars and four-bar phrases. The general effect is to bring out certain peculiarities of the folk style that tended to get smoothed out in conventional arrangements: peculiarities of melody and rhythm (like those of ecclesiastical chant) which didn’t fit in with standard academic procedures.

  Perhaps it was in response to such
things, as well as to the overture itself, that Musorgsky composed his song “Kalistratushka” that May, and labelled it “Étude in folk style” (“Etyud v narodnom stile”). The song is a setting of a pseudo-folk poem by Nekrasov about a young man who fulfills his mother’s prediction of a happy life while his wife slaves away and dresses in rags. As a genuine folk song, this kind of story would have been told to one short tune with many verses (there are several of the kind in the Balakirev collection). Musorgsky treats it artily by varying the melody and tone to fit the changing moods, rather as if the singer were telling the story by way of a chain of related melodies.

  Some of these melodies, however, derive fairly candidly from tunes in the collection. The singer’s first theme is close to Balakirev no. 1 (“Ne bïlo vetru”), which is also the first theme of the overture, while the second theme of the song is not quite so close to no. 2 (“Poydu, Poydu,” also in the overture) but with an obvious family resemblance. After that, the song drifts away from the collection, but never so far as to lose kinship. Here and there Musorgsky imitates the protyazhnaya pesnya—the metrically fluid lyrical peasant style in which individual words are “drawn out” over several melody notes, and the meter reflects the sung phrase, rather than the other way round. The first line of the setting is of this kind: a seven-beat bar (for the two syllables of “nado”—“over”), followed by two six-four bars and a four-four for the seven syllables of “mnoy pevala matushka” (“Mama sang [over] me”). In general the melodic style is like an extended version of folk song, modal but with chromatic colorings and some leaps unlikely in authentic folk singing. The fall of a whole tone at the end of the first phrase is highly idiomatic, however (it even has a technical name: peremennost’, “mutability”).8 In general one might be listening to a folk musician with a developed mind but his roots still in his village soil. It was a style that Musorgsky, who was not much interested in folksy arrangements as such, soon learned to put to higher use.

  While Musorgsky had been doing battle with Carthage, César Cui had also been at work on a new opera, set in Scotland. In fact his idea for an operatic version of Heine’s William Ratcliff went back to 1861. But his method of working was barely more systematic than Musorgsky’s. According to Richard Taruskin, the author of the best English-language study of this opera, Cui began with the first scene of Heine’s second act (a tavern scene), and only turned to the opening act some time in 1862, then left the final (short) scene of this act unwritten, and instead at some time in 1863 set to work on the opening of the last act, and so forth.9 At the time in 1864 when Musorgsky was struggling with Salammbô, Cui was writing the crucial scene in his act 2 in which Ratcliff, having murdered his beloved’s two previous bridegrooms, confronts but fails to dispatch the third. Then, like his young friend, Cui seems to have shelved the project—not, however, out of any waning of enthusiasm or conviction, but simply because the need to supplement his income as a fortifications instructor had become too pressing to be denied. “Since the salary I received,” he wrote later,

  was insufficient for subsistence, my wife and I opened a preparatory boarding school for youths wishing to enter the Engineering Academy, and, with the exception of languages, I took it upon myself to give instruction in all subjects. Even the summer with its holidays was not free. On the contrary, this was the most feverish preexamination time. Besides, one had to bring the boarders up, not just instruct them. So we were together at all times, as if one big family, eating, living in the country, taking walks, boating, and so on, all together. It is understandable that in such conditions I could write only in snatches, and I wrote the opera not sequentially, in order, from first scene to last, but in separate scenes from various acts, whatever I was most interested in at a given moment.10

  As if the school were not enough to keep the wolf from the door, Cui also started taking on work as a writer on music for the Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti (St. Petersburg Gazette), at first on an occasional basis (one or two long articles a month, starting in March 1864), later as a regular reviewer. It hardly seems surprising that, for a time, composition took a backseat, even if—as Taruskin points out—Cui did not need the excuse of a busy life to justify a spasmodic approach to creative work. He had worked the same way ever since graduating in 1857, and so, for that matter, in their various circumstances, had Balakirev and Musorgsky.11 Taruskin calls it a habit; others have put it down to sheer amateurishness. But part of the trouble, at least, may have been a lack of clear artistic direction, in circumstances where it would have been morally, if not technically, easy to tag along with the German or French mainstream, but where there was a conscious aesthetic need to find a Russian alternative. Cui did eventually—unlike Musorgsky—finish his opera. He returned to it in earnest in 1867 and 1868, and it was staged at the Maryinsky Theatre under the youthful Eduard Nápravník in February 1869. And the finished product tends to support the “mainstream” argument, because, with all its considerable virtues and by no means inconsiderable character, William Ratcliff is very far from establishing a Russian alternative, in style, in technique, or in content.

  A German play about Scotland hardly looks like an attempt at anything of the sort, even with a libretto in Russian (adapted by Cui himself from the translation by Alexey Pleshcheyev, the radical poet of Musorgsky’s rustling leaves). Heine’s early tragedy (1822) taps into the romantic spirit of Scott’s recent Waverley novels and The Bride of Lammermoor, but with a Macbethian image of Scotland as a country of wild, gloomy mountains, crazed aristocrats, melancholy ballads, and cackling witches. William Ratcliff, rejected by Mary, the daughter of the laird MacGregor, has twice murdered her betrotheds as she waited at the altar, and now intends to kill a third, whose wedding is in progress as the curtain rises. But Ratcliff himself is wounded in the ensuing fight, and when he presents himself, pale and distraught, in Mary’s bedchamber, she suddenly realizes her love for him. There is, though, a sinister backcloth to these events. William’s father had loved Mary’s mother but had been killed by her jealous father. As William enters the bedchamber, Mary’s nurse is relating the old story, and William, who has himself had visions of a mysterious couple reaching out their arms to one another, is suddenly transformed into an agent of revenge. He draws his sword and kills Mary, her father, and himself.

  From the start, Cui approached this terrifying story in the spirit of German romantic opera—Weber, Marschner, the Schumann of Genoveva—leaving out the social ironies (Douglas, the latest bridegroom, talking wearily about London life) and the genre detail (the thieving innkeeper teaching his little boy the Lord’s Prayer), and setting the violent action in a more or less conventional operatic frame. A lot of what he composed first—the act 2 tavern scene and act 1 wedding—is chorus, of the kind that would have attracted Wagner’s anathema against “scenery that has learned to march and sing.” But for the dramatic action he gradually evolves a through-composed, quasi-symphonic style of which Wagner might rather have approved, whatever he would have thought of Cui’s technical mastery, which is reasonably adequate to the tasks he sets himself but looks distinctly thin beside such contemporary masterpieces as Tristan und Isolde or even Verdi’s Forza del destino, which had its first performance in St. Petersburg in November 1862 when Cui was probably at work on his act 1. Like Wagner (whose music he encountered for the first time in the St. Petersburg concerts of early 1863), Cui uses leitmotifs, of a sort, to bind the musical drama, though never with the richness or intricacy of Wagner. In one or two cases, the motives serve as important recurrent themes, developed in the orchestra as well as the voices; mostly they are simple reminiscence motives, reminders of one person or situation in the context of another—a device of some importance in an opera so heavily dependent on the narration of past events.

  It’s hard for us now to be sure about the effect of William Ratcliff in the theatre, since performances in recent years (or in the West at any time) have been nonexistent. The music itself is interesting, sometimes strong and atmospher
ic, certainly better than the work’s total neglect would suggest; it is easy to understand Tchaikovsky’s remark to Balakirev, before he had actually heard a performance (if he ever did), that “I look through Cui’s opera every day and am delighted. I didn’t expect that this opera would be so remarkably good.”12 We may even appreciate the importance attached to it by the Balakirev circle, who were desperate to succeed in opera (not least because St. Petersburg concert life was so limited) but had still achieved practically nothing in the field. What is less easy to accept is the work’s iconic status as an example of what Taruskin, in his chapter heading, calls (perhaps ironically) “ ‘Kuchkism’ in Practice.” If by “kuchkism” we understand what Stasov, Balakirev, and company, saw as the defining attributes of an identifiably Russian style, then William Ratcliff is scarcely kuchkist at all. In the single respect that it seeks to create a close bond between the words and the music, so that the latter is heard as an emanation of the former, it might seem to reflect (of all people) Serov’s analysis of those scenes in Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka where the music is tightly mapped onto the contours of Pushkin’s own verse, an idea that became important for the kuchka later on. It frequently, though by no means always, sets Pleshcheyev’s Russian as it stands. But the rhythmic and accentual patterns are in fact largely conventional, and sometimes, as Taruskin has shown, even violate natural Russian prosody. The few cases where Cui achieves a naturalistic effect are offset by many pages dominated by the normal artifices of early romantic opera.