Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  From the start the idea seems to have been connected in his mind with children. Perhaps the discovery was accidental. A week or two after the Dargomïzhsky evening he made a setting of a bitter little lullaby by Nikolai Nekrasov, “Yeryomushka’s Lullaby” (“Kolïbel’naya Yeryomushki”), in which the rocking of an orphan’s cradle is accompanied by worldly advice about getting on in life by sucking up to the right people. Soon afterward he wrote two more songs about children, a setting of a tiny poem by Mey called “Children’s Song” (“Detskaya pesenka”: perhaps “Nursery Song”), and a more elaborate piece to a text by Musorgsky himself, “With Nyanya” (“S nyaney”), in which a small boy pesters his nyanya to tell him stories. This latter song and the Nekrasov lullaby were written down in the same notebook and dedicated “to the great teacher of musical truth, Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomïzhsky.”

  Musorgsky loved children and was at ease with them. While inclined to keep grown-ups, especially emotionally demanding ones, at arm’s length, with children he could relax and talk to them in their own language. Dmitry Stasov’s daughter Varvara remembered him well from this time.

  He often came to our house, either in town, or at the dacha in Zamanilovka, near Pargolovo, and since he didn’t pretend with us and didn’t talk to us in that artificial language that grown-ups normally talk with children in houses where they are friends of the parents, we not only quickly became attached to him but even began to consider him one of us … With me, as the oldest, Musorgsky often talked about “serious matters.” Thus he was the first to explain to me that the stars were divided into different constellations and that many individual stars, like the constellations, had their own names … We children were not in the least afraid of him and would often run to him with all our nonsense and even for “judgment” on some of our “dramatic conflicts.”6

  Musorgsky would sing and play children’s songs to them. Varvara recalled how they would laugh “to see a grown-up at the piano singing such ‘songs’ as were usually sung by our nannies … But it was only later that we realized the difference between ‘the songs a child invents’ and art songs.” It may be, though, that Musorgsky himself was inclined to blur this distinction. The world of the romance, with its roses and nightingales, its sighs and tears, its rustling leaves and rippling brooks, was no longer of much interest to him; but in turning to children for his subject matter, he was very far from playing down life’s earnestness. On the contrary, it must have been the essential seriousness of children that made it easy for him to identify with them. It wasn’t a case of escaping into the frivolous. The point about children was not that they were silly or funny, though they often were; the point was that they were natural, unforced. Observing them brought one close to a reality of behavior and feeling untainted by drawing-room manners or sophisticated passions. They were a ready-made starting point for the art of the truthful.

  What was needed was a reversal of point of view. “Yeryomushka’s Lullaby” is still a grown-up’s song—still, that is, a lullaby, colored by anxious fears for the child, untouched by the child’s own fears. “Detskaya pesenka” seems, by contrast, to be a genuine child’s song, almost a nursery rhyme. A raspberry bush grew in the garden; the sun warms it, the rain cherishes it. Naninka grew up in the tower; Daddy loves her, Mummy cherishes her (the parallelism, and the shift of tense, are characteristic of folk poetry). But though the song is charming, there remains a touch of artifice in its simplicity, symbolized, in a way, by its ending on an unresolved seventh chord which, in this context, feels like a rhetorical gesture. It was only in the third of these songs, “With Nyanya,” that Musorgsky entered convincingly into the child’s mind and created a miniature drama whose scenario and music seem to be entirely controlled by childish logic. He must have realized that he had taken a significant step in this song, since he soon added more in the same vein and published them all as a cycle called Detskaya (The Nursery).7

  Everyone has had or had to look after a child like the one in “With Nyanya.” Tell me, he (or possibly she) pleads, the story about the horrid bogeyman, the one who dragged children into the forest and chewed their bones. Was it because they’d been rude to their nyanya and disobeyed their daddy and mummy? No, don’t tell me that story. Tell me the one about the tsar with a limp and the tsaritsa who always had a bad cold and every time she sneezed it smashed the windows.

  Each of Musorgsky’s previous children’s songs, like his character songs in general, had hinged on one crucial pattern of speech, from which the music took its core thematic material. Now the technique is subtly different. Somewhere behind the composer’s text is an unstated genre scene; the nyanya is perhaps making the bed or cooking supper, while the child plays with his toys or does a painting. Meanwhile, his demand to be told a story is no more than surface chatter, since nyanya evidently is not telling him a story and probably is not intending to. So the character of the song comes, not from an essential activity, but from an inessential one. It’s as if Musorgsky were suggesting that, when you come down to it, true reality is made up of trivial or unimportant things. Reality in the grander sense, like Berlioz’s “March to the Scaffold” or Lyudmila’s abduction, or in the symbolic sense, like Schubert’s rejected lover in a winter landscape or Beethoven’s distant beloved on his hillside, was all very well for a certain kind of formal, stylized composition. But if you wanted to get at the essence of humanity, you had to catch it in its day-to-day off moments, and this meant listening to its unreflecting speech, its chitchat, its bread-and-butter language, since we reveal ourselves most fully when we are thinking least about ourselves.

  Hence the little boy prattling away about stories. Naturally his chatter is formless and erratic, since his mind is half on some other activity. But for Musorgsky this is precisely where its interest lies. He wants his music to reflect the child’s fickleness of mind, his in-and-out focus, as expressed in the varying pace and emphases of his speech. So: “Rasskazhi mne, nyanyushka, rasskazhi mne, milaya [tell me, nyanyushka, tell me, my dear], pro tovo, pro buku strashnovo” [about that man, about the horrible ogre].8 The accents are exaggerated, as a child would make them, while the unaccented or half-accented syllables are more or less thrown away, in Russian as in English. For instance, nyanyushka and milaya would normally take a first-syllable accent, but because they are routine incidents in the child’s way of talking, they retain only a light emphasis. Above all, the accents are irregular, and Musorgsky makes no attempt to iron them out into a regular metric scheme, but instead lets the child sing in even crotchets, marking the accents by discreet melodic climaxes and hairpin crescendos. The result of all this is a constantly changing meter controlled by the verbal accents. The song starts off in 7/4 but is soon changing time signature on practically every bar, and since the child scarcely pauses for breath, rests are used mainly for emphasis (for instance, a quaver rest before “strashnovo”—“horrible”). At the end of the first section, after he has finished listing all the disagreeable things the ogre did to the children, the little boy at last pauses, then goes on more hesitantly and rather slyly: “Nyanyushka! Was that why the ogre ate them, those children, because they upset their old nyanya?” All this Musorgsky captures with wonderful precision; one pictures the child, hears his tone of voice, senses precisely his desire to tease, perhaps mildly irritate. Will he come and get me, is the unspoken thought, for being annoying about stories? “Is that why he ate them … nya-nyushka?”

  The music’s identification with the child is absolute, and this has some interesting consequences, of which the irregular meter is only the most obvious. The tune also to some extent follows the verbal accents, but it also responds to the child’s expressive way of describing things. Thus on “pro tovo, pro buku strashnovo” the voice drops on the final syllables of each word, as if the ogre might be a dark secret, better mentioned in a hushed whisper. The prevailing melodic interval is, for the moment, the tritone, or augmented fourth, conventionally a nonvocal interval, used here and elsew
here to express horror. In general, Musorgsky pays little attention to the normal rules of well-formed melody, any more than he bothers about correct harmony. The harmony is essentially anecdotal, coloring the child’s mental picture and his way of talking about it. Dissonance is used to enhance the picture, not always in a strictly grammatical way, though the writing is certainly not atonal; rather, the tonal design is extremely informal. The song starts in G-flat major, but tends toward B-flat (the key it ends in). But Musorgsky uses cadences like bookends, to brace a somewhat easygoing sequence of events in between. Sometimes the child sings what might be fragments of folk song: for instance, about the tsar and tsaritsa “who lived across the sea in a rich castle,” an almost lyrical picture which he then spoils by remembering that the tsar had a limp, and wherever he stumbled a mushroom would grow. In this way, the music always reflects the imagery of the moment, which of course is just the way a child talks.

  Analyzed in this way, “With Nyanya” might sound chaotic. In fact it is a crisp little scena which ends just soon enough, with a snatch of the opening music, a mock-dramatic cadence, and a soft piano coda, as if apologizing for the child’s naughtiness. Above all, there is a mastery of timing and an instinct for character that reveal the born theatre composer. When Musorgsky performed the song at the Purgolds’ at the end of April 1868, Dargomïzhsky is supposed to have remarked, “Well, that outdid me,” though whether in a complimentary sense or in the sense “if nothing else” is not entirely clear. It certainly did, in any case. The novelty of The Stone Guest has always been overstated, as has its quirkiness. Technically, it did nothing much beyond what Wagner had been doing more brilliantly and on a far bigger scale in his as yet unknown Ring, and its vaunted realism was little more than the word-for-word setting of an existing play, which, if it had actually been offered as a libretto, would hardly have raised an eyebrow. “With Nyanya,” by contrast, does seem to take Chernïshevsky’s admonitions about art aspiring to the level of reality quite literally, though in so doing it also shows the limitations of the theory. After all, the piece has to succeed as a self-contained entity, an object with specific boundaries that enclose it within a virtual space. The idea that watching a child play for three or four minutes would be in any way a comparable (let alone a superior) experience is not so much obviously false as categorically absurd, which is of course why Chernïshevsky, when he talked about music, had to limit his idea of “reality” to the concept of folk singing as a natural phenomenon. Nevertheless, Musorgsky did for a time believe that the mere imitation of life could be a blueprint for worthwhile art, and it took a much bigger experiment than this one brief song to convince him that that was not in fact the case.

  The logical next step was to follow Dargomïzhsky and compose an opera on an existing play. But the play would have to be in prose, like “With Nyanya,” which effectively ruled out Pushkin or, for example, Griboyedov, whose famous Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma) was likewise in verse. The natural choice was Gogol, whose three completed plays are comedies in prose. Musorgsky later told Stasov that the idea of making an opera out of Marriage (Zhenit’ba)—the least well-known of the three—was suggested by Dargomïzhsky himself “as a joke,” and backed up by Cui “not as a joke.”9 He duly started composing the first scene early that June and had soon written enough to play to the circle and get their opinion.10 Three weeks later he went with his brother’s family to their new dacha at Shilovo, near Laptevo, a hundred miles or so south of Moscow, and there, in a little over a fortnight, working in a wooden hut, and for the first time in his life without a piano, he composed the remaining three scenes of the opera’s first act. Outside the rain poured down; inside the music poured forth. “So that the weather and I,” he told Cui, “went in parallel.”11

  More even than in Gogol’s Government Inspector (Revizor), the comedy in Marriage hinges on the deeply prosaic, corrupt, and above all indolent nature of the provincial Russian gentry class. The central character, a minor civil servant called Ivan Podkolyosin, has for some time been reluctantly contemplating getting married, not because of a sentimental attachment to any individual, but because, as he explains in his opening speech, it’s something that at a certain point, and all things considered, one probably ought to do. A matchmaker (a woman by the name of Fyokla Ivanovna) is on the case, and has a suitable candidate, Agafya Tikhonovna, in view. Unfortunately there are not only rival suitors but also a rival matchmaker, in the person of Podkolyosin’s friend Kochkaryov, himself a former client of Fyokla’s, who in the course of the play’s two long acts sees off Fyokla and the other suitors, sets up the wedding, complete with guests and reception, but is left in the lurch by Podkolyosin, who at the last minute loses his nerve and escapes through a first-floor window of Agafya’s house.

  It is easy to see why Dargomïzhsky, whose own “realist” opera had been elevated in its subject matter if not its treatment, was only half-serious in proposing this rambling farce as a subject for an opera. Mozart might have composed it brilliantly; but it was precisely the farcical-cynical element in Mozart’s buffa subjects that the nineteenth century disliked (Don Giovanni was played, but without its deflating final sextet, The Marriage of Figaro much less, Così fan tutte hardly at all). For Musorgsky, on the other hand, the antiromantic tone suited his current needs like a glove, because it forced him to imagine a music that would come as close as possible to a simulacrum of everyday speech, without the intervention of the loftier aspects of romantic realism: the vivid portrayal of the fantastic or the extraordinary; the cultivation of the ugly and sinister; the idea of program music; the symphonic prose of Wagner, which Musorgsky knew about but did not know. Set verbatim, as Dargomïzhsky had set Pushkin’s Stone Guest, Marriage gave even less opportunity for musical digression and was tailor-made for a music in which, as Musorgsky was soon explaining to Lyudmila Shestakova, the characters

  speak on the stage, as living people speak, but withal so that the character and intonational force of the dramatis personae, backed up by the orchestra, which consists of a musical outline of their way of speaking, achieve their aim directly, that is, my music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades, that is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling, must without exaggeration or violence turn into music that is truthful and precise, but (which means) artistic, highly artistic.12

  By the time he concocted this somewhat elaborate explanation of what is, in fact, quite a simple idea, Musorgsky had essentially composed all the music he would ever compose for Marriage. He had set the entire first scene of the play, in all its prosaic, ribald detail, with only minor cuts, mainly of speeches that were too mundane even for his well-armed sensibilities: for instance, Podkolyosin’s ruminations on how boots can give you corns, and Kochkaryov’s shopping list of drinks for the wedding reception. He had written some forty minutes of music, covering approximately a fifth of the two-act play, and must have begun to realize that at that rate the finished opera would end up longer than Ruslan and Lyudmila, a notoriously lengthy work. It’s true that he was telling everyone that he was thinking about his second act (Gogol’s act 1, scene 2), albeit in somewhat guarded terms. At the end of July, writing to Shestakova, he was “thinking over the second act”; but a fortnight later he was still—in a letter to Cui—thinking about it but had “not started writing it down. I feel I must bide my time.”13 “The second act,” he told Rimsky-Korsakov on the same day, “exists only as an idea and a plan—it’s still too early to compose it!”14 But then he had already told Cui that “the first act will, in the end, the way I see it, be able to serve as an experiment in opéra dialogué [Dargomïzhsky’s term for the straight setting of an existing play].” He was still at this point early in July working on the first act and hoping to “finish [it] by winter; then we’ll be able to judge and ordain.”15

  The key word in all these equivocations is “experiment.” He had suddenly become highly self-conscious about what he was up t
o, and had perhaps begun to realize that, like any experiment, this one might not work. The issue is clear from the very start of the first act. In the normal way planning an opera is a reasonably complicated process. A libretto has to be either invented or distilled from an existing story: in any case, it has to be worked out in advance, its structure, sequence of events, and characterization devised to meet specifically musical needs, which are obviously not remotely the needs of a spoken drama. One has only to think of the relationship between Glinka’s Ruslan and the Pushkin poem on which it was based, or between Verdi’s Rigoletto and its source, Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse (both of them operas Musorgsky knew well), to see how fundamental the change of medium is to the change of genre. By contrast, Musorgsky had only to take out a copy of Gogol’s play, open the book, and start writing. It was as if he were simply to decide, on the spur of the moment, to read the play out loud, a decision hardly momentous enough in itself to guarantee a momentous result.