Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The G-minor symphony was not wholly unknown in St. Petersburg; the central adagio and scherzo had been played at an RMS concert under Nikolay Rubinstein a year before. But the first movement was entirely new to the circle, and it took them by surprise. After all, its composer was a conservatory graduate, and therefore an object of suspicion among the Balakirev set. Any talent he might have possessed would obviously have been wrecked by all those Jewish pianists and German professors. Yet what did they hear? A beautiful, elegant melody, without preamble, flowing in the most natural, unaffected way into a no less attractive and interesting second subject: writing that transformed the sonata principle into an effortless lyrical outpouring. The circle liked it, Rimsky-Korsakov reports, and they liked its composer, “agreeable company and a sympathetic man who knew how to conduct himself simply and always speak with sincerity and warmth.”5 The feeling must have been mutual, since Tchaikovsky would continue to correspond amicably with Balakirev, and would often attend his soirées when he was in St. Petersburg. Now and then Balakirev would feed him subjects for musical treatment, as he did his kuchka friends, and they would correspond about the results and Tchaikovsky would often defer to his three-year-senior colleague. Artistically, though, he tended to look down on the kuchka, and to consider their admitted talents too inhibited by coarse or limited technique. His own bent was naturally toward the Western tradition; he would generally be working on a symphony or a concerto or a string quartet, or a ballet or opera based, as likely as not, on some non-Russian literary subject.6 And he would usually (if not quite always) finish what he had started. It wasn’t that he was uninterested in Russian materials: he would write operas on subjects from Pushkin or Ostrovsky, and he would sometimes borrow folk tunes or Orthodox chant. His many songs nearly all set Russian texts. But his Russianness would remain essentially a dialect of the great European musical language; and this suited his particular genius, which had no need of rejecting traditions or techniques or influences in order to define itself adequately. Tchaikovsky was one of those fortunate artists whose individuality is so natural that they never have to think about it. The kuchka’s perpetual agonizing about style and methodology was alien to him; he could not understand it, and to the extent that he was aware of it, he was apt to despise it.

  The fluency of Tchaikovsky’s symphony may well have troubled Rimsky-Korsakov, who was himself writing what he thought of as a symphony, but was apparently having difficulty reconciling symphonic procedures with the demands of his program. In June he tried again with revenge, and this time came up with a thematic figuration that was original and had the necessary venom, even if the movement was not in other respects essentially different from the discarded one: figuration alternating with motto, and a marked tendency to go round in circles rather than open out new territory. No doubt happy, all the same, to have solved one of his problems, he set off to stay with the Purgolds, who were spending the summer of 1868 at Lesnoye, in Tver province. Perhaps he was already attracted to the younger sister, Nadezhda. But curiously, the message of the two songs he composed at Lesnoye is that it was Sasha, the older sister, who for the moment held his eye. “Noch’ ” (“Night”), which he dedicated to Nadya, is an uncomplicated evocation of nocturnal sounds and scents, likable enough but in no way suggestive. On the other hand “Tayna” (“The Secret”), dedicated to Sasha, is a love song of a certain insistence, a setting of an anonymous Russian translation from Adalbert von Chamisso (the poet of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben).7 “When, my dear friend, you kissed me on the mouth, the stars gleamed alone in the night … Who gave away our secret?” Or was Rimsky-Korsakov himself engaging in a tactical deception?

  Soon after his Lesnoye holiday, Rimsky-Korsakov spent three weeks on the Tver estate of a certain Ivan Lodïzhensky, the elder brother of the twenty-five-year-old composer who had started coming to Balakirev’s evenings a few years before. Like Musorgsky, Nikolay Lodïzhensky had suffered the fate of many a younger brother in the ruinous conditions imposed on landowners by the emancipation. As a composer, to be sure, he was little more than a dabbler. He seems to have been a talented keyboard improviser; but not much got written down, and hardly anything got finished. In later years Nikolay became a respectable diplomat. But in the sixties he cut a somewhat eccentric, antiestablishment figure, sleeping on bare boards, going to confession in his filthiest old clothes, and generally behaving in an erratic, unpredictable way. One might see him as the ultimate failed archetype of a kuchkist: gifted, untutored, unmotivated, unfocused, also perhaps rather lazy. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, he improvised bits of at least one opera (The False Dmitry), one or more symphonies, and “musical fragments that simply had no home.” “All of this,” he goes on, “was nevertheless so graceful, beautiful, expressive, and even technically correct that it at once won the attention and sympathy of us all.”8 Alas, apart from one set of half a dozen songs, published in 1873, every note of it vanished without trace.

  Borodin had also started writing songs again in 1867, after a hiatus of more than twelve years, and while his subject matter is closer in genre to Rimsky-Korsakov’s than to Musorgsky’s, he is noticeably less beholden to lyrical stereotypes. Like Musorgsky, he liked to write his own texts, but less in order to describe the observed reality that interested his younger colleague than to achieve a certain precision of form and imagery in the magical world that he wanted to inhabit. So (in 1867) he writes about a “Sleeping Princess” (“Spyashchaya knyazhna”) whose Prince Charming never comes, and a dark forest that sings of ancient battles between freedom and force. Then, the following summer, there is a “Sea Princess” (“Morskaya tsarevna”) who, Tamara-like, lures young travellers into deep waters; a setting of a poem that could almost be by Heine (“The False Note,” “Fal’shivaya nota”) about a false assurance of love; and finally one about a poisoned love (“My Songs Are Full of Poison”—“Otravoy polnï moi pesni”) that actually is by Heine. The settings perhaps lack the freshness and vividness of Musorgsky, but they never lapse into the merely conventional. Dianin links the 1868 songs to Borodin’s feelings for Lodïzhensky’s unhappily married sister, Anna Kalinina, who had fallen in love with him during the summer and with whom, in the autumn, he had an intense relationship, described in agonized detail in long letters to his wife in Moscow.9 But there is little in either the words or the music to support Dianin’s claim that they “reflect what he was going through and reveal the slight element of tension in his relations with his wife.”10

  For some reason both princesses—the one who sleeps and the one who entices—prompted the same musical image: ostinato chords based on unresolved major seconds, a quietly disturbed sonority that might suggest the mystery of sleep or the magic of seduction, but was probably a straightforward musical obsession of Borodin’s for which he simply wanted a pretext. “The Sleeping Princess” also makes much use of the whole-tone scale, but not, as one might expect, to portray the dissolution of unbroken sleep, but on the contrary to depict the activity around the sleeper that fails to wake her: the witches and goblins, the (false) rumor of an approaching hero. The one element of tension in “The Sea Princess,” on the other hand, is the chord of the flattened sixth (D-flat in the key of F major), which alternates with the tonic chord, a reminder of Glinka’s fondness for this harmony as an exotic device. But exactly the same chord (C-flat in the key of E-flat) opens the Heine song, where it presumably stands for the lover’s bitter if unexplained resentment (“I bear many snakes in my heart, and have to bear you there as well”)—a favorite Heine motif. Borodin’s own poem for “The False Note” is itself a fairly obvious imitation of Heine: “She assured me of her love, I didn’t believe her”—and here the harmonic tension is momentarily greater, though one might feel that the song reflects Yekaterina Borodina’s (likely) feelings at least as much as her husband’s.

  The most unusual thing about these songs is their structure. Both “The Sea Princess” and “The False Note” seem incomplete, the one apparently for l
ack of a concluding verse to accommodate the music’s return to the home key, the other as a Schumannesque rejection of the beloved’s falsehoods; here, as so often in Schumann, the piano concludes the song on its own. “My Songs Are Full of Poison” is based on a three-bar phrase pattern, likewise rounded off each time by an extra piano bar. These rhythmic effects must have been a deliberate experiment, since Borodin wrote two of the poems himself, while the Heine—so brief and dismissive—has what one might regard as a built-in ellipsis, the poet’s characteristic refusal to inform us what exactly it is that he so bitterly resents in the woman he loves.

  The most interesting of these songs, however, is the simplest. The “Song of the Dark Forest” (“Pesnya tyomnogo lesa”) is an imitation folk poem of a somewhat bardic character, and Borodin sets it entirely in heterophony—the kind of unison in which the parts stray from one another but never quite lose touch. The divergence becomes greater, as one might expect, as the poem becomes more dramatic and the force overwhelms the freedom. The other striking feature of this song is the largely unvaried five-four meter, which, however, Borodin disguises by redistributing each set of three fives as 5 + 3 + 7. Later there are 5 + 6’s that recall Musorgsky’s “Little Feast,” composed at roughly the same time (September 1867). But whereas Musorgsky is merely responding to the poetic meter, Borodin creates his irregularities by adding rests or by arbitrary barrings. This is essentially the difference between the realist and the idealist, or, if you like, the pragmatist and the theorist—though the latter term suits Borodin rather poorly. The point seems to be that Borodin has an idea of what might constitute bardic practice, and re-creates it; Musorgsky simply treats his material as he finds it.

  Back in St. Petersburg in early August 1868, Rimsky-Korsakov at last put the finishing touches to Antar. The third movement, “Power,” still remained to be finalized, and he was also planning a slow introduction to the fourth movement, modulating from the D-major ending of “Power” to the D-flat major of the finale. He described his work on the third movement in a letter to Musorgsky, still far away in Shilovo. “I am drawing the situation of an Oriental potentate rather than an abstract feeling,” he explained. “The beginning which you know is played only by woodwind and brass with cymbals. The second theme in A major (the harem), with a quite original accompaniment on tamborines and cymbals, has a certain oriental chic of its own, after which Power (Antar’s theme in F major with fanfares).”11

  He must have played at least parts of the third movement at Borodin’s before they had all gone off for the summer, and in true kuchka fashion there had been a good deal of discussion, and some disagreement, about the course the work was taking. Rimsky-Korsakov had told them he was writing a symphony, but Balakirev had evidently complained that it was not symphonic enough, and wanted him to compose “Power” “as a big allegro with a broad symphonic development of the themes.”12 Musorgsky, on the other hand, bridled at any such suggestion. Symphonic development, he said, was like German Milchsuppe or Kirchensuppe, “a calamity for us, but Germans love it. In short, symphonic development, technically understood, is manufactured by a German, like his philosophy, which has now been done away with by English psychologists and our own Troitsky. A German, when he thinks, starts by analyzing, then demonstrates, while our [Russian] brother starts by demonstrating, and only then amuses himself by analyzing.”13 By the same token, Musorgsky opposed Rimsky-Korsakov’s idea of a modulatory introduction to the finale. “What could be more poetic,” he inquired, “after a forte D major, pomposo,… than a melancholy D-flat major, directly, without any preliminaries?… Why do you want to borrow Love from the Germans?… Oh preliminaries! How much good you have ruined!”14

  Poor Rimsky-Korsakov! By nature a conventional thinker whose instinct was to develop colorful ideas by traditional methods, he tumbled straight into the intellectual gulf that was already opening up between the different members of the circle. Balakirev had already shown in his Russian and Czech overtures that it was to some extent conceivable to pursue Glinka’s style of folk-song treatment along symphonic lines. In due course, Tamara would show that a “national” style had nothing to fear from good conservatory practice, even if it did not adhere to it literally, and whatever its composer might say about conservatories. This, however, was something Musorgsky could never swallow. His artistic xenophobia remained impenetrable; he longed for his friends to share it and refused to see why they could not. For him music had become an empirical activity, and received forms and procedures no longer held the slightest interest. Not that he was careless about artistic refinement or form in a more general, pragmatic sense. His work on Marriage had probably taught him that you could not rely solely on natural phenomena to make fine art; you could start with the intonations of the world around you, but in the end everything hung on what the artist did with those intonations, how he selected them, cut them, and framed them, how he related one element to another. But Rimsky-Korsakov’s worries about whether you could follow D with D-flat without going through tortuous modulations were to him quite alien, if not actually ridiculous. “Creation itself,” he argued, “contains its own laws of refinement. Verifying them is internal criticism; their application is a matter of the artist’s instinct. Without either of these, there is no creative artist; if there is a creative artist, there must be both the one and the other and the artist be a law unto himself.”15

  These arguments may or may not have impressed Rimsky-Korsakov, but it’s clear that he gave them some thought. Whatever his opinion of Musorgsky’s technique at that time, he respected his artistic judgment, and after toying with a deft slow introduction to the finale pivoting on a sustained horn A (the dominant of D) sideslipping to A-flat (dominant of D-flat), he scrapped the whole idea and instead brought in the solo cor anglais directly on the D-flat of his beautiful finale theme, which incidentally had been given him, complete with harmony, by Dargomïzhsky, who in turn had found it in a published collection of Arab melodies.16 But the problem continued to bother him, and when he revised Antar in 1897 (by which time he was a composition professor at the conservatory) he reinstated the modulatory introduction, albeit in a slightly different form. He also took to worrying once again about the work’s status as a symphony, until in his last revision, of 1903, he decided to abandon the designation altogether and rename the work a “symphonic suite”—the label he had meanwhile also attached to his Sheherazade (1887).

  In his autobiography, he tried to explain: “I was wrong to call Antar a symphony. My Antar was a poem, a suite, a fairy-tale, a story, or whatever you like, but not a symphony.” And he proceeded to elaborate the point that while the first movement was “a free musical representation of one episode of the story after another, unified in the music by the constant occurrence of Antar’s own theme,” the second movement was more or less monothematic, while the third movement, for all its contrasted themes, remained essentially an episodic march, with “a sort of middle section and light development of the two main themes.” The finale was “a kind of simple rondo with one theme and subsidiary phrases … [and] a long coda on Antar’s and Gul-Nazar’s themes.” Withal, he adds the claim that “this form came to me without outside influences or indications,” since after all the task was a narrative and lyrical one, allowing “complete freedom of musical structure.”17 A symphony, by implication, entailed no such freedom. Perhaps Balakirev would have agreed. And yet one feels that these complicated, not to say self-exculpating, observations come somewhat strangely from the erstwhile junior member of the supposedly maverick kuchka.

  Whatever Balakirev’s initial opinion of Antar, he programmed it at once for the coming RMS season, and duly conducted the first performance in March 1869. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, it went down well enough (including with Balakirev himself),18 though Cui, reviewing the second performance three years later, remembered its reception in 1869 as “cold,” and congratulated the audience on their “developed musical understanding” in the intervening years.19 The
crucial point, in any case, was that—as before—Rimsky-Korsakov was writing music that was fit and ready for performance while his older colleagues were still mired in unfinished, inchoate, fragmentary masterpieces that might gratify their sense of pioneering heroism but stood little chance of ever reaching the stage or the concert platform. Cui, admittedly, had at last finished William Ratcliff after seven years of difficult time management, and it was staged at the Maryinsky in February, a month before the Antar premiere. Musorgsky, meanwhile, had abandoned Marriage and was embarking on a wholly new, far more ambitious operatic project. Rimsky-Korsakov himself had for some time been toying with a similar project of his own. Balakirev’s Firebird was at least theoretically still a going concern. Then, in April 1869, the full house collected its last card with Stasov’s suggestion that Borodin compose an opera on the twelfth-century Russian epic The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.

  Anyone familiar with the kuchka’s past record of work completion might well have viewed these activities with dismayed incredulity. It would have seemed a classic case of running before they could walk. But opera was a huge temptation to the kuchka, as to nationalists elsewhere. It passed so many of their tests for a music that would be specifically Russian; it suggested a broad narrative canvas that could accommodate the ebb and flow of historical conflict, the clash of the personal and the public, the vivid portrayal of the ethnic or the mythic or the exotic, the color, the fantasy—all those things that, by identifying time and place, prompted a music that would be theirs rather than anyone else’s, that drew on their materials, their forms or lack of them, their typologies, their language. If instrumental music was German by tradition and international by its nature, opera was the particularist genre par excellence. It helped, no doubt, that the Germans had never truly made it their own, notwithstanding some goodish attempts. Mozart, it should be remembered, was not highly regarded by the kuchka, and in any case his best-known opera was Italian. Wagner most of them knew only by reputation and from a few bleeding chunks heard in concert. They could, they thought, safely ignore or abuse him.