It was the same evening that Musorgsky played them Marriage and Cui the latest parts of William Ratcliff. But this was something quite different—neither an experiment, like the Musorgsky, nor a thumping piece of old-fashioned melodrama, like the Cui. Rimsky-Korsakov had obviously taken A Life for the Tsar, with its folk tunes and dance episodes, as his character model; and he had learned lessons about the setting of Russian in arioso style from Dargomïzhsky. Yet as a whole the flavor and dramaturgy of these Maid of Pskov fragments was new. No Russian composer, perhaps even no non-Russian, had ever integrated conversation, storytelling, and genre with quite such fluency and naturalness: the girls playing catch, the nurses discussing Olga’s paternity and the horrors in Novgorod, while the girls accompany their fruit picking with a delicious setting of an actual folk tune, “Po malinu, po smorodinu,” about the perils of tangling your long hair in the wild fruit bushes. When it came to the duet, Rimsky-Korsakov showed that he could effortlessly raise the temperature without essentially changing idiom. Tucha announces himself somewhat imperiously from offstage with a song about the cuckoo in the dark forest; and when Olga runs out to him they sing a duet that achieves what Dargomïzhsky neither managed nor seems to have wanted, a smooth progession from arioso (accompanied recitative) to lyrical song, so that from the start of the act to (nearly) its finish the focus sharpens from the proto-cinematic montage of the genre scenes to the intense, concentrated feeling of the distressed lovers on the edge of the forest, still expressed, though, in musical terms recognizably derived from the earlier folk elements, and incorporating as its main theme an actual folk song, “Uzh tï, pole moyo,” no. 25 in the Balakirev collection.11
By January, Rimsky-Korsakov had completed the first act, with a final scene in which Olga’s supposed father, Prince Tokmakov, confesses to her unwanted fiancé, the boyar Matuta, that she is not his daughter but his niece—at the same time revealing this fact to Olga herself, who is eavesdropping in the bushes. Who her father is, Tokmakov has no idea. At the end of the act the bells ring out, announcing the veche meeting, which in this original version will form the entire second act. (When he revised the work, Rimsky-Korsakov took the—one would think fairly obvious—step of running the two scenes together.) “They ring no good,” Olga sings. “They are burying my happiness.”
Unfortunately, they were also for the time being burying Rimsky-Korsakov’s work on The Maid of Pskov. Early on 5 January 1869, Dargomïzhsky had at last died after a long struggle with heart disease, leaving his magnum opus, The Stone Guest, unorchestrated and even with some musical threads untied. The previous evening, Balakirev had conducted the first proper performance of Borodin’s First Symphony (as well as the Maid of Pskov chorus of welcome, now fully composed and orchestrated), and Dargomïzhsky had “waited impatiently for news of how the concert had gone, but unfortunately none of us called on him after the concert for fear of disturbing a sick man so late at night … By the following morning Dargomïzhsky was no more … ”12 He had always said, “If I die, Cui will complete The Stone Guest and Rimsky-Korsakov will orchestrate it.”13 Such decrees from beyond the grave cannot be refused, however regrettable they may seem; so, for the first but by no means the last time, poor Rimsky-Korsakov had to down tools on his own work and muddy his hands with somebody else’s. True, there had been minor precedents, including the Schubert arrangement of the previous May, and the orchestration of a wedding chorus from William Ratcliff for a summer concert at the Maryinsky, which Cui claimed he had no time to do. Both had given him trouble and the results, in his opinion, had been unsatisfactory. He now had to score, from scratch, an hour and a half of another man’s masterpiece. It would be good practice—better, perhaps, than he knew. But it slowed his own work down, as he put it, to the pace of a snail.
By the time Musorgsky put pen to paper on his own new opera, late in October 1868, he had both Lohengrin and parts of the first act of The Maid of Pskov in his mind’s ear. Wagner was perhaps a negative influence, a trigger rather than a model, but Rimsky-Korsakov’s work must have set him thinking along musical lines, and may even have been a factor in his decision to compose Boris Godunov. The similarities were obvious enough. Here in Pushkin was a monarch obsessed with power, fearful and paranoid, with blood on his hands, a deep love of family in his heart. As in Mey, the personal factor played against a broad historical canvas, including a handful of crowd scenes, slender in content but suggestive for a composer prepared to take the hint and expand. This would mean, of course, departing from Pushkin’s text, whereas it was a mere three months since Musorgsky had been explaining to Shestakova how, by setting Marriage as it stood, he would “fix Gogol in his place and the actor in his place, that is … say it musically such that you couldn’t say it in any other way and say it as Gogol’s characters wish to speak.”14 But then Marriage had, by his own admission, been an experiment, and one which—already in August—he had confessed to Rimsky-Korsakov ran the risk of “a monotony of intonation.” The same day he had described it to Nikolsky as a “preparation.”15 One might see it as a necessary discipline, like life classes as a way of learning to draw; the student won’t always be drawing human bodies, but the technical study is at once purifying and enriching, in due course enabling work not envisaged by the discipline.
In 1868 Pushkin’s Boris Godunov had never been staged, and there were some who regarded it as unstageable. Though clearly modelled in some respects on Shakespeare’s history plays, and poetically and linguistically rich in the same kind of way, it seems studiously to avoid crucial aspects of Shakespearean drama. For one thing, the title character appears in only six of the twenty-three scenes in the play as published, and in two of these his appearance is fleeting. Moreover, the dramatic texture is loose, not unlike a comic strip, in which the narrative is laid out in a series of discrete images, and the sequence of events can be hard to discern, unless, like Pushkin’s presumably intended audience, you already know (from Karamzin’s history) the salient details.16
You would know, for instance, that Boris Godunov was the brother-in-law of Ivan the Terrible’s feeble-minded son, Tsarevich Fyodor, for whom he had acted as regent after Ivan’s death; that Fyodor’s half-brother, the nine-year-old Dmitry, had been found one day in 1591 with his throat cut, and that Boris was widely suspected of having ordered his murder.17 At the start of the play (the year 1598), Fyodor himself has died and Boris is being urged to accept the crown, against his own presumably tactical show of reluctance. The monk Pimen has almost finished chronicling the history of Orthodox Russia, and describes to the young novice Grigory how he was himself present at Uglich, saw the corpse, and heard the murderers incriminate Boris. Grigory, travelling with the vagrant monks Varlaam and Misail, flees to Poland, intending to return as Tsarevich Dmitry back from the dead. At an inn on the border he narrowly escapes capture. In Krakow he secures Polish support and the hand of the ambitious Princess Marina (who is well aware of his imposture), on condition that he become tsar. Boris, meanwhile, though relaxed and authoritative in his family circle, is increasingly terrorized by accounts of miracles at Dmitry’s grave and reports of his supposed return. Suddenly, inexplicably, he dies, passing the succession to his own son, Fyodor. But in the final scene Fyodor is murdered by boyars loyal to the Pretender.
Possibly with kuchka assistance, possibly without, Musorgsky compiled seven scenes from this complicated sequence, in some cases eliding elements from more than one, and drawing in all on ten of the scenes in the play. Most strikingly, he left out altogether Pushkin’s four Polish scenes, and all the later scenes in which the Pretender appears, so that Grigory vanishes from the drama—except as an unseen threat—after jumping out of the pub window on the Lithuanian border in Musorgsky’s scene 4. On the other hand, he retained the essential elements of all the play’s scenes in which Boris himself figures, and by ending with the tsar’s death (which Pushkin does not), he ensured a much sharper focus on the title role. He also engineered a crucial change in Boris’s per
sonality. Pushkin makes it obliquely clear that his Boris is guilty of the murder of Tsarevich Dmitry, but though shaken to the core by Shuisky’s description of the child’s undecayed corpse and by the patriarch’s account of the miracle at the graveside, the tsar retains his composure, and his death is not directly linked to these revelations. For Musorgsky, by contrast, Boris is a character unhinged by guilt, who has hallucinations of the murdered child (not just Pushkin’s metaphorical “bloody boys in the eyes”), appears deranged at the boyars’ council, and collapses and dies on hearing about the miracle. In fact his treatment of Boris in this first version of the opera is the climax of his opéra dialogué experiment, transferred from Gogol’s trivial comedy of manners to the epic ravings of a tragic ruler.
In general, Pushkin is as cool in his portraiture as he is easygoing in his dramaturgy; he treats his characters like pawns and pieces in a chess game. Now and then a deeper psychology emerges, in Boris’s scene with his children or the scene of his death, or the scenes for the Pretender, or Shuisky, or the boyar Pushkin. But the psychological development is inhibited by a certain disjointedness in the action, whereby the different “regions” of the plot seem to exist independently of one another, and might even be interleaved in different sequences.
For Musorgsky this neutrality, so to speak, may well have been a particular attraction of the play as an opera subject. It meant that he could impose his own musical needs on the template supplied by Pushkin. This was certainly a change from his attitude toward Gogol in Marriage. There he had allowed himself to be limited by the text of the play, composing nothing but monologue and dialogue, and studiously avoiding the specific things that normally give music its point: song, aria, ensemble, chorus, movement, orchestral color. By contrast, his handling of Boris Godunov at once restores the primacy of music. The very first scene he composed—the people outside the Novodevichy Monastery being goaded by the police to implore Boris to accept the crown—is an amalgamation of two short scenes in the play, in the first of which three individuals refer briefly to Boris’s refusal, while in the second the same individuals (presumably) describe the people (the narod) “howling, sinking down in waves, row on row, more and more,” while the “people” themselves have only two lines of “weeping and wailing.” For a composer it was too good an opportunity to miss, and Musorgsky duly turned it into a tremendous choral tableau. He invented byplay between individuals, and he introduced the figure of the brutal, whip-cracking pristav, the police officer, with whom the people seem to enjoy a curiously ambivalent, almost affectionate relationship. What in the play had been little more than spoken stage directions was converted at a stroke into a musical equivalent of a broad popular canvas, like the ones that would soon be painted by the nascent Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) group of realist painters.
Altogether, Musorgsky constructed three substantial scenes out of Pushkin’s relatively casual images of the narod. In fact his coronation scene (scene 2), with its massive choral setting of the well-known “Slava” folk song, is based on a brief scene in the play in which Boris accepts the crown in the presence of the patriarch and the boyars, and the people do not figure at all. The third choral scene in the opera’s first version, the so-called St. Basil’s scene, is textually fairly close to Pushkin’s scene 19, but again with the role of the chorus, and the individual characters who step out of it, considerably expanded. Musorgsky seems not to have contemplated any equivalent to Pushkin’s final two scenes, where the author’s namesake addresses the people in the name of the “lawful” tsar, Dmitry, and the death of Tsarevich Fyodor and his mother is proclaimed to the crowd in the Kremlin Square. Perhaps the composer was impressed by the final stage direction in the published version of the play, in response to the boyar Mosalsky’s command that they shout for Dmitry: “The people are silent.” Whether he would have accepted this neat balance to his opening scene if he had known that the play originally ended with the people shouting as instructed, we shall probably never know. More likely, given his general approach to Pushkin’s work, he would have avoided tying threads in any such tidy fashion.
What clearly did interest him was how to translate his Gogol method of word setting into writing for chorus. Pushkin, as we saw, had used the device of individual voices on the fringes of the crowd describing its behavior. But for Musorgsky it was important to get inside the crowd and capture its vital flesh-and-blood energy: to represent its behavior, not merely describe it. And the way he managed this was a stroke of genius, one that stamped Boris Godunov from curtain-up as something entirely new and fresh and virtually without precedent in opera as it was known. At first the people, goaded by the pristav, fall dutifully on their knees and implore Boris to accept the crown, much as they might pray to God to save their souls. The style is essentially that of folk song, protyazhnaya, complete with irregular barrings shaped by the verbal accents, and simple block harmonies in root position (tonic in the bass). Soon the crowd fragments, and badinage replaces pious hymn singing. Now, however, the orchestra regulates the meter, and the voices fit into it, in groups of two, four, six (Musorgsky indicates the numbers), singing most of the time in even quavers, but erratically placed within each bar, so that a feeling of spontaneous conversation is achieved within a tautly structured frame.
But the most powerful discovery in this first Boris Godunov is in the writing for solo voice, where Musorgsky devised a procedure that retreated quite sharply from the verbal dialoguing of Marriage. The reason for this is obvious once one hears the result. In the Gogol opera the characters are drawn satirically; their essential existence is one-dimensional. They represent sloth, or venality, or officiousness, and they are funny because so absolute. They are like Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well: simply the thing they are makes them live. Music can give them very little more, beyond making fun of them, which is what a Rossini might have done brilliantly, or casting them in vignettes, like the simpleton in “Darling Savishna” or the distracted novice in “The Seminarian.” Pushkin’s characters invite a very different kind of musical treatment. Even when not fully developed, they are drawn psychologically; they are driven by confused motives and passions, their sins and terrors are grand, their ambitions outrageous. Their spiritual existence is intense. Here music is in its element, but it has to act as music; it can’t just sit back and let the words tell it what to do. It has to peer into the characters and situations, and light up hidden areas of feeling where words, with all their power, fall short.
The first hint of this in Boris comes in the just-crowned tsar’s brief monologue, aside, amid the celebrations in scene 2 of the opera. But as a technique, it comes fully into its own in the third scene, in the Chudov Monastery, which in the original version was composed exclusively for the solo voices of the monk Pimen and his acolyte, Grigory.18 From the start of the scene, structural control is exercised by the orchestra, which sets and maintains the pace throughout, like a steady-flowing river on which the voices float like driftwood, sometimes catching the stream, sometimes bumping over rocks or shallows. Vocally, the writing is what is technically known as recitativo stromentato: “instrumented” or, better, accompanied recitative. The voice has to fit into the tempo and rhythm of the accompaniment, but can distribute its own phrases freely within that scheme. This might sound like a description of Wagner’s technique as described in Opera and Drama or as implemented in The Ring. But Musorgsky’s orchestral writing is not symphonic in the Wagnerian sense. There are themes and motives (recurrent themes), some of which act as leitmotifs representing characters or even concepts; but they are rarely treated discursively or developmentally. To abandon the image of the river, one might hear this accompaniment as a kind of rolling backcloth, as scenery which, miraculously, changes to reflect the mood and imagery of the libretto.
Section by section, then, it is the text that dictates the musical discourse, while the voice reacts phrase by phrase, word by word. In the case of the old monk, Pimen, this is a calm, reflective process. Only when
recalling the terrible events at Uglich does he become agitated, reliving the horror of that night. The young monk, Grigory, is from the outset more excitable, his latent instability revealed in quick, snapped phrases as he suddenly wakes from his recurrent dream about surveying Moscow from a high tower. Then, as he observes Pimen still writing, he becomes calmer, more monkish, until he remembers hearing about Pimen’s earlier career as a soldier in Lithuania and at the siege of Kazan, at which point a distinctly uncloistral note of exaltation invades his music. Such contrasts are the lifeblood of Musorgsky’s method throughout this first version of Boris. They of course reflect his painstaking word settings in Marriage, but without the remorselessly verbal speech rhythms and melodic contours of that work. In fact the text in this scene, as well as in the following scene in the inn, is as close to Pushkin as Marriage was to Gogol. The enrichment is in the music.
One can trace the entire technique through the part of Boris himself in the brilliant Kremlin scene, which Musorgsky completely rewrote (including the libretto) when he revised the opera, but which in its original version remains a model of how opéra dialogué can be transformed into music that speaks both as music and as theatre. Here Pushkin’s text is treated more freely, with various additions and compressions; for instance, Boris’s “Dostig ya vïsshey vlasti” (“I have attained the highest power”) has no equivalent in the play, which tends to avoid reflective soliloquies. Nevertheless, the setting is still essentially measured recitative. The vocal part is strictly mapped on to a metrically regular accompaniment, but with its own idiosyncratic internal rhythms which reflect the extreme strong-weak accentuation of the Russian language. In general, as before, the flow of musical ideas is governed by the orchestra; sometimes the voice leads, sometimes it travels the same road, often it takes a slightly different route, like one of those hill paths that, inexplicably, divide and rejoin, or even like the podgoloski type of folk polyphony.19 This turns out to be an extraordinarily flexible form of dramma per musica. It can change character with mercurial speed: from the gentle, affectionate simplicity of Boris’s words of comfort to his widowed daughter Xenia (mainly regular quavers), to the greater range and intensity of his monologue, and the near-hysteria of his interview with the wily Shuisky. These contrasts are achieved largely within a single tempo and meter through variations in the note values: the greater the stress, the greater the variation—opéra dialogué, but with strict musical controls.
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 31
