Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  At all events, Musorgsky proceeded to recompose Boris in a manner that transformed it into a significantly different kind of opera, and he did so with an alacrity that has led many to argue that he had already been planning some kind of revision for some time before the rejection was announced.7 He almost immediately composed the first scene of an act set in Poland, at the castle of Sandomir, in the boudoir of the beautiful but unscrupulous Princess Marina Mniszek. The Pretender has arrived at the Polish court in the hope of drumming up support for his attempt on the tsarist throne, and Marina, egged on by the sinister Jesuit Rangoni, plans to seduce him, become his tsaritsa and, as Rangoni puts it, “proclaim the true [that is, Roman Catholic] faith to the Muscovite heretics.”

  There are a number of remarkable things about this new scene. For one thing, it has no real parallel in Pushkin, and in particular virtually the entire character of Rangoni and his interview with Marina is a pure invention of Musorgsky’s.8 Secondly, the scene launches at once into a chorus of maidservants of a conventionally decorative “operatic” kind as remote as can be imagined from the unadorned severity of the rejected score. It is almost as if Musorgsky had made up his mind to solve the gender problem and ditch his embargo on operatic set pieces all at a single stroke. The chorus is followed by an extended solo for Marina, in alternating mazurka and krakowiak rhythm à la Glinka, again very much in the character of a set piece. Finally Rangoni appears, and in a tense duet terrorizes the princess into pursuing her ambitions on the church’s behalf. Even this is more formal in its texture than any of the duologues in the original version of the opera. Musorgsky is naturally at some pains to distinguish the effete and (as he wants to insist) devious Polish court from the rough, if dangerous, honesty of the Moscow streets. Yet it remains hard to avoid the sense of an altered stylistic perspective, and this is to some extent borne out by subsequent changes and additions.

  The first Polish scene is dated 10 April 1871 but was probably finished a week or so later. “I’m finishing the scene,” Musorgsky wrote to Stasov on the 18th; “the Jesuit has given me no sleep for two nights running. That’s good—I love it, that is I love it when composition goes like that.”9 He soon embarked on the next Polish scene, but was then for some reason sidetracked into rewriting the existing Kremlin scene, perhaps because he was still thinking about the gender question and had the idea of composing songs for the female characters in that scene, Boris’s daughter, Xenia, her nurse, and Tsarevich Fyodor (a trouser role for a girl soprano). In fact Xenia did not get a song, but instead had her opening lament for her dead fiancé recomposed, so that by the time Musorgsky reached the point of adding songs for the Nurse and Fyodor he was in a new imaginative groove and more or less committed to redoing the entire long scene.

  The final product, completed in September, is a radically different affair from the original, even though it incorporates a good deal of the same text and episodes, and some of the same music. There are not only new songs, but also new ideas. The Kremlin has now installed a chiming clock which, as Fyodor explains to his sister, strikes the hours and half-hours and out come people playing trumpets and drums. This is of course a setup by Musorgsky for the astonishing final episode, in which Boris, unhinged by Shuisky’s insinuating description of the smiling corpse of the murdered Tsarevich Dmitry, mistakes the mechanical figures for the image of the bloodstained child. Thus an element of formal balance is introduced into what was previously pure episode-by-episode opéra dialogué. In the same way, as Taruskin has shown, what was originally a fairly relaxed two-part design—genre scenes followed by the political and psychological brass tacks of Boris’s interview with Shuisky—is hardened into an emphatic contrast between the songs and games, the maps and clocks and the (alas) unimportant bereavement of the first part, and the melodramatic mental and moral disintegration of the second part, connected, however, by the single thread of the clock. Above all Musorgsky weakened the dialogué element by importing into Boris’s monologue a whole further chunk of the temple music from Salammbô—music essentially lyrical in character, and conceived well before there was any idea of speech-music.

  After finishing the new Kremlin scene, Musorgsky made a few changes to the cell scene in Chudov Monastery; he cut out Pimen’s account of the murder and introduced the offstage choruses of monks. For the inn—probably at about the same time—he composed a little folk song for the Hostess and rewrote the start of the scene to fit. But once again his creative juices began working toward a new conception, this time to do with the treatment of the crowd, which had not of course been an issue where the gender problem was concerned (since the chorus women had always had plenty to sing), but which now somehow got caught up in the implications of his more spectacular—one might say more operatic—approach in the Polish and revised Kremlin scenes. The impulse was so strong that he was prepared to discard one of the most brilliant scenes in the original version of the opera—Boris and the yurodivy, the Simpleton or holy fool, outside St. Basil’s Cathedral—in order to accommodate his new idea of a revolutionary scene in the Oryol countryside to the south of Moscow. It was to be a straight substitution. St. Basil’s would be replaced by Kromy Forest—as the setting was called—and the opera would end, as before, with Boris’s death.

  Where St. Basil’s had been a masterly example of the application of dialogué principles to a dynamic crowd scene taken straight from Pushkin, Kromy Forest was to be, rather, a series of large-scale set pieces like the more spectacular moments in Meyerbeer or, to take a more recent example, Verdi’s Don Carlos, which had had its Russian premiere at the Maryinsky three years before. There was no equivalent scene in Pushkin, so Musorgsky had to write his own text, and the result was significantly different from anything in the original score, or even in the score as so far recomposed. Where the Pushkin scenes, however much altered textually, had retained the essentially unitary, snapshot character of the individual tableaux, Kromy turned out more cinematic in its dramaturgy, with a powerful forward thrust in the action toward what might have been a triumphant curtain had Musorgsky not decided to expose the emptiness of the whole popular charade by transferring the yurodivy and his lament for the poor, starving Russian people from the end of St. Basil’s to the end here. When Musorgsky later accepted Nikolsky’s suggestion that the Kromy scene should come after Boris’s death, he effectively turned this lament into an epilogue for the entire opera.

  Musically, Kromy is constructed as a series of evolving paragraphs driving toward a catastrophic climax at the appearance of the Pretender on horseback, in armor and a white cloak. The chorus, previously so passive, are suddenly galvanized into violent and destructive action. They capture the boyar Krushchov (Boris’s envoy), tie him to a tree stump, and torment him, at first in the same style of choral dialogue as in the Novodevichy and St. Basil’s scenes, but then in a mock glorification based on an actual folk song about a hawk in pursuit of a quail and set as a choral song in three verses. At this point Musorgsky inserts the first of the two yurodivy episodes from the St. Basil’s scene, here something of a distraction in dramatic terms, but musically useful as respite from the relentless thrust of the choruses, and also because it will “explain” the reprise of the yurodivy’s lament at the very end. Next, enter Varlaam and Misail, the bibulous monks from the inn scene, transformed into rabble-rousing demagogues who goad the people into the uncontrolled frenzy of the choral music from here to the entry of the Pretender. This is by far the most constructed sequence in the whole opera. The people respond to the monks in a headlong ternary-form chorus (with another folk song, “Zaigray, moya volïnka”—“Play on, my bagpipes”—from the Balakirev collection, as its central element), after which two Jesuits appear singing a Latin variant of Varlaam and Misail’s opening chant, thereby completing what amounts to a broad five-part arch form—something previously quite alien to Musorgsky’s dramaturgy. This whole section then flows effortlessly (via a brief episode in which the crowd sets about lynching the Jesuits) into the sl
ow march of the Pretender and his retinue—another offshoot of the monks’ chant, but also, as it happens, a further gift from Salammbô, where it accompanied the procession of the priests after the sacrifice to Moloch. Finally the yurodivy and his lament for Russia close out the whole intricate design.

  How did it come about that Musorgsky ended his work on Boris Godunov (apart from completing the love duet in the fountain scene and orchestrating all the new music) with a scene so unlike its predecessors in style and conception? It has been argued that the switch from St. Basil’s to Kromy embodied a change in the political aspect of the work. It made the people the real heroes of the opera, portrayed them as taking the destiny of Russia into their own hands, etc., etc. This was naturally an idea greatly favored by Soviet critics. But it hardly survives unbiased analysis. Musorgsky himself called the people in Kromy brodyagi—that is, “vagrants” or “tramps”; they are the down-and-outs who will latch on to any upheaval: the opportunist, semi-criminal element of the fourteenth-century Jacquerie troubles in France or the summer riots in London and Vancouver in 2011. They attack Krushchov, an emissary of the tsar (as they suppose, though Pushkin has him defecting to the Pretender); they next lynch the two Jesuits (foreign Catholics), but then side with the Pretender and his foreign Catholic army. To read this as political (not to say heroic) action is clearly to mistake the act for the motive. It’s true that in Pushkin, the urban poor participate in, without actually committing, the murder of the tsarevich and his mother. But even there the people are portrayed as more or less passive instruments of renegade boyars. There is no sign of a Wat Tyler or a Stenka Razin to lend their behavior ideological direction.

  As for the scene’s musical design, what Taruskin calls its “new monumentality … its reliance on the kind of thing Serov had called ‘musico-scenic frescoes,’ and in particular its heavy reliance on folk song motives,” it is plausible to hear all the new elements in the revision as simply the latest stage in Musorgsky’s retreat from the doggedly theoretical positions of The Stone Guest and Marriage. But if so, the change was not without its external impulses. Almost on the very same April day that Musorgsky completed his first Polish scene, Serov’s third and last opera, The Power of the Fiend (Vrazh’ya sila), had its first performance at the Maryinsky Theatre. The production was posthumous. Serov had died at the age of fifty three months before, and this may have made it easier for the kuchka to study it with an open mind, though there is not much evidence of any such frailty in Cui’s venomous review of the premiere in the Vedomosti. Only later did he acknowledge the work as “an early attempt to present a people rather than a chorus,” and in so doing admit its composer, however reluctantly, to the ranks of the New Russian School.10

  For all its bloodcurdling title (which can simply mean The Devil), The Power of the Fiend is a kind of folk opera, based on a fantastic Gogolian comedy by Ostrovsky (Live Not the Way You’d Like—Ne tak zhivi, kak khochetsya) about a philandering young merchant who, during the Shrovetide carnival, falls temporarily into the power of a diabolical local blacksmith, but escapes just in time as the matin bell chimes. For various reasons, Serov transformed this tale into a tragedy which ends with the merchant murdering his wife. But he retained the folk elements that are a crucial part of the play, and tried to incorporate them as an organic aspect of the work’s overall musical idiom, very much as (unbeknownst to Serov) Musorgsky was doing in the first version of Boris Godunov. In both cases, a certain aspiration to “realism” was a vital part of the concept. But it came out in fundamentally opposed ways. Whereas with Musorgsky, realism—at least initially—meant abandoning the artificialities of conventional number opera and treating music according to the patterns and rhetoric of ordinary speech, Serov’s idea was to reduce operatic formulae to the simplicity and naturalness of authentic folk song, as in the old Russian vaudeville, but with a greatly enriched harmonic and melodic palette. So The Power of the Fiend ended up as a number opera, carried along by songs and set pieces of one kind and another, in apparent defiance of the work’s tragic theme, which had admittedly emerged only at a comparatively late stage and as one element in a terminal disagreement between the composer and the playwright, who up to that point had been acting also as librettist.

  We can’t be sure that Musorgsky was in any specific way influenced by Serov’s highly unorthodox treatment of this subject. He certainly attended the first performance, but no opinion of his on the work has come down to us beyond a few guarded remarks about the libretto in a letter to Stasov written the day before the premiere. All we can say is that in all Serov’s operas, there was a strength of conception and often an unexpected musical resourcefulness that one instinctively knows impressed the circle, even though it was virtually impossible, for reasons of pride and politics, for them to admit it directly to one another. Whatever they may, for instance, have thought of his somewhat primitive idea of setting Ostrovsky’s rhyming couplets straight in the manner of folk poetry, they were surely struck by the originality of his expansion of this method in the Shrovetide celebrations of the fourth act, where he layers and imbricates his ethnic material in a way that clearly anticipates the richly overlaid textures and swift intercutting of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Taruskin calls this scene “one of the supreme evocations of urban folklore on the Russian stage,” and he quotes Boris Asafyev’s vivid description, which can almost be read as a description of the outer tableaux of Petrushka.11

  We can be a little surer of another operatic influence on the revised Boris Godunov, that of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov, not only because the composers were close in the two or three years during which both operas were being written, and not only because both were frequently present at play-throughs of each other’s work in progress, but above all because, for a crucial few months in the gestation of both works, they shared an apartment in (of all people) Zaremba’s house on Panteleimonovskaya; and this “apartment” was in reality no more than a single large room in which the two composers Boxed-and-Coxed, Musorgsky composing at the piano in the mornings while Rimsky-Korsakov performed mechanical tasks such as copying or orchestrating, then Rimsky having the room to himself in the afternoons when Musorgsky went off to work at the ministry.

  In fact, by the time the two composers moved in together in August 1871, The Maid of Pskov was fully composed, and the first two acts were complete in full score. The attractive image of Musorgsky writing his Kromy scene in the mornings and Rimsky-Korsakov his veche scene in the afternoons is one of those neat scenarios beloved of romantic film directors, but unnecessary as an explanation of the workings of influence in real life. Musorgsky had heard and admired the veche scene more than a year previously, in June 1870, when Rimsky-Korsakov had played it to him before going off to his brother’s house in western Finland, where he finished the orchestration of The Stone Guest. The point about their cohabitation is that any part of the draft score of The Maid of Pskov was available to be played through, studied or—in the evenings—talked about. Since it was their long-established habit to discuss each other’s latest work, it would have been an odd turn of events for them not to do so when actually living in the same room. In the circumstances, one might suggest that the similarities between the two works are surprisingly few.

  The veche scene already in any case shows ample signs of a familiarity with the choral scenes in the first version of Boris Godunov. The bells that announce the veche are, iconographically at least, those that proclaim Boris’s coronation; the harmonies and scoring are different, but the idea of alternating unrelated dissonant chords over deep pedal notes is the same. Rimsky-Korsakov has also taken hints from Musorgsky’s choral dialogue music in the Novodevichy and St. Basil scenes of his opera. The crowd’s agitation at the summoning of the veche and its reaction to the messenger’s news from Novgorod are brilliantly conveyed in snatches of conversation, a hushed chorale at his first bitter words of greeting from the ravaged city, and a distraught scherzo after the announcement that Ivan is on his way
to Pskov. But in general Rimsky-Korsakov makes less than Musorgsky of the distinction between spontaneous exchanges between individuals and groups, on the one hand, and the expression of group emotion on the other. In Musorgsky’s 1869 score the set-piece choruses are always moments of collective action: the regimented appeals to Boris in the opening scene, the coronation festivities, the cries for bread outside St. Basil’s. In The Maid of Pskov, after the first veche exchanges, Rimsky-Korsakov tends mostly toward an oratorio-like treatment of the chorus without distinction between what one might call the public and the private. Of course, the dramatic situation is inherently public in this sense. Taken as a whole this fifteen-minute scene is a superb piece of musical theatre for a composer with no previous experience of the medium. From the ringing of the tocsin to the point at which Mikhail Tucha breaks into his revolutionary song (another tune from Balakirev’s collection,12 but of course with a new text, which was censored when the composer first submitted the opera for approval early in 1872), the alternation of solo, ensemble, and chorus has an irresistible impulse not equaled in Boris until Musorgsky composed Kromy, almost certainly under the impression of this veche music. The two scenes have the same accumulation of mass energy, fragmented at first, building up to a terrifying, terrified collectivity. By contrast, the crowd scenes in the 1869 Boris are more tableau-like in design, echoing the dynamic of Pushkin’s individual scenes. In order to break this pattern, Musorgsky had finally to design a scene of his own.