Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The point about the first of these songs, “Sailor the Cat” (“Kot Matros”),19 is that the little girl has hurt her hand and runs to her mother for a bit of emotional first aid. She was looking for her parasol when she saw the cat through the window, trying to get at the bullfinch in the cage. She ran out and roughly pushed the cat away, but hurt her hand on the cage. Naturally she blames the cat: “What sort of a cat is that, Mama—eh?” (“Kakov kotto, Mama—a?”). For Musorgsky the question is rather: “What sort of a child?” The answer is unmistakable: she is jolly and happy and ever so slightly dishonest. The damage seems not very severe. She tells the story like a nursery rhyme, simple and sprightly at the start, then piling on the harmonic agony when she gets to the juicy part: the bullfinch chirping pathetically in its cage, her tiptoeing up, then standing very still, pretending not to notice, then clouting Sailor just as he’s about to grab the bird. Musorgsky handles these details in his now familiar graphic manner, but discreetly, without any more exaggeration than a child would give in the telling, and in a neat ternary form, plus a slow coda in which she suddenly remembers her hurt hand and grizzles softly, ending alone with the piano’s final dissonance still hanging unresolved.20

  In the other song, “Poexal na palochke” (“He Rode Off on a Broomstick,” sometimes rather freely translated as “Ride on a Hobbyhorse”), a boy goes wild pretending that the broomstick is a galloping steed carrying him away for something urgent in the town. But he gets overexcited, falls off his “horse,” and hurts his leg, and there is another short-lived episode of adult comforting, another rapid cure, and he’s up and away once more, this time hurrying home for supper. Here Musorgsky lets the piano be the broomstick, with the boy’s voice riding the brilliant accompaniment somewhat erratically, stopping to call out to his friend Vasya, then setting off again, then getting very audibly out of control and crash-landing with an “Oh, it hurts! Oh, my leg!” (“Oy, bol’no! Oy, nogu!”). As in the bedtime song that had ended the published cycle, the nyanya now appears and distracts his attention in one of the most beautiful episodes of the whole cycle—beautiful especially, it seems, because, like the final movement of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, “The Poet Speaks,” it supplies much-needed reassurance, to the listener as much as to the injured child, of refuge and solace in the dangerous childish world of heroic deeds and fatal disasters. But Musorgsky refuses the potentially sentimental ending and instead waves the boy off into the imagined distance, back on his broomstick. The Soviet editor of Musorgsky’s works, Pavel Lamm, placed this song last for fairly obvious reasons: it does genuinely end, and happily, unlike “Kot Matros,” with its painful doubts about feline morals. What is most telling, though, is the delicate subtlety of the conclusion, its complete avoidance of rhetoric or intrusive adulthood. This is the boy’s coda, not the slightly patronizing grown-up smile that Rimsky-Korsakov tacked on to “Kot Matros” at the very end of the cycle as he arranged it.

  All this work—the songs and the thinking around Khovanshchina—reveals an artist in love with humanity as a chaotic and seemingly unpredictable phenomenon. The whole idea of a classical art promoting an idealized, perfected image of man, the art of the Renaissance and the art of the Greeks on which it modelled itself, has become anathema. He has been reading Darwin’s Descent of Man, and is obsessed with the richness of the world in which mankind finds itself, and enthralled by the idea that what may seem to be the prison of determinism is in truth the loving, violent embrace of a passionate, hot-blooded reality. This is the letter in which he compares man’s situation to being clasped in the arms of a “strong, burning, loving woman.” “The Lilliputians,” he tells Stasov, “are compelled to believe that the classical school of Italian painting is the absolute, while in my opinion—it is deadly and as repulsive as death itself.” He implicitly rejects that aspect of Chernïshevsky that sees art as an inferior representation of the beauty of the real world. “The artistic depiction of beauty alone,” he asserts, “that, in its material sense, is sheer childishness—art in its infancy. The finest traits in man’s nature and in the mass of humanity, tirelessly digging through these little-known regions and conquering them—that is the true mission of the artist.” “Toward new shores!” [“K novïm beregam!”], he thunders, apparently echoing Herzen’s From the Other Shore (S togo berega), a key document of the irrationality and randomness of history, written a decade before The Origin of Species.21

  “Toward new shores!”—fearlessly, through storm and sandbank and hidden rocks, “toward new shores!” Man is a social animal and cannot be otherwise; among men in the mass, just as in the individual man, it is always the finest traits that slip through the grasp, traits untouched by anyone: to notice and study them, by reading, by observation, and by conjecture, to study them with one’s whole being, and feed humanity with them—what a healthy dish such as they have never yet tasted—there’s a task! Delight and eternal delight!

  In our Khovanshchina we shall try, shall we not, my dear soothsayer?

  CHAPTER 21

  Three Tsars and a Tyrant

  The Imperial Theatres directorate had finally, in their cautious, unenthusiastic way, removed their objections to the staging of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The relevant report, issued in March 1872, commented on the libretto’s “mutilation” of Pushkin and its vulgarization of his historical characters. The opera’s ending, it added (referring presumably to the scene of Boris’s death, which still at this point concluded the work), “is incoherent and compressed to an extreme degree.” “But in opera,” it admitted in a resigned tone, “even a poor libretto, in the presence of good music, has its merits.” The only possible barrier to a stage performance was Nicholas I’s decree of 1837 against the portrayal of tsars onstage, and this the committee did not have the power to override. Instead it passed the buck to His High excellency, the Minister of Internal Affairs, who could, if he saw fit, solicit a waiver from Tsar Alexander. On 5 April, Alexander added the single word “agreed” (soglasen) to the report, and that—allowing for the necessary slow progress of the documentation back down the chain of command—was that, at least as far as the lèse majesté issue was concerned.

  Exactly when Boris was actually, officially cleared for performance is a lot less certain. The soprano Yulia Platonova, who took the role of Marina in the early performances, claimed many years later that she had forced Gedeonov to put it on by demanding it for her benefit performance;1 and it does seem that Gedeonov decided rather suddenly and inexplicably, as late as October 1873, to bring an end to the heel dragging and foot shuffling of his subordinates and order that the work be put on during the 1873–4 season. Whatever the truth of Platonova’s memoir (written more than a decade after the event), the final decision to stage the opera was almost certainly not taken until the autumn of 1873. Meanwhile, various excerpts had been performed. Nápravník had conducted the coronation scene in an RMS concert in February 1872, and Balakirev had included the polonaise from the second Polish scene in what turned out to be his final FMS concert in April. Naturally there were several private run-through performances with piano, and—if Musorgsky’s own autobiographical note is to be trusted—it was as a result of one of these, at the Purgolds’ that autumn, that Gedeonov’s assistant, Nikolay Lukashevich, agreed to stage three scenes from the work as part of a triple bill at the Maryinsky the following February. This could have been in spite of the lack of full clearance, since the scenes performed—the inn scene and the two scenes of the Polish act—were ones in which neither the tsar, the people, nor any Russian courtier or dignitary of the Orthodox Church appears (Varlaam and Misail were described as vagrants, and of course the Jesuit Rangoni didn’t count). Nevertheless, it does seem that the late decision to stage the work was unconnected with problems of censorship or official clearance, all or most of which had been resolved by the end of 1872.2

  Rimsky-Korsakov had also had his problems with the censorship over The Maid of Pskov, but they had been got over, he tells us in his memoi
rs, thanks to the intercession of the navy secretary, Nikolay Krabbe, a longstanding antagonist of his brother, Voyin, who, when Voyin died suddenly in 1871, went out of his way to help the young composer, presumably in some spirit of remorse. It was agreed with the directorate that Tsar Ivan could appear, in return for the expunging of all direct references to the proto-republicanism of the veche, Tucha, and his fellow freedom fighters. On these terms, The Maid of Pskov had been slated for performance in the autumn of 1872, but had been several times postponed because the tenor, Dmitry Orlov, had been ill. It finally reached the stage on New Year’s Day 1873, only the second kuchka opera to be produced, and by far the most ambitious public statement thus far of the nationalist ideals of the Balakirev circle, in particular its preoccupation with Russian history, language, and folk culture, the plight of the Russian people, and the significance of the country’s ancient political institutions.

  In his memoirs, Rimsky-Korsakov paints a colorful picture of the rehearsals for his opera: the conductor, Nápravník, “impassive … but his disapproval [making] itself felt even against his will,” the singers “conscientious and amiable” but often irritated by the composer’s youthful unwillingness to make adjustments on practical grounds. But the performance went off “marvellously” (chudesno), according to Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov took a dozen bows from the conductor’s box, and the students were so taken with the freedom fighters’ song at the end of the veche scene (not, of course, so called) that they “bawled the song to their hearts’ content up and down the corridors of the conservatory.” Needless to add, the press was in the main carping and negative. Even Cui, who reviewed the performance at great length in the Vedomosti, managed to pick holes in the fabric of his praise. He found the music monochrome, the recitatives incorrectly arranged as between the singers and the orchestra; and in tracking through the work scene by scene, he as usual allocated marks, plus and minus, in the Balakirev manner. But he found much to admire, especially the veche scene (“a step forward for art”) and the orchestration throughout; and with all its shortcomings, he thought The Maid of Pskov “a most gratifying event in our art, [enriching] our repertory with a solid and extremely talented work [and serving] as new proof of the seriousness of direction, strength of conviction, and significant future of the new Russian operatic school.”3

  Few agreed with him in print. Laroche, in Golos, even drew attention to the fact that Rimsky-Korsakov’s membership of the Balakirev circle guaranteed him “the invariable and enthusiastic praises of the musical feuilleton of the Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti” (that is, of César Cui). In fact Laroche makes it clear that he regards the young composer as by far the most gifted member of the circle, but one whose work is “infected with all the deficiencies of the musical surroundings that bred him.”

  The music in the new opera is all too esoteric in the harmonic sense, too full of choice dissonances and rarefied modulations, too rich in curiosities, too highflown and precious for a drama taken from historical life and representing a coarse age with simple feelings and passions, and people not driven by reflection. In the extremes of harmony, in presenting the sharpest and most abrupt dissonances, in unexpected combinations and chordal twists Rimsky-Korsakov has taken a significant step forward as against his previous works, and this is what gives the opera its extremely morbid character. Such music, to my mind, ought to have been written for an opera on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.4

  Curiously enough many of the passages that Laroche grumbles about are ones also singled out by Cui for complaint, a fact that says a good deal about the Petersburg factions of the day. Laroche, one of the first batch of conservatory alumni, argues from the lofty position of the well-taught, well-groomed graduate thrown into unwilling contact with the artistically and technically unwashed, while Cui, himself a musician of extremely doubtful academic pedigree, is both anxious to conceal that fact and at the same time actually somewhat unsympathetic to the innovations that, as a matter of policy, he trumpets as the attributes of the New Russian School. Cui’s own music reveals, as we have seen, a fundamentally conventional cast of mind wrenched into nonconformity, as Laroche might have said, by its own technical inadequacies. It would continue to be hard for the professor of fortifications to grasp the true merits of the work of his “fellow radicals.”

  Exactly five weeks after the Maid of Pskov premiere, on 5 February, Musorgsky’s Boris at last had its first taste of the public stage. In the end, according to Stasov, it was the chief stage director of the Maryinsky, Gennadi Kondratyev, who persuaded Gedeonov and Lukashevich to include the three scenes as part of his benefit performance, alongside the second act of Lohengrin and act 2, scene 1, of Weber’s Der Freischütz, knowing—Stasov remarks cynically—that the choice would bring in good money, since Boris’s problems with the censor had done wonders for its public profile, while the three scenes were chosen to avoid as far as possible reigniting those problems. The selection ignored questions of stylistic or narrative coherence. The inn scene emerged as a comic, satirical vignette; it provoked uninhibited laughter, and when the curtain came down someone shouted “Gogol in music.”5 Practically the only thing it had in common with the ensuing Polish scenes was the figure of the Pretender, sung by Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, whose friendship with Lukashevich may also have been a factor in the choice. In essence the scene in the inn was a product, little altered, of the opéra dialogué phase of the work’s evolution, while the Polish act at least partly reflected Musorgsky’s concern to regularize his work for the benefit of the directorate, and thus came appreciably closer to the popular idea of the “operatic.”

  Curiously enough, these inconsistencies, so obvious on a cool appraisal, seem to have bothered hardly anyone in the Maryinsky Theatre that night. At the end of the inn scene, and again at the end of the whole performance, the audience stood and cheered, in spontaneous reaction to the work’s sheer theatrical brilliance, and untroubled by those aspects of the music that were either radical or inept, depending on your point of view. It was as usual the critics, guardians of artistic rectitude, who had to weigh up the awkward balance between stylistic novelty and techniques evolved and codified under quite different auspices. The problem was confronted by Laroche with startling candor. Contemplating Musorgsky’s few published works—songs, piano miniatures, a short piece for chorus and orchestra—he set off for the Maryinsky “with the strongest prejudice against the new music that I was expecting to hear.”

  For the most part [the published works] were series of tuneless cries, abstruse for the ear and uncomfortable for intonation, accompanied by some kinds of chord or chordal figurations whose cacophony, whether naïve or malicious and deliberate, surpass all description. In terms of musical technique this accompaniment offers a spectacle unheard of in the annals of art. The most elementary schoolboy blunders—parallel octaves, parallel fifths, unresolved dissonances, the appearance of new tonalities without modulation, spelling mistakes in sharps and flats, wrong barrings—all these things leapt to the performer’s gaze … Playing through a work by Musorgsky I was always thinking of the need to open a reform school for musical juvenile delinquents.

  But the Boris excerpts forced a sharp change of mind. Of course the same technical failings were apparent at every turn. “But the ratio between these shortcomings and the spiritual power that breaks out from under them is not at all what I saw in the romances.” The first Polish scene Laroche found unremarkable. “But the other two excerpts from the opera—the inn scene and the scene by the fountain—amazed me with the brilliant musico-dramatic talent they proclaimed.” He was particularly struck by Varlaam’s Kazan song. “Both the melody and the multifarious instrumental variations of this song display immense power; the harmonic discourse is marked by an elasticity and brilliance which I least of all expected of Musorgsky, and there is something wild and terrible about the atmosphere of this whole number, which the composer conveys with poetic animation. The same animation reigns also in the scene by the fountain.” A
nd in observing that of the two composers whose new operas had just been staged Rimsky-Korsakov was by far the more finished and technically knowledgeable, Laroche made a judgment whose acuity seems to cut through the prejudices of the academic mind toward an instinctive, if grudging, recognition of the authority of genius.

  In offering my candid assessment of the merits and defects of Musorgsky’s music, I have not the least idea of giving him any kind of advice. I regard him as a fait accompli, and I suppose that for him to turn from his wrong road and fill in the gaps in his education would be incomparably harder than for Rimsky-Korsakov … The composer of Boris … possesses much greater imaginative individuality and originality, as a result of which it must be more difficult for him to submit to any kind of external discipline, for example the rules of strict contrapuntal style. What is missing from Musorgsky’s musical education can scarcely ever be made up, and even if he himself should still have any doubts about his artistic maturity, they must have been dispelled on the 5th February by the brilliant reception given to his work.6

  Similar distinctions might have been observed in the lifestyles of the two composers. Rimsky-Korsakov, having become a professor of composition in 1871, had married Nadezhda Purgold in June 1872, and was busy demonstrating his newfound regularity of existence by composing a third symphony, in C major (no flats or sharps), as if in conscious rejection of the endless flats and sharps of Balakirev’s favorite keys. As for Musorgsky, his life was reaching a crisis. After Rimsky-Korsakov’s marriage (at which he was best man), he naturally had to find new lodgings, and that September he moved into an apartment on his own, but in the same house as César Cui and his wife, Malvina, close to the Neva. At about this time his behavior began to cause concern among his close friends. The first to notice something amiss was Stasov, who wrote to his daughter Sofia Medvedeva six months later hinting enigmatically at trouble in store for Musorgsky, without quite specifying its nature. The three scenes of Boris have been given, but there are still no plans to stage the whole opera; Vasily Bessel’s plan to publish the vocal score in the autumn will produce income, but meanwhile its composer is without means, and in danger (Stasov seems to imply) of stagnating and losing the impulse to compose.