Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The fact was that Musorgsky was drinking more heavily than was good for him. This had become common knowledge at least within the Stasov family. A few weeks later Dmitry Stasov wrote to his wife, Polixena (who was away in Salzburg), that Musorgsky had confessed to recent fits of dementia—presumably delirium tremens—while emphasizing that he had not been drinking to excess, as Dmitry would presumably have supposed. But Musorgsky was drinking. He had taken to frequenting a traktir (bar-restaurant) on the Bolshaya Morskaya called the Maly Yaroslavets and drinking cognac in large quantities into the small hours with a group of new arty friends, including an ex-naval officer called Pavel Naumov and the actor and storyteller Ivan Gorbunov.

  The effects began to show in his appearance and perhaps also in his manner and conversation. Dmitry noticed that he looked drawn and thinner, and Polixena became so concerned at her husband’s reports that she wrote to Musorgsky in motherly terms from Salzburg urging him tactfully to look after himself and not to allow whatever was troubling him—office work, promotion, finance, the failures of life—to undermine his health and destroy his creative spirit. One day that summer, Borodin reported to his wife, Musorgsky was seen in Pavlovsk blind drunk, and kicking up such a din that the police had to be called. “They tell me,” he added, “that he’s already drunk himself out of his mind and has begun to imagine all kinds of rubbish … This is horribly sad! Such a talented man and to sink so low morally. Now periodically he disappears, now reappears morose, untalkative, quite unlike his usual self. After a while he pulls himself together again—nice, jolly, amiable, and witty as ever.”7

  No doubt it was in the hope of disrupting this lifestyle that Vladimir Stasov tried to persuade Musorgsky to travel with him to Vienna that summer. “Such a man should certainly be given a sniff at Europe as soon as possible,” he told his daughter Sofia.

  Apart from anything else, so much first-rate new music will be played in Vienna, both in the theatre and in concerts, which at another time he couldn’t see or hear anywhere else. It’s impossible to let such an opportunity pass. Besides, he is already thirty-four years old; he is now at the peak of his talent and he is starting a new opera.8

  Soon Stasov devised a more elaborate scheme, which involved taking Musorgsky to visit Liszt in Weimar. It may have reached Stasov’s ears that Vasily Bessel was himself planning to call on Liszt in order to show him some Russian scores, and it will have struck him that this would be a good moment to present the most talented of their composers in person at the fountainhead of new music. Alas for Stasov’s plans, Musorgsky resisted all attempts to tear him away from his routine. Even after Bessel’s brother had stopped his cab and run after him down the street in order to tell him about Liszt’s enthusiastic response to The Nursery, he insisted that his duties in the Forestry Department prevented him from leaving St. Petersburg, and when Stasov wrote from Vienna in early August urging him to come anyway, he concocted what looks like a cock-and-bull story about his office chief having eye trouble and the inhumanity of abandoning him at such a moment. Stasov wrote to his sister Nadezhda Stasova in a rage:

  I sent Musoryanin a demand that he come here immediately, using for the journey the cash reserves I left behind in St. Petersburg. But already on Saturday evening 4/16 August a telegram arrived from him saying that it was “impossible, since the illness of some chief or other meant that he was running his department on his own.” What! Because of some idiotic head of department, such a marvellous thing as a visit to Liszt, playing with him and listening to him, has to go by the board! Yes, and Musoryanin’s a fool, he doesn’t know how to lie, how to invent, how to get his way.9

  But Musorgsky presumably was inventing, or at least exaggerating, as a cover for some sense of inadequacy or inferiority, the fear that he, the untutored composer of an ambitious grand opera, would be shown up in front of Europe’s most famous musician and his no doubt highly competent retinue. For Stasov, a seasoned traveller who made no special claim to musical ability, it was another matter. He could discuss music with Liszt in an intelligent and sufficiently deferential way without invasion of his own professional competence. For Musorgsky, who had never travelled outside Russia, it was one thing to ridicule German musical expertise from the safety of a St. Petersburg drawing room, quite another to confront it on its home ground and in the person of its, in a sense, greatest representative. He might have been bolder had he known that Liszt had particularly remarked on the freshness of works like Sadko and William Ratcliff, as well as The Nursery, which he put down to their freedom from outside influence, “their energetic defense against foreigners,” as his acolyte Adelheid von Schorn expressed it in her account of the episode to Bessel.10 But there was something else that would probably have kept Musorgsky at home in any case. He was bathing, as he put it in his next letter to Stasov, “in the waters of Khovanshchina.”11 “I realize,” he wrote a month later, “that I had to find a free minute to have a talk with you, my dear généralissime, had immediately to answer your new urgent call to Europe—to Liszt. But at the same time I realize that I had, finally, to get down to Khovanshchina, as its time has come.”12

  If he had said he was drowning in the waters, it would have been not much farther from the truth. “None of us,” Rimsky-Korsakov wrote twenty years later, “knew the real subject and plan of Khovanshchina, and from Musorgsky’s accounts, extremely florid, elaborate, and involved (as was his habitual way of expressing himself at that time), it was hard to grasp its subject as something whole and consistent.”13 This remained the case. Throughout July and August 1873, Musorgsky was writing long, rambling letters to various members of the Stasov family, pouring out his obsession with different episodes of the history that he hoped to turn into a viable music drama but whose eventual shape was still, it seems, shrouded in mystery.

  What we have, at this stage, is situations: the battle between, on the one hand, the modernizings of the young Tsar Peter and, on the other hand, tradition, represented by the old boyar family of the Khovanskys and the so-called streltsy militia, originally founded by Ivan the Terrible as a tsarist guard, but by the late seventeenth century a dangerous, freebooting element that took sides in the succession struggles, had opposed Peter’s accession, and at the time of Musorgsky’s opera was acting more or less as a private Khovansky militia. Peter has removed his older half-sister, Sofia Alexeyevna, from her position as regent, but she is still in correspondence with her former chief minister (and perhaps lover), Prince Vasily Golitsïn, an unscrupulous opportunist, Westernizing and modernizing in tendency, but above all hungry for power. From the convent to which Peter has consigned her, Sofia machinates against the Khovanskys; her agent the boyar Shaklovity invents a Khovansky plot against the throne and, later, engineers the murder of old Ivan Khovansky. Meanwhile, Tsar Peter moves against the streltsy, first condemns them all to death, then pardons them on condition that they disband. Through all these events runs the thread of the Old Believers, in the persons of the elder Dosifey and the complex figure of his acolyte Marfa, opponents not only of Tsar Peter’s threatened repressions against the Orthodox Church, but of recent reforms within the church itself. Musorgsky’s chronology, as it eventually emerged, is a considerable distortion of the actual history; but as a picture of the times and of the issues and personalities that shaped them, it seems reasonably accurate.

  Of clear narrative there is as yet little sign. Musorgsky talks mostly about the opera’s ending, in which the Old Believers, led by the formidable Dosifey, are to commit mass suicide on a funeral pyre rather than wait to be massacred by Tsar Peter’s guards. But he also contemplates the opening of the first act, in which the sinister boyar Shaklovity forces the Scribe to write out a denunciation of the Khovanskys, father and son; to Stasov he describes in some detail the scene (eventually act 2) between Prince Golitsïn and the dissentress Marfa and the ensuing row between Golitsïn, Khovansky, and Dosifey, and in great detail the confrontation in act 3 between Marfa and the embittered spinster Susanna. Some o
f the music for these scenes he claims is “in hand” but that it is “too early to transfer it to paper.”14 The only hint of any music on paper is his remark to Stasov that “I prepared the scene of Marfa with Mother Susanna, which (that is, the scene) I have just presented, together with the instrument [sic], to Dmitry Vasilevich [Stasov]: we’re to try out the said scene today …”15 The dates on the manuscript scores of Marfa’s song at the start of act 3 (18 August) and the scene with Susanna, up to the entrance of Dosifey (5 September), confirm the hint, though curiously the text as set is a great deal less elaborate than the version Musorgsky describes, in considerable poetic detail, in his letter to Stasov. It is as if the drama is evolving in his mind quite independently of its musical setting, a drama distilled from his extensive reading and profound cogitation, and uninhibited by the fierce demands of music. No wonder it cost him so much in sheer artistic discipline to bring the opera to even the sprawling near-completion that it reached before his death. “How people can get things done,” he lamented to Nadezhda Stasova, “I don’t know; but I can’t and it’s probably because of this that I try to outdo Sisyphus himself.”16

  He might well have been thinking of Rimsky-Korsakov as an example of such people: steady, married, a full-time professional musician, disciplined, an effective time manager. For Musorgsky, life was entropic, tending toward disorder. Rimsky-Korsakov was a kind of closed system, his energy always directed efficiently toward the task in hand. At the start of 1873 he was still nominally an officer in the Russian navy. But in the spring of that year he was appointed to the civilian post of inspector of navy bands, which meant not only that he was able to hang up his uniform for the last time, but also that, with his new income added to his modest emolument as a conservatory professor, he was for the first time what he called “a musician officially and incontestably.”17 His conservatory appointment had forced him into a close study of harmony and counterpoint; now his new post inspired, if it did not actually force, him to familiarize himself with the musical instruments in the bands he was going to inspect. He had always laid claim to a sharp ear for orchestration, and on the whole his orchestral works had proved it. But he also admitted to a certain ignorance of the mechanics of the different instruments, their ranges, their strengths and weaknesses, their technical possibilities and limitations. He now set about remedying this defect with the same thoroughness that he had brought to his theoretical studies two years before. He even planned a textbook on instrumentation, but soon realized that this was beyond him and, in a rare leakage of the closed system, quickly abandoned the idea.

  The C-major symphony, which he orchestrated that summer while working on the textbook, is a better expression of the organized mind anxious to demonstrate the virtues of study. The first movement, for example, works on the principle that strict symphonic writing is a form of economy, a process whereby a small amount of material is made to serve a grand purpose, with the help of various technical devices: fugue, imitation, free motivic working, augmentation (the theme played slower), or diminution (the theme played quicker). This is all quite impressive, but unfortunately the material itself is colorless, and nothing in the treatment suggests that the composer’s juices were stimulated by these worthy processes in the way they had been by the exotic imagery of Antar or the historical drama of The Maid of Pskov. Listening to this music, as well as the slow third movement and the very fast finale, one remembers the stern ticking-off Rimsky-Korsakov gave himself in his memoirs for ever having called Antar his “Second Symphony.” “Only its form of four separate movements,” he wrote, “approximated it to a symphony. Berlioz’s Harold en Italie and Symphonie fantastique, despite being program music, are indisputably symphonies; the symphonic working out of the themes and the sonata form of the first movements of these works remove all doubt about the correspondence between their content and the requirements of symphonic form.”18

  Leaving aside the circularity of a symphony being symphonic, and the begged question about the “requirements of symphonic form,” there remains something deeply unedifying about this kind of taxonomy, as if a musical genre were a kind of navy manual or a passport application. The slow movement and finale of Rimsky-Korsakov’s C-major symphony pass his test with flying colors: they work their motives efficiently and noticeably, use respectable contrapuntal techniques, and even form family relations between movements (the main first-movement theme pops up at the end of the finale, in the most natural way imaginable). They never for a minute stir the blood. The five-four-time scherzo, which Rimsky-Korsakov took from his abandoned B-minor symphony of 1866, is livelier and fresher. But the trio, which he tells us he wrote on an Italian lake steamer on his honeymoon in 1872, is disappointingly short on radiance or joie de vivre. One hopes they were a jollier couple than this. But of course, being a symphonic movement, it had no business with the catching of moods; its sole task was to be a trio.

  Surveying these two works, the first hesitant sketches for Khovanshchina and the far from hesitant first version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphony, one might well wonder what had become of the kuchka as a creative or even theoretical entity. There was surely no reading of kuchkism—or probably any other -ism—that could subsume two such fundamentally disparate concepts. What was more, the group itself was visibly disintegrating. Balakirev had entirely abandoned composition and conducting, had gone into a deep depression, and had taken to religion, to Stasov’s intense dismay, not only because of his own agnosticism, but because he was well aware of Balakirev’s defining role in the circle’s activities. In his gloomier moments, he could more or less write its epitaph. After a thinly attended musical evening at his apartment in March 1874, at which Anton Rubinstein had played Schumann’s Carnaval, Stasov told his brother that

  in spite of the incomplete company, Rubinstein made an unusually big impression on me … Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov lost out terribly by their absence, but we—I think not. In their present condition, they would scarcely have added a thing! And what has that spineless creature Borodin contributed? Scarcely one word, scarcely an idea, hardly any sign of life—has he actually got anything to say? No, they’ve gone to the bad without the whip and spur and the rousing voice of Balakirev. He alone among them had energy, strength of spirit and initiative.19

  Only Cui escapes the lash of Stasov’s scorn, perhaps because while he, like Musorgsky, was engaged on an opera for which Stasov had supplied both subject and scenario, he, unlike Musorgsky, was showing signs of working systematically toward a decisive end product. With Angelo there was slow but definite progress; with Khovanshchina there was merely enthusiastic digression. By the end of 1873, Cui had completed the final (fourth) act of his opera, a substantial part of the third act, and at least two scenes of the first, to judge by a letter of early August from Musorgsky to Stasov, which refers specifically to the scenes and quotes the main theme of one of them.

  Hugo’s play, Angelo, tyran de Padoue, is a characteristically long-winded and elaborate sixteenth-century love story masquerading as political drama, somewhat similar in this respect to his Le Roi s’amuse, on which Verdi had based Rigoletto twenty years before. It had already supplied Mercadante with a subject for his opera Il giuramento and would soon be the base of Poncielli’s La Gioconda. Angelo has a wife, Catarina, and a mistress, an actress called Tisbe, but he is troubled more by fear of the Venetian Council of Ten, under whose aegis he governs Padua, than by passion for either woman. Tisbe meanwhile is in love with a certain Rodolfo (the alias of Ezzelino da Romana, the scion of a former ruling, but now exiled, family of Padua), who, however, is in love with Catarina, though he has not set eyes on her for seven years. All this we learn through a device whereby a Venetian spy by the name of Homodei proves to Rodolfo that he has the power to help him gain entry to the governor’s palace and see Catarina. It transpires that Homodei is himself in love with Catarina and is devising her meeting with Rodolfo in order to incriminate her in Angelo’s eyes. But there is one crucial aspect of Catarina’s
history that Homodei does not know. Many years before, she had successfully pleaded for Tisbe’s mother to be reprieved from execution for some petty indiscretion, and Tisbe has long been seeking her unknown benefactress in the hope of repaying her. After recognizing Catarina in Angelo’s chambers, she arranges a deception whereby (as in Romeo and Juliet) Catarina swallows what Angelo believes to be poison but is in fact a sleeping draught. She also arranges for horses to be waiting for Catarina’s and Rodolfo’s escape. But Rodolfo, who has killed Homodei and now believes Catarina dead by Tisbe’s hand, stabs Tisbe, who dies as Catarina revives.

  Cui and Stasov managed to include a surprising proportion of this farrago of complexities in their scenario, and even introduced some genuine political action in the form of a revolution scene (act 3) in which Rodolfo is revealed as a conspirator and freedom fighter (inspired perhaps by the role of Tucha in The Maid of Pskov), but Homodei, renamed Galeofa by Cui, is killed not by Rodolfo but by the crowd, after Rodolfo has denounced him as an informer. This scene, dominated by choral action of one kind and another, is obviously modelled on Rimsky-Korsakov’s veche and perhaps also Musorgsky’s Kromy Forest (so far heard only in the drawing room with piano). But Cui was unable to overcome a certain timidity of style in the portrayal of popular unrest, and the scene comes out tame by comparison with its models, square in phraseology and conventional in harmony.