Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  More interesting and revealing is the way in which the character portraiture and the lyric and dramatic writing in the solo scenes is left far behind by Boris Godunov and even by The Maid of Pskov, both of them works that Cui knew perfectly well by this time. The exact reason for this quickly becomes obvious. The basic problem that Cui never managed to overcome was short-windedness. Like many moderately talented but untrained composers, he had good ideas but found it hard to extend simple phrases into complex musical sentences and paragraphs. He could deploy rich chromatic chords with the best; his harmonic language is compounded of higher dominant preparations of one kind and another, the sort of thing that hotel pianists have at their fingertips and can use to enrich any tune, from a nursery rhyme up to a twelve-note row by Schoenberg. But as with hotel pianists, the preparation is followed at regular intervals by the expected resolution, with the result that what ought, on dramatic grounds, to be an intricate, developing fabric constantly lands with a thud on the musical equivalent of a full stop. The general effect of this habit is to trivialize the characters and the drama. What should be psychologically involved and evolving is reduced to a mosaic of emotional utterances, affecting in their way, but limited in reach, like those of an adolescent. At times we seem almost to be in the land of Gilbert and Sullivan, whose Trial by Jury was on the stocks at much the same time as Angelo. But whereas Sullivan was parodying the clichés of romantic opera, Cui was taking them seriously and in constant danger of being trapped by them.

  The strange thing is that most other members of the circle seem to have been unaware of any shortcomings in Cui’s manner. Angelo is largely innocent of significant Russianisms or notable individualism of any kind. Yet Musorgsky was at first enthusiastic: “Kvey [Cui],” he told Stasov, “has done a very good scene for Rodolfo with Anafesto [Galeofa] and a marvellous narration for Tisbe to Angelo about her mother.”20 And when Borodin heard the first two acts at Rimsky-Korsakov’s a year later, he was beside himself with delight: “beyond charm, beyond beauty,” he described it to his wife.21 No doubt there was an element of wishful thinking or simple loyalty in such remarks. Stasov himself, though, was more equivocal. A lot of the first act, he told Dmitry’s young daughter Zinaida, was “so-so,” though Tisbe herself was “splendid!!”22 To Dmitry himself, on the other hand, he observed three months later that Musorgsky still “believed in Cui stupidly and blindly.” But the most trenchant judgment on Angelo was penned very early in its career in a diary entry at the end of 1871 by Sasha Purgold, after singing Tisbe in a run-through of (probably) part of act 4 at her parents’ house. “I have no sympathy for this piece,” she wrote; “it is terribly stilted, complicated, and not very talented.”23

  Angelo would have to wait another two years for its first stage test; but for those with ears to hear, it was already becoming apparent that, if kuchkism meant Boris Godunov, The Maid of Pskov, Borodin’s B-minor symphony, and Balakirev’s longed-for Tamara, whatever these works might add up to as a coherent national or reform program, Cui no longer had anything of substance to contribute to it.

  CHAPTER 22

  Toward New Shores

  At long last, on 27 January 1874, Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov reached the stage of the Maryinsky Theatre as a complete opera, conducted by Eduard Nápravník. As one would expect of a work so unlike anything to which either the singers or the orchestra were accustomed, the first performance was preceded by a large number of rehearsals, all or nearly all of which Musorgsky himself attended. His participation was important, and not only for reasons of musical style and interpretation. It guaranteed his approval of the way the work was presented. From start to finish he acquiesced to Nápravník’s suggestions, which included cuts and also, one may surmise, modifications of detail, since Nápravník, though painstaking as ever in his preparation and rehearsing, was unenthusiastic about the music and inclined to be dictatorial about ways of showing it in the best possible light. Stasov, for one, was infuriated at the sight of Musorgsky lamely giving in to whatever butchery Nápravník saw fit to visit on his opera. “Our poor Modest,” he wrote to his daughter Sofia Fortunato after the premiere, “is drinking more and more this year, and now is so fogged by wine and by the fear that they will remove his opera from the theatre that he slavishly listens to Nápravník and all the Maryinsky Theatre singers, is halfway distanced from our circle, cuts from the opera whatever they tell him to, and, in general, seems as much a wet rag as if he were Al. Nik. Serov, of blessed memory. If he continues to be such a cowardly, shallow, and small-minded person, I’ve definitely made up my mind to break with him.”1

  Musorgsky had agreed to the complete omission of the scene with Pimen and Grigory in the Chudov Monastery and a number of less substantial cuts, including the tsarevich’s parrot song, both chiming-clock episodes, and various passages from the two Polish scenes and the Kromy Forest scene. Apart from the Chudov scene, this was all, as it happened, music added in the revision. It was long supposed that Chudov had been cut because of the censor’s actual or anticipated objection to the representation of monks onstage. But the equivalent scene in Pushkin had been included in the production of the play in 1870, and in any case Pimen appeared later on in the opera in the scene of Boris’s death.2 So it seems that the cuts were made on Nápravník’s insistence, either on grounds of artistic taste or simply because of the work’s inordinate length. Done in full, it would play for well over three hours of music, plus the numerous intervals demanded by scene changes between the acts. All the same, the choice of cuts seems curiously damaging. In particular, the loss of Grigory’s initial motivation must have made the work’s already somewhat casual dramaturgy more impenetrable than ever. Yet this scene was cut from all performances of Boris during Musorgsky’s lifetime; it was first heard, on its own, in 1879 in a concert performance by the FMS conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov, but was not staged until the premiere of Rimsky’s version of the opera in 1896.

  Withal, the production was by every account a spectacular success, visually stunning, musically persuasive. The sets, taken over from the play (apart from Kromy, which of course had to be newly designed), were sumptuously realistic to a degree that may be hard for the modern reader, accustomed to stark, geometric stage designs and symbolic or updated costuming, to comprehend. The two Kremlin interiors, the Terem and the Granovitaya Palace, were authentic and detailed reproductions of richly painted, vaulted sixteenth-century Muscovite chambers; the fountain scene was a leafy glade in a densely wooded garden through which could be glimpsed the steps and buttresses of Sandomierz Castle. The singers were, of course, costumed accordingly.3 The intervals, four of them, must have been lengthy. As for the music, the cast could hardly have been stronger. Ivan Melnikov, the first Ratcliff in Cui’s opera five years earlier, stepped up as the first in a long line of great Borises, most of whom have taken his melodramatic parlando style (with attendant cries, gasps, and moans—a style that, as we saw, probably originated with Mikhail Sariotti in Serov’s Judith) as an automatic element in the vocal technique required to convey the hysteria that overtakes the guilt-wracked tsar in his great act 2 and act 4 monologues. The tenor Fyodor Komissarzhevsky (the Pretender), the venerable Osip Petrov (Varlaam), and the soprano Yulia Platonova (Marina)—whose benefit it was—all repeated their roles from the three scenes of the previous year. Nápravník, though out of sympathy with the music, conducted conscientiously, as ever, and won plaudits on all sides for the clarity of his reading and the quality of the orchestral playing.

  The audience loved it. They loved the spectacle, they responded to Musorgsky’s astonishing grasp of character and his unfailing instinct for the stage, and they apparently liked his music, even though it had few of the attributes that normally appeal to an operatic public weaned on Italian bel canto and Gallic lyricism. They called the composer onto the stage over and over again—eighteen or twenty times, according to Stasov. They were noisy in their appreciation of this huge opera by a composer most of them had scarcely heard of until a
year ago and whose biggest previous work on public view was a chorus lasting barely seven minutes. Of course they were reacting intuitively, as audiences will. They apparently did not notice the defects in Musorgsky’s technique, his failure to observe the most elementary rules of good harmonic and contrapuntal behavior, his “wrong notes” (as one critic called them), and his deplorable lack of respect for Pushkin’s text. But fortunately, a band of well-read music critics was on hand to explain why this audience reaction was incorrect, to point out that in fact (as another critic put it) “on the technical side … Mr. Musorgsky is weak to the point of absurdity,” that his “lack of artistic instinct, coupled with ignorance and the desire always to be ‘new,’ results in music that is wild and ugly,” and that his orchestration, when bearable, was like Rimsky-Korsakov’s (that is, by the book), but at other times was “repulsive and monstrous.” In general, this same critic insisted in a later review, every aspect of the work bore “the stamp of incompetence.” But then, in discounting the first-night success, he concluded that “we consider it a real success [only] when operas attract good audiences over a period of several years,” after which, presumably, the “incompetence” ceases to matter.4

  Even the most cursory glance at the many and lengthy reviews that Boris Godunov attracted exposes the remarkably low intellectual standard of music criticism in St. Petersburg in the 1870s. By and large, the critics were simply bemused by the originality of Musorgsky’s style, and preferred to see it as a product of his well-known lack of training rather than of an exploratory genius that simply did not fit their preconceptions. Here and there the work was praised for its dramatic qualities but damned for its lack of music in the “normal” sense. The word “cacophony” crops up with monotonous regularity. It never seems to occur to these reviewers, a number of whom were professors at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, that the rules and conventions by which they earned their daily bread had not been brought down by Moses from Mount Horeb but had been distilled ex post facto by theorists like themselves from the works of creative geniuses who, in many cases, had made their own rules and broken them to suit themselves. All that can be said in defense of such critics is that greater musical minds than theirs sometimes reacted in a similar way. The conservatory-trained Tchaikovsky, for instance, told his brother, Modest, after studying the score that “Musorgsky’s music I send to the devil; it is the most vulgar and vile parody on music.”5

  The only reviews of the first Boris that are seriously worth reading today—and even these less for their acuity of judgment than for what they tell us about the musical context in which Musorgsky was working—are those of Tchaikovsky’s friend and ex-fellow student Hermann Laroche and Musorgsky’s close friend and kuchkist colleague César Cui. Laroche, as we saw, had surprised himself the year before by finding a “brilliant musical and dramatic talent” in the inn and Polish scenes. Now, after witnessing the complete opera, he still finds talent; but the praise is more muted and judicial. He manages, in effect, to explain away Musorgsky’s gifts as a product of a progressive spirit and a kind of studious method, which knows how to feed its artistic ambitions by opportunistically tapping into a range of contemporary resources while endeavoring to rise above them all. “Such personalities,” he remarks with mild condescension, “are well known to experienced observers of Russian life: a man who has learned ‘gradually, something, and somehow,’ but feels constrained by his surroundings and is unconsciously striving toward the light, toward freedom, is a sympathetic phenomenon.” Laroche might be thinking, one imagines, of Pierre Bezhukov in War and Peace, or even Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He analyzes how this liberalism, as he calls it, affects Musorgsky’s treatment of Pushkin, compelling him to coarsen and disfigure the “soaring poetry” of the play on the grounds that “the real Boris, the real Pretender and the real Marina, in the opinion of such liberals, did not speak at all as beautifully as Pushkin has them speak.” With more than a touch of irony, he suggests that it is only the folk-song element in Musorgsky’s style that prevented him from writing like the hyper-realist novelists Nikolay Pomyalovsky and Fyodor Reshetnikov (both, incidentally, alcoholics who had died in their twenties). Then, Laroche sneers, his language “could have been made more real than reality itself.” Yet he seems to praise the composer’s talent for reproducing the characteristics of speech. “We have seen a man here who can observe how people speak and who is gifted with a sensitivity that perceives the special accent of the moment and the individual accent of the person.”6

  In all these observations Laroche shines an acute intelligence on music whose power he plainly recognizes but is unable, at bottom, to comprehend. One way of evading this dilemma is to trace what he calls Musorgsky’s borrowings from the recent operas of other composers whose work there are good reasons to despise. Musorgsky may, for instance, ridicule Serov in his “Peepshow,” but this doesn’t prevent him from copying aspects of Serov’s style and method. Fyodor’s clapping song (Laroche thinks) is an obvious derivative of Yeryomka’s song in the third act of The Power of the Fiend and generally of a number of things in that work and Rogneda. Musorgsky’s habit of piling up dissonant chords over long bass pedals is learned from the carnival scene in The Power of the Fiend, though never, Laroche adds, “have the crudest model works reached such naïve coarseness as we see with this imitator.” And if not Serov, then Dargomïzhsky, the influence of whose Kazachok and Finnish Fantasy Laroche finds in the more general folk-montage elements of Boris (rather, he adds, than that of Glinka’s Kamarinskaya; but then, “in this method of variation, Dargomïzhsky himself is nothing other than an impoverished and motley dressed Glinka”). Finally, the conservatory-trained, theoretically solid critic notes with thinly veiled contempt that Musorgsky writes his music at the piano. “Remove his piano today,” Laroche insists, “and tomorrow he would no longer be a composer … It can generally be said that the imagination of this musical realist is tremendously influenced by the position of his own ten fingers on the black and white keys … The selection of tonalities, the modulation, and the voice-leading [part-writing] of this strange composer are so pianistic that one can only explain them as an incessant noodling with an abundant use of the right pedal.” As a critical observation this is shrewd and suggestive; as an insult it hardly merits serious consideration.

  Cui’s notice in the Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti, like his review of The Maid of Pskov the year before, is essentially an elaborate and extended mark sheet. This scene is good, that not; this detail pleases, that is ineffective. He objects to the fact that in the opening chorus of the Polish act, “the note F-sharp fails from too frequent repetition.” He likes Marina’s mazurka, especially the “charming episode” in the middle section, though even here “the note D-sharp fails from too frequent repetition.” As before, one is irresistibly reminded of Rimsky-Korsakov’s report on Balakirev’s teaching method. The review is by no means wholly negative, but the laundry-list approach gives equal prominence to the praise and the blame, whereas one might reasonably have expected that in writing about a major work by a fellow kuchkist, Cui could have congratulated him more generously on an astonishing achievement while presenting the negative points (such as might have been unavoidable) as the wholly understandable symptoms of Musorgsky’s inexperience at composing on this vast scale. Instead he dwells, finally, on the opera’s flaws, which result, he alleges, “from the fact that the author is not strict or critical enough with himself, and from his undiscriminating, complacent, hurried way of composing.”7 Musorgsky was outraged. “The tone of Cui’s article,” he wrote to Stasov, “is odious … This reckless assault on the complacency of the composer!… Complacency!!! Hurried composition! Immaturity!… whose?… whose?… I should like to know.”8

  It would be easy to suggest that Cui was simply jealous of his younger colleague’s popular success, so much greater than the at-best-tepid reception of his own William Ratcliff. He probably was genuinely uncertain how to respond to this curious musico-
dramatic hodgepodge, so lacking in coherent narrative or musical process in any traditional sense. His own concurrent work on Angelo is enough to show where his own sympathies lay in the matter of musical drama. And as for the remorseless impartiality of the distinguished columnist, that was simply the standard journalistic tone in the dangerous little aquarium of St. Petersburg music, where it was always a case of eat or be eaten, and where the time-honored Russian habit of compensating extreme approval with extreme reproof was fully on display.

  Cui was not the only one of Musorgsky’s circle who found it hard to swallow the more eccentric aspects of his originality. Some time in 1873 he had formed a close friendship with a twenty-five-year-old poet by the name of Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov. In June of that year he had written to Stasov recommending the young man as a poet in whom “almost everywhere, sincerity gushes up, almost everywhere you can smell the freshness of a fine, warm morning, with a superlative inborn technique.” He went on to explain that Kutuzov was not at all a man of the sixties, writing poetry of a socially motivated type, but on the contrary an introspective kind of writer who “forged into verse those thoughts that occupied him, and those longings peculiar to his artistic nature.”9 At one of the circle’s evenings that summer Musorgsky had performed his “Peepshow” for the umpteenth time, as usual to hoots of laughter from the assembled company. Kutuzov, however, was baffled, not knowing any of the musical references, and afterward, walking home with the composer, he confronted him with his difficulty. Surely, he suggested, “The Peepshow” could not be regarded as a work of art; it was merely a private joke, “witty, wicked, talented, but still no more than a joke, a prank.” That night they stayed up till dawn while Musorgsky went through his repertoire of works that he thought would please the earnest Kutuzov. When at last they parted, they left each other, Kutuzov records, “with the realization that we had much more in common than we had supposed a few hours earlier and that we would be seeing each other rather more often.”10