Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  So far as one can judge from the few exhibits that survive, the drawings and paintings in the memorial exhibition that opened in February 1874 at the St. Petersburg Architectural Association were remote even from the world of Boris Godunov. By no means all the subjects were Russian, and those that were seem to have been of the fantasy variety, devoid of realism in any conventional sense. Nevertheless, they caught Musorgsky’s imagination, no doubt partly because of his grief over Hartmann, but surely also because there was in his idea of Russianness an instinct for the grotesque and exotic, for the magical and superstitious, and for images of heroism and terror. On one level Pictures is all the same a realist work. Its primary subject is the composer visiting the exhibition. “My physiognomy,” he told Stasov, “is to be seen in the intermezzi.”20 We hear him, see him, enter the gallery, stop in front of the first picture, ponder, move on to the next one, and so on until the ordinary considerations of well-formed art decree that the “Promenade,” as he called the introduction and, by implication, each intermezzo, should retreat into the pictures and reappear as part of their subject matter, rather than his.

  As for the pictures themselves, they remain cool images, pieces of music hung on the wall: the hobbling, bow-legged gnome; the old castle with (according to Stasov) a troubadour singing before the gate; the children squabbling in the Tuileries gardens in Paris; the Polish cart drawn by oxen (“Bydlo” = cattle); the ballet of young chicks in, literally, shell suits; the rich and the poor Jew (a montage by Musorgsky from two separate paintings which Hartmann had given him early in their acquaintance); an argument about a cow in Limoges market; the Rome catacombs with Hartmann and (in a mysterious sequel) the “physiognomy” of the composer himself; Baba-Yaga circumnavigating her hut in a mortar (using the pestle as a propeller); and finally the Kiev gate, a very grand translation of Hartmann’s somewhat quaint façade.

  For all its anecdotal appearance, Pictures from an Exhibition makes a surprisingly integrated impression in performance. This is partly thanks to the linking “Promenade,” which comes five times, much varied each time, before vanishing into the pictures: the second part of “Catacombs,” where Musorgsky seems to join Hartmann inspecting the skulls (“Con mortuis in lingua mortua,” the subtitle reads, in somebody’s, if not Musorgsky’s, bad Latin);21 and “The Great Gate” whose main theme is a kind of abstract of the “Promenade” motif, which itself then rematerializes in the clanging of bells toward the end.

  No less important, though, is the key sequence, obviously planned with care, using the device of linking or adjacent pitches. Thus, for instance, the “Promenade” ends on a B-flat chord; “Gnomus” starts on C-flat, a semitone up, in the key of the subdominant, E-flat minor; and the second “Promenade,” in A-flat major, has E-flat as its second note, which in turn, respelled as D-sharp, is the first note of “Il vecchio castello”; and so on. The model for these various mechanisms is probably the piano suites of Schumann, which adopted similar devices to bind together loose assemblages of character sketches. Stylistically, too, Musorgsky is more indebted to Schumann than he might have cared to admit, whatever the circle’s general admiration for that particular German master. Several of the individual pictures seem to echo the capricious imagery and figuration of pieces in Carnaval or the Davidsbündlertänze, without imitating them in any specific way. There is, at any rate, nothing overpoweringly Russian about Musorgsky’s “Tuileries,” or his “Ballet of Unhatched Chickens,” or his “Limoges Marketplace”—and why, after all, should there be?

  But these pieces, with their orthodox harmonies and regular phrasing, stand in deliberate contrast with the overtly Russian “Promenade,” as is plainly indicated by the marking nel modo russico at the start of the work.22 The main theme is a Musorgskian folk song, by its nature unbarred, but barred for convenience in fives and sixes, and harmonized, after a solo opening, in the manner of the opening chorus of A Life for the Tsar, in block chords as if it were an Orthodox liturgy. Later “Promenade”s vary these elements but retain their essential character. The third and fourth intermezzi, for example, introduce some modest polyphony, suggestively colored minor-key harmony, and (in the fourth) metric irregularities so deviant as to make nonsense of the actual barrings. Here no two consecutive bars have the same number of beats (the sequence is five, six, seven, six, five, seven, five, six, five, three); yet on a coolly rational view the piece could be barred in four-four, with the exception of a single six-four bar. Needless to say, this is not a serious suggestion. Musorgsky’s barrings are obviously designed precisely to undermine the strict metric accent, and particularly to weaken the sense of upbeat, which he will surely have associated with the highly regimented and directed character of German music. We first saw this weakening in vocal music, in Marriage and The Nursery; but although those are not folk-song-based works, the idea undoubtedly originates in folk singing, as is evident from the barrings in Balakirev’s 1866 collection, which sometimes struggle to fit the melodies into halfway-regular meters. The humble “Promenade” of Pictures may, however, be the first in a long line of Russian instrumental pieces that treat meter as a function of an imaginary verbal syllabication, rather than as an abstraction from the dance, the march, or the work song.

  Taken as a whole, Pictures from an Exhibition is a rare example by a kuchka composer of an effective synthesis of strong Russian and strong Western elements, in which respect it echoes Hartmann’s own work, much of which has non-Russian subjects and was executed outside Russia. As a gallery of visual images turned into music, it perfectly reflects the circle’s ideas about realism; in fact, it draws on Musorgsky’s own technique of portraiture through song. What, after all, are “Bydlo” or “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” but piano portraits akin to “Darling Savishna” or “The Seminarian,” either of which one might imagine rethought as drawings by Hartmann? At the same time, Musorgsky must have recognized that in an instrumental work on this scale, thoughtful construction was de rigueur. Even in the casual-sounding “Gnomus,” with its graphic montage of the stumbling, shambling, scrabbling dwarf, there is a careful balancing, though very little integration, of the different musical elements. Several of the pictures are cast, Schumann-like, in ternary form. The two Jews enter separately, then combine, after which Musorgsky adds a melancholy little coda—the poet speaking, perhaps: one of the most beautiful moments in the whole cycle.

  But compositionally the most impressive part of the work is the final series, from “Limoges” onward, which achieves a powerful sweep of continuity through the solemnities of “Catacombs” and the mystery of the “lingua mortua,” by way of the violent “Baba-Yaga,” to the grandiose “Great Gate,” with its clanging bells and its imaginary choir chanting a free version of the Orthodox hymn “As you are baptized in Christ,” a reminder that Kiev was the tenth-century cradle of Russian Christianity (though, as Michael Russ points out, Musorgsky’s chorale-like treatment has a somewhat Lutheran flavor).23 These are also the most original pages. Stasov compared “Great Gate” (unfavorably) with the final scene of A Life for the Tsar but still, without deliberate paradox, called it “a beautiful, mighty and original thing … in an entirely new manner.”24 As for the sepulchral harmonies of “Catacombs,” familiarity with the famous Ravel orchestration is apt to obscure the extraordinary boldness of these slow, heavily pause-marked chords as writing for piano, an instrument that cannot sustain long notes or crescendo or diminuendo on notes once struck. Musorgsky may have had Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” in the back of his mind as he sat at the piano composing this music; the piano texture and spread of the hands are similar. But how did he expect the hapless pianist to execute the drastic crescendos and diminuendos that he placed over almost every chord in the first line of music? The answer must be that he didn’t, but that he wanted the player to think them, and in thinking them to create an illusion of slow progress, as the guide’s lantern swings from side to side, illuminating the skulls at random, and making them—in what follows—glow.
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  Although Musorgsky must have played Pictures in whole or part at circle evenings at Stasov’s or Borodin’s or Lyudmila Shestakova’s, he never played it in public, and there is no record of a performance by any other pianist, nor was the work published, in his lifetime. Perhaps he thought of it as an orchestral piece that awaited scoring. That would explain why, though he was a fluent pianist, the writing sometimes lies awkwardly on the instrument; but the same is true of other piano works by him. Stasov referred to the “purely orchestral chords” in “Catacombs,”25 but that might simply be a way of describing them. Not the least oddity is that the so easily distracted Musorgsky composed this half-hour masterpiece—by far his biggest instrumental work—in a matter of three weeks of June 1874.26 It’s almost as if he regretted finishing it with such ease and feared that it might not withstand the scrutiny of the kinds of pianist (most probably the Rubinstein brothers) who might be expected to perform it. Had Balakirev still been on the scene, things might have been different. But just as likely, Balakirev would have tried to make him rewrite it; and that would not have gone down well.

  CHAPTER 23

  Distractability

  Whatever Stasov might say about Musorgsky’s drinking habits, he had to admit that they had no very obvious adverse effect on his composing. A thirty-minute piano suite and a fifteen-minute song cycle would be a good one-year tally for the most professionally minded composer; and there was more: not only the Goleniscev-Kutuzov song “Forgotten” but also a revised version of the old “War Song of the Libyans,” retitled Jesus Navin (the Orthodox name for the biblical Joshua), and with a new middle section derived from Mathô’s lament in act 4 of Salammbô. Musorgsky had even, at Stasov’s suggestion, tinkered with a new satire, in the general vein of “The Peepshow,” but this time aimed at the critics of Boris Godunov, especially Laroche. Oddly enough, Musorgsky’s new friend Kutuzov, the scourge of “The Peepshow,” seems to have provided the text for this piece, which went by a mysterious pair of alternative titles: “Nettle Mountain” (“Krapivnaya gora”) and “The Crab” (“Rak”). But hardly any music got written, and when Kutuzov inquired about the work’s fate, Musorgsky replied that “I had a lot of fun with ‘Peepshow,’ and that’s enough! I can find something more serious to do.”1

  That, at least, was an understatement. In July 1874, with Khovanshchina in fragments and Sunless still wanting its last two songs, he had started contemplating yet another opera subject, the very one that the Purgold sisters had suggested to him the previous year, Gogol’s Soro-chintsï Fair. This comic tale, he wrote to Karmalina, would be “good as an economy of creative strength” since “two heavyweights, Boris and Khovanshchina, in a row might weigh me down.”2 At the same time he was struggling with a song in memory of his beloved Nadezhda Opochinina, who had died at the end of June at the age of fifty-three. This “Graveside Letter” (“Nadgrobnoye pis’mo”), for which Musorgsky himself composed the text, is an intensely personal cri de coeur, if not quite a confession. “Oh, if only those to whom, I know, my wild cry makes no sense could comprehend your soul; if only people could hear you in conversation, in heated debate, perhaps I could sketch for them your bright image, lit by your love of truth, your questing mind, your calm way of observing people.” The simple directness of the words is an assurance of sincerity if not much else. But the music Musorgsky composed, before abandoning the song with some unknown proportion unwritten, is very far from simple. Suddenly, for this master of the graphic, unexpected dissonance and the vivid response to words and character, musical language has become an intensely concentrated expression of inner feeling, melodically and harmonically cohesive and process-driven, as if he had undertaken a crash study of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or Liszt’s “Vallée d’Obermann.” As it stands, the song is in two parts, a dark, grief-stricken lento lamentabile in a highly chromatic E-flat minor, and a somewhat lighter, but still slow, section in G major (triggered by the “bright image” and the “love of truth”), ending on the dominant of that key. Probably Musorgsky intended a quasi-reprise of the lento but had difficulty envisaging a strong, as opposed to morose, conclusion. Or perhaps he became uneasy about the confessional aspect of the text. But even in its incomplete state, the “Graveside Letter” is one of his most moving, committed songs, and an intriguing complement to the not-yet-finished Sunless and its despairing lovelessness.

  “The year 1874,” Rimsky-Korsakov later wrote, “may be considered the start of Musorgsky’s downfall.”3 It was, all the same, comparatively speaking an annus mirabilis for his music. He seemed to have acquired focus and an ability to work in a concentrated way. The same was hardly true of his fellow kuchkists. Rimsky-Korsakov was taken up with his new post inspecting navy bands; he spent the summer in Nikolayev in the southern Ukraine redesigning the port band and the spring and autumn teaching and pursuing his study of counterpoint and fugue. In Bakhchisaray, the ancient capital of the Crimean Khanate, he “first got to know so-called Oriental music in its natural state … [and] was particularly struck by the apparently random beats of the big drum, out of time, which produced a marvellous effect.”4 But all year he composed hardly anything of his own until, at the very end of 1874 or early in 1875, he lost patience with fugal study and gave vent to a string quartet (in F major) which demonstrated, with a certain laborious self-satisfaction, his newfound mastery of imitative counterpoint, a technique that dominates every one of the four movements.

  Not surprisingly, this work went down badly with Stasov and company. It must have justified their worst fears about Rimsky-Korsakov’s various kinds of institutionalization: not only his newfound obsession with formal counterpoint, but even the (as one might suppose) harmless decision to write a string quartet, something that no member of the kuchka had ever risked before, and dangerous evidence of a capitulation to the Germanic tendencies of the conservatory. Borodin, who had also had a practically blank 1874, was probably only half-joking when he told Lyubov Karmalina that he had sketched a string quartet of his own “to the horror of Stasov and Modest [Musorgsky].”5 But unlike Rimsky-Korsakov, whose quartet was completed long before its first performance at an RMS concert in November 1875, Borodin made only spasmodic progress on his A-major quartet and only finished it in 1879. His difficulties were the same as before. His administrative duties at the Academy of Science were, if anything, more arduous than ever after the retirement of the professor of chemistry, Nikolay Zinin, in 1874; he had his own teaching, and constantly took on gratuitous extra work, for instance the organizing of courses in medicine specifically for women, who were still not admitted as regular students. The decisive obstacle to his composing, however, had been his wife’s, Yekaterina’s, presence in St. Petersburg for the entire winter and spring of 1874. As usual, she kept her husband up half the night, ate supper at midnight, and slept till the middle of the afternoon, while he, of course, had to be at his academy desk at a normal time every morning. This timetable, moreover, can have done his health little good. He was twice ill in the early part of 1875, and the only good thing about that, as he told Karmalina, was that it gave him spare time to compose a little, and the act of composing made him feel better.6

  In spite of this lifestyle, he had suddenly in October announced to Stasov his intention of resuming work on Prince Igor, nearly five years after definitively abandoning it. Stasov later reported that he had been talked into this decision by one of his music-loving academy pupils.7 But perhaps he was in an operatic mood in any case after hearing and liking the first two acts of Angelo at Rimsky-Korsakov’s a month or so earlier; or possibly he had been to hear the revival of Tchaikovsky’s Oprichnik at the Maryinsky early in October, six months after its premiere in that same theatre. There is some perceptible common ground between Tchaikovsky’s rich blend of lyrical arioso and ethnic Russiana in an epic historical context and what Borodin eventually made of Stasov’s scenario for Prince Igor. One could add that Tchaikovsky’s sometimes ramshackle dramaturgy would have made a questionable model
for Borodin’s. But alas, Prince Igor was not destined to achieve dramaturgy even in this specific, rounded sense.