Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  By the end of July 1875 Musorgsky had composed the whole of act 1 in piano score (he never orchestrated any of it), and was soon hard at work on act 2. This brought a complete change of tone. We are in the house of Prince Vasily Golitsïn, chief minister to the regent Sofia and also her lover, as is revealed by the letter from her that he is reading as the curtain rises. Unlike the Old Believers and reactionaries of the first act, Golitsïn is a self-consciously modern thinker, a Westernizing sophisticate, social reformer, enemy of serfdom. The suave introduction seems to portray him as a gentleman of cosmopolitan taste and good breeding, but this is soon exposed as a mere cloak for a rough Russian temper and a manner scarcely less bullying than that of the Khovanskys or Shaklovity. He receives a series of visitors. A Lutheran pastor comes to complain about Andrey Khovansky’s harassment of Emma and to ask Golitsïn to permit the building of a new church in the German quarter. Next Marfa appears and, for no clear reason, offers to tell the prince’s fortune, a piece of mumbo-jumbo that seems out of tune with her Christian piety, but was presumably included so that Musorgsky could use up the one piece of music he had composed for his abortive Gogol opera The Landless Peasant five years before. To both these visitors Golitsïn reacts with a degree of violence. “Have you gone mad?” he yells at the pastor. “Do you want to build over the whole of Russia with your churches?” And Marfa’s somewhat negative view of Golitsïn’s future provokes a still more poisonous response; as she leaves, he instructs his servant to follow her and drown her in the marsh. It is no surprise, therefore, that when Khovansky arrives to discuss Golitsïn’s recent annulment of certain aristocratic privileges, the conversation rapidly becomes a quarrel, a quarrel into which Dosifey himself soon intrudes and to which he contributes with an attack on Golitsïn’s “foreign schooling” and an invitation to “lead your Teutons against us with their diabolical army” (a sentiment that no doubt came straight from Musorgsky’s own heart). Eventually the quarrel is interrupted by Marfa, who has somehow escaped murder with the help of a troop of the tsar’s youth guard, and by Shaklovity, announcing an attempted coup by the Khovanskys in the nearby estate-village of Izmaylovo.

  Throughout 1875 one has the impression of an intense labor of composition, the outcome of which was more than an hour of high-quality music, whatever the dramatic problems encountered—and to some extent left unsolved—along the way. Musorgsky had even found time to write what turned out to be most of a superb new song cycle to words again by Kutuzov. By the end of the year he claimed to have completed the opera’s second act (of five), and to be embarking on the third, which, he told Stasov, was “in waiting [and] will be easy now.” But that proved unduly optimistic. True, the first part of the act, with Marfa’s love song and her altercation with Susanna, was already written (the song was even in print). But after composing the chorus of Old Believers that precedes the song, the intervention (yet again) of Dosifey—this time defending Marfa against Susanna—and Shaklovity’s aria lamenting Russia’s fate at the hands of her enemies within and without, he found his attention drawn back to certain unresolved difficulties in act 2. The scene with the pastor was, it seems, as yet unwritten or for some reason unsatisfactory. Above all, the final scene lacked an ending. Musorgsky now wanted it to be a quintet for Marfa, the tenor Golitsïn, and the three basses, but was balking at the intractable combination of voices. He eventually planned to write it “under Rimsky-Korsakov’s supervision.” But in the end he never wrote it at all.

  These problems, in any case, were as nothing to the objections Stasov suddenly came up with in a long, painstaking, and deeply dispiriting letter he wrote to his younger colleague in May 1876.18 He was, he said, very happy with the first act of Khovanshchina, but profoundly unhappy with act 2. Marfa’s two appearances, he said, were completely pointless, and the quarrel between Golitsïn and Khovansky utterly irrelevant to the rest of the opera. To tell the truth, he remarked with an almost sadistic lack of sensitivity, “this whole act (as libretto) might as well be thrown out, and the opera would lose nothing by this in terms of plot.” He took equal exception to act 3 as it stood, where he admitted there were “choruses and songs … and superb music, but neither action nor interest of any sort.” There was also, he added, “no connection of any kind with the rest of the opera.” Being Vladimir Stasov, he naturally had concrete alternatives to propose. He produced a completely new scenario for these two acts which would have enabled Musorgsky to recycle a good deal of the existing music, albeit in a radically reorganized and to some considerable extent recomposed form. An act he had regarded as near enough finished, and another that was quite fully planned, would suddenly have to be rethought. Stasov’s criticisms were of course correct (though it might be argued that his alternative version was only marginally an improvement). But what seems not to have occurred to him, well though he knew Musorgsky, was the ease with which the wind could be taken out of those merrily flapping but all too loosely rigged sails. After a longish pause, the composer replied humbly and with only the faintest hint of an epistolary pout. “For some while,” he confessed, “but long enough, Musoryanin has been subject to certain doubts, misgivings, suspicions and all these tutti quanti of one’s leisure time … Khovanshchina is too big, too unusual a task. You, généralissime, I’m convinced, did not suppose that your remarks and suggestions had been taken by me in any un-Musoryanin way. I have suspended work—I have taken thought, and now, and yesterday, and weeks ago, and tomorrow are all thought.”19

  Somehow work on act 3 staggered on. Excerpts were played at Stasov’s and Shestakova’s, plans were announced, suggestions made. But not till the last year of his life did Musorgsky again achieve the intensity of work on the opera that, had he kept going in 1876, might have brought this ramshackle masterpiece to a proper and early conclusion. And, whatever he may have told Stasov, he adopted none of his suggestions.

  The eventual failure to complete Khovanshchina was nearly as great a disaster as Borodin’s failure with Prince Igor: at least in the end Musorgsky composed most of his piano score, and left the work in more or less comprehensible shape as a whole. There was no need for the frantic shuffling of bits of paper, the desperate speculation about what music went with what action, the ransacking of memories of play-throughs, and the composing of whole scenes “in the style of” that were necessary to make Borodin’s work even remotely stageable. It’s true that Rimsky-Korsakov did in fact compose whole stretches of music for Khovanshchina, did in fact change almost every bar of Musorgsky’s score, as well as performing the essential task of orchestrating (or, less essential, reorchestrating) it all. But this was because of his opinion that Musorgsky, for all his undoubted genius, was incompetent to the point where his artistic intentions were constantly blocked by his lack of technique. “A lot had to be redone, shortened, and extended,” he reported in his memoirs. “In Acts I and II there turned up much that was superfluous, ugly as music, and a drag on the action.”20 The idea that these two acts were musically on so consistently high a level that to change them at all amounted to a kind of sacrilege would have been beyond the comprehension of this brilliantly gifted but at bottom conventional-minded musician.

  In Sunless, Musorgsky had evolved a new kind of lyrical style that drew on the realist manner of Boris and The Nursery but adapted it to the requirements of poetry that was inward and reflective rather than visual or theatrical. Khovanshchina continues this exploration in a variety of different ways. “I’m working,” he told Stasov, “on human speech [and] I’ve arrived at a melody created by this speech, I’ve arrived at an embodiment of recitative in melody … I should like to call it intelligent justified melody.”21 And he cites an example from the third act: Marfa’s confession to Dosifey of her “sinful” love for Andrey (“The terrible torment of my love”—“Strashnaya pïtka lyubov moya”), which he claims to be “something alien to classical melody (so much loved), but at once understandable by each and every one.”22 On the face of it the distinction might seem rather fine
. The prose text is laid over a metrically regular melody, with the aid of some discreet melismatic ornamentation, which helps stretch the words to the bar lengths, a normal enough classical procedure, but one usually applied to verse texts. The melody moves by step, while the harmony at first reflects the torment in Marfa’s soul (tense diminished-seventh chords in a very unsettled E-flat minor), then relaxes into the static calm of D-flat major as Marfa pleads for release in death, at which point the two-plus-two structure of the phrases expands into a more generous three-plus-three. All this is beautifully managed, but hardly seems likely to cause the river Neva to burst its banks. In fact there are similar things even in the original, austere Boris, notably the yurodivy’s song, but also Xenia’s lament at the start of the first version of the Kremlin scene. Meanwhile, there is still plenty in Khovanshchina that employs the arioso style of its predecessor—for instance, much of Shaklovity’s scene with the Scribe in act 1, or the Scribe’s altercation with the Muscovite settlers just afterward, a scene that Rimsky-Korsakov thought “extremely unmusical” and removed bodily from his edition.

  The difference is essentially a matter of emphasis. Boris had been cast mainly as a series of relatively compact tableaux, whereas Khovanshchina has at the outset more the feel of a grand opera with stage spectacle mixed in with confrontations of individuals. The first three tableaux of Boris last, between them, about as long as act 1 of Khovanshchina, and it may be partly for this reason that the discourse in the later opera seems wider-ranging and more varied, not always, it must be said, to its advantage dramaturgically. Musically, though, this sense of elongation goes with a noticeable enrichment of the lyrical element, which, after all, had been largely absent from the original Boris. In the revised version of that opera a change is already noticeable, not so much in the extra songs, which are charming but add nothing much to the language, as in the music for Marina and the Pretender in the Polish act. Kromy is not lyrical in this sense (apart from the yurodivy, pasted in from the old St. Basil’s scene), but it does, as we saw, foretell the broad, cinematic sequencing of events that characterizes much of Khovanshchina but not, to the same extent, the rest of Boris Godunov.

  The ingredients, though, are not dissimilar. The Khovanshchina chorus still chatters polyphonically, then breaks periodically into collective prayer or lamentation or greeting, couched in the form of harmonized chant or folk song. Compare the people’s pleading for bread in the St. Basil’s scene of Boris with the Muscovites’ lament for Mother Russia in the first act of Khovanshchina, or the chorus of pilgrims in the prologue of Boris with the chorus of Old Believers at the end of act 2 of Khovanshchina. A change in discourse is more noticeable in the big choral greeting of Khovansky in act 1, which not only has a broader sweep than anything in Boris outside Kromy but also expands by way of clear thematic connections into the music for Khovansky himself and then a ceremonious choral version of that music. This is followed by a most un-Boris-like trio for Emma, Andrey, and Marfa, culminating in a brief but very grand ensemble reprise of the Khovansky music. All this has a Meyerbeerish feel that we noticed also in Kromy and that will eventually color the later acts of Khovanshchina as well.

  As for the more conversational act 2, from the start an intimate, almost lyrical note is struck in Golitsïn’s reading of the regent Sofia’s letter with its recollections of their past love. But this is still within the compass of the arioso style, involving mainly syllabic word setting and the voice part laid out freely over a metrically regular accompaniment. The genius of this style is shown by the way Musorgsky adapts it to characterize the different personages who enter Golitsïn’s drawing room, even to depict different sides of his and their personalities. The music of this act has been considered dull; but as the dramatization of conflict between individuals it is anything but dull. Notice, for instance, Golitsïn’s proneness—for all his supposed cosmopolitanism—to outbursts of embittered patriotism (a motivic element much weakened by the cuts often made in this act); notice, too, the difference of pace between the mercurial, quick-tempered Golitsïn and the rougher, earthier Khovansky, and also how Musorgsky underlines Khovansky’s barrack-room simplicity by frequently accompanying him in bare unison octaves, just as he outlines Dosifey’s cloistral placidness in religioso block harmony, at least until the old Raskolnik is goaded into sarcastic mockery by Golitsïn’s dismissal of “the old ways.”

  The biggest anomaly of this act is that Golitsïn, having been set up as such a strong figure, effectively vanishes from the opera hereafter. The next biggest is Marfa herself. Stasov wanted to make her Golitsïn’s mistress, no doubt in the same spirit as certain stage directors who have wanted to imply that she has been Dosifey’s. But we may feel relieved that Musorgsky ignored the former suggestion (and perhaps never thought of the latter). Marfa is nevertheless the most interesting figure in the whole opera, and the hardest to pin down. Her music does have a certain mournful sensuality, and it could be from this quality that Musorgsky drew his concept of intelligently justified melody, which might just as well be thought of as speech-song rendered poetic. Unfortunately the difficult gestation of the work’s later acts may have prevented him from developing this intriguing idea into a fully evolved operatic language. As it stands, in Marfa’s music and, perhaps, in Shaklovity’s act 3 aria, it looks not much different from well-formed lyrical writing of the kind that came spontaneously to Borodin, with the one, perhaps important, qualification that, as previously in Marriage, Musorgsky was working with a prose text, something that was still rare on the operatic stage.

  There will be more to say about both Khovanshchina and Prince Igor, but nothing more will happen that will turn either of them into a complete or satisfactory entity. Both remained dramaturgically disordered works, with characters who come and go, scenes that make no sense, confrontations that hang in space, unmotivated and unresolved. Both have powerful situations that might belong to the greatest operas ever written. And both have music of such brilliance that merely to think about them is to feel excitement tinged with a painful regret. If Boris Godunov and Maid of Pskov had shown the kuchkist ideal as an authentic route to great music, these two successors reveal the depressing consequences of what Musorgsky had called rasseyannost’, distractability, a quality that was, alas, ingrained in the kuchkist mentality.

  CHAPTER 24

  Dances of Death

  The circle had continued to meet, at Shestakova’s, at Borodin’s, or at the Stasovs’ city apartments or their dacha at Pargolovo, among the lakes and low hills to the north of the capital. But it was more and more difficult to see it as a coherent group. Part of the trouble now was Rimsky-Korsakov’s defection to academe, and his typically uncompromising attempts to fill the gaps in his technical equipment and theoretical knowledge by spending most of the summer of 1875 composing fugues. Musorgsky, in particular, was scathing about such activities.

  Oh that his ink had dried up quite,

  Before it helped the quill to write!

  he versified viciously to Stasov.1 Then, a month later to Kutuzov: “Artistic truth can’t tolerate predetermined forms; life is varied and often capricious.”2 “Is it possible,” he eventually demanded of Stasov, “that remembering the past will fail to disturb his [Rimsky-Korsakov’s] log-like slumber; if only one living thought were to slip into the cerebellum (that needs it) and down as far as the heels (that need it). Repentance is a great thing. The trouble is that repentance is inaccessible to Talmudists, they are too strong on the dead letter of the law, too soullessly enslaved.”3 But Rimsky-Korsakov was no longer his sole target. As a member (ironically enough) of the music panel convened to report to the Imperial Theatres directorate on Cui’s Angelo in the spring of 1875, he had written with loyal enthusiasm about its “remarkable musical charms” and the “astounding impression” likely to be produced by its act 2 and act 3 finales. But privately he reacted coolly when Cui played the third act over at Shestakova’s in September. “It’s so-so; it’ll do,” he remarked laconical
ly to Kutuzov; and to Stasov, “when will these people, instead of their fugues and obligatory third acts, glance into sensible books and converse in their pages with sensible people?” Even Prince Igor was not completely spared. “In the amalgam of Borodin’s very sympathetic, dramatic work,” he assured Kutuzov, “there’s a lecture: you, as an artist, will sense this in a flash. I hope you’ve understood me: Borodin instructs his heroes to form conclusions from a collision of facts and accidents—as you like, it’s all the same. However likeable the composition—the listener has no option, but only: ‘roll up, gents, and see the wild beasts.’ ”4