Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Amid all the obscurities and periphrases, one detects a problem that is at least partly Musorgsky’s own. Up to the time of Boris Godunov, his musical thinking had essentially been driven by circle doctrine, by Stasov’s theories of Russianness and Balakirev’s negative attitude to the music profession and musical convention in general. In Boris itself he had, almost without noticing, begun to pursue his own course, ungoverned by other people’s (or his own) theories or polemical ideas; and since Boris he had moved farther away, and in a direction that could scarcely have been predicted under the tenets, such as they were, of kuchkism. Suddenly his sense of the thrust of his own art has made him acutely aware of its difference from the art of others. After all, it is unbelievable that, in the sixties, he had simply failed to notice that Cui was a limited composer of a fundamentally orthodox gift, that Rimsky-Korsakov was a hardworking, methodical craftsman for whom productivity came before aesthetic posturing, and that Borodin’s was a lyrical, melodic talent that would stand or fall on its response to emotion and the exotic, and was hardly suited to the meticulous psychological portraiture that Musorgsky wanted to cultivate. The only big thing these composers had ever had in common was that at a certain time, they had cleaved to one another as Russian musicians to whom Russia did not cater. Now suddenly this all became clear to him, and casting around for an explanation, he found it in Balakirev’s disappearance. “Held by Balakirev’s iron gauntlet,” he fantasized to Stasov,

  they began to breathe with his mighty lungs (if not with all his powerful chest), and set themselves tasks that would have troubled great men. Balakirev’s iron gauntlet was released, and they felt weary, in need of rest; where to find this rest? In tradition, of course … The “Mighty Heap” have degenerated into soulless traitors; the “lash” has proved to be a child’s whip. Anyone more indifferent to the essence of life, more unnecessary to contemporary creativity than these artists, I think you will not find anywhere in the Celestial Empire.5

  What, though, had been these heroic tasks? An opera or two, a symphony here, an overture there, a few songs, some piano pieces. The real heroism, surely, was here and now, in Khovanshchina, in the Gogol opera he was half-planning, and in the settings of Kutuzov’s verse, which were presenting new challenges for which neither kuchkism nor Kutuzov’s own somewhat blinkered view of Musorgsky’s art offered much guidance. Suddenly he seems afflicted by artistic loneliness. It shows in his complaints; and it shows in his behavior.

  The Maly Yaroslavets provided him with one form of escape. But there were others. He began to appear frequently in concerts, especially charity evenings, as a piano accompanist, often in music that, in his moments of aesthetic moralizing, he would have regarded with contempt. Unfortunately, he was an excellent pianist, a quick and adept sight reader, and a responsive partner who seemed able to pick up the nuances of a singer’s interpretation at a moment’s notice. Various stories were told about his ability to perform competently, without rehearsal, even when far gone in drink. As a result he was in constant demand, and seems rarely to have refused. “Generally speaking,” the physician Vasily Bertenson recalls, “no charity concert took place without Musorgsky. The musical evenings in the seventies that were organized annually by the students of all the institutions of higher education for the benefit of their needy comrades, were unthinkable without his participation. Modest Petrovich was a superb accompanist of singers. Himself as poor as Job, where charity concerts were concerned he would never accept money for his work.”6

  Then there was his employment at the Forestry Department, which occupied a substantial part of each day, however much or little of his mental energy it may have absorbed. In March 1875 he was promoted to “senior chief of Section III,” a very doubtful distinction which landed him with the task of looking after the office in the not infrequent absence of his immediate superior, a man called Voluyev (promptly corrupted by Stasov into “Kholuyev”—“the lackey”), who seems to have been the worst kind of rule-bound bureaucrat and who was perhaps behind what Musorgsky, at the end of the year, called “a vulgar little intrigue [that] has been got up against me at the Ministry.”7 One can well imagine the mixed feelings, of boredom, dread, and relief, with which he put away his manuscripts every day at noon and departed to push a pen and shuffle papers for several hours in his government office.

  Finally, there was the issue of his accommodation. After being shut out of Kutuzov’s apartment at the end of July, he turned up at five o’clock in the morning at the apartment of his Maly Yaroslavets friend Pavel Naumov on Vasilevsky Island, and effectively billeted himself on him and his common-law wife, Maria Fyodorova. “As you know,” he explained to Kutuzov, “I am afraid to stay alone.” “I’ve liked very much being at Naumov’s,” he went on, “particularly in the summer: the garden, the wide street, the Neva nearby. Visitors … good conversation, sometimes music; all kinds of news, gossip, and chitchat—you live, breathe, and work.”8 Naumov was famously good company, a bon vivant living on a naval pension and that of a deceased, rich wife (Maria’s sister), art- and music-loving, and generally free and easy in his ways, as is borne out by his openly living with his sister-in-law after his wife’s death. Musorgsky got on well with them both, and even dedicated to Maria Fyodorova a song “Misunderstood” (“Neponyatnaya”) that seems to defend her against the aspersions and even, perhaps, ostracism of Naumov’s respectable friends. Unfortunately, the song is nondescript and does the lady no very notable favors.

  Naumov himself was in many respects an agreeable distraction. And for the same reason his influence was feared, no doubt rightly, by those who set store by Musorgsky’s ability to concentrate on his composition. Three years later, when he was still living with Naumov and was causing his musical friends extreme anxiety, Lyudmila Shestakova confided in Vladimir Stasov: “It’s too bad about Musorgsky, he’s such a wonderful person! If there were only some way to pull him away from Naumov, I think he might be rescued definitely … ”9

  In 1875, few yet understood the depth or extent of this danger. Musorgsky was drinking and easily distracted from his music, true enough; but the music he was actually producing seemed to belie the ill effects of his lifestyle. At Naumov’s he rapidly finished off the first act of Khovanshchina, and by the end of the year he had also completed the first draft of act 2. But even before the move, he had composed a set of songs that, in retrospect, show his music to be moving into a new and powerful phase that might, had he lived longer, have led on to operatic work of even greater range and power than Boris Godunov.

  At this stage there were only three Songs and Dances of Death, as the cycle was eventually christened. But in scale and emotional weight they were the equivalent of twice that number. It’s worth comparing these six-minute pocket dramas with the music being written by Musorgsky’s colleagues. Rimsky-Korsakov had spent the year studying counterpoint and composing fugues and canons. He described his activities in a letter to Tchaikovsky:

  Having gone through all the species of counterpoint during the winter, as well as imitation and a bit of canon on a cantus firmus, I have gone on to fugue and canon. This summer I wrote 61 fugues (long and short, strict and free, in 2, 3, 4, and 5 voices, with and without chorales), 5 canonic variations on one chorale, 3 variations on another, and several embellished chorales.10

  This was not quite like the study of Bach famously made at certain stages of their careers by Mozart or Beethoven or Schubert, the effects of which are immediately and powerfully apparent in their own music Rimsky-Korsakov’s contrapuntal studies were, it seems, strictly directed toward teaching. He understandably disliked the idea of a professor of composition who did not know the mechanics of his art, just as he disliked the thought of a professor of instrumentation who did not know instruments. Accordingly he set out to correct both deficiencies in himself. That he did not regard this work as artistically significant is apparent from the pieces he allowed to be published; for instance, the Six Piano Fugues, op. 17, are, as he claims in his autob
iography, “successful,” but only in the sense that they are proper fugues expertly worked. Musically they are quite impersonal and without profile.11 And the same can almost be said, as we saw, of the F-major string quartet, which is so cluttered with imitative counterpoint that one might be listening to a demonstration rather than a piece of music.

  Cui, on the other hand, since finishing Angelo, had been writing songs. There are two sets of six, settings of Heine, Pushkin, Alexey Tolstoy, and others. But while some of the songs are attractive, they scarcely step outside the range of the conventional drawing-room romance (in a few cases in the first set, op. 9, they barely even aspire that high); and the rare instances of harmonic daring are apt, as before with Cui, to look like poor judgment, the product of an imprecise ear rather than an adventurous mind. Looking at these songs, Rimsky-Korsakov’s fugues, and the character—if not the quality—of much of Prince Igor, one might be forgiven for wondering what was so special about the kuchka, at a time when Wagner was finishing Götterdämmerung, Brahms his C-minor symphony, Bizet his Carmen. Verdi’s Aida appeared on the Maryinsky stage for the first time in November 1875 and earned mildly ironic praise from Musorgsky for “[outdoing] everything, everyone, even himself. He has done for Trovatore, Mendelssohn, Wagner—practically Amerigo Vespucci. The spectacle is wonderful, and fabulously impotent in the personification (with reminiscences!) of the tooth-grinding African blood.”12 For the psychologist of Boris, The Nursery, or, now, the quarrel at Golitsïn’s house, this was an empty kind of splendor. But if he was struggling with the ensembles in Khovanshchina (the trio in act 1, and the unwritten quintet in act 2), a genre at which Verdi excelled, he could show his dramatic mettle in a form of songwriting that went beyond anything in the recent Western concert repertoire and would hardly be out of place on the operatic stage.

  The Songs and Dances of Death in fact draw to some extent on an earlier Western model, cultivated by Schubert and Loewe, among others: the narrative ballad. Musical storytelling, with or without reflective interludes, was of course an ancient tradition, linked to the public recounting of heroic tales or topical news or propaganda. The ballad singer was essentially a channel for the information he conveyed. Graham Johnson has described Schubert’s approach to the ballad in terms that might well be applied also to Musorgsky: “It seems,” he writes, “that in composing ballads Schubert enjoyed playing the somewhat distanced role of camera operator (also responsible for lighting, costumes and crowd scenes) as opposed to leading man, as in his own lieder productions (where the poet is of course co-director).”13 In its original incarnation, moreover, ballad singing was often associated with dance, as the name suggests (the root is the same as for “ballet”). Schubert’s ballads tend to be very long, rambling affairs, recitative interspersed with lyrical song, and with frequent changes of mood and angle, like the different emotions and voices one puts on when telling a fairy story to a child. But there are compact examples, of which the most famous by far is “Erlkönig,” a dance of death if ever there was one. When August von Gymnich sang “Erlkönig” and other songs at a private concert in Vienna in 1820, a reviewer observed that Schubert “knows how to paint in sound, and these songs surpass in the truthfulness of their characterization anything else in the world of Lieder.”14 He, too, might have been talking about Musorgsky.

  Like “Erlkönig,” each of Musorgsky’s ballads (the description is mine, not his) tells a story that ends in a death, or, in one final case, celebrates multiple deaths: the sick child lulled into a sleep from which there is no awakening; the dying girl serenaded by Death in the person of “an unknown knight with miraculous powers”; the drunken peasant who falls asleep in a snowstorm; the battlefield patrolled by Death as a military commander whose troops are the dead soldiers. The poems, like those of Sunless, are by Kutuzov, but the idea was Stasov’s, or so he claims in his biography of the composer.15 The beauty of the concept, of course, was that it was open-ended. Kutuzov had listed the project as “Dances of Death: Scenes from Russian Life”; and you could imagine a whole series of different scenes ending in death: the monk in his cell, with distant bells; the returning political exile drowning in sight of his home shore; and any number of others. Kutuzov wrote out a list of twelve topics, of which Musorgsky composed and wrote down three, though he certainly composed at least two others that he never put on paper. The fourth surviving song, “The Commander” (“Polkovodets”), added in 1877, is not on Kutuzov’s list of topics.

  In his valuable study of the composer, David Brown calls the first song, “Lullaby” (“Kolïbel’naya”), “Musorgsky’s last truly realist song.” While true in a sense, this seems to me to miss a point. The obvious difference between “Lullaby” and the other three songs is that it is not a dance, but a ballad in the Schubert manner, in many sections and many tempi, alternating recitative with the songlike lullabying, not of the mother (who spends her time trying to push Death away), but of Death himself. The picture, certainly, is vividly truthful in the same way that the songs in The Nursery are truthful. But realism is by no means absent from the other songs. Instead, they locate the objective image in a musical genre that is highly specific to the narrative context: a serenade for a beautiful girl; a rough trepak for a drunken peasant tottering home in a blizzard; an imperious march for Death on the battlefield. In this way Musorgsky imports the Chernïshevskian concept of “reality” into a formal language close to that of the lied and remote from the simple lyricism of the typical Russian romance. We might almost be witnessing the birth of a Russian lieder genre which, like Schubert, fuses the simple songlike and descriptive styles of earlier writing into a new form richer in dramatic and expressive possibilities. “Almost,” because the Songs and Dances of Death, by a tragic irony, had no successors in Musorgsky’s or, it seems, anyone else’s work until the Fourteenth Symphony of Shostakovich.

  “Lullaby” specifically reverts to the anecdotal discourse (and perhaps setting) of The Nursery, except that the atmosphere is no longer light, but somber. The introduction depicts the dying child and his mother, a frozen candlelit tableau; but as the door cautiously opens and Death enters, the scene comes to life in an unequal dialogue between the terrified mother and Death, portrayed as something between a doctor and an undertaker, chillingly calm in speech and manner, black clad no doubt, with top hat and leather bag. With such a scene Musorgsky is in his element. As Death tiptoes to the child’s bedside, the music recalls another narrative episode involving the death of a child, Pimen’s account of the murder of the tsarevich in the first act of Boris Godunov. It then brilliantly—and to tell the truth, beautifully—parodies the conventions of the lullaby style, robbing it of its soothing effect by ending, every time, on a minor chord and with a perfunctory, dismissive quaver on the last syllable. The mother, by contrast, pleads with increasing agitation for her son’s life, as she might beg a doctor to do something—anything—to save him. Musorgsky handles this rapid montage of tempo and figuration with the easy virtuosity of the born storyteller. For the singer, though, especially the kind of bass who often finds himself singing this music, the task is less straightforward and can easily be botched by overcharacterization. The character is already in the music, and needs only nuanced help to make its effect. Musorgsky himself was famously gifted at this kind of performance, and no doubt in his case the ability to think it went with the ability to do it.16

  The remaining three songs abandon the dialogue method, and instead explore the narrative possibilities inherent in the genres being parodied. Thus, for example, the second song, “Serenade,” is cast as a languid siciliano—the same basic rhythm as Don Giovanni’s serenade in the second act of Mozart’s opera. First Musorgsky sets the scene, using conventional romance imagery: gentle semiquaver figures (in E minor) for the “magical languor of blue nighttime in the trembling dusk of spring,” except that the restless harmonies and searching melody warn us that the girl who might—even would—enjoy the promise of such a night has a lover whose kisses will b
e fatal. Death serenades her a semitone lower in a funereal E-flat minor, offering her a freedom from decay every bit as mendacious as Don Giovanni’s promise of marriage to Zerlina, and perhaps in its way no less seductive. The extraordinary power of this slow dance must lie, precisely, in its grasp of the psychological truth that destruction can have an irresistible beauty of its own, and that charm often teeters on the edge of evil because it disturbs the balance of the mind. As usual with Musorgsky, the scene materializes out of the music. The girl rises from her bed with shining eyes and calls out softly to her lover; she descends the staircase, goes out to him, and perishes in the petite mort of his embrace. Death’s melody has a grandeur and nobility that seem to belie its deadly intention, until we recognize that our usual concept of nobility is about as limited as the image of nature in the average moon-and-June romance.

  “Trepak,” the third song, makes a similar point in a less somber way, if one can speak about death in such terms. The peasant in this tale is not sick but drunk, so his death in a snowstorm is tragicomic, and almost as agreeable (the poet seems to argue) as the oblivion that came in bottled form. The old man is “hounded by grief, sorrow, and indigence,” but he dies smiling, or so Death assures us, to the rhythm of the dactylic dance that, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko, had created frenzy in the sea kingdom and set off a storm that sank the ships. Musorgsky’s trepak, like his siciliano, is essentially slower than the folk model, though it lurches somewhat from tempo to tempo, and is itself affected by the weather, as Death calls up a blizzard, vividly portrayed in the piano part, to “weave a snowy, downy shroud to wrap the old man in like a child.” But the real comedy of the song, in the richest sense, lies in the derivation of the trepak melody from the penitential requiem hymn, the Dies Irae. The opening figure of the dance is an inversion of the first three notes of the plainsong tune, while the next four are a modally altered version of the next four in the plainsong. Musorgsky’s version first emerges in the scene-setting introduction, to the second line of Kutuzov’s poem, about the blizzard that “weeps and moans” (cf. the penitent in the Dies Irae’s “Ingemisco,” “Guilty, now I pour my moaning, / All my shame with anguish owning; / Spare, O God, thy suppliant groaning!”). It then forms almost the entire basis of the actual dance.