Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  With this, their correspondence takes up again, almost as if it has never been interrupted. Tamara is mentioned from time to time. “If you don’t hear Tamara,” Balakirev writes, “it’s only because I wouldn’t want to present it to you in bits, as it is at present, still less to play some kind of paste-up of a few bars or figures, as I did for your brother.”11 Stasov hears from Rimsky-Korsakov that “Tamara is under way, and even whole pages have been newly composed!”12 At last, in March, he hears Balakirev play, presumably, substantial excerpts. But somehow the work still does not get finished. Balakirev is preoccupied editing Ruslan and Lyudmila, with the help of Rimsky-Korsakov. He transcribes Berlioz’s Harold in Italy for two pianos, and Stasov, in Paris for the 1878 World Exhibition, acts as his go-between with the publisher, Brandus & Cie. Meanwhile the indefatigable Stasov starts proposing subjects for new works, just like old times. He sends Balakirev the great visionary poem of chapter 6 of the book of Isaiah (“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne”), together with Pushkin’s free paraphrase (“The Prophet”—“Prorok”). “Who knows,” he muses, “maybe you will do something on this wonderful, incomparable subject, to which, in my opinion, nobody is so suited as you!”13 Later he proposes Raphael’s great Vatican fresco of the “Meeting of Pope Leo with Attila the Hun.”14 But Balakirev is concentrating on the Ruslan proofs, ignores the Isaiah idea, then elaborately rejects the Raphael as “not even a serious picture, but rather a Roman Catholic scherzo—an edifying vignette, fit for an illustrated volume of improving works on the Ravenna Fathers, which, elegantly bound and illustrated, might make a suitable impression as a reference book on a nice little table in [Nikolay] Shcherbachev’s mummy’s boudoir.”15 And still Tamara remains unfinished.

  If Tchaikovsky was wrong about Balakirev, he was right enough about Cui, who had added more songs to his op. 9 and op. 10 sets, without apparently any greater desire to go beyond their bland charm. His Thirteen Musical Pictures (Trinadtsat’ muzïkal’nïkh’ kartinok’) precisely fit Tchaikovsky’s picture of the composer fussing over pretty little ideas, adorning and embellishing them, but never breaking out of the pattern imposed by the childlike imagery of what are apparently Cui’s own poems: the little hare hopping around in the fir tree, the swallow arriving as herald of spring, the cockerel with his golden comb. Even where the poems have a genuinely folkish quality, the music does not, but remains firmly in the parlor of tonic-dominant harmony and two-or four-bar phrases. Here and there the next set of romances, op. 11, attempt something more challenging. Most striking is Alexey Tolstoy’s “To the Bell, Peacefully Dozing” (“V kolokol’, mirno dremavshiy”), a poem that briefly recalls the veche scene in The Maid of Pskov, with its clamor of bells summoning the people to war. Within his limits, Cui achieves a certain vividness of sonority in response to the poet’s crashing bombs and brazen bell peals, even if the potential horror of the scene escapes him. Settings of Adam Mickiewicz and Heine have the instant charm that Tchaikovsky identifies as characteristic of Cui; but as he also indicates, they lack personality, and might for the most part be by Schumann on a slightly off day.

  As for Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky’s assessment differs from Laroche’s only in its avoidance of colorful imagery. And it seems unlikely that he would have moderated it in any way if he had been aware of the parlous condition of Musorgsky’s personal life and health in the early months of 1878. Since working on act 2 of Sorochintsï Fair (at Naumov’s dacha at Tsarskoye Selo) the previous August Musorgsky had composed nothing. In concert after concert he appeared as accompanist, invariably unpaid, rarely in music of his own: concerts in aid of working girls, concerts in aid of needy students, or wounded soldiers, or indigent artists. He accompanied Darya Leonova (the original Hostess in the Boris excerpts of 1873) on two or three occasions in April, and spent several weeks of the summer at her dacha in Peterhof, without—probably—producing anything more demanding than a vocal score of the fortune-telling scene from his old Landless Peasant draft for act 2 of Khovanshchina.

  Petrov’s death in March undoubtedly hit him hard—more, one might say, than was entirely natural. All his life he had depended to an abnormal degree on father and mother figures, and this dependency seems if anything to have grown more marked as his psychological condition worsened. The new closeness to Leonova, whether or not sexual in character, suggests an exceptional need of the moral support of an older woman (he was thirty-nine, she forty-nine and apparently happily married). And this need could sometimes emerge in the form of behavior that, in a disagreeably adult way, could only be described as infantile. Since the previous autumn, his drinking and its effects had grown worse. He would talk about “strange ailments” or—the old euphemism—“nervous fever.” The condition would come in phases. After Petrov’s funeral he calmed down for a while, and Lyudmila reported to Stasov that he had been to see her “completely straightened out and almost like a decent person.”16 At the end of July he and Balakirev met at Lyudmila’s for the first time since Balakirev’s resurrection, and Balakirev was “pleasantly surprised by him as a person. No self-promotion or any kind of self-worship, on the contrary he was very modest, listened seriously to what was said to him, and didn’t protest at all against the necessity of knowing harmony and even had nothing against working at it with Korsinka.”17 But within days the amenable façade had cracked. Several days running he appeared at Lyudmila’s “looking dreadful and stayed quite a long while; seeing that things were getting worse, I felt I had to do something, and in order to save him and to protect myself, I wrote him a letter, asking him not to call on me when suffering from his nervous irritation (as he calls it).”18 This ultimatum, from a woman he adored, had a sobering effect, and the next day he appeared at her apartment “in complete order.” But Stasov, to whom she related all this, was not convinced.

  Before our eyes [he told Balakirev] one of the best, most talented of our comrades and brothers—Musorgsky—is quietly sinking into the water, down, down to the very bottom, like a ship in which damned worms are, day in day out, chewing a hole. Maybe all is not yet lost and he can be saved. He’s surrounded by appalling drunkards and scoundrels of the worst, grossest variety: all his drinking companions at the Maly Yaroslavets—they’re the ones who’ve dragged him down and ruined him, with his weak and impressionable nature. But you exert a strong attraction on all the best people, who include Musoryanin … It seems to me that if you want to, Mily, you can do, if not everything, then a lot. What’s needed is to detach and remove him from his low drinking crowd and their whole vacuity. Ask him round often, see him often, smother him with work and jobs, with your kindness and gentleness and fatherly protection and helpfulness, don’t leave him alone—it will be a self-sacrifice on your part, but you will be doing, perhaps, one of the greatest and noblest deeds of your entire life: you will be saving a human soul.19

  Balakirev did his best. Musorgsky had brought his “Witches,” as Balakirev still called St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, for his old mentor to look over, and Balakirev had sent him away with the usual instructions about how to remedy its defects. Whether or not he saw the revised Mlada/Sorochintsï Fair version and its beautiful new ending with chiming bells and dawn breaking is not altogether clear, though one suspects not, since he makes no mention of this striking and important change. Later there were meetings to discuss progress. But one evening in October Musorgsky failed to turn up, and Balakirev reacted with irritation. “So much for your talk about my beneficial influence,” he grumbled to Stasov. “On the whole I’ve no hope of making a lively, energetic human being and composer out of Musorgsky. He’s too physically damaged to be anything but the corpse he now is.”20

  Balakirev had also been trying to talk Borodin into giving more attention to composition, but had come to the conclusion that Lyudmila was to blame for distracting his attention by inviting too many irrelevant people to her evenings, instead of treating them as a species of night school in which the renascent Balakir
ev could offer instruction to the disorientated members of his former circle. But Borodin needed no help in the gentle art of self-distraction. Early in 1877 he had expressed to Karmalina the faint hope of finishing Prince Igor by the 1877–8 season. But he had then proceeded to spend a good part of the summer—theoretically his best time for composition—on a trip to Germany, escorting two students who were going to complete their studies in Jena, and paying a series of visits to Liszt in Weimar—visits that produced a sheaf of wonderful letters and a set of reminiscences, gave a great boost to Borodin’s confidence, but seem to have done little to concentrate his creative energies. Later, holidaying with Yekaterina in the village of Davidovo in Vladimir province, east of Moscow, he tinkered with the string quartet he had sketched two or three years before, but otherwise spent most of his time walking in the pine forests and breathing in the wonderfully fresh, resinous air. Of Prince Igor, as far as we know, not a note was composed.

  The following winter, as we have already seen, he composed Vladimir’s act 2 cavatina and the duet with Konchakovna, but nothing much else apart from four short pieces for a collaborative piano work called Paraphrases. Once again he and Yekaterina holidayed at Davidovo, and this time the distraction was altogether more spectacular. One night the whole village caught fire, and they had to flee for their lives and spend the rest of the night in a field, where the nervy Yekaterina promptly had a fit of agoraphobia. Poor Borodin! Much as he adored his wife, he must sometimes have wished her on some remote planet where she could be an object of loving contemplation rather than an all-too-present destruction of the tranquility of his days and nights. According to Dianin, Yekaterina would never thereafter go to bed before dawn, and would insist, as before, on everyone else staying up until her bedtime. Nevertheless, soon after the fire Borodin went to Moscow, bought a piano, had it installed in the undamaged Davidovo house to which they had soon moved, and on it composed a substantial part of the scene in act 1 of Prince Igor in which a group of young girls plead unsuccessfully with Yaroslavna’s brother, Vladimir Galitsky, to release one of their number who has been abducted by his retainers, and the retainers themselves—including the comic villains Skula and Yeroshka—sing a drunken song in praise of Galitsky. The composer seems to have had no difficulty thinking himself into this dazzling and chaotic tableau, and the music has an effortless brilliance of movement and portraiture that makes a complete mockery of Tchaikovsky’s remarks about Borodin’s supposed technical ineptitude. Liszt had been more perspicacious. “Please don’t listen,” he had urged after playing through Borodin’s B-minor symphony, “to those who hold you back from your direction; believe me, you are on a true path, and you have so much artistic flair that you have nothing to fear in being original; remember that exactly the same advice was given to Beethoven and Mozart and others in their time, and they would never have become great masters if they had thought of following such advice.”21

  As for the Paraphrases, this was one collaborative work that actually got written and published. It had started some years previously as a polka that Borodin had composed for a little girl (his future adopted daughter, Ganya) who had asked to play a piano duet with him. Since it turned out that all she could play was the two-finger piece known in Russia as “Tati-tati” (a version of “Chopsticks”), Borodin had simply composed a polka that fitted that piece played over and over as an ostinato, or a kind of “ground treble,” with ingenious harmonic digressions in the grown-up part. Later Rimsky-Korsakov suggested a set of pieces written in the same way. So Borodin, after an initial show of reluctance, added a “Funeral March” and a “Requiem” (with mock organ introduction and phantom voice parts), and there were other pieces by Cui, the young Anatoly Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov himself, whose contribution, unsurprisingly, included a “Fugue grotesque” and a “Fughetta on B-A-C-H.” The young pianist was simply required to repeat “Tati-tati” for the entire duration, pretty much as children have rattled away at “Chopsticks” ever since Euphemia Allen first had the infuriating idea at about the time that Paraphrases was conceived. The collection was published in 1879, and a copy was sent to Liszt, who liked it so much that he wrote a fragment of his own which was duly included in facsimile—along with a piece by Shcherbachev and a new mazurka by Borodin—in a second edition of 1893.22

  Meanwhile, Rimsky-Korsakov’s work with Balakirev on the editing of Glinka prompted him to take another look at The Maid of Pskov, and soon afterward it inspired him to set about composing a new opera. He seems to have recognized early on that this was a decisive moment in his career. “Work on Glinka’s scores,” he wrote fifteen years later, “was an unexpected schooling for me.” He had allowed himself to become bogged down in schoolroom studies of a conventional kind, and suddenly here he was confronted by the sheer freshness of a genius who had never known a lecture theatre, who had learned all he needed to know by direct encounters with music and musicians, and who had merely taken a few months of crash instruction by a German theorist in order to knock all these different influences into some kind of cohesive style. “I greedily lapped up all his methods,” the ever-studious Rimsky-Korsakov reports. “I studied his handling of the natural brass instruments, which give his orchestration such unspeakable transparency and lightness; I studied his elegant and natural part-writing. And this for me was a salutary discipline, leading me out as it did onto the path of contemporary music, after my vicissitudes with counterpoint and strict style.”23

  For a start, he looked on The Maid of Pskov, and found it wanting. It was altogether too unbalanced, too rich in harmonic extravagances, too poor in counterpoint, too roughly structured, too obviously the product of an untutored method. With characteristic thoroughness he embarked on a root-and-branch revision. What was there he rewrote bar by bar, enriching the texture, regularizing the harmony, expanding some scenes, contracting others, adding counterpoints, and generally making a respectable woman of the poor maid. Above all he composed an entirely new prologue, taken from Mey’s original play (and including the lullaby he had composed eleven years before), about Olga’s mother, Vera Sheloga, her confession to her sister, Nadezhda, of how she had fallen in love with a boyar who rescued her when she was lost in the forest and had given birth to his child, and how this boyar turned out to be Tsar Ivan himself. At the end of the prologue, Vera’s husband returns from the wars, and Nadezhda, to save her sister, claims the child, Olga, as her own. Apart from this thirty-minute scene, Rimsky-Korsakov added a number of new episodes, including a confrontation between the tsar and a yurodivy called Nikola the Simpleton, all too obviously modelled on the St. Basil’s scene in Boris Godunov, and a (partly fugal) chorus of wandering pilgrims based on a folk tune called “Poem About Alexey, Man of God,” which Rimsky included, he tells us, on Balakirev’s insistence “in view of the beautiful tune and because of his penchant for saints and the religious element in general.”24

  This 1877 Maid of Pskov turned out in every respect better written and more substantial than the original. But alas, no one liked it. The circle gave it routine endorsement but without warmth; even the composer’s wife was tepid, and to tell the truth the composer himself found it hard to prefer it to the original. “I also felt that in its new form my opera was long, dry, and rather heavy, in spite of its improved design and noteworthy technique.”25 He offered it to the Imperial Theatres for production, but Nápravník was as unenthusiastic as everyone else, and nothing happened. The second version of the opera was neither performed nor published, and in the end Rimsky-Korsakov was reduced to plundering it for other works. He extracted the “Alexey” chorus and published it separately; he took the short overture to the prologue and four of the entr’actes and turned them into a suite of incidental music for Mey’s drama, likewise neither performed nor published as such. And many years later he made yet another, final version of the opera—without the prologue, which he worked up and published as a separate one-acter called The Boyarina Vera Sheloga.26 Suddenly, having belonged to a group of compo
sers who seldom finished a single work, he had become a sort of magician who could turn one work into five without obvious effort. This facility might partly account for his friends’ cool reception of what had once been a model kuchkist artifact. It certainly explains Tchaikovsky’s muted admiration, and his uncertainty as to whether Rimsky-Korsakov would “turn out a great master” or be “completely swallowed up in contrapuntal complexities.”