Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  When I arrived at the concert, I saw to my chagrin a very small number of concertgoers, although at that time the highest society from the capital and other towns, so to speak, converged on Yalta … In the first interval I rushed to the green room. M.P. was sitting in an armchair, disheartened, like a wounded bird. The lack of audience and the failure of the concert had obviously had a serious effect on him.10

  In this particular case, though, steps could be taken. The Rossiya “had a magnificent, large hall with a decent grand piano, and, moreover, the hotel was full of people whom it would be possible to interest in the forthcoming concert. This time the concert was a great success.”

  But as in Nikolayev, the best music-making was in private. “We managed,” Madame Fortunato explains, “to listen to many of Musorgsky’s wonderful songs performed by the composer himself and Leonova, but above all several scenes from Boris and Khovanshchina. Is it necessary to say how great and powerful the experience was for those listeners, including the young and the old who had almost never or not at all listened to music, and were shaken to the depths of their being?”11 These were the tour’s best moments; but Yalta (perhaps among other places) also witnessed some of the worst. We can imagine the details all too well from a letter Stasov wrote to his daughter a day or two before the travellers’ return to St. Petersburg.

  I was vexed by only one thing that I learned from your letter, namely that he continued with the same outrageous behavior as here. It was impossible for us to discover this from anyone previously—and it’s specifically what interested us: we all hoped that perhaps the change of scene and company and the unexpected novelty of travel would bring about some kind of revolution in him, would set him to rights. Vain hope—everything has remained as before.12

  Amid the general gloom of this strange episode in Musorgsky’s life, one small light shines. At some point on the tour he made a setting of Mephistopheles’ song in Auerbach’s cellar from Goethe’s Faust: the so-called “Song of the Flea.” Exactly when and for what reason he composed this song is hard to establish; it was certainly written for Leonova and is dedicated to her, but she seems not to have performed it until they were back in St. Petersburg.

  At first sight, the piece sits oddly among Musorgsky’s realist songs, and it certainly does not belong with his romances. But the mistake is to see the text in isolation.13 Mephistopheles’s absurd tale of the king who loves his flea so much that he has him fitted with an expensive outfit, appoints him minister of state, and forbids his courtiers to scratch when bitten, is a satire, not on royalty, but on the coarseness and futility of tavern life, as symbolized by Brander’s only slightly less stupid song about the poisoned rat who believes his affliction to be unrequited love. It is this exaggerated absurdity that is the real subject matter of Musorgsky’s song. Of course, Russian and Russianist basses from Chaliapin on have tended to test the self-parody to destruction, with their demonic laughter and their heavy insinuations on the repeated word blokha (“flea”: the creature is for some reason feminine in Russian). But this is not wholly alien to Musorgsky’s image of a Mephistopheles who is showing Faust that no matter how vulgar or fatuous the entertainment, it will go down well with the mindless and the drink-sodden. One hopes that the composer’s brilliant re-creation of this vignette was not inspired by his own condition. The song’s immaculate workmanship seems to suggest that it was not.

  While Musorgsky was trekking round the Ukraine, Borodin had returned for the summer to Davidovo, despite unhappy memories of the previous year’s fire, and despite the fact that the house he would be staying in had other occupants, no beds, a broken stove, and chairs that gave way when you sat on them.14 His piano, though, had been moved in, along with various papers, which (characteristically, one fears) included sketches for Prince Igor that he had forgotten about. The first music he worked on, though, was the string quartet he had started five whole years before and that still lacked its scherzo. In essence, the work dated from the winter of 1874–5, at a time when Rimsky-Korsakov had also been writing a string quartet as an escape from his fugal studies, but had ended up filling the quartet with fugues after all. Borodin’s A-major quartet is also quite generously supplied with fugue, and may well originally have been the outcome of conversations with Rimsky about the desirability of proving oneself in the kind of chamber music not much favored by the Balakirev circle. But there is no doubt which of these two works is the more successful and characteristic. Rimsky-Korsakov’s work is patently an experiment in applied technique; Borodin’s is a minor masterpiece.

  Probably the real model for the fugal elements—in every one of the four movements except the scherzo—was in any case not Rimsky-Korsakov but late Beethoven. On the title page of the original edition, published in Hamburg in 1884, Borodin added a note: “angeregt durch ein Thema von Beethoven” (“prompted by a theme by Beethoven”), the theme in question being the second subject of the substitute finale of the B-flat quartet, op. 130, which is practically quoted as the allegro first subject of Borodin’s first movement. Roger Fiske once suggested that the reference was accidental and the acknowledgment a face-saving recourse after the fact.15 But if so, the discovery was made early on, since Borodin pointedly repeats the theme in Beethoven’s key (A-flat) in his development section, which would be unlikely in an A-major movement without the conscious allusion. But Borodin had used this kind of starting point before, in his early Cello Sonata, based on a Bach theme overheard from the next-door flat in Heidelberg. He seems not to have felt apologetic about such borrowings; in fact one suspects he was rather proud of them.

  In any case, his quartet writing is fundamentally unlike Beethoven’s. Where Beethoven had used the equality of the four instruments as pretext for the intense working of themes and motives, Borodin’s approach remains essentially lyrical, with fugal episodes as conscious intrusions of formal counterpoint. When he wants to complicate the texture, he simply enriches the accompaniment, sometimes spectacularly so, as in the rolling arpeggio embroideries of the second subject in the development section and the first subject in the recapitulation. A cellist himself, he may seem to be chancing his arm in such passages, which can sound laborious in performance, though technically unproblematic on paper. But there are few things more exquisite, even in Beethoven, than the trio section of the scherzo, a wonderful tapestry of high violin and cello harmonics supported by semiquaver figures in the alto register, con sordino. There might be a faint memory of the musette trio in the scherzo of Beethoven’s A-minor quartet, op. 132. But really Borodin’s piece is a completely original find, made perhaps with cello in hand. Indeed the whole scherzo, largely composed at Davidovo in 1879, is one of his most brilliant and stylish inventions, and one that makes nonsense of his supposed inability to compose without help. Borodin’s problem was not technique but time and mental space. Given those rare commodities, he could write with fluency and flair.

  The result, admittedly, belongs to a straightforward classical quartet tradition. Hardly anything in the work would identify it as Russian, except possibly the andante theme in F-sharp minor (Aeolian mode), which Dianin traced to the same “Sparrow Hills” folk song that had formed the basis of the “Chorus of Glorification” he had composed almost four years earlier, a few months after the initial drafts of the quartet.16 This is Russian, though, in the same way as the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s first quartet of 1871, which Borodin must certainly have known: a modal folk tune harmonized like any ordinary tonal melody, then twisted into a fugue subject with a chromatic headpiece. Apart from this, Borodin’s A-major quartet is if anything less folksy than Tchaikovsky’s D-major. Its Russianness has to be teased out of certain minor devices of harmony and melody that the kuchka tended to copy from one another or from their historic mentor, Glinka.

  It is worth comparing this andante with the beautiful chorus of peasants that Borodin inserted, during these same months at Davidovo, between Yaroslavna’s lament and her reunion duet with Prince Igor in the final ac
t of the opera. Here again the key is F-sharp minor and the mode Aeolian (the mode of the piano white notes starting on A); but now the music is genuinely modal, with hardly a single note outside the scale. Moreover, the chorus is partly composed in podgoloski style, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Trinity song in May Night, and with peremennost’ (the tendency to switch to a lower keynote, in this case from the F- sharp to the unison E on “gore naveval”—“that blew sorrow [down on us]”). It’s as if, with a string quartet, Borodin had been conscious above all of writing in a Western tradition, whereas with Russian operatic peasants he was positioning himself no less consciously within a nationalist tradition defined, romantically, by thinkers like Stasov and, ethnographically, by recent collectors of folk song, from Balakirev to Prokunin and even Melgunov, whose collection came out precisely in 1879.

  During the summer, though, he composed a swath of music for the opera’s first act that shows him adopting folk idioms on a much broader platform, as a way of defining all kinds of people, as groups, and even—in particular cases—as individuals. In 1878 at Davidovo, as we saw, he had composed the scene in which the girls plead in vain with Galitsky to release their abducted friend, after which Galitsky’s retinue (including Skula and Yeroshka) sing his praises and call for him to take over as ruler. Now he completes this scene with Galitsky’s own apostrophe to fun, drink, and sex as a recipe for good governance (just before the girls come to plead, so that we know their chance of success is not high), then continues with the remainder of the act, in which Yaroslavna (after her arioso) hears the girls’ complaint against Galitsky, confronts him with it, then receives the boyars who report the defeat of the Russian army and the capture of Igor and his son. This whole act forms a complete dramatic entity full of action and color and rich in portraiture of a psychologically rounded type. If only Borodin had been able to continue his work on this level, what an opera Prince Igor would be! But the fact is that at this stage he still had no finished scenario but was still working from hand to mouth dramaturgically. And so it would continue.

  Not the least remarkable feature of this act is the powerful continuity that is able to embrace so many characters and episodes, and such a wide range of musical materials. The pacing, for an act compiled at such intervals, is amazingly assured. The tone is set by the opening “Slava” chorus (composed 1875), then swiftly taken up by Galitsky himself in his recitative and song (1879). The mood is rough and unruly. The men, patently, are buoyed up by alcohol, and what they sing is essentially street music: coarse, rowdy, and suggestive. As a crowd they are what police sometimes nowadays call “good-natured”: that is, to be avoided. And Galitsky is as bad as the rest, expressing the most unsavory sentiments in a loutish, foursquare drinking song distantly reminiscent of Varlaam’s Kazan song in Boris Godunov, but without even Varlaam’s pretense at heroism. When the girls appear, they plead with Galitsky in the style of a folk lament, with chromatic inflections, still at a tempo that implies a certain urgency (1878); but his response is lazy, mock-reassuring: “What are you women howling about? Your sister will be well looked after …” This comes twice, in the manner of a verse and refrain, at the end of which Galitsky shoos the girls away. Then enter the so-called gudok-players, Skula and Yeroshka, who act as rabble rousers for Galitsky’s retinue in what Borodin, with nicely placed irony, christened “Knyazhaya pesnya” (“Princely Song,” or “Song About the Prince”: 1878), again essentially a wild drinking chorus, with solo repartee for the tenor Yeroshka and the bass Skula in the manner of a rhyming party game: “bring us bitter—brew it [navari]; bring us sweet—fill it [nasïti]; bring us vodka—still it [nakuri],” and so on. Finally, in an orgy of drunken celebration, the men name Galitsky as their chosen leader, before reeling away into oblivion in a well-modulated musical fade-out.

  The scene now changes to Yaroslavna’s quarters, and the frenzied mood gives way to anxious calm and a general atmosphere of genteel femininity (1869). The rough folkishness that dominated the previous scene is replaced by a flexible, free-flowing arioso, eloquent but restrained, as befits a princess of the blood. But when the girls come in (1879), they revert to the folk character of their scene with Galitsky, albeit in a gentler, more respectful tone (until, that is, they turn to describing the behavior we ourselves have just witnessed, which they do in a breathless five-four chatter not unlike that of Musorgsky’s “Dearest Savishna”; this passage was probably not composed until 1880). The scene that follows between Yaroslavna and Galitsky (1879) is a superb piece of confrontational music drama, the two utterly different personalities maintained against one another, while the progress of their dispute is carefully charted by the musical pacing. Yaroslavna is at first reproachful but dignified (arioso, allegro moderato); but Galitsky’s tone is cheeky from the start, adapting the motive of his first entrance (“It would be a sin to hide that I dislike boredom”) to what now becomes an insolent, indolent brush-off: “It’s none of your business, and curtsey when you speak to me.” He even borrows a musical phrase from Yeroshka’s party game: “I keep what I seize, I seize what I want, and what I have seized I neither know nor wish to know.” Yaroslavna flies at him—agitato but contained—with the threat of Igor’s return, referring to the main theme of her arioso on this precise topic, but Galitsky only repeats his mocking song—“What is your Igor to me?”—and when she rebukes him for threatening her with retribution when he takes over as ruler, he repeats it once more, a semitone down, with the ultimate masculine sneer that “I was only joking; I wanted to see you get angry.” Borodin thus turns their argument into a kind of refrain form in which it really is hard to see how Yaroslavna, with all her grandeur of personality, can get the better of this ruthless and dissolute brother. In the end, she dismisses him from her presence, but shaking with emotion and weary at heart. And the music trembles and sinks down with her.

  The complicated finale (1879) starts with the arrival of the boyars as messengers of Igor’s defeat and capture, to music of great solemnity, matched by Yaroslavna’s restored arioso of dignity. Like their Muscovite confreres in Boris Godunov, the Putivl boyars are a sturdy but bovine crew, qualities that Borodin captures in unison choral writing of an impressive, lumbering stolidity, against which Yaroslavna’s growing agitation and random interventions stand out for their warmth and immediacy of feeling. Such contrasts, so often treated as stereotypes in romantic opera, Borodin seems to have been able to imagine in vividly human terms, and everything in this scene is truthful and touching.

  In the second part the boyars, having informed Yaroslavna that the army has been destroyed and her husband and son taken prisoner by a tribe of godless barbarians, cheerfully reassure her that the city walls are sound and have always withstood attack. She is doing her best to look happy at this news when the tocsin booms out warning that the city is indeed under attack, the fortress in flames and the people fleeing. This was the sequence of events left by Rimsky-Korsakov when he edited the act from the confusion of Borodin’s papers. But there survives also a brief but highly dramatic scene before the tocsin (1879), in which Galitsky breaks in with his retinue, shouting that the Polovtsï are at the gates, and threatening to seize power there and then himself. Why Rimsky-Korsakov (or Borodin) excluded this passage is unclear. The music is crude, certainly, like the participants: a violent five-four solo and chorus are answered by the boyars rebuking the intruders in their bluff, monometric style, and insisting on their loyalty to the absent Prince Igor. But dramatically the episode is important, because it confirms Galitsky not just as a repellent wastrel but as a serious political threat.

  Unfortunately Borodin was never able to pursue the implications of this marvellous act, much of which is left hanging by what survives of the later Putivl scenes. Galitsky, so menacing at this point, plays no further part in the drama; Skula and Yeroshka reappear at the very end in time to assert their undying loyalty to the throne. We are left with the frustrating sense of having witnessed a great musical dramatist at work, but without the finishe
d product of his labors. The torso of Prince Igor may lack the consistent power and originality of Musorgsky’s best work, but in quality of idea and in its sense of character and the stage picture, it is scarcely inferior. Its realism is the natural instinct of the intelligent, humane dramatist, not the hard-won truthfulness of the ex-theorist. Its barbarism is superbly unconstrained, as barbarism must be but, in nineteenth-century opera, seldom is. Had Borodin ever completed the work, it would surely have ranked with Boris Godunov among the great music dramas of the age. As it is, like Khovanshchina, it remains a potential, sometimes vivid, sometimes shrouded in uncertainty, never less than exciting: a Venus de Milo among operas, as intriguing for what is not there as beautiful for what is.

  · · ·

  One day in December 1879, Musorgsky reported to Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov that for the past few months he had been suffering from “some kind of strange illness, which broke out with such force in November that my doctor, who knows me well, gave me only two hours to live.”17 No doubt it was the old trouble, and the doctor, Lev Bertensson, knew Musorgsky well enough to know that only the direst threats could be expected to influence his behavior. Whether even they did so in this case seems open to question. Musorgsky had already, more than a year before, effectively lost his job in the Forestry Department, and had only been rescued from complete indigence by Balakirev’s friend Tyorty Filippov, who held a senior civil-service post in the Government Control Office and arranged for Musorgsky to be transferred there as a junior inspector. The position carried few if any duties; according to another close friend, Nikolay Lavrov, the composer’s sole obligation was to collect his monthly salary. He “did nothing at work and would arrive drunk after a sleepless night,” but Filippov “never reprimanded him for such behavior, and permitted Musorgsky such indulgence by saying: ‘I am a servant to the artists.’ ”18 Eventually, however, even the warmhearted, music-loving controller could no longer keep up the pretense, and at the end of 1879 Musorgsky was finally and irrevocably dismissed from the government service.