Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Three days into the new year Stasov wrote to Balakirev in alarm. Musorgsky, he announced, “is on the way out—from the 1st January he’s been left without a job and without any means!!! There’ll be even harder drinking! Can’t you do something, and very soon if possible. There’s no time to lose.”19 Stasov seemed to believe that Balakirev still had some kind of paternal influence over the prodigal son. But it was Filippov, once again, who came up with the best idea. They would all club together to pay Musorgsky a monthly retainer of one hundred rubles, by way of a commission for him to complete Khovanshchina. Balakirev, who was himself practically penniless, would not contribute. But Stasov, Filippov himself, and two or three other friends would between them make up the amount; and with luck Khovanshchina would get finished quickly. What Stasov did not yet know was that another group of Musorgsky’s friends, headed by his old Preobrazhensky colleague Fyodor Vanlyarsky, had had or would soon have a similar inspiration with a different goal. In mid-February Stasov wrote again to Balakirev: “Mily, it seems that another company is giving Musorgsky assistance at eighty rubles a month, but on the sole condition that he complete his opera Sorochintsï Fair within a year or so. This is why he is so determinedly resisting writing Khovanshchina at the present time.” The coincidence is striking, and knowing the devious tendencies of the serious addict, one is tempted to suspect manipulation on Musorgsky’s own part. In January he had written, in his orotund way, to thank Stasov for his “good news.” “In spite of small misfortunes, I have not and will not give way to faintheartedness. My motto, which you know: ‘Dare! Forward to new shores!’ has remained unchanged. If fate allows me to broaden the well-trodden path toward the vital goals of art, I shall be delighted and exult: the demands of art on its practitioners today are so huge that they are capable of swallowing up the whole man.”20 After all, if Khovanshchina, why not Sorochintsï Fair? There were those who had always had a predilection for his Ukrainian opera, not least Anna Petrova, for whose husband it had been intended from the start. Musorgsky could happily trust to his ability to finish both operas, relieved as he was of his daily visits to the ministry. Why not broaden the well-trodden path in this essentially practical fashion?

  The small misfortunes could not be wholly discounted. Some were behavioral, others circumstantial. Soon after returning home from the Leonova tour he had had at short notice to orchestrate Marfa’s song and the first part of the streltsy chorus from act 3 of Khovanshchina for an FMS concert that Rimsky-Korsakov was conducting at the end of November. (Rimsky also conducted the Persian dance from act 4, but had to orchestrate it himself, time being short: typically he “corrected” the harmony and part writing, without, he claims, Musorgsky’s noticing.)21 The next “misfortune” was a commission to provide a piece for a gala spectacular in the Bolshoi Theatre in St. Petersburg celebrating the silver jubilee of Tsar Alexander II. The performance, on 19 February, was to take the form of a series of tableaux vivants representing various triumphs of the reign. Borodin, for instance, would compose a brief symphonic poem, In Central Asia (V sredney Azii), portraying Russian expansion to the East; Rimsky-Korsakov would provide a choral-orchestral setting of the well-known “Slava” tune (as in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov); Tchaikovsky would write a piece about Montenegro; and so forth. Musorgsky’s topic was the capture of the city of Kars, in Kurdish eastern Turkey, a rare success in the Crimean War which had conveniently happened soon after Alexander’s accession in 1855.

  Taruskin sees this whole event (which never took place, on account of the disappearance of the would-be promoters) as one more sign of the kuchka “being unmistakably drawn into the establishment.” But this is to make a great deal out of a minor paying commission for a composer who had just lost or was about to lose his salaried job. It isn’t as if Musorgsky took a great deal of trouble over his Capture of Kars. On the contrary, he simply took the unused “Procession of the Princes and Priests” from his music for Mlada, scrapped the middle (priests’) section, and composed a new so-called trio alla turca, a distinctly tired piece of snake charmery with the regulation crop of augmented seconds and diminished fourths and little or no connection with the main march, based on a Russian folk song from Balakirev’s collection. With this done, he could return to his juggling act with the two operas and their respective sponsors.

  At first he seems to have concentrated on Sorochintsï Fair, exactly as Stasov had feared. The main reason for this was that his Vanlyarsky agreement required him to publish individual movements as he went along, which made it hard for him to pretend he was composing when he was not. It also meant, of course, that he had to take time making fair copies for the printer, copies which from time to time the publisher, Nikolay Bernard, managed to lose, so that Musorgsky had to make them again. Under this compulsion, he worked ostensibly on the adaptation of the Bald Mountain music to fit the improbable scenario of the hero Gritzko’s dream of the Black God (Chernobog) and the witches’ sabbath. But when Rimsky-Korsakov visited him early in May, he saw that it was the same old Mlada version of the original symphonic poem, not even recopied. He also found Musorgsky still in bed at midday and vomiting at frequent intervals, as if it were a perfectly normal function. He tried to persuade him to spend the summer in the country with him and his family, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Khovanshchina was being deferred until 1881.

  In fact Musorgsky was not wholly fabricating when he told Stasov in early August that “all that’s left to be written of Khovanshchina is a little bit of the self-immolation scene.” Spending the summer at Leonova’s dacha in Oranienbaum, he had just, at last, completed the violent first scene of act 4 in Khovansky’s house, with the Persian dance and the painfully beautiful setting of the “Ladu, ladu” folk song (to a Belorussian melody he had got from the Maryinsky’s lighting engineer), leading up to Khovansky’s murder. He had finished the third act with the scene of the streltsy and their wives, Kuzka’s song with balalaika, and Khovansky’s last-minute instruction to the streltsy not to take on Tsar Peter’s guards. And he had written the fifth act up to, but not including, the final chorus of Old Believers, for which he wrote out the theme but composed nothing more. The quintet at the end of act 2, with which he had wanted Rimsky-Korsakov’s help, remained unwritten. And the whole work, apart from the scenes he had scored for the November 1879 concert, still had to be orchestrated. “As for Khovanshchina,” he wrote to Stasov at the end of August 1880, “it is on the eve of completion: but the instrumentation—O ye gods!—time.”22 It was the last time that he mentioned the work, and it seems likely that not another note of it was composed.

  CHAPTER 28

  Death by Sunlight

  Borodin’s contribution to the ill-fated gala was a six-minute tone poem depicting the passage through the central Asian desert of an Oriental caravan of horses and camels with an escort of Russian soldiers. The image was apparently meant to be patriotic and Russo-centric. Borodin’s program note for the eventual first performance (in a concert put on by Leonova in April 1880) talks about the caravan being “under the protection of the formidable military power of the conquerors,” and only for an RMS performance in Moscow in August 1882 was this discreetly changed to “under the protection of the military power of Russia,” with “the peaceful songs of the Russians and the natives [merging] into one common harmony.”1 The idea of conquest, no doubt, had been germane to the gala in praise of Alexander II. By August 1882, alas, the conquering tsar had gone the way of many would-be liberalizing rulers down the ages and been blown to pieces by a revolutionary’s bomb on his way to the Mikhailovsky Manège on 1 March 1881.

  Borodin’s visual concept is an extension of Musorgsky’s idea for his Polish oxcart in Pictures from an Exhibition, which had set off in the foreground but then gradually receded into the distance.2 Borodin’s caravan starts far away, draws (rather suddenly) near, then more gradually recedes again. The effect is of an exaggerated perspective, as in certain paintings by the realist Wanderers (for instance, Repin’s Ba
rge Haulers on the Volga, or Perov’s Troika), whose annual exhibitions had become a feature of the late-winter months in St. Petersburg. The musical means are simple. A solo clarinet is the first to appear, playing what is supposed to be a Russian folk song in A major, soon taken up by a solo horn in C major, as if slightly more distinct. Next we glimpse the caravan itself, in the form of plodding bass string pizzicati, soon joined by a melancholy A-minor tune on the cor anglais. This melody is the Oriental element, winding its way sinuously across the steppe in the manner of the Polovtsian girls at the start of the second act of Prince Igor. But as Dianin points out, the version here is less “Oriental” than the operatic version; it lacks the chromatics and augmented seconds and of course the insinuating quality of the soprano voices, partly because Borodin wrote it specifically to fit the Russian tune when they come together as the caravan starts to recede. One could, perhaps, interpret this as emblematic of the closeness of Russia to its eastern provinces. Or it might suggest that the Stasovian “East” was simply Russia with bare tummies and pointed shoes. Either way, In Central Asia remains a small masterpiece sui generis, like Glinka’s Kamarinskaya, which in procedural terms it somewhat resembles.

  After composing this elegant piece, Borodin went back into his scientific shell for many months. In the summer he completed the act 1 finale of Prince Igor, including the episode of the mutiny and some other fragments that were subsequently discarded, and probably composed the brief five-four chorus in which the girls describe the ghastly behavior of Galitsky’s retinue. But otherwise worldly cares took precedence. In May he had told Balakirev that he was busier than he had ever been. “There’s never been a year,” he wrote to another friend, “when I have had so much urgent and essential work as now. It has happened quite often that I’ve gone to bed at two or three in the morning, and got up at four or five.”3

  Thus the kuchka worked away at ancient concepts, or at nothing much at all. Since Angelo, Cui had written only songs, his contribution to Paraphrases, and an attractive but derivative suite in six movements for violin and piano (op. 14), a work that violinists in search of repertoire might still find useful, but that makes few waves artistically. Balakirev was working on Tamara but still using his editing of Glinka as an excuse for not finishing it. Only Rimsky-Korsakov, as usual, worked steadily on substantial compositions, even though he, too, had been editing Glinka as well as orchestrating Musorgsky and at least offering to help Borodin “revise” Prince Igor (though the offer was at this stage declined). He was also teaching and conducting. Balakirev had not forgotten his important role as adviser to his young colleague. On one occasion he turned up at an FMS rehearsal of his Overture on Three Russian Themes and started instructing Rimsky-Korsakov on how to conduct, “which,” its object not unreasonably thought, “at a rehearsal, in the presence of the whole orchestra, was wholly inappropriate.”4 When it came to the teaching of music theory, though, Balakirev was pleased to acknowledge Rimsky-Korsakov’s greater competence, and would pass his pupils on to him for instruction in that subject. In January 1879 he had asked him to take on a thirteen-year-old gymnasium pupil by the name of Alexander (Sasha) Glazunov, a boy “very talented and extremely interested in orchestral music, forever writing out scores, and constantly getting his mother to ask me things like how to write for triangle or double bass.”5 For various reasons it was nearly a year before Rimsky-Korsakov made Sasha’s acquaintance, but he at once recognized his brilliant gifts, his “superior ear” (which obviated the need for him to study elementary theory or the basic aural training known as solfeggio), and his enthusiasm for self-education. “His musical development,” Rimsky-Korsakov informs us, “advanced not by the day, but by the hour.”6

  Perhaps it was his acquaintance with the young Glazunov that provoked Rimsky-Korsakov’s scathing judgment, in a letter to Semyon Kruglikov, about his fellow kuchkists: “Owing to inadequate technique, Balakirev writes little, Borodin with difficulty, Cui in a slipshod way, Musorgsky sloppily and often absurdly … Believe me, although, speaking perfectly frankly, I consider that they possess far more talent than I have, yet I don’t envy them a penny’s worth.”7 Glazunov was the living proof that genius properly and systematically guided would swiftly rise above the limitations of even the most brilliantly gifted amateur. Rimsky-Korsakov would probably have regarded himself as an intermediate case: gifted, if not brilliantly, self-taught and a rapid learner from a poor start, in which he was hampered by the obscurantist attitudes of a group of untaught ideologues. The danger of such an argument was that it was too much predicated on quality of product. What if the systematically guided genius turned out to be a petit maître, a fluent stylist who simply did what his predecessors had done, but updated? Would that prove that Stasov was right after all to claim that conservatory teaching stifled the imagination, or merely that the initial assessment of the individual’s talent had been overoptimistic? Was it even sensible to make such judgments on so little evidence?

  Rimsky-Korsakov himself was daily demonstrating the virtue of disciplined method. After finishing May Night he had cultivated a growing enthusiasm for folk mythology and pagan ritual. In the summer of 1879 he had started an orchestral tone poem called Fairy Tale (Skazka), prompted by Pushkin’s prologue to the narrative poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, which was in his mind, presumably, because of his work on Glinka’s opera; and he had composed a four-movement string quartet on Russian folk themes. Alas, Balakirev immediately took against Fairy Tale when its composer—unwisely, one might feel—showed him the draft that autumn; and as for the quartet, it went down badly with the members of the Davïdov Quartet (including Leopold Auer) when they played it over for his benefit. He promptly withdrew the quartet and abandoned Fairy Tale; instead he embarked on a revision of his old Overture on Russian Themes. Then, in the late spring of 1880, he set to work on a new opera, based on Ostrovsky’s play The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka). Within three months he had composed a complete draft of this long opera, and in less than a year, by the end of March 1881, the score was complete and ready for performance. As light relief from the opera, he had taken up his Fairy Tale again in late July 1880, and polished it off, orchestration and all (a nineteen-minute work), within a couple of months. At the same time, he had started turning the string quartet into a twenty-minute Sinfonietta for orchestra. A more telling illustration of his remarks to Kruglikov, made while at work on the score of The Snow Maiden, would be hard to imagine.

  Exactly what Balakirev had objected to about Fairy Tale Rimsky-Korsakov does not say. But he may have disliked its lack of a clear program. Pushkin’s prologue (which is printed as an epigraph to the score) is a mildly ironic list of possible fairy-tale subjects which he imagines told by “a learned cat” tethered by a golden chain to a green oak tree by the sea. From the cat’s repertoire, Pushkin chooses Ruslan and Lyudmila. Rimsky-Korsakov chooses instead to compose a musical tale whose plot, purely and simply, is the music itself. It annoyed him, he tells us, that people tried to find in his work a depiction of the physical elements of the prologue; they wanted to hear the cat prowling up and down on the end of its chain, the mermaid in the branches, Baba-Yaga in her hut, and the thirty beauteous knights who emerge one by one from the clear waters. But Fairy Tale is its own fairy tale.

  Admittedly Rimsky-Korsakov slightly undermined his position by referring to the 1879 draft, in a letter to Kruglikov, as “the musical tableau Baba-Yaga,”8 added to which the highly episodic form seems positively to invite pictorial interpretation: the larghetto introduction with its mysterious chromatics and fluttering violins; the D-minor allegro, pesante and menacing, the solo flute weaving a magic spell, and the curious allegretto theme, played first by solo clarinet, which the composer for some reason bars in duple time though its meter is unequivocally triple—a sure sign of hocus-pocus. Although the work is in some kind of sonata form, with all the main themes recapitulated and ending with a curtailed repeat of the introduction, there is no real attempt to integrate them into an organic e
ntity. They keep their distinctive profiles, like the pictures in a child’s storybook. In itself this is hardly a weakness, and the main problem with Fairy Tale is that its harmonic texture is somewhat unvaried and the melodic material unremarkable. There is color in the orchestration and contrast in the instrumental texture; but this is not quite enough to carry such a substantial score.

  The Sinfonietta, eventually completed in 1884, is a much simpler, more candid piece of work, directly based on the first three movements of the abandoned string quartet, probably somewhat expanded, to judge from the composer’s own description of the quartet. In general character it resembles the early overtures of Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov himself in being made up of a medley of folk songs worked up in quasi-symphonic style, with motivic development, some unobtrusive thematic cross-referencing, and even, in the slow movement, a rather self-conscious fugal episode. The tunes themselves are nearly all taken from Rimsky-Korsakov’s own 1877 collection, including one later made famous, in modified form, by Rimsky’s most illustrious pupil, Igor Stravinsky, in the “Round Dance of the Princesses” in his Firebird. In fact Stravinsky took more than just the theme from his teacher; the surrounding figuration also suggests an acquaintance with the Sinfonietta, short of actual theft; he knew, in any case, that the work was unknown in the West and so could safely be plundered. But then, as is often the case, Stravinsky’s version is better than its model. And in general the Sinfonietta is a well-made, dullish piece, at best the sum of its borrowed parts.