Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The Snow Maiden is altogether another matter. It was already apparent from May Night, with all its limitations, that opera would be Rimsky-Korsakov’s best avenue of escape from the aridities of his contrapuntal studies, which had gone on draining the sap from his instrumental and choral music. Even with Fairy Tale, one senses in its lack of subject matter a certain straitlaced reticence about imposing a story on a serious piece of music. With an opera there could obviously be no such constraint. We don’t know why, in the winter of 1879–80, he reread Ostrovsky’s play, having first read it without much pleasure soon after it came out in 1873. But probably the search for a subject that would provide a platform for his growing interest in folk mythology stirred some memory of the play. In fact the piece is quite undramatic compared with Ostrovsky’s realist or genre pieces such as The Storm or Live Not the Way You’d Like. Its strength is in its atmosphere and poetic charm, the charm of invented worlds; but atmosphere was precisely what Rimsky-Korsakov was looking for at that moment. Suddenly, he tells us, his “warmth towards ancient Russian custom and pagan pantheism, which had manifested itself little by little, now blazed forth in a bright flame.” He became obsessed with Ostrovsky’s characters: Snegurochka herself, the shepherd Lel, Tsar Berendey, and the various anthropomorphisms—Spring, Shrovetide (Maslenitsa), and Grandfather Frost. The following year he and his family spent the summer at an estate village called Stelyovo, in the flat, wooded, lakeland country south of Luga, and here the whole environment and landscape fed his obsession: “Everything somehow particularly harmonized with my pantheistic mood at that time … Some thick, gnarled branch or a stump overgrown with moss appeared to me the wood demon or his dwelling; the forest Volchinyets, a forbidden forest [as in act 3 of the opera]; the bare Kopytyets hillock, Yarilo’s [the Sun god’s] mountain; the triple echo heard from our balcony seemed the voices of wood-goblins or other wonders.”9

  To the modern way of thinking, these excitements seem essentially those of a child, and very curious indeed in a hard-nosed rationalist like Rimsky-Korsakov, a man whose mind was much later described by Stravinsky as “closed to any religious or metaphysical idea.”10 One has, though, to remember the connection for Russians of his generation between pagan ritual and magical fairy tales, on the one hand, and ethnic Russianism and narodnost’, on the other: what Stasov, raving about the tale of Sadko, had labelled as “tableaux of Russian nature on the island of the Sea King … themes of pagan antiquity, of ancient worship, of our ancient life.”11 Also, by a peculiar twist of mentality, these atavistic mysteries could become an object of scholarship and taxonomy. In his autobiography, Rimsky-Korsakov describes Yuli Melgunov, whose first collection of folk songs “transcribed directly from the voices of the people” had come out in 1879, as “a dry theorist and compiler of a barbarous collection of Russian songs.”12 But he himself, as we saw in connection with May Night, was starting to interest himself in the correct classification and application of the tunes he included in his compositions. You could share the pagan wonder at the forest and the bird life and the seasons and at the same time take careful note of the ritual practices, their timings and purposes, associated with these phenomena. You could be, at one and the same moment, primitive man and modern anthropologist. The combination seems to have appealed to Rimsky-Korsakov (though whether or not his musical attributions are correct is another matter).13 The Snow Maiden, on this reading, is a fairy tale that might take its place in some monumental treatise about seasonal customs in pre-Christian Russia. We are in the land of the Berendey people and their Tsar Berendey, a wise and soft-hearted old ruler. In the nearby forest, winter is almost over, Spring is freeing herself from the grip of Grandfather Frost; but their quarrel is an annual event, and in fact they have a daughter, Snegurochka, whom they plan this year (like well-constructed bourgeois parents) to place for the summer with a good family, Bobyl’ Bakula and his wife, Bobylikha, a childless (and presumably landless) Berendey couple. Snegurochka is beautiful, gentle-natured, but, of course, cold. She makes friends with the villagers, and especially the herdsman Lel; she loves his songs but cannot return his affection. When her friend Kupava’s fiancé, Mizgir, catches sight of her, he is so enraptured that he instantly throws Kupava over, and meanwhile the same thing happens to every engaged couple in the land, so that Tsar Berendey’s plan to propitiate the sun god, Yarilo, by marrying them all on Yarilo’s day looks like coming to grief. But if any man can win Snegurochka’s love, Yarilo will be appeased. On the eve of Yarilo’s day Mizgir makes passionate advances to Snegurochka, but only succeeds in frightening her, until, in the final act, Spring responds to the snow maiden’s prayer and enables her to fall in love with him. Alas, at the mass wedding ceremony the next day, the hot rays of the sun melt Snegurochka; in despair, Mizgir drowns himself in the lake. But the Berendeys rejoice at the death of winter and sing a hymn of praise to Yarilo.

  The resonances of this tale are various, some obvious, some perhaps less so. They belong to a land where winter is an extreme, frightening event, and spring is scarcely less violent: destructive as well as creative, but in any case not responsive to human cares. All we people can do is perform ritual acts that will appease the elements, remind them, perhaps, of our presence and our needs, and reassure ourselves that we too are participants in the natural cycle, constant like the birds and the trees, even if, like them, we perish as individuals. For Rimsky-Korsakov such matters were of vital interest. His score is punctuated by songs and choruses that mark out the natural cycle of winter, spring, and summer. Even the birds have a ritual dance in the form of a musical game, in which the feathered creatures are classified by rank: “Who among us birds is the greatest, who is the least? Eagle the chief, quail the scribe; owl the deputy chief,” and so on. At the end of the prologue in the forest, the natural scene is invaded by the townspeople, bidding ceremonial farewell to Maslenitsa, the Orthodox equivalent of Shrovetide, but in pagan mythology the last week of winter. In a brilliant medley of folk songs, Rimsky-Korsakov constructs a ceremony of his own, proceeding from the surly, almost mocking “Hey, holy Maslenitsa” (“Oy, chestnaya Maslenitsa!” to a fragment of a melody from his own collection, no. 32), through the joyous “The cocks crowed very early” (“Ranïm-rano kurï zapeli”), to the solemn, heraldic “Happy to meet you, greet you” (“Veselen’ko tebya vstrechat’, privechat’,” based on Rimsky’s no. 42, which is actually about waiting for Maslenitsa), and ending with the hushed “Come back to us in three short days” (“Vorotis’ k nam na tri denyochka”), which plainly refers to the Resurrection. Rimsky-Korsakov explains that the short, chantlike fragment that intrudes at this point—“Maslenitsa mokrokhvostka” (“Soggy-tailed Maslenitsa”)—is “a scoffingly sacrilegious reminder of the Orthodox Mass for the dead,” which seems to confirm a Christian subtext to the whole chorus.

  Sequences of this kind can make a brilliant spectacle on the stage. At the start of the third act, the people celebrate the eve of Yarilo’s day to a sparkling, Glinka-like setting of the folk song “Hey, in the Field a Lime Tree” (“Ay, vo pole lipen’ka,” no. 54 in Rimsky’s collection)—a tune Tchaikovsky had also used in his incidental music for the original production of the play. In the final scene, just before Snegurochka melts away, the brides and grooms approach Tsar Berendey singing two variants of a millet-sowing song from Balakirev’s collection (no. 8). Here the stage direction specifies that “during the singing the two sides [girls and boys] approach with slow steps in the time of the song.” And there is something balletic about this kind of tableau. The setting is ceremonial, pageant-like, and frames an action that is more often decorative than dramatic. The prologue, for instance, contains many beauties of a “forest murmurs” variety (though Rimsky-Korsakov’s knowledge of Wagner still probably stopped at Lohengrin).14 The orchestral texture, especially the woodwind scoring, is a constant delight, and the harmonic language, both here and in the Berendey acts, is just rich and chromatic enough to suggest a magical, fairy-tale world, without eve
r straying beyond what Rimsky would have permitted his advanced composition students. At such times, the Glinka of Ruslan and Lyudmila is never far away, and is sometimes distinctly close, for instance in the bardic chorus that opens the second act, or Berendey’s processional soon afterward.

  As drama, too, The Snow Maiden has a good deal in common with Ruslan. As in a fairy story, its characters are largely emblematic. They have no psychology and they seldom change except by magical intervention, as when Snegurochka is allowed to fall in love with Mizgir by fiat of her mother, Vesna-Krasna (Spring-Beautiful). And as usual in fairy land, such change, reluctantly conceded, brings rapid disaster. The human characters, with the marginal exceptions of Tsar Berendey and Lel (who sings three attractive, somewhat folksy arias), are ciphers. We know nothing about Mizgir or Kupava except that they have just fallen in love. Mizgir switches to Snegurochka for no reason (her astounding facial beauty is a fairy-tale reason, not a real one). Kupava complains to the tsar, then the next time we see her she is in Lel’s arms. When Snegurochka melts, Mizgir jumps into the lake, but nobody minds much. As Tsar Berendey explains, “The sad death of Snegurochka and Mizgir’s terrible end cannot alarm us. The daughter of Frost, chilly Snegurochka, has perished. For fifteen years the sun has been angry with us; now with her miraculous death, Frost’s interference is at an end.” In other words, the Snow Maiden and her lover are seasonal events. The cold is defeated by a human sacrifice, and all combine in a hymn of praise to the Sun god, Yarilo.

  The opera’s sheer length (over three hours of music) and its flat dramatic and psychological surface will probably always militate against its acceptance on the non-Russian stage, for all its musical charms. It remains, though, a work of some historical significance. As Musorgsky struggled with the final stages of Khovanshchina and Borodin tried, on the whole successfully, to bring the epic personages of Prince Igor to emotional life, the era of realism as an artistic rallying cry was discreetly drawing to a close. One might instead see Ostrovsky’s play, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s better-known opera, as the pursuit of a different strand in nationalist art: authenticity not in the history and language of Russians, but in their mind and their art. The Snow Maiden is many things, but realistic it is not. It harks back, however artificially, to ancient mythologies, and transports the Russian peasant with his smock and his folk song out of the historical world and into a timeless antiquity of magic and ritual. It was fitting that, after its Maryinsky premiere in February 1882, it would be one of the first operas staged, in 1885, by the Chastnaya Opera (Private Opera) at Abramtsevo, where Savva Mamontov had established a colony of artists, including several of the Wanderers, dedicated to the revival of Russian folk design in costume, furniture, architecture, ceramics, and book illustration. The decorative aspect of fairy tales was one element in all this. The parallel with the English Arts and Crafts movement and the Pre-Raphaelites is obvious and has often been made, though in the Russian version the social element—always a strong factor in pre-emancipation realism and a powerful motive in the English rural revival—is much less evident. On the contrary, Mamontov’s most notable successors, the magazine Mir iskusstva and Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, held aloof from any kind of social concern and dedicated themselves instead to pure design, the rule of beauty or fantasy, the “making strange,” art for art’s sake. Thus, by a curious twist of fate, the gentle Snow Maiden turns out to be a direct ancestor of the Chosen One who dances herself to death to propitiate the vernal gods in the most famous ballet of Rimsky-Korsakov’s most famous pupil.

  In Oranienbaum, that summer of 1880, Musorgsky had composed, and composed well. Without the distraction of Sorochintsï Fair, he might even have finished Khovanshchina properly, whereas there was little chance of his completing the Gogol opera that year, even without Khovanshchina. The material was too fragmented, too inchoate, and it seems probable that his mind was no longer capable of imposing a coherent structure on such a large-scale work. He was observed by an eleven-year-old boy who was living at the same dacha with his parents.

  Once a week at Leonova’s there was a reception followed by a dinner. Usually Musinka was in charge of the dinner. From the room in the rear one could hear the clatter of dishes and the uncorking of bottles. Each time Musorgsky came out he was more and more “in his cups.” After dinner the concert would begin. Musorgsky played the piano (by now quite “ready”) as accompanist and soloist. He performed his own works with amazing perfection, producing a “shattering effect” on the listeners.15

  Leonova had decided to start singing classes in her St. Petersburg apartment on the Kryukov Canal, and recruited Musorgsky to act as her assistant. She prided herself on her “totally new methods of teaching,” which somehow included having him write exercises in two, three, and four parts as a basis for practicing solfeggio. Rimsky-Korsakov records with dismay the “horrible part writing” in these exercises and the very idea of Musorgsky teaching elementary theory; but above all he laments the time that Musorgsky devoted to a collaboration that he, Rimsky-Korsakov, regarded as demeaning and unproductive. Leonova was an aging opera star whose sense of her enduring vocal qualities far outstripped the reality, and while she claimed that “Musorgsky was astonished at my success in the training of voices,” Rimsky remembered her as untrained herself, and “so hardly capable of teaching vocal technique.”16 As for Musorgsky, he kept himself going with a constant supply of wine and mushrooms, to the despair of Leonova, who minded the interruptions and recognized them as a symptom of decline.

  Some time in 1880, Musorgsky had left the Naumovs and moved into a room on Ofitserskaya, not far from Leonova’s and the Maryinsky; and there, during the autumn, he composed in somewhat desultory fashion a series of short, insipid piano pieces: “Meditation” (“Razdum’e”), a childlike “album leaf” mostly in two parts or with pedal notes in the left hand; “In the Village” (“V derevne”), an extended fantasy on what Musorgsky labels, for some reason, a “canto popolare”; and finally “A Tear” (“Sleza”), shed, we may suppose, for the premature demise of a mighty creative gift. On 3 February 1881, Rimsky-Korsakov conducted “The Destruction of Sennacherib’ in a concert of the FMS, and Fyodor Stravinsky sang Musorgsky’s song “Forgotten.” It was the last written music of his to be heard in public during his lifetime. But the next evening he himself presided at the piano for a literary evening in memory of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who had died a week before. As a black-framed portrait of the great novelist was brought into the hall, Musorgsky improvised “a funeral knell, similar to that heard in the last scene of Boris.” It was one of those unrepeatable historic moments, like Beethoven’s legendary Weihekuss—his consecrating kiss—on the child Liszt, except that in this case there was no passing of the flame, only a dying flicker, shared, but soon to be extinguished.

  A week later Musorgsky arrived at Leonova’s in “a nervous and irritable state”—presumably of the usual kind—and suddenly announced that he was homeless and without means of any sort. No doubt this was not strictly true. Later in her account of the episode, Leonova explains that she decided to give him a room “knowing that if anything were to happen to him again in his lonely apartment, he might be left without help.”17 In certain moods, as we know, Musorgsky was afraid of being on his own. But this time it was something more than a mood. That evening he and Leonova attended a party in the house of a certain General Sokhansky, the father of one of Leonova’s vocal pupils, who sang during the evening to Musorgsky’s accompaniment; but afterward, during dancing and cards, he suffered what seems to have been a mild stroke. That night he slept in a chair in Leonova’s apartment. The next morning he appeared much better, but when she asked him how he was, he replied that he felt well, then immediately swivelled round and crashed to the floor. “My fears were not unfounded,” Leonova remarks; “had he been alone he would certainly have suffocated; but we at once turned him over, took care of him, and sent for the doctor. Before evening he had two more, similar, attacks …”18

 
With the help of Dr. Bertensson, they got him into the Nikolayevsky Military Hospital on Suvorovsky Prospekt (near the Smolny Convent). For this highly irregular arrangement—since these days he was a civilian—he had to be listed as “the hired civilian orderly of intern Bertensson.” He had a quiet, spacious, sunny room, his own nurses and ancillaries, excellent food, and frequent visits. Naturally, alcohol was forbidden. But in all other ways, Stasov thought, “it was just as if he were in his own home, surrounded by his own family and by the fondest of attention.” The reality, as he knew, was more sinister. “The doctors now say,” he told Balakirev two days after Musorgsky’s admission, “that they weren’t strokes that he had, but the onset of epilepsy.

  I was with him yesterday and today (Borodin and Korsakov were there yesterday and the day before, and a lot of other friends as well): he looks as if nothing was wrong with him—now he recognizes everyone, but talks the devil only knows what nonsense and tells a stream of fantastic stories. They say, too, that, quite apart from the epilepsy and the strokes, he’s also gone a bit mad. As a person he’s done for, though he may live on (say the doctors), perhaps for a year, perhaps for a day.19