Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Walsh

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd., London.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walsh, Stephen, [date]

  Musorgsky and his circle : a Russian musical adventure /

  by Stephen Walsh.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-27244-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-385-35048-8 (eBook)

  1. Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich, 1839–1881. 2. Moguchaia kuchka

  (Group of composers) 3. Composers—Russia—Biography. 4. Music—

  Russia—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Music—Russia—20th

  century—History and criticism. 6. Nationalism in music. I. Title.

  ML390.W175 2013

  780.92—dc23

  [B] 2013004600

  Jacket images: (center) Modest Musorgsky from The Granger Collection, NY; (corners, clockwise) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, and Mily Balakirev from DeA Picture Library / The Granger Collection, NY

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  For Anthony Powers

  It is strange to remember those thoughts and to try to catch

  The underground whispers of music beneath the years

  —HENRY REED

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 Arrivals

  Balakirev—Russia—The kuchka

  2 The Father Figure

  Glinka and His Operas

  3 The Lawyer-Critic

  Vladimir Stasov—Belinsky

  4 The Officer and the Doctor

  Musorgsky—Borodin—Dargomïzhsky—Study with Balakirev

  5 On Aesthetics and Being Russian

  Chernïshevsky—Stasov and theory—Modes of nationalism

  6 New Institutions

  Anton Rubinstein—The RMS and the conservatory—Reactions

  7 First Steps

  Oedipus—King Lear—A Prisoner of the Caucasus—Songs and passions

  8 The Third Rome: The Clerk and the Midshipman

  Moscow—Folk song—Herzen—Emancipation—Musorgsky at the ministry—Rimsky-Korsakov

  9 Wagner and His Acolyte

  Wagner in St. Petersburg—Serov and Judith—How the circle responded

  10 An African Priestess and a Scottish Bride

  The commune—Salammbô—Cui the music critic—William Ratcliff

  11 Home Is the Sailor

  Musorgsky songs—Rimsky-Korsakov returns—His First Symphony—Rogneda—The Bogatyrs—Balakirev’s Folk-song collection—The Stone Guest begun

  12 Life Studies

  Romances and song portraits—Musorgsky and politics—Balakirev in Prague—The kuchka named

  13 Symphonic Pictures and an Abstract

  Borodin’s First Symphony—Tamara—St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain—Sadko

  14 A French Guest and a Stone One

  Balakirev at the RMS—Berlioz in St. Petersburg—The classicist—More song portraits—The Stone Guest and the circle

  15 A Child and an Aborted Wedding

  Musorgsky and children—“With Nyanya”—Marriage

  16 Outsiders

  Antar—Tchaikovsky and the circle—Borodin songs—Lohengrin at the Maryinsky

  17 History for the Stage

  History plays—The Maid of Pskov begun—Boris Godunov

  18 An Opera Performed, an Opera Abandoned

  William Ratcliff staged—Prince Igor conceived—Prince Igor dropped—Balakirev dismissed—Islamey—“The Peep Show”—The Nursery

  19 A Shared Apartment …

  Balakirev in decline—Boris rejected—Boris revised—The Power of the Fiend—The Maid of Pskov—Borodin’s Second Symphony

  20 … and a Shared Commission

  Professor Rimsky-Korsakov—The collective Mlada—The Stone Guest staged—Research on Khovanshchina

  21 Three Tsars and a Tyrant

  The Maid of Pskov staged—Boris excerpted—Work on Khovanshchina—Angelo

  22 Toward New Shores

  Boris staged “complete”—Golenishchev-Kutuzov—Sunless—Pictures from an Exhibition

  23 Distractability

  Rimsky writes fugues and a string quartet—Prince Igor resumed—More Khovanshchina

  24 Dances of Death

  Musorgsky the idealist and the drinker—Naumov—Songs and Dances of Death—Rimsky-Korsakov as editor

  25 A Chaos of Operas

  Angelo staged—Work on Prince Igor and Khovanshchina—Sorochintsï Fair—Rimsky’s wind chamber music

  26 Drowning in the Waters

  Opinions of the kuchka—Balakirev rises—Musorgsky sinks—May Night

  27 The Chemist in His Laboratory

  Musorgsky as accompanist—On tour with Leonova—Borodin’s First Quartet—Prince Igor continued—Khovanshchina almost finished

  28 Death by Sunlight

  In Central Asia—A Fairy Tale and Sinfonietta—The Snow Maiden—Musorgsky’s last days

  29 Heirs and Rebels

  Musorgsky buried—Tamara completed—Borodin’s Second Quartet and Third Symphony—Glazunov and Belyayev—The kuchka ends

  EPILOGUE The Survivors

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  Preface

  The story of nineteenth-century Russian nationalism is one of the most fascinating and colorful in music history, and the music the nationalists wrote is some of the most popular and original in the entire classical repertoire. Moreover, it connects directly with the social and political history of the period, because the composers were responding specifically to ideas about society and the relationship between society and art that were central to Russian thought in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the 1917 revolutions.

  Yet despite this rich texture of significance, there are few essential books specifically on the subject. The only book in English on the kuchka as a whole is an enjoyable but essentially anecdotal account by the Russian historian Mikhail Zetlin which is stronger on atmosphere than ideas or music. There are standard, if old-fashioned, biographies of Borodin and Balakirev, and some excellent lives of Musorgsky, including David Brown’s Master Musicians volume, a short study by Caryl Emerson, and two at one time indispensable but now antique books by Gerald Abraham and Michel Calvocoressi. The academic literature is strong but specialized, much preoccupied with source materials, textual variants, issues of style, the correcting of supposed historical misunderstandings, and general questions such as realism and ethnography. To the best of my knowledge, no musically literate general study that is both scholarly and readable exists.

  My book is an attempt to meet those rather stiff criteria. The case for such a study is certainly unanswerable. When one considers the vast literature on Wagner and Verdi, the poverty of what is available on the kuchka is shameful. One doesn’t have to claim that any of the Five are in the same league as those two masters to argue that their work and ideas merit closer attention than they have so far received. Leaving aside the indispu
table fact that Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov is among the greatest and most original of all nineteenth-century operas, that the work of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov includes music adored by people who could not name its composer, and that Musorgsky’s songs are as remarkable in their way as any in the German tradition, the intellectual and aesthetic context of these composers’ lives and work is alone well worth studying.

  Their existence as an authentic group—meeting several times a week, discussing one another’s work in progress, arguing about the goals of art—coincided roughly with the 1860s, which were a time of intellectual ferment following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Genuine creative collectives of this type are rare in music, probably because music doesn’t usually deal with discussable ideas. For the kuchka it was crucial that their mentor was a nonmusician, the art historian Vladimir Stasov, a follower of the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who had argued that it was the task of art to reflect the realities of social and political life and the task of the critic to interpret art in that spirit. Stasov, who had known Glinka—the “father figure” of Russian music—concocted his own set of values as to how such ideas might be adapted to a specifically nationalist music, and he did his best to impose them on his musical circle, with the help of the composer Mily Balakirev, the strongest personality in the group.

  The group’s amateurism is often held against it, and it’s true that their failure to produce regular, completed scores was at least partly due to their lack of the discipline and technical know-how that come from proper study. The fact that they mostly had other jobs obviously didn’t help. Borodin, a musical genius, was also a vocational research chemist. Musorgsky was the younger son of landowners impoverished by the Emancipation, who was forced by sheer necessity into civil-service drudgery. Only Rimsky-Korsakov, who started out as a naval cadet, managed to square the circle by accepting a professorship in the Conservatoire in 1871. As a result he turned himself into a productive and disciplined musical worker who passed on his reformed work ethic to pupils like Glazunov and (especially) Stravinsky.

  But that wasn’t all that he, and the kuchka as a whole, passed on. Not only was their music part of the stylistic environment from which Stravinsky emerged, but it also had a profound influence on the two most important French composers of the turn of the century, Debussy and Ravel; and things Debussy found in Musorgsky inspired innovations that passed into the work of Messiaen and from there to Boulez and others of the postwar generation. Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Pictures from an Exhibition, Night on Bald Mountain, his many songs, and the problematical unfinished opera Khovanshchina are monuments to one of the most independent-minded of all composers. Borodin’s two completed symphonies, two string quartets, and the operatic torso Prince Igor reveal a more conventional but brilliant talent dissipated by divided loyalties. The steadier, less remarkable, but still individual work of Rimsky-Korsakov, and occasional flashes of brilliance in Balakirev’s piano music and his symphonic poem Tamara, round out this strange but intriguing picture. Only the fifth member, Cui, a crucial figure within the group, left no music of lasting significance, even though there are works of his, as I try to show, that don’t deserve the near-total oblivion to which posterity has consigned them.

  The emergence of this curious and somewhat quarrelsome bunch of semitrained composers from a musical environment previously dominated (like the other arts in pre-Napoleonic Russia) by foreigners, is a strangely moving and absorbing episode in music history. In trying to bring it to life for the general reader I have been heavily dependent on existing published material, as will be evident from my endnotes and bibliography. To a large extent the book is a work of synthesis, thickly colored, though, by critical ideas of my own for which no one else can conceivably be blamed. Some thanks are due, nevertheless. Natalya Braginskaya, of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, helped me on matters to do with Russian language and accentuation and, along with her husband, Dmitry, was a warm and attentive host to me and my wife during our visit to St. Petersburg for the Rimsky-Korsakov Conference there in March 2010. I was also greatly helped on this visit and subsequently by Larisa Miller, chief music archivist of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The conference itself was a huge stimulus; thanks to Lidia Ader, hard-working and efficient organizer, for inviting us. We Westerners still mostly read only horrors about Russia in our newspapers. It’s a pleasure to emphasize the amazing friendliness and generosity of real Russians when one visits their country these days.

  At home I have had invaluable archival help from, especially, Dr. Nicolas Bell, curator of Music Collections at the British Library; from the staff of Cardiff University Music Library; and from Alison Harvey of the Special Collections division of the university’s Arts and Social Studies Library. I had useful and interesting conversations about Rimsky-Korsakov with John Nelson during his year in Cardiff on an Erasmus doctoral exchange. The extensive, if curiously erratic, Russian holdings of the London Library filled many potential gaps, and the library staff were unfailingly calm and efficient in helping me dig them out. My own department, Cardiff University School of Music, supported me as ever with research funds. Andrew Maby gave me hours of his time on technical support. I should like particularly to thank Chuck Elliott, for his support, patience, and strong editorial help on this and previous projects.

  My darling wife, Mary, has as ever endured it all with no more protest than was necessary to keep me focused. Above all her advice has been a vital corrective to the hermetic tendencies of university-funded and -refereed research. Now she has to read the book to prove that it has worked.

  CHAPTER 1

  Arrivals

  Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev—eighteen years old, of medium height, thick-set, and with a youthful beard already framing a noticeably ample, rounded head—arrived in St. Petersburg for the first time in his life late in November 1855.* He was travelling with his patron, Alexander Ulïbïshev, a scholarly, music-loving Nizhny-Novgorod land-owner who had taken young Mily under his wing four years before, paid for his piano lessons, and given him the run of his exceptionally well-equipped music library. The boy was one of those young musicians who seem from time to time to spring up from nowhere, almost out of nothing. His mother had played the piano and taught Mily what she could. But she had died when he was ten years old, after a summer visit to Moscow for the boy to have piano lessons with Alexander Dubuque, a pupil of the great John Field.

  As for Mily’s father, not much was to be expected from that quarter. Alexey Konstantinovich Balakirev was a minor civil servant in Nizhny-Novgorod. But he was by no means a dull, steady, mildly corrupt citizen of the kind most often to be found in such provincial government posts at that time. On the contrary, he was a difficult, quarrelsome man, quick-tempered and intolerant, and all too ready to make enemies among his colleagues and employers. In course of time Mily would be called on to pull strings for his father in precisely the way that a father might normally be expected to pull strings for his son.

  Yet the young man had evidently come to St. Petersburg with Alexey Konstaninovich’s blessing, since, however slight his father’s interest in music, he at least had the wit to see that Mily’s talent represented the family’s best chance of swimming out of the provincial backwater to which his own limitations had confined it.

  Mily, decidedly, had talent. His mother must have recognized it, or had it forcefully pointed out to her, or she would hardly have transported them both two hundred and fifty miles, long before the country’s first significant public railway, for three months of what must have been expensive lessons with a distinguished teacher. The child’s gift was that of a keyboard prodigy, whose significance in the 1840s was perhaps comparable to that of a promising young footballer in our own day. But there can have been few in Nizhny-Novgorod who were capable of penetrating the musical extent of that gift, a full century before the founding of the city’s conservatory. You were a good pianist? Excellent, you would give concerts and make a lot of money. The idea that prec
ocious brilliance on an instrument might conceal or breed some kind of creative genius—whatever that might be—was unlikely to have struck any but the most speculative thinkers among the music lovers of the great east-facing commercial city on the Volga. And who could blame them? Even in west-facing St. Petersburg in 1855 there was no conservatory, no music college, few professional concerts, no institution of any kind that might encourage a musically gifted teenager to explore his abilities outside the narrow corridor of tried and trusted instrumental method. Public music making in the capital was still dominated by foreigners and under the administrative control of more or less nonmusical bureaucrats. Russian musicians were scarcely taken seriously.

  All the same, it was an interesting time for a gifted young man to arrive in St. Petersburg. Nicholas I, the most reactionary scion of the autocratic Romanov dynasty so far, had died in February 1855, and his son Alexander II was already being seen as the white hope of those who regarded the reform of Russia’s social and political institutions as an essential concomitant of her longed-for economic, moral, and cultural liberalization. By chance that same year, a Ukrainian-born Russian composer and virtuoso pianist by the name of Anton Rubinstein had launched a critique of the condition and character of Russian music in the Viennese journal Blätter für Musik, Theater und Kunst. The main motif of the article was the inadequacy of a national music based exclusively on folk song, but it underpinned this thesis by noting public neglect of native music and the lack of proper professional musical training in Russia. Rubinstein himself had been an infant prodigy, had been carted round Europe in the early 1840s as a child phenomenon, and had then spent two years studying music theory in Berlin. His own music understandably owed nothing to folk sources, Russian or otherwise, but was at its best a well-formed branch of the German instrumental school dominated at the time by Mendelssohn.

  Of course, Rubinstein’s remarks had gone down badly in St. Petersburg. But however vague his grasp of the essence of Russian folk music, it could hardly be denied that there were few if any Russian composers able to compete in terms of professional expertise with the foreigners whose music still dominated the boards of the main (Italian) opera house on what is now Teatral’naya Ploshad’—Theatre Square. Most Russian opera at least up to the 1830s had been of the Singspiel or vaudeville type, made up of simple folkish songs interspersed with dialogue. A handful of composers had studied in Italy and come back writing music of an essentially Italian cut. But that would naturally have supported Rubinstein’s point about the desirability of a cosmopolitan attitude to style and technique.