Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  As for orchestral music by Russian composers, there was hardly any at all and none of real substance, for the good reason that there were still, in 1855, no established concert series or symphony orchestras anywhere in Russia. Such orchestral concerts as were given took place only in Lent, when theatrical performances were banned, and they not unnaturally tended to include Western repertoire, probably in mediocre, pickup performances. Instrumental chamber music existed, but essentially for amateur performers in rural or aristocratic drawing rooms. No Russian had composed anything remotely on the scale or in the intellectual manner of the classical Viennese string quartet. No groups existed in St. Petersburg or Moscow that would attempt to play such music.

  The most characteristic genres of Russian music in the twenties and thirties were the sacred concertos of Dmitry Bortnyansky, eighteenth-century in style but unlike the classical church music of the West in being for voices alone (since instruments were not allowed in the Orthodox Church), and the drawing-room songs with piano composed in large numbers and to Russian texts by gifted dilettantes such as the three Alexanders, Alyabyev, Gurilyov, and Dargomïzhsky. For the most part the aim of these composers’ romances (as Russians call the lyrical song) was to provide a shapely, metrically regular tune with a simple, unobtrusive accompaniment—an 1820s equivalent, perhaps, of a modern guitar chord sequence. There would be the occasional imitation folk song; and here and there the music would take on a freer, more declamatory character, as in some ancient ballad of a bardic singer accompanying himself on the harp. A fine example of this ballad type is Dargomïzhsky’s early setting of Lermontov’s “Tuchki nebesnïya” (Heavenly Clouds) (1841–2), in which the poet, exiled to the Caucasus, compares himself to the clouds driven southward by the north wind. Very occasionally something in a poem will prompt mildly daring harmony, as in the same composer’s setting of Pushkin’s “Vostochnïy romans’ ” (Eastern Romance) (1852), where the opening words—“You were born to arouse the poet’s imagination”—provoke some risky chords, but not, alas, a very inspiring melody. These are nevertheless superior examples of what Richard Taruskin once called the “urban style russe,” an idiom much cultivated by Russian songwriters of the twenties, thirties, and forties, in which authentic or quasi-authentic folk songs had their faces washed and their hair combed to make them suitable company for nicely brought-up young ladies.1

  The one person whose music challenged Rubinstein’s melancholy diagnosis was Mikhail Glinka, the composer of two works that had seemed to set new standards for Russian opera but which, at the time of Balakirev’s arrival in St. Petersburg, were languishing, performed poorly or not at all, unpublished and to a large extent unappreciated. In 1855 Glinka was fifty-one years old and had more or less abandoned composition in favor of socializing, disillusioned by the comparative failure of his second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila, in 1842 and by the shoddy, inattentive revivals of his first, A Life for the Tsar (1836), since then. He was like Chulkaturin, the hero of Turgenev’s recent short story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man.” By birth a dvoryanin, a member of the minor land-owning gentry, he had grown up in an environment where it was possible to cultivate an intensely musical, artistic nature, but out of the question to put it into any kind of professional practice. Glinka could perform music at home or on his uncle’s estate to his heart’s content; he could even write songs or piano music or chamber works for the kinds of mixed group that might assemble on such occasions. But it would be little more than a hobby. “No doubt I was occupied with music,” he records in his Memoirs for the summer of 1826, “but I really don’t know what I accomplished.” “Did I compose anything in Naples?” he asks himself later. “I don’t remember.”2 Having neither the need nor the opportunity to embark on a career, and being—like many of his class—an instinctive valetudinarian, he had gone abroad on medical advice at the age of twenty-five, spent three and a half years in Italy, and another five months in Berlin studying harmony and counterpoint with the great Siegfried Dehn, before returning to his family home in Novospasskoye, near Smolensk, in May 1834, two months after his father’s death.

  It was at this point that Glinka’s musical career, and with it the whole history of Russian music, took a decisive turn. The American scholar Lynn Sargeant began a fascinating recent study of the social context of Russian musical life by insisting that “Russia was hardly a silent world in the first half of the nineteenth century,” and that “although prominent composers of European fame were slow to emerge, Russian musical life was dynamic and successful, meeting the needs and expectations of its participants and the public.”3 But that “although” is just the point. It was not simple mythmaking that prompted virtually all Russian composers in the second half of the century to regard Glinka as the starting point of a Russian music that would be accepted abroad as a significant tributary of the muddy river of great art. “Dynamic and successful,” perhaps, but only to the extent that “the needs and expectations” were limited and untutored. To this day, not a single work by any other Russian composer of Glinka’s generation or earlier has entered even the fringes of the repertoire abroad. Glinka’s own work from before his return to Russia, mainly hybrid chamber music and songs, remains little known farther west. No less strikingly, this music, though occasionally of superior quality, had relatively little impact on the work even of his compatriots. It was his two operas, together with a handful of brilliant late orchestral miniatures, that suddenly, almost out of the blue, created the launching pad for that adorable, eccentric repertoire of masterpieces and near-masterpieces that we now think of as the very essence of Russian romantic music. More surprisingly, perhaps, it was precisely that repertoire, with all its oddities and unorthodoxies and inspired gaucheries, that provided one vital resource for the new music of the twentieth century, music that was far from gauche, sometimes far from adorable, too, but that knew its own mind and method, and that eventually swelled into an alternative mainstream flowing from a source remote from that of the classical symphonic and operatic tradition.

  In this strange history, a major role—perhaps the major role—was played by the subject of the present book, the group of composers known in the West as the Five and in Russia as the moguchaya kuchka, the Mighty Little Heap (sometimes less accurately translated as the Mighty Handful). As with most such artistic circles, the origins and membership of the kuchka were a good deal less clearly defined than history has tended to imply. The name originated in 1867 in a review by the group’s intellectual guru, the musically trained art historian and critic Vladimir Stasov, of a concert that included music by only two members of the history-book kuchka—Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov—alongside works by Glinka and Dargomïzhsky. It was evidently meant to give the sense of a commando unit of Russian composers forcing themselves on the attention of an unsuspecting world. But it was studiedly nonspecific. No doubt Stasov would have included the other three of the Five—Borodin, Cui, and Musorgsky—if they had had pieces in the concert. But then he might have included other circle members too—Nikolay Lodïzhensky, Apollon Gusakovsky, and others—on the same grounds. His object was to locate a new tendency in Russian music starting with Glinka, flowing through the somewhat younger Dargomïzhsky into the work of a burgeoning group of composers still in their twenties or early thirties. The kuchka was simply his image for this tendency.

  In fact, by 1867, as we shall see, the group was more than a decade old, and was already starting to show signs of disintegration as a coherent aesthetic unit, though its members stayed friends and the circle as such continued to meet. As one might expect, this was roughly at the moment when the various composers were beginning to emerge as clearly profiled personalities, and the profession of ideals was being replaced by strong and individual acts of creation. Indeed, it is by no means easy at this stage to identify in their music exactly what it is that makes them a unified group, as distinct from “outsiders” like Tchaikovsky or Alexander Serov or even Anton Rubinstein himself. Perhaps it was nothing m
ore than the spirit of the stockade, combined with a sense of loyalty to some notional set of principles, often betrayed in practice, in their work as in their lives. Even if one singles out particular attributes that can be traced back to the common source of Glinka, they are rarely if ever unique to the kuchka: Tchaikovsky and Serov, for instance, owed as much as they did to the composer of A Life for the Tsar. The kuchkist César Cui, on the other hand, owed relatively little to him. Moreover, they often disagreed sharply over the relative value of Glinka’s works. Stasov disliked A Life for the Tsar because its hero was a doglike peasant who sacrificed his life pointlessly to shore up a corrupt tyranny; Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov admired it because it gave them musical and dramatic clues for their own work. Stasov defended Ruslan and Lyudmila because it wasn’t A Life for the Tsar and Glinka had nevertheless to be idolized; but the composers of the circle loved it for its sheer fertility of idea, its fearless mixing of styles, its magic and fantasy, and its astonishing originality of sound and texture. They forgave its dramatic absurdity, rambling narrative, and vague characterization, things it shared with Russian fairy tales and that set it apart from the orderly dramas of the Western tradition they were so anxious to reject.

  Glinka, then, was an icon, part image, part symbol. No doubt the image explained the symbol. Glinka’s music, especially his operas, was so much more powerful and brilliant than anything previously composed by a Russian that it was inevitable to regard it as a starting point. What else was there? Bortnyansky, Catterino Cavos, Yevstigney Fomin, Alexey Verstovsky, Alyabyev, Gurilyov: relentlessly parochial, derivative, even amateurish figures, not fit for starting anything more exciting than a church service or a coffee morning. Glinka towered as far above such composers as Beethoven had towered above the Spohrs and Hummels and Clementis of his day. It was even tempting to regard him as practically the equal of Beethoven; at least his impact on the Russian composers who followed him was in some ways comparable to the impact of Beethoven on his German successors. He was at once a model and a touchstone; the very concept “Russian composer” seemed to depend on his authority. Above all, he was a source not shared by Western composers, a signpost that pointed away from the Italo-Germanic school tradition into regions inaccessible to them.

  Glinka is therefore a necessary starting point for us, too, if we hope to get under the creative skin of his successors, and especially of the kuchka. There will be other starting points, not all of them musical. None of them will explain the phenomenon of the kuchka. They will merely help locate it.

  Alexander Ulïbïshev was acquainted with Glinka by correspondence, though it seems unlikely that they had ever met. A dozen years before bringing Balakirev to St. Petersburg, he had published a three-volume biographical and analytical study of Mozart, and he had sent a copy to Glinka a few months after the premiere of Ruslan and Lyudmila. It was thus perfectly in the normal order of things for him to take his young protégé to call on the great composer. Mily of course knew Glinka’s music. He had even composed a piano fantasy, in the manner of Liszt, on themes from A Life for the Tsar. He knew and admired Kamarinskaya and the so-called Jota aragonesa, the first of two Spanish overtures, of which the second was the Souvenir d’une nuit d’été à Madrid. And he knew Ruslan (but perhaps admired it somewhat less).

  The two “Nizhegorodskies” arrived at Glinka’s apartment one evening in late December 1855, in the middle of a supper party the composer was giving for a group of friends, including Dargomïzhsky and Dargomïzhsky’s sister Sophia and her husband. Glinka’s own much younger sister, Lyudmila Shestakova, was also present, and she described the occasion. It was Christmas, and the atmosphere was convivial. Glinka asked Balakirev to play something, and he, with consummate tact, sat down and played his own arrangement of the trio from the final scene of act 1 of A Life for the Tsar. “My brother listened very attentively,” Shestakova reported, “and afterward they talked about music together for a long time.” It transpired that the two composers, thirty-three years apart in age, had many musical opinions in common, and by no means in every case opinions of which Ulïbïshev will have approved. On Russian music especially they found common ground: on the role of folk music, on orchestral writing, on form, aesthetics, and interpretation. Glinka, for all his authority as the doyen of Russian music, was inclined to be agreeable and a shade languid in conversation, while Balakirev, just turned nineteen, provincial and inexperienced, spoke with the confidence and certainty of untroubled youth. They were as if on an equal footing. “Balakirev,” Glinka told his sister, “is the first man in whom I have found views so closely approaching my own on everything concerning music.… He will in time become a second Glinka.”4

  A few weeks after this meeting, Ulïbïshev returned to Nizhny-Novgorod, leaving Balakirev to his own devices in the capital. Of course they remained in close touch, and Ulïbïshev continued to support the young man financially, until quite suddenly a year later he died and the patronage ceased. By that time, Balakirev had made a handful of concert appearances, and some influential acquaintances. At Glinka’s he had met Stasov and Alexander Serov, one of the most feared music critics in St. Petersburg. At a soirée of the university inspector Fitztum von Eckstedt he had befriended César Cui, a twenty-one-year-old student at the Academy of Military Engineering. But like his father he was a poor networker; and he detested concert giving. “I have to use all my will-power to play or conduct an orchestra in public,” he once wrote, “not of course without injury to my nature. It always struck me as horrible that if you write something, there’s no other way of hearing it than in a concert. It’s like telling a policeman all your most secret inner impulses. I feel morally defiled after every such public act.”5

  Thus Balakirev, poor and unknown, rejected the one means that might have gained him money and status in a capital city that, it must sometimes have seemed, understood little else. At this moment he could easily have faded back into oblivion. That he did not do so was a triumph of personality as much as of talent; but above all it was a feat of historical opportunism such as can only happen at the most inauspicious times and in the least favorable places.

  * * *

  * Note: All dates are Old Style.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Father Figure

  Until the first production of A Life for the Tsar, in November 1836, Glinka’s work had been strictly that of a dilettante. To call it amateurish would be to miss the point; among his early compositions are works of real brilliance and expertise. But—with the possible exception of a few songs—they are historically indolent, say nothing new or particularly personal, and merely confirm the essentially salonesque character of the culture for which they were conceived. In Italy he had rubbed shoulders with the famous composers of the day, including Donizetti and Bellini, had heard and to some extent imitated their music, but had at last begun to feel artistically homesick, fed up with his own aesthetic neutrality and with the facile lingua franca of the music that was all around him in one Italian opera house after another. “All the pieces I had composed to please the inhabitants of Milan,” he wrote near the end of his life, “had only convinced me that I was not following my own way and that I truthfully could not become an Italian. Longing for home led me, step by step, to think of composing like a Russian.”1 What that might mean, of course, remained to be seen. It was something for which no theory existed, but which, like all solutions to great problems, awaited the consideration of a unique practitioner of genius.

  Glinka’s immediate answer, when he arrived back in Russia, was to plan an opera with a specifically Russian plot, but not the kind of comic or picaresque-folksy subject that had dominated the vaudeville repertoire. Instead the composer’s choice fell on the historical tragedy of the peasant Ivan Susanin, a serf of the future first Romanov tsar, Mikhail Fyodorovich, who at the time of Mikhail’s election as tsar in 1613 was supposed to have saved his master from a murderous band of Polish and Cossack marauders by losing them in a deep forest, sacrificing his o
wn life in the process.

  Glinka himself was by no means a political animal. The subject seems to have been pressed on him by the writer Vasily Zhukovsky as an alternative to his own romantic short story “Mar’ina Roshcha,” for which Glinka had already started composing music. If so, Zhukovsky was probably being opportunistic on Glinka’s account. For the past eight years he had been tutor to the young tsarevich (the future Tsar Alexander II), and he was certainly well briefed on the concept of Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost’—Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality—which had been promulgated a year or two earlier by the minister of education, Sergey Uvarov, as an approved ideological basis for what Uvarov called “the education of the people.” The doctrine of Official Nationality, as it came to be known, was essentially a clever device for harnessing the dangerous energy of progressive national consciousness that had grown out of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, had infected especially the aristocratic and intellectual classes of Russian society, and had culminated in the Decembrist putsch against the new tsar, Nicholas I, in December 1825. In the Glinka libretto, largely written by the tsarevich’s secretary, Baron Georgy Rosen, Susanin at first greets the Polish soldiers (Roman Catholics, of course) by inviting them to his daughter’s wedding; but when they rudely brush this aside and insist on his showing them the way to Moscow, he changes his tune (literally) and, to a melody plainly colored by Russian Orthodox chant, loftily proclaims that “our native land is great and holy!… The road to Moscow is not for foreigners.” “I have no fear of death,” he adds, adopting the folk tune that had begun the opera as an apostrophe to the Russian motherland: “I will lay down my life for Holy Russia!”