Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  How much Stasov had read of the recent German literature on program music and its association with the progressive wing of new music in that country is hard to establish. The fact that he laid hands on Marx’s Beethoven so soon after its publication suggests that he will also have perused Franz Brendel’s History of Music in Italy, Germany and France, first published in 1852 and a key text on the linking of program music with the “Music of the Future,” as Wagner was calling it, or the “New German School,” as Brendel dubbed the somewhat arbitrary (and not very German) grouping of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner himself. The point was that treating music as portraiture or depiction or narrative freed it from the stereotyped requirements of classical form and harmony and opened up new vistas of musical sound and sense. For Brendel the climax of this process was the recent symphonic poems of Liszt. Berlioz was brilliant, but too wedded to what Brendel called “the poetic idea,” not musical enough in his thinking. Wagner was still the composer of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and the author of a series of provocative theoretical essays about opera whose musical outcome was as yet unknown. But Liszt was the very model of a composer who derived new, autonomous musical forms from literary or pictorial subject matter, and filled them with music that was vivid, daring, and original.

  For Stasov, the idea of free form went with another tendency that he wanted to promote in Russian music: a healthy distaste for theory and the authority of the academy. There was a strong element of sour grapes about this. Since there was no such thing as a conservatory of music in Russia, the only way for a Russian musician to acquire any kind of advanced musical training was to study abroad—in Germany, France, or Italy. And this would inevitably impose a procedural strait-jacket and Western colorings that would be hard to reconcile, Stasov thought, with the Russian spirit. Glinka, admittedly, had studied counterpoint with Dehn in Berlin. But he was at some pains in his Memoirs to play down the importance of such things. The director of the Milan Conservatory had tormented him, he said, with the intricacies of counterpoint, “but my lively fantasy could not be subjected to such dry and unpoetical work, and I soon gave up my lessons with him.” “Subsequently,” Stasov reports, “Dargomïzhsky too mastered precisely the same thing very quickly … [and] later on Dargomïzhsky’s successors and colleagues did not, like the Germans, expend long years pointlessly, but learned it very quickly and easily, like any other grammar.”11

  Stasov himself probably knew enough about music theory, and certainly, by the 1880s, enough about the composers in question, to know that this assessment was simply untrue. He knew all about the difficulties they had had finishing works, the lack of formal and technical sophistication, the short-windedness and lack of intellectual thrust, in much Russian music of the fifties and sixties. It simply did not suit his book to admit it. No doubt Glinka was right that too much counterpoint could stanch the imagination; but the right amount could just as well release it. Everything depended on the teaching. But since there were no reputable Russian composition teachers in the 1850s or early 1860s, it might well have been that the heavy hand of imported pedagogues would have crushed the fragile flower of native genius at that time. At any rate it would probably not have fitted the particular materials and subject matter that Stasov already had in mind as appropriate to an emerging national music.

  Thus Stasov’s objection to systematic theoretical study in music automatically conjured up Belinsky’s observation that “absolute nationality is only within the reach of men who are free from extraneous foreign influences.”12 Music theory was essentially a German invention; so the rejection of theory was anti-German, and furthermore implied a rejection of the dominant German musical culture, notwithstanding Stasov’s huge admiration for individual manifestations of that culture, just as Belinsky, for all his love of Western literature, saw that in order to create an identity of its own Russian literature had to separate itself from the overpowering influence of the French and English novel. But there was an important difference. For Belinsky, the insistence on a national literature was linked to the idea of social and political reform, but the connection was somewhat ambiguous. “Though nationality,” he wrote in 1841, “is intimately associated with historical development and the social forms of the nation, these two things are not one and the same thing;… both Peter the Great’s reforms and the Europeanism he introduced in no way changed, nor could they change, our nationality, but only reanimated it with the spirit of a new and richer life and provided it with a boundless sphere for manifestation and activity.”13 Belinsky draws a distinction between the Russian word narodnost’, which he takes to mean nationality in the sense of a prelapsarian, ethnically integrated people, and the loan word natsional’nost, which he understands in the greatly enriched sense of the nation at large, “the conglomerate body of all social estates and conditions.”

  There may be yet no nation in the people, but the nation has a people. The songs of Kirsha Danilov [an eighteenth-century itinerant musician and folk-song collector] possess narodnost; the poetry of Pushkin is national … Narodnost’ … presupposes something static, permanently established, not moving forward; it represents only what is actually present in the people in its given state. Nationality, on the contrary, contains not only what was and is, but what will be or can be. Nationality, in its evolution, draws together the extreme opposites which, to all intents and purposes, could not be foreseen or foretold.14

  Narodnost’, for all its coherence and purity, was the frozen condition of Russia before Peter the Great came along and thawed it into a flowing river with tributaries, confluences, and, at the far end, the great wide ocean.

  Stasov might have agreed with Belinsky’s historical analysis, but he would not have been so interested in his outcomes. For him narodnost’ possessed a cultural authenticity that far outweighed any associations with social or political backwardness. Like the Slavophiles, he saw some kind of salvation in the uniqueness—the essential non-Europeanness—of pre-Petrine Russia, though his emphasis was more on folklore and peasant culture than on the Orthodox Church, which for the Slavophiles was the focus of the distinction they drew between the communal spirit of old Russia and the growing materialism and individualism of the West. Stasov, in fact, was agnostic, and his interest in the Russian church and the Russian soul was primarily aesthetic. He would talk about the “flesh-and-bone inmost character of the Russian people [narod],” through which “one grows and draws strength.”15 He took a deep interest in the church modes—the various scales of the sung liturgy—and explained them to Balakirev, pointing out their differences and the fact that they occur also in Russian folk music. Excited by the possibilities they offer a modern composer, he urges Balakirev to get to know them through use rather than study. “Imagine,” he writes, “what new ammunition you would bring back here [Balakirev is in Nizhny-Novgorod]. Instead of the two scales new music possesses [major and minor] … you’d suddenly have a whole eight!! What a new source of melody and harmony!”16

  Stasov was also becoming obsessed with Russian folklore, not because it provided a model for social reform but because it embodied a spirit that was fundamentally unlike and unrelated to anything in the Western tradition: a spirit purely Russian in character and origin. In fact he was slow to bring this point of view into focus. In a long memorial article on Glinka spread over three issues of the Russkiy vestnik in 1857, he had argued that A Life for the Tsar was specifically weakened by its reliance on folk models, when the essence of nationality “is contained not in melodies, but in the general character, in the sum total of conditions—diverse and wide-ranging.”17 But this, as Taruskin explains, was part of a highly tendentious polemic in favor of Ruslan and Lyudmila, and particularly in praise of that work’s many dramatic absurdities and irrelevancies, which happened to suit Stasov’s current idea that operatic verisimilitude—the pretense that traditional opera had anything to do with realism—was dead. The idea was no more than a temporary convenience. Quite soon he is trying to interest Balakirev in th
e ancient tale of the merchant Sadko, who descends to the seabed and marries the Sea King’s daughter, but whose gusli (psaltery) playing at their wedding inspires such frenzied dancing that a great storm blows up, the Sea Kingdom comes to an end, and Sadko has to return to his real wife in his native Novgorod. Stasov is excited by the tortuous detail and bizarre situations of this story, and rages correspondingly against the “unbearable vulgarity” of all those sailors’ songs, shepherds’ songs, and yeomen’s songs in Wagner, Haydn, and Félicien David. “It might,” he concedes, “be a pendant to Gluck’s Orfeo, but with a totally different subject and in a Russian mold.”

  Anyone who wants to grasp Russian art, ancient Russian life, must start by putting out of his mind the wish to seek out with us anything resembling the Greek Olympus or the Greek gods, Neptune and company. With us everything is different, a quite different tone, different situations, different characters, different background, different scenery. Neptune in an izba! Neptune and the dance of the Sea King! Neptune a lover of gusli music! How unlike the Greek temper all this is, how it all goes against the habits and tastes of the European public, and of our apelike public as well! And meanwhile what new, fresh, colorful, succulent themes. What tableaux of Russian nature on the island of the Sea King, what themes of pagan antiquity, of ancient worship, of our ancient life, at the start, on the ship, then at the wedding feast, people and gods all together. And finally, at the very end, a tableau of old Novgorod and the river Volkhov—a marvellous subject, it seems to me!18

  The point about the people and gods reflects the pre-Petrine structure described also by Belinsky, but productively superseded, in his view, by Peter the Great. Before Peter, he explains, “the wedding of the lowliest village muzhik was the same as that of the greatest boyar: the difference was merely a matter of abundance of viands, costliness of clothing—in short, the importance and sum of expenditure. The same knout hung over both the muzhik and the boyar, for whom it was misfortune but not dishonor. The serf easily understood his master, the boyar, without the slightest strain on his intelligence; the boyar understood his serf without need of coming down to his intellection. The same corn brandy cheered the hearts of both …”19 Peter the Great was a hero because he had breathed life into this dead system, and given it the potential for reform, even if the present situation was disagreeable. But Stasov’s liberalism was skin deep, apolitical. He was attracted by what he saw as the egalitarian aspects of mythic Russia, but what he really loved was its authentic Russianness, its whiff of ancient ritual and magic, its fairy-tale colorfulness, and that rambling irrationality that comes with the additive nature of old folk tales. This was the essence of narodnost’, and it was narodnost’, if he was completely honest, that made his blood tingle, however much he might side with reformist natsional’nost in his mind, his conversation and his friendships.

  The fascination with folk myth and ritual led naturally to another of Stasov’s illiberal proccupations, what one might call the Oriental connection. In Ruslan and Lyudmila, his preferred Glinka opera, the base setting is Kievan Rus; but when Ruslan and his fellow suitors set off in search of the abducted Lyudmila, they implicitly head east—that is, into strange lands where magic is commonplace and good and evil wage perpetual war through the lives of anyone foolhardy enough to travel that route. Of course, “east” has to be understood metaphorically. It could embrace any of those territories Russia had annexed since 1800, including the Caucasus (to the south), much of central Asia to the east of the Caspian Sea, even Finland to the northwest. It was an Orient of the mind, but nonetheless potent for that. Its general character was in fact Islamic rather than Chinese, its climate hot and sultry, conducive to enchanted sleep and sensual abandon, an enticing but dangerous place of unreason and forgetfulness. Stasov, though, took a scholarly view of these unbookish attributes. Russian culture, he argued, was essentially Asiatic in origin: its language, its clothes, its customs, its architecture, its utensils, its ornaments, even its stories and bardic poems, its melodies and its harmonies—all came from the East, whether from central Asia, from India or Persia, from the Ottoman Empire, or from Byzantium.20

  The argument, with all its obvious flaws and biases (Stasov knew nothing about Eastern harmony; the Russian language is a hybrid of Eastern and Western elements, and its alphabet is Greek) was no doubt a considered deduction from his knowledge of Eastern art. Its application to music was a great deal more speculative, and not in itself very useful. But it gave him an extra peg on which to hang his hostility to German music, a music as remote from the exotic East as one might suppose it possible to find. The East, by comparison, belonged to Russia. To a Russian the Orient was at the same time strange and familiar. He looked across his eastern (or, preferably, southern) border and there it was, beckoning, yet veiled and mysterious, girt with high mountains and washed by the dark sea, geographical features that, as a matter of fact, were unknown to most Russians. No wonder so many Russian writers had evoked these fringes of the empire: Pushkin in his Prisoner of the Caucasus and his verse tales Tsar Saltan and The Golden Cockerel; Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time; Tolstoy, just recently, in his Sevastopol Sketches. These authors, admittedly, were describing or evoking; they were not mimicking. Stasov in effect wanted Russian music to absorb Oriental elements, just as, he later hyperbolically claimed, “every truly talented European architect, sculptor, and painter has tried to reproduce the unique forms of the East.” Only music, he grumbled, had dragged its heels. The alla turca episodes in Mozart and Beethoven were little more than gestures, of no real significance. It would be the task of the new generation of Russian composers to create a new idiom that incorporated orientalism as an organic element in a recognizably national musical language, folk-song-based, taking its subject matter from Russian history or myth, tales of the East, or the reality of Russian life. It was a task only Russians could perform; and nothing a conservatory could offer would help them perform it.

  CHAPTER 6

  New Institutions

  In the same year that Chernïshevsky published his influential master’s thesis, Anton Rubinstein’s article “Die Componisten Russland’s”—“The Composers of Russia”—came out in the Viennese Blätter für Musik, Theater und Kunst. The title was bland enough, and to tell the truth the article amounted to not much more than a brisk survey of the provincial scene in St. Petersburg, with lists of composers and brief outlines of work, all almost entirely unknown even to specialists outside Russia itself. It was, however, read or at least reported in Russia; and it caused trouble.

  Rubinstein himself was Russian in a slightly complicated sense. His parents were converted Jews who lived in a Ukrainian-speaking part of Transdniestria, on the Russian side of the river Dniestr which at that time divided the tsarist empire from Romanian-speaking Bessarabia. The region was in the so-called Pale of Settlement, the mainly non-Russian fringe to which Jews in the empire had been confined by law since 1791. However, having converted while Anton was still an infant, the Rubinsteins were no longer trapped in the Pale, and they moved to Moscow in about 1834, when he was four or five years old. There he took piano lessons, progressed with barely credible rapidity, and was soon touring Europe as a child prodigy in the company of his teacher, Alexander Villoing. For most of the nine years from 1839 to 1848 he lived abroad, in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. He met Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer. In Berlin he studied theory with Glinka’s old teacher, Siegfried Dehn, and he only returned to Russia in 1848 in order to escape the widespread revolutions in the West that year.

  The next six years in St. Petersburg were crucial for Rubinstein in establishing himself as a virtuoso pianist and composer. He was patronized by Nicholas I’s widowed sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovna; he had several operas staged, conducted the first performance of his “Ocean” Symphony, and appeared many times as a solo pianist. By the time he left St. Petersburg for a European concert tour in 1854, his reputation in Russia, at least as a pianist and conductor, was absolutely
secure. His music, admittedly, had made less of an impact. It was fluent, competent, but not strikingly individual, and it always made the greatest effect when he himself played it. It must have been his inability to make solid progress as a composer with the Russian public and critics that, among other things, nourished his sense of dissatisfaction with the St. Petersburg musical scene as a whole. And yet the Viennese article did not dwell on such matters, but instead attempted an assessment of the composers working in Russia and of the creative issues raised by their best work. And it was precisely here that he gave what was no doubt unintentional offense.