Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  However tendentious Stasov’s criticisms, they were echoed by others. Balakirev of course was of precisely the same opinion. Musorgsky read the Vek article on the train to Moscow and grumbled to Balakirev especially about Rubinstein’s views on amateurism.

  He says that in Russia there are not and never have been musician-artists, but there have been and are musician-amateurs; he bases his argument on this, that the genuine artist works for glory and money, and not for anything else, and then he clinches his argument saying that it is impossible to call anyone an artist and proclaim him a talent who has written less than three or four good things during his lifetime. What prerogatives does Rubinstein have for such narrowness—glory and money and quantity rather than quality.9

  This, too, distorted Rubinstein’s argument, which was in essence that the amateur who has no need to compose (or perform or teach) for a living will become a dilettante who works spasmodically and never entirely masters his craft: money is not a test of quality but a necessary condition, and quantity its natural concomitant. But it is easy to see that for Musorgsky, still an uncertain pupil with vague ideas about composition but little or no technical knowledge, the article represented something of a threat. Very different was the case of Stasov’s old school friend Alexander Serov, by now an experienced and outspoken music critic, but also a would-be composer who had never made any serious attempt to offer his work to the public gaze, apparently precisely because of the conditions of Russian musical life that Rubinstein was describing.

  Serov remained silent about Rubinstein’s Vek article, but instead used the opening of a new venture called the Free Music School (FMS) just over a year later as the occasion for a vicious attack on the RMS and its founder. The FMS was the brainchild of a conductor by the name of Gavriyil Lomakin, who had built his reputation as director of the private choir of Count Dmitry Sheremetev, but had had the idea of using choral training as a framework for basic music teaching. This was an utterly different concept from that of the conservatory, and may even have been suggested to Lomakin by the prominent opponents of Rubinstein specifically as a counterthrust to that institution. Balakirev, for one, was certainly involved in the plan from an early stage, lending ideas and conducting the school’s orchestra. Lomakin was in charge of the choral training. In any large amateur chorus most of the singers are musically untrained enthusiasts who read music with difficulty if at all, but who love making music in the only way available to the untaught, by singing. They present an obvious opportunity for elementary instruction in music theory, sight singing, and those other ancillary terrors of childhood instrument lessons which grown-ups, on the other hand, welcome with the desperate enthusiasm of those who have discovered late the profound joys of self-improvement. Lomakin was evidently a talented choral conductor and a gifted communicator, and he quickly established the school’s concerts as major musical events in the St. Petersburg calendar, and its day and evening classes as a magnet for the would-be amateur musicians of the second and third ages in Russia.

  The FMS opened its doors in April 1862, and Serov seized on it at once as a pretext for a brutal onslaught against Rubinstein. His argument, in a nutshell, was that while the RMS was an essentially bogus institution imposed on the supine Russians by an incompetent but well-connected foreign virtuoso, Lomakin’s choral concerts (pre-FMS) were an authentic expression of the Russian spirit, amateur only in the very best sense, “gathered together and guided by that great master of his craft, the Russian conductor, without any outside help.” In the same way the new conservatory, due to open in September, was portrayed in the most lurid colors by comparison with the Free Music School.

  Russia itself cannot expect anything but positive harm from this institution, as from everything built upon lies, deceit, ignorance, narrow-mindedness and selfishness … We, I repeat, could have seen all this, and, perhaps, we do see and realize it, but … we doze on in our Slavonic apathy. Our “Yankels,” however, are not slumbering. On the contrary, they keep all musical activity in both St. Petersburg and Moscow under continual siege. Soon, with the founding of the conservatory they desired for themselves as the future breeding-ground for talentless musical civil servants, they begin to throw their weight around in the province they have acquired in a thoroughly despotic manner, trying to crush any musical talent in Russia that does not spring from within their own Yankel ranks. Out of a hatred of all that is Russian, they are doing all they can to nip in the bud any true and natural development of Russian musical talent.10

  Yankel is the Jewish innkeeper and money lender in Gogol’s Taras Bulba, who, when asked to help Taras Bulba rescue his son from the Poles, thinks first of the price on Bulba’s head, but tries “to suppress within him that everlasting obsession with money which winds like a worm around the soul of every Jew.” Serov is alleging that Rubinstein’s motive in founding the conservatory is greed and self-interest. But the suggestion is as preposterous as the allegation that Rubinstein is hostile to “Russian talent.” In reality the conservatory was so short of the necessary funds in the months before it opened that Rubinstein and his supporters had to go cap in hand to potential sponsors and were practically reduced to collecting money in the streets. During the five years of his early directorship, he contributed substantial sums of money from his own pocket to support indigent students. Meanwhile, his intensive teaching and administrative load often obstructed his own more lucrative career as a performer and composer. As for his supposed anti-Russianness, if Rubinstein had wanted to block Russian talent, he would hardly have wasted time and energy on a conservatory in the Russian capital, the interminable battles with ignorant autocrats and self-important civil servants, and the abuse to which he was subjected by a largely malevolent press.

  Serov, distinguished critic though he was undoubtedly capable of being, was partly motivated where Rubinstein was concerned by jealousy, partly by plain anti-Semitism, partly by personal disappointment. The fact that Rubinstein was a Jew certainly made his successes harder to stomach. Here was this foreigner, as Serov, like Stasov, chose to regard him, starting an artistically successful concert series, composing, performing, and conducting with brilliance, founding and running a conservatory; and Serov, a leading Petersburg music critic with aspirations to compose, was not even consulted, not invited to sit on the board of either organization, and meanwhile, under the conditions of Russian musical life, could barely scrape a living from his own public activities. His bitterness is perhaps understandable. What is more striking to the modern reader is the candor with which it is expressed. There is little attempt to conceal his malice, little attempt to argue his point of view in a coherent or rational way, not the slightest pretense at objectivity or fair-mindedness. As a result, the genuine arguments against Rubinstein go largely unarticulated. He was himself an autocrat and an authoritarian. He antagonized colleagues and supporters by his insistence on getting his own way in every detail, by his bullying micromanagement and reluctance to delegate. His own music, though attractive and well written, was devoid of individuality, but served willy-nilly as a model of the kind of good practice that had previously been beyond the reach of untaught Russian composers. Rubinstein, as we saw, was no progressive; he disliked the modern trends in Western music and certainly did not encourage their emulation by his students. His touchstone was Mendelssohn, dead fifteen years and, inconveniently, a fellow Jew. It was by no means ideal in Russian eyes to have such a figure alone guiding the minds, as well as the method, of the most naturally talented and impressionable of their young musicians.

  Stasov, unlike Serov, was motivated not by malice but by dogma. Personally he seems to have stayed on reasonable terms with Rubinstein, and he was certainly above Serov’s crude ad hominem anti-Semitism. Calling Rubinstein a foreigner was for him a device for positioning the conservatory outside his definition of what was truly Russian, and if that involved a measure of generalized anti-Semitism, well, so be it. Just at this moment he was at the height of his enthusiasm for anci
ent Rus, its myths and its music. His passion for the Sadko story coincides precisely with his attack on Rubinstein and his defense of the Russian amateur. A few months later he is criticizing Glinka for his dependence on certain harmonic clichés picked up from his study with Dehn in Berlin, but praising him for his grasp of the old Russian skazki (tales), greater, he claims, than even Pushkin’s or Lermontov’s. It is precisely this passion, this desperate aesthetic partisanship, that he maintains Serov lacks: Serov’s opinions are influenced by events, personal relationships, popular taste. There was some truth in this. For instance, Serov supported the FMS against the conservatory; but soon afterward, when he realized that Balakirev was involved with Lomakin, he turned against the FMS as well, having fallen out with Balakirev a year or so earlier over the latter’s opinion of his opera Judith. This inability to detach ideology from personal hostility, common enough at all times and in all places, was endemic in the small world of sixties St. Petersburg.

  Rubinstein survived as director of the conservatory until 1867, when he resigned over the refusal of the political authorities to guarantee him the degree of control he demanded, in what he still regarded as a personal fiefdom. At the same time he relinquished the directorship of the RMS. The circle were beside themselves with delight. “The Petersburg conservatory is falling apart,” Musorgsky wrote to Balakirev, who was conducting in Prague. “General-of-music Tupinstein has quarrelled with the conservatory clique and intends to resign—the poor professors have lost heart and you can now see them on the streets in sackcloth, with cheap penitential cigars (in place of candles) in their teeth (hands) and their heads strewn with ashes (from these cigars)—the heart contracts when you meet them.”11 At the conservatory Rubinstein was succeeded by Nikolay Zaremba, another theorist detested by the circle. The new conductor of the RMS, however, was none other than Balakirev, an appointment that apparently had Rubinstein’s support and may even have been his recommendation.

  CHAPTER 7

  First Steps

  Modest Musorgsky’s studies with Balakirev had pursued their unconventional course. On the one hand he was a dutiful, acquiescent pupil, ready to accept his master’s superiority in all things musical, intellectual, and psychological, though the master was barely two years his senior. On the other hand, the need to assert his own identity was becoming more urgent. Reading between the lines of a complicatedly self-analytical letter he wrote to Balakirev in October 1859, one detects echoes of disagreements about which Musorgsky felt a certain compunction, as if they reflected unresolved confusions in his own character. They had been arguing, most recently, about Christ and the Mosaic law of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” and evidently the discussion had become heated, since Musorgsky felt constrained to write an explanatory letter as soon as he got home in the small hours. The next day, he wrote again, assuring Balakirev of his deference while excusing his occasional fractiousness. “I must explain my conduct towards you from the very start of our acquaintance.—At first I recognized your priority; in our arguments, I saw the greater clarity and stability in your point of view. And however furious I sometimes became both with myself and with you, I had to admit the truth. From this it’s clear that my self-esteem provoked me into a stubborn persistence both in argument and in my general relations with you.”1 Musorgsky is, naturally, apologizing for what the authoritarian Balakirev must have seen as a lack of due respect. But others could recognize the virtues of this trait. “How skillful he was,” Vladimir Stasov’s daughter Sofia Fortunato recalled, “at defending his own convictions while respecting the views of others!”2 Later, as we shall see, he would mellow to the point where the respect would sometimes submerge the convictions altogether.

  Argument, no doubt, was one thing, artistic direction quite another. Musorgsky was wearying of the scherzos and allegros that Balakirev had set him, and instead was following his example in a more constructive way. At some time in the late spring of 1858, Stasov had suggested to Balakirev that he compose incidental music for the forthcoming production of Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Alexandrinsky Theatre; and although, despite Stasov’s promptings, no commission came from the theatre and there was never in any case much hope that Balakirev would finish in time for the play’s opening that December, he nevertheless worked away at the score, starting with an entr’acte before act 5, then continuing somewhat laboriously with the overture. Musorgsky must have known about this project; in a letter to Stasov from Nizhny-Novgorod in July 1858, partly about the King Lear idea, Balakirev specifically suggests Musorgsky as one of the people to whom their correspondence can be shown.3 And it was precisely at this time that Musorgsky embarked on his overture to Sophocles’ Oedipus, another famous play about a dispossessed king.

  No such overture has ever surfaced, though Musorgsky had it complete in his head and played it to Stasov that same July.4 Six months later, however, he finished a chorus which he labelled “Scene in the Temple from the tragedy Oedipus in Athens.” This chorus survives in several versions, was eventually reused by Musorgsky in his first opera, Salammbô, and can reasonably be considered the earliest work that in any way—however slight—foreshadows the composer of Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina.5 Exactly what sort of work it was meant to be, though, is by no means clear. The earliest manuscript includes stage directions, which might suggest an opera, or possibly choral music for inclusion in the play; but there is no specific correspondence with either of Sophocles’ Oedipus dramas, except to the extent that Oedipus’s children Antigone and Polynices appear, as in Oedipus at Colonus. It might simply be that, having started out with the idea of writing incidental music, Musorgsky found himself drawn into the subject quite independently, and without any practical association. The stage directions disappear from the later manuscripts, which probably reflects his vagueness about which Oedipus play the music was actually meant for. Oedipus in Athens, as Gerald Abraham was the first to point out, is a play by the Alexandran playwright Vladislav Ozerov (1804). Yet the second version of the chorus expressly identifies the tragedy in question as “Oedipus, by Sophocles,” while the third version refers only to a “Chorus of the People, from Oedipus.” Thirteen years later Musorgsky described the work to Lyudmila Shestakova as “music for Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus: a chorus in the temple of the Eumenides, before the entrance of Oedipus.” By that time, perhaps, it no longer mattered much either way.

  Whatever its intention, two things can be said about this three-minute chorus. In style, it entirely lacks individuality; even to place it as the work of a Russian composer would be difficult if it weren’t for the text in that language. It might be music from an early Verdi opera; and indeed the stage directions are more suggestive of the Old Testament paganism of, say, Nabucco, with its high priests, ritual sacrifices, and terror-struck crowds, than the structured, dignified intensity of Greek theatre. The people are assembling in the temple in a mood of anxious expectancy; a sacrifice is taking place. Oedipus and his children appear and “the people recoil in horror. The high priest enters holding a ritual sword and attended by two other priests. A muffled thunderclap. The people are rooted to the spot …” Oedipus’s death is redemptive, as in Sophocles, but his blood, in the sung text, is innocent, unlike that of the play’s “doer of dreadful deeds.”

  Conventional though it is in idiom, the chorus reveals a decided talent for dramatic portraiture in music. The crowd’s anxiety is caught in the hushed, panting unison of the opening phrase and the sudden crescendo of terror; the ending is subdued and prayerful, but ruffled by a single detail—the sharpened fourth degree (B-natural instead of the routine B-flat) which robs the harmony of its natural closure and leaves suspended the final question, “Will innocent blood save us?” With an acute instinct for situation, Musorgsky avoids peroration, but ends quickly, as if to say that silence is the most powerful response to public despair. This vivid sense of theatre and dramatic psychology was something Musorgsky could hardly have learned from Balakirev, who had no more experience of music
for the stage than he had himself. At the very moment that Musorgsky was completing the first version of his Oedipus chorus, in January 1859, Balakirev was struggling with his overture to King Lear, having already composed only the short entr’acte, material from which was providing the basis for the overture. Three more entr’actes and a processional would follow in the course of 1860 and early 1861. But the production meanwhile had long since come and gone, and Balakirev’s score was destined never to be played in any theatre during his lifetime.

  It is not, in any case, a stagey score. Apart from the processional, which accompanies Lear’s first entrance in act 1 (somewhat eccentrically in triple time), and the music for Lear’s awakening in act 4, the overture and entr’actes are all apparently curtain music, and their models—more or less overt—are mainly symphonic. Above all they are foreign: specifically German, and in one case English, or at least fantasy-English. For his own overture, Balakirev had plainly been studying the symphonies and theatre overtures of Schumann. He and Musorgsky had played them many a time four-hands, and the scores had all been available for several years. On occasion the modelling is so close, even down to the orchestration, that one might well suppose one was listening to a lost work of the Leipzig master, except that Balakirev’s writing is squarer and more repetitive, more dependent on imitation and sequential repetition. Of any debt to Glinka there is little trace. Instead the perhaps surprising image of the despised Mendelssohn pops up here and there, in the shape of his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For some reason—perhaps the Shakespeare connection—this work was an exception to Balakirev’s usually condescending attitude to Mendelssohn. Or maybe he simply found it a convenient model for his own Shakespeare music, however different the context. At one point in the entr’acte to act 3 the debt comes close to actual borrowing, in the puckish folk tune Balakirev attaches to the Fool, which seems to derive directly from Mendelssohn’s rustic tune for the mechanicals at the end of his intermezzo. It turns out, however, that the situation is rather more complicated than that.