Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Vladimir Stasov had the occasional habit of writing Balakirev long letters full of excitement about his latest musical discoveries. One such letter, about scalic melodies in Schumann’s Piano Quintet, has already been discussed. But this was only one part of an epic communication prompted, as it happened, by Stasov’s interest in the King Lear project. Having offered to put in his oar with the Alexandrinsky management, he starts suggesting actual themes for Balakirev’s score. He copies into the letter a tune which he calls “a very ancient English song, to the music of which English peasants in Gloucestershire to this day sing some kind of ballad about the Anglo-Norman invasion of England, in an English so old as to be now almost entirely incomprehensible.” Next he turns to “a clown’s song for Shakespeare’s As You Like It” that he claims “was used for this purpose in the English theatre in Shakespeare’s own lifetime.” The tune, which he quotes, turns out to be a close cousin to the Mendelssohn theme—so close, in fact, that a German music critic had speculated “that Mendelssohn must have got to know this song at the time of his English trip and made use of it for his Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Finally Stasov quotes a third, more lyrical tune that he again claims (not very plausibly in this case) to have served as music for the fairies in Shakespeare’s day. “I hope you like it,” he prompts. This time, however, Balakirev does not take the hint, but prefers a more wistful “English theme” which he seems to have found for himself, and which he composes very beautifully into the “soft music” that accompanies Lear’s awakening in Cordelia’s tent in act 4 of the play.6

  Taken as a whole, this is an accomplished and attractive score which certainly deserves to be better known. But, like Musorgsky’s Oedipus, it is largely devoid of any discernibly Russian profile. Even when Balakirev incorporates folk material, it is not Russian, and the treatment has a generic character which stays close to the harmonic textbook with a few decorative modal attachments. In fact the curious thing about this act 4 music is how closely it anticipates the lyrical manner of the English ruralist composers of the Vaughan Williams generation and after—curious, of course, because Balakirev was writing music for an English play in a Kentish setting, albeit that of a French encampment, and because Vaughan Williams was not even born for another dozen years. This is perhaps the one real invention in the whole work. Otherwise one has to bear in mind that, notwithstanding his air of authority in the presence of his young colleagues, Balakirev was still himself only in his early twenties, with an unformed style and a limited compositional technique to go with it. His previous work, apart from a breezy (but not very Spanish) Overture on a Spanish March Theme and a scrappy, medleylike Overture on Three Russian Songs, either had been for his own instrument or had at least included the piano in a significant role. Hardly any of it was noticeably personal. An early one-movement piano concerto in F-sharp minor, composed during his first year in St. Petersburg and given a single performance at a university concert in February 1856, had subsequently vanished into a bottom drawer; a piano sonata in B-flat minor from the same period had drawn on folk material for its first movement but was otherwise heavily indebted to Liszt. Neither work came out in print in Balakirev’s lifetime. Instead, his first published music was a set of twelve songs composed in the interstices of work on King Lear, settings of lyric poems by Lermontov, Alexey Koltsov, and the like. They are likeable but unambitious pieces in the romance style of Alyabyev and Gurilyov, a style that brings folk simplicity into the drawing room and attaches to it a certain mild emotional intensity that today might be called “attitude.” At this stage Balakirev writes on the whole more interestingly for piano than for voice. He almost entirely avoids the melismatic writing that Russian composers associated with the “drawn out” style of the protyazhnaya which allowed the Slav passion to flow, and instead composes one note to each syllable, as in genuine folk songs and nursery songs. Not one of these works could be said to propose a new direction for Russian music. At best they announce a talented young composer who might translate the European tendencies of the forties into a solid, interesting local equivalent.

  The King Lear Overture was played for the first time by an orchestra at a university concert in November 1859, but must have been run through before that, at Balakirev’s or Cui’s, in the four-hand piano transcription Musorgsky made as soon as it was finished in September. The three young composers were often together these evenings, at least during the long spring and winter months, with Stasov and other friends; and it had become a routine to present their latest pieces of work, or work in progress, for one another’s approval, or disapproval, as the case might be. Sometimes we know how they reacted; often we don’t. Musorgsky had played his Oedipus prelude at Stasov’s, and reported to Balakirev (who had not been present) that Stasov had liked it.7 Unfortunately he seems to have improvised, or played from memory, and never to have written the music down. The chorus, of course, we have, but we don’t know when or if he played it, and if so, what the reaction was.8 One evening in February 1859 there was a major event of this kind. A handwritten poster survives announcing a private performance, at the house of Cui’s new parents-in-law, of Gogol’s play Tyazhbe (The Lawsuit) and a one-act comic opera by Cui himself called Sïn’ Mandarina (The Mandarin’s Son). The cast is listed. Cui’s young wife, Malvina Bamberg, played the soprano lead, Yedi, the innkeeper’s daughter who (as in Smetana’s not-yet-written Bartered Bride) is being forced to marry against her will but ends up with the man she loves when he turns out to be the long-lost son of the local mandarin. Musorgsky sang the part of the mandarin, according to Stasov, “with such vitality and gaiety, with such skill and comedy of voice and diction, attitude and movement, that he made the whole company of friends and colleagues roar with laughter.”9

  It was Cui’s second opera. At the time of his first meeting with Musorgsky, as we saw, he had been writing a romantic opera based on Pushkin’s narrative poem A Prisoner of the Caucasus, and he had completed the two-act score in 1858 and submitted it for consideration by the Imperial Theatres directorate. It had even got as far as a run-through, but had then been rejected, supposedly on the grounds of inept orchestration.10 Meanwhile, he had composed The Mandarin’s Son to a libretto by Viktor Krïlov, a far less ambitious piece made up of musical numbers separated by spoken dialogue, in the manner of German comic Singspiels such as Weber’s Abu Hassan or the opéras comiques of Auber. The music shows talent but, as one might expect, little individuality. Yedi and her lover, the servant Muri, sing a pretty waltz duet of a mildly Gounodesque cut (exactly a month before the Paris premiere of Faust); there is an effective rage song for the Osmin figure Zay-Sang, who has a contract to marry Yedi, and attractive arias for Yedi and for the mandarin, lamenting the loss of his son. But there are few musical surprises, except perhaps of the undesirable kind: where Orientalisms might be expected, for instance, Cui produces a polonaise (for the innkeeper’s duet with the mandarin) and a polka (for the final quintet). The mandarin is announced, for no obvious reason, by a sprightly (and rather likable) march already heard at the start of the overture. From this jeu d’esprit by an untrained twenty-four-year-old one might well have predicted a successful future as a composer of light opera, if hardly as a member of a deviant avant-garde group of Russian nationalists. A Prisoner of the Caucasus, though, is a somewhat more interesting case.

  Exactly what had prompted the twenty-two-year-old fortifications graduate to embark on a tragic opera on this scale is a matter for conjecture. Perhaps it was the example of Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka, also based on a narrative poem by Pushkin, which had been premiered in St. Petersburg the year before. The libretto, again apparently by Krïlov (but not credited in the published score), incorporates one or two parts of Pushkin’s text verbatim and adapts other parts, while generally keeping fairly close to the original narrative outline. There is nothing supernatural or magical in the poem, unlike in Rusalka; but instead Pushkin, who was on holiday in the Crimea (and much the same age as Cui) when he wrote it, richly evokes
the atmosphere of those parts of the southern empire where ethnic Russia confronts the alien and by implication barbarian cultures of the annexed territories. The setting is a Circassian camp in the Caucasus, at a time of tribal warfare against the neighboring Cossacks. A Russian prisoner is dragged in amid wild rejoicing, exhausted and barely conscious. In the course of the poem he is befriended by a beautiful Circassian girl, who brings him food and drink and nurses him back to health. She eventually declares her love for him, but he tells her he is in love with a Russian girl in his home country and cannot reciprocate her feelings. In the end, she engineers his escape; suddenly he implores her to leave with him; she refuses, then seems to agree; but then, as he swims across the river to freedom, she throws herself into it and drowns.

  For Cui, one big problem with this tale was the need to flesh out the situation and the main characters and invent new ones to populate his stage. He gives the girl a name, Fatima; a companion called Mar’yam; a father, Kazenbek; and a worthy but uncomprehending princely betrothed, Abubekar. We learn rather little about the Prisoner, who alone remains nameless, and his Russian girl is mentioned only in the final duet with Fatima, so that Fatima’s reluctance to escape with him is hard to understand. Nevertheless, in the opera she does not do so, but stays behind and, when confronted by the enraged Circassians, stabs herself.11 Not surprisingly, Cui was unable really to capture the poem’s atmosphere, which is to some extent a function of Pushkin’s ironic detachment from his characters but intense involvement in the world in which they live and move: the beauty of the Caucasian landscape, the tedium of the Prisoner’s life, the daily activities of his captors. The libretto is more or less a conventional East-meets-West melodrama, not very well motivated, and with only brief glimmers of exotic local color. The characters are wooden, the musical design stereotyped. It sets no agenda; its “Orientalism” is limited to a few augmented seconds and fourths and some stamping choral rhythms; its realism is pasteboard; its Russianness negligible. In its original two-act form it must also have seemed pretty short-winded, proceeding in a rush from the capture of the Prisoner halfway through act 1 to Fatima’s wedding ceremony and her final scene with him in the second act. In 1881 Cui added an entirely new second act and the Circassian dances in what thus became act 3, and at the same time he revised the whole score, above all the orchestration, for publication, so that a clear picture of his achievement of 1857 is now by no means easy to make out.

  All the same, for a first opera it must have shown talent. Today it is more or less routine to write Cui off as a rank amateur who, moreover, lacked the individual genius of his circle colleagues. But this judgment, like many of its kind, is nearly always made in convenient ignorance of his work. A Prisoner of the Caucasus is certainly not a score of strong personality (how could it be?), nor is it to any measurable extent innovative or even eccentric, in the way that Glinka’s operas are innovative and eccentric. In fact, like King Lear, it is surprisingly free of Glinka-isms of any kind. One recurring motif for Kazenbek makes prominent melodic use of the flattened sixth degree, a quasi-exoticism Glinka cultivated (Cui’s 1881 second act has more of this kind of thing). But in general the music’s virtues are more discreet. In style and method it belongs broadly to the tradition of German romantic opera, transferred to a sub-Russian locale. Fatima has a highly singable D-minor aria rejecting her arranged marriage, with a brief cabaletta ending entirely from Italian stock; and for the newly captured Prisoner (tenor) there is an eloquent lament preceded by a particularly attractive F-sharp-major quartet in which he bids farewell to his freedom in a musical idiom perhaps a shade too redolent of opera buffa but unquestionably tuneful, even hummable, in its way. In fact Cui’s lyrical writing for the voice is always one of his strong suits. His phrasing, it’s true, is square, and usually at the service of a strict verse meter modelled on, when not actually taken from, Pushkin, who here—as elsewhere—uses meter partly as a distancing device, something not readily available to a composer of tragic opera. One might describe Cui’s work as a salon tragedy: agreeable, well made, at times touching, but by no means equal to the psychological and emotional range of its source. To be fair, it was neither the first nor the last Pushkin opera of which that would be true.

  Taking these various dramatic or quasi-dramatic works of the young Russian proto-radicals as a whole, the striking thing is how little they deviate from the best Western models. That they show talent is beyond question. They even, on a certain level, show expertise; at least, the conventional image of rank incompetence is not borne out by these scores, any more than by countless other works of twenty- and twenty-two-year-old composers not famous for their lifelong ineptitude. A similar picture emerges from the smaller, less ambitious works of the time. Between 1857 and 1861 Cui composed a number of songs—a set of three romances, op. 3, and a set of six, op. 5, settings of Lermontov, Pushkin, Krïlov, and others. Like much in the operas, they are sensitively written for voice, in a style that recalls the simpler lieder of Schumann, rhythmically and harmonically unambitious, mainly syllabic settings that stay close to the poetic meter and seldom venture anything strikingly individual, either in the word setting or in the accompaniment. This is music that serves an amateur market, and serves it well enough: neither inept nor in the least degree groundbreaking, not even noticeably Russian, in the sense that Balakirev’s songs are Russian.

  Musorgsky, too, was spending some of his time composing songs that reflect an acquaintance with the German repertoire. But something about these pieces, few though they are, hints at wider musical horizons and a particular gift for visualizing situations, even through mediocre poetry. He was still making keyboard transcriptions for Balakirev: the andante from Beethoven’s C-major “Razumovsky” Quartet; his teacher’s King Lear Overture. And he was writing piano pieces of his own, promisingly titled (“Ein Kinderscherz” and “Impromptu passionné”), but little better than salon music in effect. But with words at his disposal, his music is starting to respond in an altogether more vivid way. Koltsov’s “Veselïy chas” (“The Happy Hour”) is set as a rough drinking song, perhaps unremarkable as music, but strikingly graphic in its imagery: the clinking glasses in the piano introduction; the subito fortissimo on “Give the singing all you’ve got, lads” (“Gromkiye pesni gran’te, druz’ya”); and not least the bibulous profundity of the “tomorrow we die” middle section, in the mellow key of the flat submediant (F major in the key of A). His only other 1859 song, “The Leaves Rustled Sadly” (“List’ya shumeli unïlo”), is arresting musically as well as pictorially. In Alexey Pleshcheyev’s poem, an unnamed freedom fighter is being buried, mourned only by the leaves. (Pleshcheyev was a member of the Petrashevsky group, and spent ten years in exile in Siberia.)12 Once again, Musorgsky pictures the scene: the gloomy oak wood, lit only by the moon; the exaggerated weight of the foliage; the somber, elegiac cantilena of the bass voice. Musically, there is not much here that Musorgsky could not have found in, say, late Schubert. But the intensity of the imagery is Russian: not only the dark, remorseless lyricism of the vocal writing, but the heavy, tocsin-like piano part, which tolls on at the end, long after the singer has departed with the other dutiful mourners. This is not yet realism in Chernïshevsky’s sense, or in the sense that Musorgsky himself came to understand it. The motivic approach to scene painting is essentially German. But the painterly response, if not yet original in musical terms, is individual and to some extent prophetic.

  A young composer who could write as well as this (he was still only twenty) might have been expected to advance rapidly toward more substantial and original work. But it was precisely at this point that the fault lines in Musorgsky’s character, aggravated by the circumstances of his life, began seriously to interfere with his composing. His relations with Balakirev, as we saw, were becoming a problem. From what we know of his work during 1860 and 1861, we can deduce that Balakirev was still leaning on him to practice instrumental writing and orchestration. He was (or at least said he was) fini
shing off the F-sharp-minor piano sonata begun in 1859 but apparently now lost without trace. He composed an allegro in C major for piano duet, imagining—as Balakirev reported in December 1860 to their pianist friend Avdotya Zakharina—that “he has already accomplished a great deal for art in general and Russian art in particular.”13 The point is that Musorgsky had just dutifully announced to his teacher his intention “to work at voice leading [part writing], beginning with three voices; and I shall achieve something worthwhile and to the point; it’s a good stimulant for me to think that there’s something nonsensical about my harmony, which must not be and that’s that.”14 Soon, on a visit to Moscow in January 1861, he is composing a symphony in D, and by the sixteenth he is telling Balakirev that the scherzo—“a big symphonic one”—is finished apart from the second trio (even though, in his December letter, he has pleaded to be let off writing scherzos). An andante in F-sharp minor is planned. The symphony is still hanging around in 1862, but not a note of it survives, apart perhaps from a four-bar fragment in B major (the supposed key of the scherzo), which Musorgsky wrote into his 13 January letter to Balakirev but did not specifically identify.