Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  If these were Musorgsky’s only blanks in the early sixties, one might be tempted to blame Balakirev for bullying him into didactic projects that did not suit him, taking advantage of his compliant nature and tendency to self-denigration. But there is a good deal else besides. During the summer of 1860 he composed a pair of choruses for his Oedipus project and began to plan what he called “a whole act on Bald Mountain (from Mengden’s drama The Witch), a witches’ sabbath, separate episodes of sorcerers, a solemn march for all this nastiness, a finale—the glorification of the sabbath which with Mengden is embodied in the master of the whole festival on Bald Mountain.” He also wrote a vocal quartet called “Lord of My Days.” These are obviously suggestive projects, which probably had nothing to do with Balakirev. But as far as is known for certain, not a note of them survives, either. Gerald Abraham speculated, on good intuition but without hard evidence, that the Oedipus choruses subsequently found their way, along with the temple scene, into Salammbô. As for the Bald Mountain, the idea in all its detail is so close to what would eventually be Musorgsky’s most brilliant orchestral score that it is hard to think of it as an essentially different piece. It looks, though, as if this would have been a vocal work, perhaps even incidental or staged music.15 In fact the subject—or something very like it—had come up two Christmases before, in a discussion between the Musorgsky brothers, Balakirev, and one or two others, on the possibility of turning Gogol’s story “St. John’s Eve” into a three-act opera.16 As before, the visualization is striking, almost as if Musorgsky found it easy to picture the kind of work he would like to write, but as yet had no idea how to write it. A programmatic model for the idea might have been the finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. But that would hardly have been a useful model musically for a Russian composer of Musorgsky’s inexperience.

  For the best part of three years, then, he wrote hardly anything of significance, and almost nothing that he was prepared to keep and put his name to. In 1862 he composed literally nothing apart from whatever he may have added to the ill-fated symphony, together with a piano-duet transcription of Beethoven’s op. 130 string quartet. He even withheld the Oedipus temple chorus from a possible performance by the RMS in the winter of 1860–61, telling Dmitry Stasov, who was on the RMS committee, that the chorus was too quick and short to stand alone, and boasting to Balakirev that he had thereby cocked a snook at Rubinstein. It appears that he was nervous about the effect of the piece, and unwilling to expose himself to the ridicule of his political enemies. But this fear, if fear it was, was merely one manifestation of a general malaise that was evidently infecting every aspect of his life.

  Musorgsky, as we saw in chapter 3, had been experiencing the perturbations of what he himself analyzed in retrospect as delayed adolescence. In his letters to Balakirev he describes the symptoms with disconcerting candor. But he is vague about the causes, perhaps because, like most adolescents, he is not sure what they are. Modern scholarship has been less reticent. Musorgsky has been flatly labelled sexless, homosexual, masochistic, and even, rather disappointingly, a discreet heterosexual. There is in fact very little evidence for any of these diagnoses.17 Of homosexuality in his known behavior there is not the slightest trace, and one can only attribute this assumption to a certain modern tendency to regard sexual discretion as more or less conclusive evidence of what one is no longer allowed to call deviance. By far the most probable thing is that he was an uneasy heterosexual nervous of physical commitment. He seems to have been attractive to young women, but tended to erect a wall of polite badinage against any threat of direct emotional involvement in that quarter. He was clearly more comfortable with older, preferably married women, and the resulting sense of security perhaps occasionally landed him in mildly disturbing situations before he had time to put up the necessary barriers.

  Something of the sort happened in the late spring and early summer of 1859, when he spent several weeks of May and June at the manorial estate of his friend Stepan Shilovsky and his wife, Maria, at the village of Glebovo, near Voskresensk on the Moscow River. Maria Shilovskaya was an amateur singer who had Dargomïzhsky as a teacher and liked to invite musicians for extended stays on the estate. Before her marriage, according to the editors of The Musorgsky Reader, she had pursued “a lurid career as salon singer, during which she dabbled in composing and exercised other less specialised talents which had earned her the distinction of ‘the most charming woman of her time.’ ”18 The implication, of course, is that she fluttered her eyelashes at Musorgsky and that he, nine years younger and vastly less experienced, duly succumbed. In fact no such conclusion can be drawn even from between the lines of his correspondence of the time. In a letter to Balakirev he describes his journey to Glebovo and he paints a vivid but unnuanced picture of the place itself. The house is luxuriously situated on a hill overlooking the home farm and surrounded by a kind of English park, “all very splendid, as you’d expect, since Shilovsky is stinking rich.” “The host and hostess are very nice,” he adds, “and Shilovskaya is entirely attentive to her guests.”19 There is a house choir rehearsing Bortnyansky and choruses from A Life for the Tsar, a performance of which is planned with Shilovskaya as (presumably) Antonida and Konstantin Lyadov conducting. Musorgsky is going to work with them.

  Did Shilovskaya really set her cap at him, now or later, and did he respond? (The reverse interpretation, one feels, would be inconceivable.) The evidence is circumstantial, to put it mildly. Less than two years later, Vladimir Stasov wrote to Balakirev asking him to persuade Musorgsky “to go straight to Maria, fall on his knees before her, weep, tear his hair, climb inside her skirt, do something nice to her: only force her by hook or by crook to summon [Konstantin] Lyadov and compel him to give the third entr’acte of Ruslan.”20 This assumption of influence is in a curious way more suggestive than the actual reality, since it implies a reputation. Musorgsky himself had just written to Balakirev, reminding him that “I was once stuck, not musically, but morally—I crawled out; but you’ll learn one day how things were—if ever our conversation should touch on it—it had something to do with a woman.”21 Was that woman Maria Shilovskaya? And was Musorgsky thinking of her when, years later, he compared the viselike grip of Darwin’s Descent of Man (which he was reading at the time) to that of a passionate lover?

  If a strong, passionate and loving woman clasps the man she loves firmly in her arms, he will recognize violence, but will have no wish to tear himself away from her embrace, because this violence is “over the border of bliss,” because from this violence, “youthful blood bursts into flame.” I am not ashamed of the comparison: however much you may twist and flirt with the truth, anyone who has experienced love in all its freedom and power has lived and will remember that he has lived beautifully, and will not cast a shadow on his former bliss.22

  The next summer (1860) Musorgsky was again at Glebovo, and for a much longer stay. He arrived there at the end of May, travelling by train via Moscow, and he seems not to have left until mid-September. It was on this visit that he tinkered with the Mengden project and composed the extra choruses for Oedipus. But otherwise we know very little about how he passed the long Russian summer in the quiet, dull Muscovy countryside. Probably he also composed the romance “Shto vam slova lyubvi?” (words by Alexander Ammosov), which is dedicated to Maria Shilovskaya.

  What are words of love to you?

  You call it delirium.

  What are my tears to you?

  Tears, too, you won’t understand.

  The music begins in agitation, but switches halfway through to a mood of dreamy reflection, with repeated chords reminiscent of the Schumann of “Die Lotosblume.” The poet now addresses a third party: “I love her alone, as I love my life, as I love the light.” Back in St. Petersburg, Musorgsky reported to Balakirev that he had been ill for most of the summer, “so that I could devote myself to music only at brief intervals; most of the time from May to August my brain was weak and highly irritated.” Quite often thro
ughout his life he refers to nervous ailments, without being clear that any clinical condition is involved. On this particular occasion it would be easy to interpret his mental state as an inability to concentrate on his work because of some emotional or even sexual distraction. But in the end this can only be speculation.

  Whatever the cause of Musorgsky’s mental troubles, they were taken seriously by his friends. Eventually Balakirev wrote him a heart-to-heart letter chiding him for preferring the company of what Balakirev called “limited personalities.”23 Musorgsky was in Moscow at the time, staying at the Shilovskys’ house in the Degtyarni pereulok, but probably in their absence, since he was sharing it with a friend called Shchukarov, who seems to be one of the characters Balakirev had complained about. He had evidently not spared Musorgsky’s feelings; “heated and hasty” is how Musorgsky describes his letter. “As to my being swamped,” he replies, “and having to be pulled out of the swamp, I say only this—if I have talent—I will not be swamped as long as my brain is stimulated.” But another passage sounds a more ominous note: “As to my preference for limited personalities, that calls for only one answer: ‘tell me who you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.’ And so logically—I, too, must be limited.” His friends, he insists, are cultivated and intelligent. But then so too were the friends who, one day, would bring him down.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Third Rome: The Clerk and the Midshipman

  On his way home from Glebovo in June 1859, Musorgsky had paid a brief visit to Moscow. It was his first acquaintance with the ancient capital, which his friend Nikolay Borozdin, an amateur composer and legal clerk who lived there, had nicknamed Jericho in honor of its sheer antiquity. On a visit a year before, Balakirev had described the city in lyrical terms. “In my soul,” he had told Stasov, “were born many beautiful feelings which I can’t describe to you. Here I felt with pride that I am Russian.”1 Now Musorgsky seems to echo Balakirev’s letter, as if Stasov had shown it to him. “Even as I approached Jericho,” he writes, “I noticed its originality, how its belfries and cupolas reeked of antiquity,… The wonderful Kremlin—I approached it with involuntary reverence. Red Square, in which have happened so many remarkable and chaotic events … this is holy antiquity … I climbed the bell tower of Ivan the Great with its wonderful view of Moscow …” But he is touched by the squalor as much as by the splendor: “Such beggars and swindlers as the world has never brought forth … In general Moscow transported me to another world—an ancient world (a world which, though filthy, for some reason has an agreeable effect on me) … You know that I was a cosmopolite, but now there’s some kind of rebirth: everything Russian is close to me.”2

  Moscow was the third Rome, the self-styled spiritual capital of Orthodoxy ever since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Everything that Peter the Great had tried to root out of Russian life had its home here: the power of the church, the backwardness and barbarity, the solemn, slow existence, the cultural provincialism, the whiff of Asia and the East. It was the deliberate burning of old wooden Moscow that had destroyed Napoleon. To a large extent Moscow was and remained the deepest symbol of Russianness, even for those whose lives were fixed in St. Petersburg. “There is a part of Moscow in us all,” Pushkin’s friend Filipp Vigel wrote, “and no Russian can expunge Moscow.”3 Above all, Moscow was the spiritual home of the Slavophiles, the group of philosophers who rejected the view that Russia’s salvation lay in modelling itself industrially, economically, and culturally on Western Europe, and argued that, on the contrary, she should cleave to her own traditions—the traditions of the Orthodox Church and ancient rural institutions such as the village-commune, the obshchina. In Moscow, the Slavophiles felt closer to the Russian soil, closer to the collective, conciliar spirit that their leading thinker, Alexis Khomyakov, had labelled sobornost, and remote from the materialism, rationalism, and individualism that they perceived in Western society and that for Russians was symbolized by West-facing, Western-planned St. Petersburg.

  Stasov’s interest in old Russia had been emerging gradually in recent years. Much later, when he was writing a history of the artistic movements of the time, he wanted to give the impression that by the early 1860s “an independent and original, profoundly national school had already come into being with us.”4 In support of this contention, however, he could only cite a motley repertoire of early works—Balakirev’s Overture on Three Russian Themes and his King Lear Overture, his and Cui’s early songs, the scherzos of Musorgsky and Cui that Rubinstein conducted in the first season of the RMS: a collection neither independent nor profound, and mostly devoid of any recognizably “national” character at all.

  In truth, the concept of a Russian school was still in its infancy in 1860. Glinka’s operas hardly amounted to a definition of anything so specific, and in any case there was disagreement as to precisely what they represented; Stasov himself had difficulty making up his mind about them. In his Glinka biography, written in some haste immediately after the composer’s death in 1857, he played down the national element in A Life for the Tsar. In the thirties, he argued,

  it was thought that in order to invest his work with national character, an artist had to put into it, as in a new setting, something that already existed among the people, born of their spontaneous creative instinct. People wanted and demanded the impossible: the amalgamation of old materials with a new art; they forgot that the old materials belonged to their own specific time and that a new art that had already succeeded in working out its own forms, also needed new materials.5

  It would be hard to conceive a more thorough refutation of his later view that “in order to be national, in order to express the spirit and soul of a nation, [music] must be directed at the very roots of the people’s life.” “Russian musicians,” he now insisted, “are no longer outsiders, but are ‘at home’ in that world from which our folk melodies, indeed all Slavic melodies, emerged into the light, and therefore they are able to use them freely, to have them appear in all the truth and strength of their coloring, personality, and character. Glinka’s achievement is now widely known and recognized. He blazed a new trail; he created a national opera in forms that exist nowhere else in Europe.”6 But this trail was barely perceptible in 1860. What else was there? Dargomïzhsky’s Esmeralda had been a grand opera in the manner of Meyerbeer, and had in any case vanished without trace. His Rusalka had folk elements and some novel word treatments, but had made few waves; and since then he had sulked and completed nothing for the stage.

  In Balakirev’s and Musorgsky’s response to Moscow one senses, rather, a new revelation, something that on a certain level took them by surprise. In Balakirev’s case, at least, it went with his current reading. Like many educated Russians in the late 1850s, he was engrossed in the volumes of Sergey Solovyov’s vast History of Russia from the Most Ancient Times, which had been coming out annually since 1851. Solovyov, in his turn, was acting in part as a corrective and expansion of Nikolay Karamzin’s incomplete twelve-volume history, with its emphasis on great men as the driving force. Balakirev and Stasov had been discussing Solovyov, in particular an article of his, “The Manners, Customs, and Religion of the Slavs, Especially in the East, in Pagan Times,” just before Balakirev embarked on a trip down the Volga collecting folk songs in the summer of 1860. The idea that Russia’s true nature was to be sought in the study of its people and their way of life was coming into focus and taking on a new intensity just at a time when the need for a special artistic direction was becoming more and more urgent.

  Russian historiography before Karamzin had been effectively nonexistent, and his work made an electrifying impact on his fellow countrymen’s sense of themselves as Russians, just when that consciousness was at its most suggestible after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812. Karamzin was to a significant degree an “official” historian. He saw the history of Russia substantially in terms of the tsars; but at the same time he assembled a huge store of background information about the Russian people, so that the i
dea of an ethnographically based history was already latent in his work, even when not fully realized. Under the conditions of autocracy that survived at least until the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the idea that historians might take an interest in the ordinary life of the peasantry inevitably took on a political coloring. So when intellectuals like Balakirev and Stasov discussed the work of Solovyov or his historian contemporaries Nikolay Kostomarov or Konstantin Kavelin, they would end up talking about the historical role of the people, their political institutions, and, naturally enough, their art. In Kostomarov, for example, they encountered the distinction between what he called the “Two Russian Nationalities,” the Great Russians and the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the parallel distinction between what Kostomarov saw as the centralizing, statist instincts of the Russians and the tendency of the Ukrainians toward local institutions, the veche (or popular assembly), and the supposedly democratic structure of the federated cities of Kievan Rus.