Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  While Balakirev was exploring the scenery and culture of the Caucasus, Musorgsky had disappeared, as we have already seen, to the family estate at Karevo. The final arrangements of the emancipation were under way. And meanwhile he, too, was writing songs, either because the business distractions were too great to allow concentrated work on anything more substantial (“Thanks to the bailiff,” he told Cui, “my brain is at the police station”),29 or because, having abandoned the symphony he had spent the last two years not composing, he simply lacked a project that demanded his full attention. In his case, the poetry book fell open at Goethe, and specifically at one of the Harper’s songs in Wilhelm Meister: “An die Thüren will ich schleichen” (“Song of the Old Man,” “Pesn’ startsa”). Then, after a brief return to his romance style in Vasily Kurochkin’s “But If I Could Only Meet You” (“No yesli bï s toboyu ya vstretitsya mogla”), he too turned to Byron, and composed his “Song of Saul Before His Last Battle” (“Tsar’ Saul,” translated by Pavel Kozlov).

  Just as Balakirev’s Georgian song opened up new musical territory in the Orient of the Russian mind, so Musorgsky’s settings of Goethe and Byron conjured up a vivid dramatic landscape, part theatrical, part psychological, that may have surprised even the composer himself. Goethe’s Harper, blind and tortured by guilt as he creeps from door to door begging for food, suggested to him both an image and an action. “A beggar,” he wrote pointedly to Cui, “can sing my music with a clear conscience” (whatever sin he may have committed, that is, within the virtual frame of the song).30 As with Balakirev, Schumann stands somewhere behind this music. His own beautiful setting of the poem has the same plodding gait and the same way of leading the bass voice attentively along a pathway marked out by the piano. But Musorgsky’s song has a religious tinge, a mendicant spirituality, that Schumann’s lacks, and that seems to arise from the modal character of the melody, which is pure aeolian (A to A on the white keys of the piano, though Musorgsky has it characteristically black, in E-flat minor). Even the piano strays from the mode in only five of the song’s thirty-five bars. The penitential flavor is emphasized by the chantlike vocal line and by the accompaniment’s pseudo-chorale, ending, after a brief coda (another Schumann touch), on a mysterious, inconclusive seventh chord, deep in the piano.

  The Byron poem inspires a portrait of quite a different kind. This is the biblical Saul—brusque, arbitrary, violent, but facing death with unflinching heroism—and Musorgsky portrays him with a certain grudging admiration for the sheer ferocity of a warrior who can instruct his commanders to slaughter him in case of defeat.31 The 1863 setting is in fact a rougher, less refined version than the one now usually sung, which is a revision from the late sixties (to a different translation by Kozlov). It has more daring harmony, more jagged phrasing, and a bigger, longer piano part. The opening is typical: the original version has a five-bar piano introduction made up of a pair of bars in four-four time followed by three bars in three-four, with a trumpet fanfare and a claxon of whole-tone chords, whereas the revision gets rid of the claxon and the three-four bars and hurries into the running quaver figure that accompanies the voice entry. In the original, too, the setting of the first two words, “O vozhdi!” (Byron’s “Warriors and chiefs!”), is detached from the rest of the line, making it more imperious, more stagey. In revising the song, Musorgsky seems to have slightly lost his nerve (or given in to his publisher)32 and smoothed out the effect, while judiciously shortening the song as a whole. Later still he orchestrated the revised version. But the original is somehow, in its rough-and-ready way, more exciting.33

  It is hard to escape the impression with this song that Musorgsky still has Serov’s music for Holofernes running through his head. Admittedly his King Saul is a tenor or high baritone (high A-flats in the key of E-flat minor, which become F-sharps in the revised version in C-sharp minor). But the character portraits have many points in common. The fanfares that introduce the bass Holofernes’s “Pobednaya truba” (“Victorious trumpet of our glory everywhere”) in act 3 of Judith are much the same as the ones that announce Saul’s speech to his generals, complete with following dissonance, which Serov, characteristically, resolves in conventional fashion but Musorgsky, no less typically, leaves hanging, unresolved. Both commanders then launch into strident, warlike marches, melodically and rhythmically similar, but in harmony always strikingly different, since Serov rarely if ever strays from the textbook while Musorgsky studiously ignores the rules and instead treats the accompaniment as a suitable backcloth to Saul’s heroic but unruly directives.

  One might speculate that Musorgsky was influenced, in this wild portrait of arbitrary power, by Mikhail Sariotti’s notorious performance as Holofernes—a blueprint for the ranting, histrionic Russian basses of the Chaliapin era and beyond. But if so, the model for Musorgsky’s Harper surely lay elsewhere, in the lyric bass epitomized by the great Osip Petrov, Glinka’s first Susanin.34 In any case, both styles would soon prove essential, when Musorgsky himself began to contemplate music for the stage.

  CHAPTER 10

  An African Priestess and a Scottish Bride

  Musorgsky returned to St. Petersburg in September 1863, and moved into a large apartment by the Kokushkin Bridge over the Griboyedova Canal, a short step from the Haymarket (Sennaya ploshad’). The apartment was rented by three brothers by the name of Loginov, and shared with two other friends, a certain Nikolay Lobkovsky, and Nikolay Levashov, a friend of Musorgsky’s from their Cadet School days. They all lived commune-style, taking their cue from Chernïshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (Shto delat’?), which had come out early that year and was being devoured by intellectual Petersburg.

  The novel is more or less a tract, today barely readable, about the new progressive society for which Chernïshevsky had been laying the ground in his political and philosophical writings since the mid-fifties—writings that had landed him the previous year in the Peter and Paul Fortress. What Is to Be Done? was written there. Like the novel’s heroine, Vera Pavlovna Rozalsky, and her husband, Dmitry Sergeyich Lopukhov, each of the Loginovs and their three tenants had his own room, and was permitted to enter anyone else’s only with that person’s permission. There was a common room for evening social activities: reading, music making, conversation. Needless to say, the form was little more than a pose, as shallow as the liberal pretensions of the professional classes in all ages. Musorgsky, after all, never in his entire life owned or rented an apartment of his own, but always shared, with his mother, his brother, or one or other friend, imposed upon or otherwise. To what extent the Loginov arrangement was essentially any different is hard now to discern. None of the other essential Chernïshevsky elements (Vera Pavlovna sets up a sewing collective, switches husbands, behaves in every way like a rational New Woman in relationships with a succession of rational New Men, etc., etc.) seem to have had any relevance to the Loginov commune.

  Until quite recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the area around the Sennaya Ploshad’, along Sadovaya Ulitsa and the Griboyedova Canal, was one of the tormented quarters of St. Petersburg. On Sadovaya, the pavé was so unstable that the tram lines would become buckled and unusable, leaving the poor would-be passengers unsure whether their tram would ever arrive, and if so, precisely where. The piles of rubble from partly demolished houses made side streets virtually impassable, and in the courtyards the debris created lakes of water or ice that one negotiated at one’s peril. The square itself, no longer a haymarket, had become a perennial building site from which there emerged only gradually a complicated network of modern shops and kiosks and, eventually, a grand new metro station. In Musorgsky’s day this was the territory, precisely, of the student Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who occupied a miserable room in a large tenement on Stolyarniya Pereulok, just up from the Kokushkin Bridge, from where he walked the 730 paces to the fourth-floor apartment of the old moneylender Alyona Ivanovna and murdered her with a hatchet stolen from the porter’s lodge
of his own house.

  Dostoyevsky began Crime and Punishment just after Musorgsky moved out of the Loginov apartment in May 1865. But the novelist had been practically a neighbor of the commune, on Malaya Meschanskaya (now Kaznacheyskaya) Ulitsa, and must often have been seen about the streets and bars of the locality. His recent books were very probably on the commune’s reading list, especially The House of the Dead, which had come out in book form only in 1862. But the communards did not confine themselves to Russian literature, nor to the social realism in which Russian authors were, in the wake of Belinsky and Chernïshevsky, at that time specializing. A recent French novel that was read by all of them at the very start of their communal life was Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, which had been published in France less than a year before and had already appeared in Russian translation, in two issues of Notes of the Fatherland, in the summer of 1863. Salammbô specifically lifted them out of the squalor and degradation of the Sennaya and deposited them in the heat and turmoil of Carthage in the third century B.C., at the time of the revolt of the mercenaries unpaid by Hamilcar at the end of the First Punic War. The exotic tale of the priestess Salammbô and the theft of the sacred veil from the Temple of Moloch by the mercenary leader Mathô seems to have struck a chord with these under-stimulated young men. But Musorgsky in particular responded with startling alacrity, and was soon at work on an operatic version of the novel. By mid-December he had composed an entire scene, including the theft of the veil, in piano score. He had already been working at the Ministry of Communications (Central Engineering Department) for two whole weeks.

  By his standards, this was a spectacular burst of creative energy. Methodical it was not. He evidently started work without any clear overall plan, without a proper scenario, and certainly without a libretto, which as a matter of fact never did get written as a whole, by him or anyone else. His approach seems to have been much the same as with “King Saul,” only on a larger scale. He pictured the scene as an isolated tableau and imagined the music to go with it. Here is Salammbô alone in the temple, guarding the veil; she strews flowers before the image of the goddess Tanit and the sacred lotus, then falls asleep while an offstage chorus intones a prayer to Tanit; Mathô and his servant Spendius appear in the darkness; Mathô is overwhelmed by Salammbô’s beauty, but snatches the veil and makes off with it, pursued by the imprecations of Salammbô, the other priestesses, soldiers, and people. This might, perhaps, have sufficed as a twenty-five-minute concert cantata. But in fact Musorgsky always intended more, as we know from Balakirev’s report to Rimsky-Korsakov, the day before the completion of the temple scene, that “Musorgsky also wants to write an opera based on Salammbô.” Balakirev was himself contemplating an opera, on the Firebird legend; and Cui, too, was deep into his next opera, based on Heine’s tragedy William Ratcliff, an excerpt from which had already been programmed by Rubinstein at an RMS concert early in the year. Cui’s two colleagues, he informed Rimsky-Korsakov from the steepling heights of his own experience, “are venturing to write operas. About Musorgsky I shall say nothing, but Balakirev will need spurring on.” What Balakirev needed most of all was a libretto. Several versions would be rejected; only a few fragments would ever be composed.

  For Musorgsky the real question was exactly what kind of opera he might venture to write. His model, plainly, was still Judith. Like Serov’s opera, Salammbô had a besieging army, priests, and barbaric rituals; it had a devout heroine who goes in disguise to the tent of the enemy commander (in this case to retrieve the temple veil); it had an exotic, “Oriental” flavor, big crowds, animals, blood, and cruelty. For an experienced theatre composer, it might have been an inspiring blend of the public and the private, the wide screen and the dark interior. Flaubert’s novel opens with a vivid description of the chaotic scenes at the mercenaries’ victory banquet in Hamilcar’s gardens at Megara. Later there are spectacular battles and blood-curdling massacres, an atrocious episode (recounted with unashamed relish) in which the Carthaginians sacrifice their children to Moloch while the mercenaries attack the city walls, and a general atmosphere of barbaric splendor and violence presented in the most horribly graphic detail. To do such scenes operatic justice would have needed the Meyerbeer of Les Huguenots or the Auber of La Muette de Portici. Musorgsky avoided them from the start, and instead went straight to the story’s narrative core, offering a portrait of Salammbô as priestess that is both charming in a decorative, filigree kind of way and at the same time largely devoid of individuality or personal character. The choral hymn to Tanit that follows is similarly beautiful but static. Things liven up modestly with the arrival of Mathô and Spendius and the theft of the veil; but their stay is brief, and Mathô’s eye contact with Salammbô little more than the casual observation of a pretty girl in church. In fact the most dynamic part of the whole scene is the final chorus of horror and pursuit, which turns out to be an adapted version of the Oedipus temple chorus of four or five years before.

  For some weeks after the completion of this scene, Musorgsky seems to have put the opera to one side. He must have been distracted by his duties at the ministry—on one occasion he put off visiting Balakirev because he was too busy, on another he pleaded his old trouble “nervous irritation” as a pretext for avoiding Alexey Lvov’s Undine at the Maryinsky. He then took up a Koltsov poem, “Winds Are Blowing, Wild Winds” (“Duyut vetrï, vetrï buynïye”), and turned it into a rambling but vivid song for bass that, in its elemental power and somber colorings, already touches areas of experience well outside those of the conventional romance. Like the “Old Man’s Song,” much of it is modal, the source, perhaps, of that curiously implacable quality which is becoming a Musorgsky fingerprint; at the same time the piano octaves lend a sweeping energy that might be the meteorological equivalent of King Saul’s “Mine be the doom.” Most interesting of all is Musorgsky’s willingness to throw in disruptive details that defy the textbook yet are obviously not a product of ignorance or incompetence. A striking example comes at the very end of the song, where, after a regulation plagal cadence in C-sharp major, the piano adds a loud F-sharp–G-sharp, like some mocking echo of the last two chords, or a door left banging by the passing gale.

  Effects of this kind may have been details remembered from improvised performances. Musorgsky often played and sang his songs at circle gatherings, and there is plenty of evidence that he, like Balakirev, sometimes made them up as he went along, either because they were not yet written down or simply because he felt entitled to change them as the mood took him. This might be partly why “King Saul” exists in two distinct versions, though, as we saw, the simplification of the later version might have been due to the publisher Bessel’s intervention. A better example is the Pushkin song “Night” (“Noch’ ”), which Musorgsky first wrote down in April 1864, two weeks or so after “Winds Are Blowing,” and which survives in two significantly different versions of more or less equal intricacy, constructed on the same basic framework (and apparently in the same year). Various details suggest an improvisation.1 The tremolando piano chords that dominate the opening in both versions are an accompanist’s cliché for a troubled mood (picking up Pushkin’s “disturbs the latter silence/Of the dark night”), while the frequent changes of figuration sound like impromptu reactions to the changing verbal imagery: languid quaver triplets for “beside my bed/A mournful candle burns,” rippling semiquaver triplets for “my words, / Mingling and murmuring/Flow,” and so forth. Finally, the puzzling fact that Musorgsky revamped Pushkin’s poem in the second version of the song, making it more verbose while leaving out some of the imagery (including the mournful candle), suggests a routine impatience with the artwork as an untouchable icon. Changing Pushkin, incidentally, was extremely mal vu in sixties (and later) Petersburg. It would get Musorgsky into trouble again, on a more famous and much more notable occasion.

  Having completed “Night” in its original version, he returned to Salammbô, and turned his attention to the problem of the choral scenes. The
first thing he composed was a thumping “War Song of the Libyans” (“Voyevaya pesn’ liviytsev”) for male chorus, which may or may not have been intended as part of the wild festivities in Hamilcar’s garden—supposedly act 1 of the opera—or might just as well have served for the mercenaries’ siege of Carthage in (presumably) the first scene of act 2. According to Stasov, the main theme was a Jewish melody that Musorgsky had overheard sung in the courtyard of his house “during a prayer session of a Jewish neighbor.”2 Musorgsky never got round to indicating the exact placement of this fine, suitably barbaric number, and one half-suspects that he composed it without any very clear idea about where it would go. One other set piece, which he wrote a few months later, the “Song of the Balearic Islander” (“Pesn’ baleyartsa”), is also usually assumed, on the authority of Pavel Lamm, to have been intended for the first act, though the only Balearic song in the novel is sung later in the story by the mercenary chief Zauxas after he has slit the throat of a Carthaginian guard and drunk his blood. But Musorgsky’s version is a love song, “In the embrace of a young girl … I forget the clash of swords,” quasi-Oriental in character (for some reason), and rather too obviously indebted to the chorus of Holofernes’ odalisques in act 3 of Judith, with its sultry cor anglais and harp.