Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The most kuchkist thing about William Ratcliff, truth to tell, is the haphazard way in which it was composed. Cui certainly had no doctrinaire Russianist intentions, or he would hardly have chosen a subject so spiritually and geographically remote, one in which the only ethnic or exotic colorings would be the occasional Scotch snap and a single, mildly incongruous, Scottish folk song, “Tibbie Fowler o’ the Glen,” supplied by Stasov and set by Cui as a chorus of (presumably) gentry at Douglas’s wedding feast. There is a nod to Glinka’s Ruslan in the whole-tone passage in which MacGregor describes the nonappearance of Mary’s first two bridegrooms, Macdonald and Duncan, at their weddings. But all in all, Ratcliff is a less candidly Russian piece of work than Judith, which imitates Glinka more overtly, is partly through-composed, uses leitmotifs, and sets the Russian language no worse. The irony is that, after he had abandoned work on his opera toward the end of 1864, one of Cui’s first acts in his new role of music critic was to publish a belated denunciation of Serov’s, cast in a mold that one recognizes from Rimsky-Korsakov’s description of Balakirev’s analytical method, praising this or that brief passage, damning others, and generally lurching from praise to blame like a music examiner marking each category of performance out of ten. “The general impression which Judith makes on the spectator,” he grumbles at the end, “is a painful one. Weariness sets in from Act II on and, constantly intensifying, weighs upon you right to the very end of the opera.” And yet “Mr Serov’s labours have produced a work which is worthy of respect and remark, standing prominently and sharply apart from the voluminous trash which is being written both abroad and here in Russia.”13 When William Ratcliff finally reached the stage, Serov wasted no time getting his own back. “A real artist,” he began his Golos review, “is always a critic, but from this it does not follow that any old musical reporter can become a real artist by merely wishing it … Art takes its revenge on those who slander it”—which amounted, as Taruskin observes, to “casting an enormous boulder at his own glass house.”14

  Thus, as 1864 drew to a close, the Balakirev circle had arrived at a mature phase which, many years later, its youngest member would find all too easy to satirize from the safety of a professorial chair at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. “Thirty years have passed by now,” Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in 1897, “since the days when Stasov would write that in eighteen-sixty-so-and-so the Russian school displayed a lively activity: [Nikolay] Lodïzhensky [briefly a member of the circle in the sixties] wrote one romance, Borodin got an idea for something, Balakirev is planning to rework something, and so on.”15 Cui was shelving one opera, Musorgsky another; Borodin was still tinkering with his symphony in E-flat (last year the slow movement, this year the scherzo), Rimsky-Korsakov—on the high seas—with his in E-flat minor; and Balakirev had himself embarked on a large-scale symphony in C which, as it turned out, he would only finish thirty-three years later, in the very year of Rimsky-Korsakov’s reminiscence. At their musical evenings they duly came and went. Musorgsky in particular would vanish for weeks on end, then reappear inexplicably; but whether these motions reflected intensities of composition, duties at the ministry, or socio-emotional fickleness, nobody quite knew. These days he was close to some friends called the Opochinins—brother and sister—and spent time with them that was discreetly resented by Balakirev (“Modinka,” he muttered to Cui, “is probably sitting on a leash at the Opochinins’ in a store-room”).16 Modinka may even have been in love with the somewhat older Nadezhda Opochinina, the dedicatee of “Night,” among several other works of his.

  A certain pattern had been set, one that would adjust itself from time to time as allegiances changed or the ordinary necessities of life began to interfere with its intellectual bohemianism. Like most artistic cénacles, it would last until its members emerged fully formed and no longer desired its protection, and thereafter would survive essentially only in the historical imagination.

  CHAPTER 11

  Home Is the Sailor

  Musorgsky had had a month’s leave from the ministry at the end of 1864 in order to visit his mother at Karevo; though only fifty years old, she was evidently tired and ailing, a widow for more than a decade, and old before her time. Modest was composing a setting of “Molitva,” Lermontov’s prayer to the Mother of God for a young child, but dedicated by the composer to his own mother: “Not for my own pilgrim soul do I pray, but for an innocent in the cold world. Surround her with the happiness she deserves, give her caring companions, bright youth and a calm old age, peace to a guileless heart, the peace of hope.” Alas on 17 March, not long after the simple, pious song was completed, Yuliya Ivanovna passed away, and her son was left to compose her epitaph, a sadly undistinguished little piano piece called “Nyanya i ya” (“Nanny and Me”), nostalgically subtitled “From Memories of Childhood.”

  A few weeks after his mother’s death, Musorgsky moved out of the commune that had been his home for the past twenty months, and moved into his brother’s family apartment on the Kryukov Canal. He had been suffering from one of his periodic bouts of nervous trouble, and it seems that it was his sister-in-law, Tatyana Pavlovna, who persuaded him, somewhat against his will, to come and live with them.1 Then, when the family went for the summer to a farmhouse at a village called Minkino, near Luga, a hundred or so miles south of St. Petersburg, he naturally went with them. Here, amid the flat, marshy farmland on the banks of the river Oredezh, he composed two more not very exciting piano pieces: “Rêverie,” based on a theme by Vyacheslav Loginov, one of the three commune brothers, and a bland A-minor scherzo, “La Capricieuse,” on a rather shapeless six-note theme by a piano pupil of Balakirev’s. The only curious thing about such music is that a composer of Musorgsky’s talent should have bothered to write it at all, unless it was as a dutiful gesture to the friends whose themes it borrows. A song, “The Outcast Woman” (“Otverzhennaya”), is more interesting, if only because of certain facts about the choice and treatment of the poem, which is the work of a noted revolutionary, Ivan Holz-Miller, recently deported to Siberia. The song itself is not remotely revolutionary, but it does suggest a dawning enthusiasm for the portrayal of the socially deprived, in this case a raddled old prostitute. Musorgsky subtitled it “An Experiment in Recitative,” which might lead one to expect a very flexible, perhaps dramatic approach to verbal meter and accentuation. In fact the experiment goes the other way, and the setting is both entirely syllabic (one note to each syllable) and largely undifferentiated in its note values, so that the strong Russian tonic accent is reduced to a pattern of discreet metric stresses. Above all, there is neither anger nor distaste in the observation of misery, merely a kind of amiable detachment, like that of a tour guide pointing out some less than salubrious aspect of an otherwise agreeable town.

  Characteristically, Musorgsky seems to have composed little else at Minkino that summer, though he later described to Stasov an experience he had while there that eventually gave rise to an altogether more poignant study in human wretchedness.

  One day [Stasov reports] he was standing by the window and was startled by a commotion that was taking place before his eyes. An unfortunate simpleton was making a declaration of love to a young girl he liked, was begging her, while ashamed of his own ugliness and wretched condition; he himself understood that nothing existed for him in the world, least of all the happiness of love. Musorgsky was profoundly struck; the bizarre figure and the whole scene imprinted themselves on his mind; they instantly conjured up distinctive forms and sounds for the embodiment of the images that had so disturbed him.2

  But a whole year would go by before Musorgsky composed “Darling Savishna,” and instead he wrote a quite different song of misfortune, a setting of the lullaby in Ostrovsky’s play The Voyevoda. An old man rocks his grandson to sleep in some kind of pre-Chekhovian frame of mind: there is misery on this earth, but “your little soul flies in the heavens.” And Musorgsky’s “Lullaby” reflects the contrast: somber and stoical at first, then smiling and drowsy toward
the end. In fact the performance directions he attached to the first version of the song (but for some reason removed when he revised and shortened it four or five years later) indicate that the grandfather himself is struggling to stay awake and does in the end fall asleep, so that the radiance of the final page amounts to dream versus reality. The music develops the idiom of the “Old Man’s Song” from a purely modal (Dorian) B-flat minor, rather dark, through strange, drifting chromatics, toward a hesitant, not quite convinced B-flat major. As in the Goethe song, a liturgical note is apparent. Much of the melody is like ornamented plainchant, now and then thrown into disarray by the contemplation of toil: “disagreeable, alien, back-breaking, everlasting, cruel, punishing.” Meanwhile, the harmony frequently evades the normal processes of tonal accompaniment, either by simply doubling the voice or by doubling it with parallel chords or, less eccentrically, through conventional chord sequences in root position. The effect of all this is to undermine one of the most crucial foundations of tonal harmony: the independent movement of the different parts. Whether Musorgsky was consciously feeling his way toward a new kind of expression, or was simply following an intuition uninhibited by any undue reverence for convention, the fact remains that this song, beautiful, touching and individual as it is, points discreetly along a path no one before him had travelled.

  Musorgsky returned to St. Petersburg from Minkino in September, and that same month young Rimsky-Korsakov, now a world-travelled twenty-one-year-old, finally arrived back in the capital from the island fortress of Kronstadt, where he had spent the summer helping decommission the cruise clipper. Music had not featured prominently on the voyage, but he had managed to complete his symphony, partly under instruction by letter from Balakirev, who, as we saw, had provided him with a Russian folk tune called “The Tartar Captivity” (“Tatarski polon”) to use as the main theme of the as yet unwritten slow movement, and then sent him corrections, which Rimsky-Korsakov dutifully incorporated. He initially wrote the movement, he tells us in his autobiography, while anchored off Gravesend at the start of 1863.3 After this the symphony went into storage until his return to St. Petersburg, at which point the scherzo—composed before his departure—still lacked a trio. Balakirev was soon bullying him to write one and to reorchestrate the whole work. Once again, Rimsky-Korsakov did as he was told, and as a reward Balakirev actually conducted the symphony in an FMS concert that December, the first public performance of any work by the young naval officer, who astonished the audience, Cui reported in his review, by appearing in uniform to take his bow.4

  Many years later Rimsky-Korsakov made a fairly drastic revision of the whole work, including a substantial recomposition of the finale. But while the final version is tighter and more accomplished, it cannot be said that it is better or more individual. On the contrary, he seems to have had a natural feeling for symphonic writing of a certain kind from the start, unlike Musorgsky, who tended to struggle with received conventions; and in following strong models, he often found personal turns of melody and harmony that still, at this distance, identify the music as his even when it lacks any striking originality. The first movement is typical. The slow introduction might belong to a lost symphony by Schumann, and the influence survives into the allegro, whose main theme is a bleak descendant of the main theme of the “Spring” Symphony. But the way Rimsky-Korsakov boxes his movement into clearly delineated sections rounded off by well-behaved passages of motivic development, all without in any way sacrificing momentum or interest, is entirely Russian, studentlike perhaps, except that one finds it also in some of the very greatest, most sophisticated symphonies of that tradition (most famously Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements).

  Cui at once drew attention to the Schumann influence, noting, for instance, the resemblance of the trio (the last music to be composed) to the equivalent section in the scherzo of Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo, and Finale. But he also rightly insisted on Glinka as a countermodel, though his suggestion that Glinka (who wrote little or no symphonic music) was the stronger influence is an exaggeration with an obvious ideological motive. The traces of Glinka are mainly confined to orchestral coloring and a few chromatic twists of melody and harmony: moments here and there where the music suddenly, inexplicably, changes from sounding German to sounding—well, Russian. But Cui was understandably on the lookout for a non-German white hope, and he readily saw it in this skillful, talented, but not in the least challenging new symphony by a composer who, as a matter of fact, had written practically nothing else. Rimsky-Korsakov’s music had all the virtues of what one already knew, with a few individual quirks, a seemingly effortless brilliance, and the beauty of being homegrown. It lacked the disadvantage of extreme originality, something with which Russian critics and to a lesser extent Russian audiences—much like their colleagues in every other country—have always had difficulty.

  Rimsky-Korsakov had quickly re-established contact with the Balakirev circle, and had once more become a regular at their evenings. Balakirev had already had some unknown degree of input into the symphony, and he and Musorgsky had played it through, four-hands, at one of his musical evenings in November. At Balakirev’s, too, the young midshipman met Borodin for the first time, and despite the eleven-year difference in their ages they got on well and were soon close friends. Borodin was now ensconced in a ground-floor flat in the Academy of Physicians (where he was a professor) at the northern end of the Liteiney Bridge over the Neva, and had settled into the bizarre combination of professional and domestic circumstances that would plague him for the rest of his life and, in all probability, help bring on his early death. His biographer Serge Dianin, whose mother was Borodin’s adopted daughter and who was himself born in the academy apartment, provides a hair-raising description of the apartment itself.

  The flat was quite spacious but not convenient as it was scattered around among official premises: the kitchen was in the basement, and those parts of the flat that were on the ground floor were separated by a corridor with doors opening on to laboratories and offices, for which reason there was a constant scurry of students and employees. There were plenty of other inconveniences. There was no quiet, secluded place for Alexander Porfir’yevich to work at home; and he did not even at that time have a private laboratory of his own, such as he managed to fix up somewhat later.5

  Rimsky-Korsakov, who had himself moved into a bed-sitter on Vasilevsky Island, took to visiting Borodin at the academy, and occasionally stayed the night. Sometimes other members of the circle would be there as well. They would talk about music, and Borodin would show them the drafts of his own symphony, at least three movements of which existed in various stages of incompleteness (the first movement complete enough to have been given a play-through by the composer and Canille at a soirée early in 1865). Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov reports,

  was an exceedingly warm and cultivated man, agreeable company, witty and original. When I visited him, I would often find him at work in the laboratory next to his apartment. When he sat over his retorts full of some colorless gas and distilled it through a tube from one vessel to another, I would tell him that he was transfusing from the empty to the emptier. Having finished his work, he would go with me to his apartment, and we would get down to musical activities or conversation, in the midst of which he would jump up and run back to the laboratory to make sure nothing had burnt out or boiled over there, meanwhile filling the corridor with improbable sequences of ninths or sevenths.6

  Borodin’s placid temperament was the one thing that enabled him to survive the circumstances of his working and married life for as long as he did. As a professor, he had to reconcile his research activities, like any modern university lecturer, with a heavy teaching load and a demanding administrative schedule. His wife, Yekaterina, charmed everyone she met and, according to Rimsky-Korsakov, “worshipped her husband’s [musical] talent.” But she did little to foster it. During her long absences in Moscow, visiting her mother or her do
ctors, her husband lived a bachelor life in St. Petersburg, trying his best to hold back the tidal waves of disorganization and overwork. When she returned to St. Petersburg, she would often have one or more relations to stay in their already dysfunctional flat. All this, Dianin remarks with cool understatement, “made things awkward for the Borodins, and they sometimes actually suffered privation, since they felt obliged to help all those in need.” To make matters worse, the insomniac Yekaterina would sit up half the night and keep her husband up as well. Not surprisingly, composition tended to stagnate. “Music,” he wrote homerically to Balakirev on one occasion, “is asleep; Apollo’s altar is extinguished; the ashes on it have grown cold; the muses are weeping, while around them the urns fill with tears, the tears spill over the brim and mingle into streams, and the streams babble and sadly announce my cooling towards art for today.”7 On this particular occasion he blamed the goose that Cui had given him for supper the day before. But the situation was, alas, of more or less daily occurrence.

  Meanwhile, the industrious Serov had composed a second opera and had it staged at the Maryinsky toward the end of October 1865. Rogneda seems to have been an attempt to create an authentic Russian music drama on the basis of a plot derived from the ancient chronicles of Kievan Rus and with a substantial infusion of simple melodies either taken from published Russian folk collections or imitations thereof. The rambling scenario, partly based on episodes in Mikhail Zagoskin’s novel Askold’s Tomb (which Zagoskin had himself turned into a libretto for the Verstovsky opera of that name), revolves round the conversion to Christianity of the founder of the Kievan state, Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich, as the somewhat confusing result of his rescue from a marauding bear by a young Christian, Ruald, and a failed attempt on his life by his wife, Rogneda, acting on instructions from the High Priest of the pagan god Perun. Serov had fallen in with the so-called pochvenniki, a splinter group of Russophile thinkers who shared the Slavophile belief that the future for Russia lay in the study of its own native history and culture (the pochva, or soil). In its own peculiar way, Rogneda was a kind of remake of Judith in terms of the emergence of the Russian nation: its location at the frontier between paganism and true religion, its confrontation of antique heroism and idealism (distorted or otherwise) with the earthy reality of the common people, its origin in a theory of what sort of opera it was necessary for a Russian composer to write at that moment, when the air was rent with competing social and political manifestos of this or that kind, none of which had any obvious chance of fulfillment in the foreseeable future.