Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure
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All this comes out musically in Rogneda as a tapestry of somewhat startling contrasts. The actual plot, which is thinly spread over the five acts, is conveyed in reasonably conventional terms: a lot of fluid recitative and arioso, post-Lohengrin, rich (if that’s the word) in standard-issue chromatic harmony dominated by the diminished seventh chord—the nineteenth century’s musical equivalent of the shock-horror bubble in a 1950s comic strip. On the other hand, the lengthy genre scenes—the dances and jester’s songs, the choruses of pilgrims, the hunters’ drinking songs—adopt a self-consciously naïve, folkish, even primitive manner, diatonic and repetitive to the point of tedium, almost studiously avoiding musical interest in any previously known sense of the term. It appears that Serov’s intention was to bring to the grand-operatic stage a lofty version of Askold’s Tomb. Richard Taruskin has shown how closely Serov’s analysis of Verstovsky’s opera can be mapped almost item by item onto Rogneda, and also the extent to which the apostrophizing of what was not much more than a better class of vaudeville was partly a way of playing down Glinka’s status as the founding father of Russian opera.8 Stasov was, of course, outraged. Long before Rogneda reached the stage he was spitting fire in Balakirev’s direction:
A friend of Serov’s has related to me some of his recent pronouncements, which I simply can hardly believe. For instance, Serov has (apparently) stated in his lectures and countless times in conversation that there’s no Russian music at all in Glinka, only some Russian themes, but with foreign workmanship: for instance, Kamarinskaya and the greater part of Ruslan; that if only Verstovsky could have been given Glinka’s talent and musical education, he would have been a much more Russian musician, and would have shown what our national music ought to be. But since none of this has yet been done by anybody, it will have to be and will be revealed in Rogneda what a true national Russian music ought to be, not just in its themes but in its spirit, its atmosphere, its workmanship and its smallest details. In this sense, naturally, the “Dance of the Skomorokhi” serves as an indictment and a corrective to Kamarinskaya. It seems to me that this is all a consequence of Serov’s lecherous cohabitation with the pochvenniki at [the journal] Epokha.9
The biggest concern for the Balakirev circle was precisely the extent to which Rogneda did or did not point the way to the authentic Russian opera of the future. They had, of course, absolutely no interest in Serov being the pioneer in this respect, however good or bad his music. But needless to say, they all went to see his new work, and one way or another they reacted. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, the official line was mockery, and damning with the faint praise of agreeing to admire one or two insignificant episodes. Musorgsky sneered loftily at this “well-educated musician who in a Russian epic poem made Perun a high priest and planted pilgrims in the Kievan forest. And as regards the connection between music and history, he came out below Verstovsky: at Vladimir’s feast he started up a modern tavern song and made the girls dance, exactly as if Vladimir were Holofernes.”10 Cui naturally seized on the opportunity to have a go at Serov in his Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti review, satirizing the plot and ridiculing its pretensions as drama. “Not a single act goes by without all manner of artifice: witches, high priests, hunters, dogs, horses, death scenes, processions, dances, dreams, moonlight—what isn’t there in this opera! These effects can be wonderful if they proceed from the subject itself. But if the subject be fashioned to seek out these effects as if by compulsion, then this is hardly art.”11
But Rimsky-Korsakov admitted long afterward that “Rogneda interested me a lot, and I liked a good deal of it, for instance the sorceress, the chorus of sacrifice to the idol, the chorus in the banqueting hall, the dance of the skomorokhi, the hunt prelude, the chorus in 7/4, the finale, and many other bits”: that is, precisely the things that Cui had made fun of. “I dared not,” he went on, “confess all this in the Balakirev circle, and even, as someone sincerely devoted to the ideas of the circle, ran the opera down in front of acquaintances … I remember how this astonished my brother, who liked Rogneda.”12 He even owned up to having incorporated ideas from Serov’s opera in works of his own. Specifically, he mentions a triplet figuration in his second symphony, Antar; but Taruskin spots a number of other minor borrowings, including the start of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (the symphonic poem, soon to be composed), an obvious echo of the curtain music at the very start of Serov’s opera.13 Musorgsky also grumbled to his friend about a phrase in Sadko that reminded him of the witch’s music in Rogneda, and begged him to change it (he didn’t).14
One can reasonably surmise that what chiefly annoyed the circle about Rogneda was how close it actually came to their own preferred creative direction, which, however, they themselves had not yet clearly identified. Serov’s occasional use of folk song, and more especially his invention and treatment of folkish themes, were a sight too close for comfort to their father figure, Glinka—Serov’s own disclaimers notwithstanding. And though there was not much that was “realistic” in the opera’s subject matter—it was really the same old fake medievalism as in countless romantic operas, from Weber’s Euryanthe through Meyerbeer and Schumann to Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin—there was undoubtedly something in the handling, especially of the genre choruses, that brought ordinary people to life, whatever might be thought about the quality of Serov’s musical material. This was one aspect of his pochvennichestvo. The other aspect, no less impressive—or disturbing, depending on your point of view—was the way he used all this quasi-populist material in the service of an “elevated” theme, the founding of the Christian Kievan state against the tide of sorcery, paganism, and other assorted villainies. Of course there was nothing very new about such things in world opera. But it was profoundly annoying to the Balakirev circle, who had scarcely a complete opera to their collective name, to be upstaged in this respect by a composer-critic whom, for reasons not entirely connected with his music, they had elected to despise.
The annoyance soon came out in a satirical operetta by the kindliest member of the circle. A year or so after the Serov premiere, Viktor Krïlov (the librettist of Cui’s operas) invited Borodin to supply the music for an operatic farce called The Bogatyrs (Bogatïri—the heroic knights of Russian mythology), to be staged at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in the autumn of 1867. But because, as usual, Borodin had no prospect of composing a complete score of his own in time, he put together what amounts to an elaborate montage of borrowings from Rogneda itself, candidly satirical in intention, from Meyerbeer, Rossini, and Verdi, and from the operettas of Offenbach, bound together by a certain amount of authentic Borodin, and wrapped round a plot only mildly more ludicrous than that of Rogneda itself. The Bogatyrs received only one performance (on 6 November 1867), has never been published, and survives only in manuscript form in the notoriously tight-fisted archives of the Maryinsky Theatre. But even for that single Moscow audience, it seems that the parody was largely impenetrable; or rather, as Dianin suggests, they failed to grasp the work’s satirical intention, but “saw in it simply a collection of rehashes of their favourite tunes,” which of course made them unwitting participants in what was being satirized. Today only half of the tunes, and of course none of the Serov, would be recognized at all.15
The one composer in their group who had any kind of a reputation as an operatic composer, Alexander Dargomïzhsky, had been keeping a comparatively low profile since his disappointment over Rusalka almost ten years before. He had still kept up his own musical evenings, but they were mainly for his students, and Stasov and Balakirev had stopped going to them. Then, at the very end of 1865, Rusalka was at last revived, and in the shadow of Rogneda it suddenly became a talking point among the circle. As against the popular realism of Serov’s opera, they could set the conversational realism of Dargomïzhsky’s, which, by a delicious irony, had actually been pointed out to its composer by Serov himself. As one critic put it, somewhat fancifully, the two composers were “inspired by the same ideal, they strive for truth in art
and its cleansing from the coarse materialism that, alas, so firmly reigns in our time.”16 Cui reviewed Rusalka in the Vedomosti, and took a slightly different line. “In Rogneda,” he pointed out, “we encounter a tasteless overload of mere external effect under the emblem of so-called ‘organic drama,’ [while] in Rusalka there is simple, truthful, stupendous drama without any emblems.” Then, to counter any suggestion that he might be exaggerating a little, he added that while Dargomïzhsky was at his best in recitative and declamatory music, he was “much weaker in the choruses and pure-musical numbers, which demand the development of musical thought and mastery of form which, generally speaking, have not been given to [him].”17 A few days after the review came out, Dargomïzhsky appeared at Stasov’s birthday party, and at once got into an argument with him about the orchestral interludes in the arias in Rusalka, which for some reason Stasov disliked. Dargomïzhsky, who was perhaps understandably touchy about the fate of his chef d’oeuvre, sat down at the piano and played one of the interludes, then got up, “irritably closed the piano and put an end to the discussion, as if to say: ‘If you can’t appreciate this, there’s no use talking to you.’ ”18
Despite this encounter, Dargomïzhsky began to turn up more often at the circle’s musical evenings, which now included regular Mondays at the house of Glinka’s sister, Lyudmila Shestakova, who had emerged from a sort of purdah prompted by the death of her young daughter Olga in 1863. She was also at Stasov’s birthday party early in January, and there met Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and possibly also Cui for the first time. At first she seems to have confined her invitations to musicians (rather oddly, since music was by no means the only entertainment: cards were also regularly played). At any rate Stasov was not initially on the guest list, and had to ask to be included. At Balakirev’s request she also began to invite Borodin. So it was that under the somewhat matronly guidance of the “aunt figure” of Russian music, the circle finally achieved the rounded form, with one or two outcrops, under which it has gone down in history as that unlikely phenomenon, a coherent aesthetic grouping of like-minded artists: the moguchaya kuchka (Mighty Little Heap) or, simply, the Five.
No such coherence, admittedly, would have been apparent to anyone casually surveying the recent work or work in hand of the group’s members at the start of 1866. You might have come away from one of their evenings thinking of them as a symphonic tendency. Rimsky-Korsakov’s First had just been performed, Borodin was showing off fragments of his symphony in E-flat, and Balakirev had the big first movement of his C-major symphony in a fairly advanced state, though apparently languishing and probably tucked away in some drawer. Much symphonic music was played in four-hand arrangements. Or you might have associated them with opera: Cui was well on with William Ratcliff, Balakirev was toying with (though hardly composing) his Firebird, and Musorgsky had not yet given up on Salammbô. The trouble was, of course, that as ever most of these works were in a seriously incomplete state. At the evenings there would be songs. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled a certain S. I. Zotova (sister of the well-known soprano, and friend of Balakirev’s, Lyubov Karmalina) singing Balakirev’s “Song of the Golden Fish.” Perhaps she also sang one or two of his more recent songs, none of them quite on the same level, or recent songs by Dargomïzhsky, who had spent some of the time while he was sulking over Rusalka composing romances, including a fine, dramatic setting of Kurochkin’s “The Old Corporal” (“Starïy kapral’ ”—a translation from the French of Pierre-Jean de Béranger), a harmonically adventurous one of Zhukovsky’s “Paladin,” and a lively one of the Spanish romance from Pushkin’s little play The Stone Guest (Kamennïy gost’). He had also composed a pair of short, brightly scored but musically unsophisticated orchestral fantasies (Baba-Yaga and Kazachok: a third piece, Finnish Fantasy, was still incomplete). But none of this added up to much of an artistic manifesto, even if you included the handful of songs Musorgsky had managed to write in the past year.
To discover their tendency as a group you would have had to listen to what they said at least as much as what they played or sang. And even then you would have had to see past their personal animosities, which encouraged them to ridicule work that was in fact consistent with their own professed aspirations. By rights they ought to have welcomed Rogneda as a serious attempt at a specifically Russian opera, and a remarkable achievement for a composer of such limited experience. Instead they made fun of it because they could not abide its author and were frankly jealous of his success. In the same way, their musical preferences in general were so much at the beck and call of their prejudices that it would have been hard to form a clear sense of the criteria behind them: why, for instance, Schumann was to be admired but Mendelssohn not, Berlioz but not Wagner, and so forth. The clear exposition of kuchka principles that one now finds in dictionaries and history books was cooked up by Stasov some years later, long after the group had ceased to exist as such. At the time you would have had to sift them out of a good deal of intellectual dross. The abiding distaste for academic learning and systematic study would certainly have been evident; jokes at the expense of Rubinstein and his conservatory were standard currency. A broad enthusiasm for Russian history and mythology would have been apparent, especially when Stasov was present, or the historian Vladimir Nikolsky, who started frequenting Lyudmila’s evenings in 1866. But exactly what that might mean in artistic terms was still far from clear: what, after all, had William Ratcliff and Salammbô to do with being Russian? That year, however, the mists did begin to part a little, and artistic direction started, fitfully, to take the place of scattered prejudice.
Balakirev had been putting together the songs he had collected on his trips along the Volga in the early sixties with a view to their publication by the firm of August Johansen later in 1866. Like previous collectors, he was arranging the tunes for voice and piano, but he was plainly conscious of the need for a fresh approach to the kind of harmony and texture that would go with tunes that, in their natural state, would have had either no accompaniment or a simple rhythm or drone. The old collections (notably those of Lvov/Prach, Daniyil Kashin, and Danilov, which we know he studied, because he asked Stasov to get them for him from the public library) had treated folk tunes as if they were normal “composed” songs in need of conventional barring and harmonization in the style of the day, like the Haydn and Beethoven arrangements of Scottish folk songs for George Thomson. By contrast Balakirev, as we saw in the last chapter, was looking for a style of accompaniment that would match the innate character of the tunes. This meant writing piano parts that kept to the mode set by each tune, without the passing chromatic inflections and the standard cadences one takes for granted in classical tonal music; it sometimes meant irregular barrings to match a song’s variable meter—something that a classical composer would have ironed out into a regular pattern of twos, threes, or fours; and it occasionally meant reducing the accompaniment to a held chord or a single line (though Balakirev does now and then provide a more pianistic accompaniment, with picturesque figuration and short piano introduction). On occasion, he would play his arrangements at the evenings, and no doubt talk about his approach. And when the songs came out in December, Cui wrote a long review which discussed the whole issue of folk-song transcription and tried to explain the extent to which Balakirev had superseded his predecessors in the matter of idiom. Even Serov, who published a huge three-part article on the subject in Muzïkal’nïy sezon (1869–71), praised Balakirev as the first editor to adopt “a sensible, clear (if not yet critical) view of the matter,” though he then, characteristically, lurched from praise to blame and back again, adding that “the theoretical principle worked out by others is put into practice by Mr. Balakirev, and to some extent successfully. We see at once that Mr. Balakirev’s collection, as a collection, is quite poor and is shot through with crude blunders of every kind—but, as a first step on a new path, it’s a highly remarkable effort.”19
Where that new path would lead neither Serov nor anyone else could ha
ve said. It is even unclear whether he was thinking of new artistic directions, or simply of a more authentic, scholarly approach to the collecting and taxonomy of folk songs. Rimsky-Korsakov was inspired by evenings spent with Balakirev listening to the new transcriptions and discussing the method by which they were made, but his immediate creative response was simply to compose an Overture on Russian Themes of his own, a well-scored but compositionally primitive copy of Balakirev’s overtures. Nobody seems yet to have had any serious idea of evolving a radical musical style derived from the principles that lay behind the arrangements. It was merely one step up from a set of songs with piano to a medley of tunes for the orchestra.
While all this was going on, Dargomïzhsky was letting slip information about a quite different project of his own, at least partly inspired, it seems, by the unexpected success of the Rusalka revival, and perhaps especially by Cui’s observations about that work in his Vedomosti review. The first mention of the idea of setting Pushkin’s Stone Guest word-for-word as an opera comes in a letter to Lyubov Karmalina in July 1866. But he certainly talked about it at the Balakirev or Shestakova evenings in January, since at the end of that month Balakirev sent a note to Stasov grumbling that Dargomïzhsky had chosen to attend a performance of Ruslan when he “would do better to spend the day with us, and play us his Don Juan.”20 And barely four months later, Stasov wrote back enthusiastically that The Stone Guest was almost finished.21 Needless to say it was nowhere near finished; in fact it never did quite get finished. More likely, Dargomïzhsky had talked about the idea, and perhaps played one or two fragments, with such newfound warmth and energy that his friends simply could not wait to hear what the work would be like as a whole. Stasov was completely convinced, Balakirev less so. “I don’t doubt,” he had said, “that a Don Juan by him will contain some unusual things, but I’m also convinced that in its essence what ought to be inevitably won’t be.”22 In any case it was to be almost another two years before any substantial work on the project took place.