Dargomïzhsky later claimed that he had been thinking about Pushkin’s famous short play as a possible subject since about 1863, but had “shrunk from so colossal a task.”23 Whether this was the same project as Stasov mentioned in a letter to Balakirev in August of that year is hard to know. As in 1866, there was a Serov connection. “One good thing about Judith,” Stasov wrote, “Dargo was so hooked by it that it has forced him to get down sooner to the (comic) opera about which he’s merely been chattering for so long.”24 Could this have been the Pushkin opera, and if so, what might that tell us about Dargomïzhsky’s original idea of the work? Unlike its historical predecessors (including even Mozart’s Don Giovanni), the play is not a comedy, either in fact or in genre, though it has its sardonic aspects, notably in the character of Leporello. Pushkin called his four short plays, of which The Stone Guest is in fact the longest, “little tragedies,” while as always in his work there are generous pinches of irony in the mixture. In any case, Dargo obviously did not get down to it. “If you see Dargomïzhsky,” Balakirev instructed Stasov in May 1865, “give him my regards and praise him to the skies, and he will then compose.”25
What chiefly excited them about The Stone Guest, when it really did start to get written, was the idea of setting the play more or less as it stood, with the attendant idea that the words would to some extent control the flow of the music, and would be, both intellectually and artistically, at least its equal. This was a new kind of response to Chernïshevsky’s insistence that art should above all aspire to reality: not the realism of action, certainly not the realism of the soil—pochvennik or otherwise—but the realism of speech and gesture; no arias or detachable numbers at all (except where the action itself required one, as with Laura’s song in scene 2), and no vocalizing, no elaborate cadenzas, no melisma, simply one note per syllable of text throughout, exactly as we speak. Here was something so close to the Russian language as such, so remote from textbook formulae, so uncompromisingly “real,” that it quickly and easily took its place in the Stasovian agenda. What the music would actually be like remained to be seen. But that it would be new and astonishing, and above all Russian, they did not doubt.
CHAPTER 12
Life Studies
The circle were in raptures about Dargomïzhsky’s idea, but they made little immediate attempt to copy it. Rimsky-Korsakov had been inspired by Zotova’s singing of Balakirev’s “Song of the Golden Fish” to compose a series of songs of his own, and—as one would expect of settings inspired by a beautiful romance and a fine voice—his songs responded to the voice, not in the spirit of Chernïshevsky’s description of singing as “like conversation … a product of practical life and not of art,”1 but as a vehicle for lyrical melody in the tradition of the salon romance of Alyabyev, Glinka, and indeed Dargomïzhsky himself.
The dozen or so songs that Rimsky-Korsakov composed during 1866 break no new ground in these ways. It’s true that his settings are mainly syllabic and respect the rhythms and scansions of the poetry, which is more or less what Dargomïzhsky was claiming to be doing with Pushkin’s verse play. All the same, they remain “art” songs in the usual sense. The accompaniments are stereotyped, so to speak, from images in the poems, rather than commenting anecdotally on the words from line to line. Lev Mey’s “Cradle Song” (“Kolïbel’naya pesnya,” from his play Pskovityanka) is supplied with a continuous rocking accompaniment; Heine’s “Aus meinen Tränen” (“Iz slyoz moikh,” in the recently published translation by Mikhailov) gets delicate semiquaver figures in the treble suggestive of the “fragrant flowers springing from my tears”; Nikolay Shcherbina’s “Southern Night” (“Yuzhnaya noch’ ”) has harp arpeggios; Koltsov’s “Eastern Romance” (“Vostochnïy romans”) has standard Orientalisms; and so forth. These are resourceful, not to say beautiful, well-written songs, and remarkably accomplished for such an inexperienced composer. But in genre they are conventional; they strive, not for novelty, but for excellence, and occasionally, within certain limitations, they achieve it.
Even Musorgsky spent the early part of the year composing rather run-of-the-mill romances, or working in desultory fashion on Salammbô. His settings of Pleshcheyev and Heine from this time are agreeable and expressive in a sociable kind of way;2 one can imagine their soulful chromatic thirds and sixths provoking gasps of appreciation at Shestakova’s evenings. But the most interesting things about the Heine song, “Zhelaniye” (“Desire”), are that Stasov disliked it, and that it carries a bizarre and alas unexplained dedication “to Nadezhda Petrovna Opochinina in memory of her judgment on me”—two items of information that are possibly connected, since Musorgsky may for a time have been in love with Opochinina, and the attachment (whatever it was) was regarded with mild disfavor by Balakirev and very likely also by Stasov. Ruminating on the surprising failure of this song, composed as it was “at a moment of particular excitement, at night on 15–16 April, as indicated in a note on the original manuscript” and with the aforementioned dedication, he points out that Musorgsky’s earlier “Impromptu passionné” (likewise, though Stasov fails to mention it, dedicated to Opochinina) was similarly written in a state of excitement, aroused by the love scene between Beltov and Lyuba in Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame?, but also “turned out very insignificant.”3
Stasov is hinting that Musorgsky’s supposed passion for Opochinina got in the way of his creative inspiration in both cases, separated though they were by a six-and-a-half-year gap. Admittedly, the “Impromptu passionné” is far from being Musorgsky’s only feeble piano piece, and one could also argue that “Zhelaniye,” though conventional, is by no means the failure Stasov claims. Nevertheless the claim itself is significant, because it probably reflects what was being said in the Balakirev circle: that Musorgsky’s feelings for Opochinina were more than platonic, that in general his emotional attachments were suspect or unsuitable, and that they were bad for his music. Stasov himself, who had affairs and daughters but never married, hated his friends’ romantic involvements, and sometimes reacted badly to their marriages. “Marrying young,” he would say, “is like going to bed too early. You wake up in the middle of the night.”4 He was annoyed by Cui’s marriage at the age of twenty-three, and grumbled to Balakirev that “we’ll have to say goodbye to him until such time as he and Matilda quarrel and part company, which of course can’t fail to happen.”5 And as we saw, he overreacted spectacularly to his brother Dmitry’s marriage in 1861. Where Musorgsky was concerned, however, he need not have worried on this particular score. The threat to his genius would come from a very different quarter.
Only a few days after the Opochinina incident, whatever it was, he was writing to Balakirev in an entirely positive spirit about two quite separate projects.6 One of them was a revised version of the “War Song of the Libyans” in Salammbô, which he called a “new little piece,” though it did not substantially differ from the original of two years before, except that he now produced an orchestral score. The other was a still older project in a new form, which Musorgsky referred to as “the witches.” This harked back to his old idea of a dramatic scene drawn from a play called The Witch by Mengden; in fact it looks as if he may have been working from the original sketch plan which he had outlined in a letter to Balakirev in September 1860, so similar is that plan to the eventual form of St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain (Ivanova noch’ na Lïsoy gore), though there is no evidence of any music for the Mengden project. A much more direct inspiration was probably Anton Herke’s performance of Liszt’s piano-orchestral Totentanz at an RMS concert under Rubinstein in March 1866, apparently its Russian premiere.7 There are no witches in Liszt, but plenty of diabolism and rattling of bones; and the musical evidence that Musorgsky was impressed by Liszt’s frenetic variations on the Dies irae plainchant is irresistible.8
How soon did he hit on the astounding opening of St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, so utterly unlike anything in Russian music up to that time? There are no intermediate dates in the manuscript, but t
he evidence of his April letter to Balakirev is that he already had a good idea of what he later called “the assembly of the witches” at the start of the piece, but was having trouble with the next section, “the devils” (poco meno mosso) and Satan’s cortège (irruente, senza fretta). That year he spent the summer months at a dacha in Pavlovsk; but in mid-August he was again writing to Balakirev and wanting to take the train back to St. Petersburg, a journey of an hour or so, to talk to him about what he was still calling “the witches.” However, soon after that he was again writing songs, including two or three of his most original to date. So it’s tempting to conclude that at this point he was again stuck on the orchestral work and instead vented his mischief making, so to speak, on a medium with which he was more at home and in which he knew how to go against convention in a creative way.
His first diversion was a brilliant voice-and-piano setting of an episode from Taras Shevchenko’s epic poem Haydamaki: an old man sings and dances a fast “Gopak” to his own accompaniment on the Ukrainian lute (kobza), in the form of a naigrïsh, a kind of nonstop dance with varied repeats of a basic melody and rhythm, somewhat in the manner of Glinka’s Kamarinskaya. This is by far Musorgsky’s most folkish piece of writing to date; both tune and rhythm have a rough, authentic flavor, with harmonic discolorations and wild strummings: “A potom vsyo chok da chok, vsyo chok da chok!”—“Then it’s cheers and more cheers, and still more cheers!” The singer/narrator steps into the different characters: the old man himself, tipsy and somewhat rowdy; the shrewish wife who hauls him out of the pub and sends him off to fetch millet, then reminds him slyly how as a young girl she used to throw her apron front over the windowsill and nod at every passing Semyon and Ivan while making lace.
This is some way away from the comfortable folk-song arrangements in the Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov overtures, and very far indeed from anything in their songs. One might speculate that Musorgsky was still to some extent mentally in the world of satanic revelry, even that Balakirev may have suggested writing a dance-song as a study for the orchestral work. The similarities are certainly worth noting. The naigrïsh quality is of course common to the two works, as is the harmonic freedom. The song answers the question, how do you keep a fast dance going for a significant length of time without monotony? The simple folk-song idea in “Gopak” (each two-bar phrase repeated) may well have suggested a way of treating the problematical “devils,” starting square and easy but becoming more and more tipsy-delirious, with added half-bars for the diabolical equivalent of the old wife’s shouts of “Vot kak!” and “Vot shto!” (“That’s how!” and “That’s what!”), which in turn suggest the dancer’s cries of “Goy!” (“Hey!”) at the start and finish of the song. There are even thematic parallels. For instance, the rising quaver melody at the wife’s “Kol’ zhenilsya, satana” (“Since you’re married, you Satan”) is a clear foretaste of the clarinet-and-bassoon theme, poco accelerando, in Satan’s cortège on Bald Mountain. Of course, these satanic elements in the song are comic. But Musorgsky also saw comedy in his witches’ sabbath, as we learn from a description he gave to Rimsky-Korsakov after the work was finished.9
After composing “Gopak” at the end of August, he made his own setting of Heine’s “Aus meinen Tränen,” more Schumannesque than Rimsky-Korsakov’s with many repeated chords (but far longer and more elaborate than Schumann’s own laconic little song in Dichterliebe), then at last turned his attention to the sad episode he had observed from his window at Minkino the summer before. “Darling Savishna” (“Svetik Savishna”) is his first serious attempt at a musical portrait “from life.” “Life” in this case, however, was something different from Dargomïzhsky’s idea of a vocal line controlled by the prosody of the spoken language; or rather, it was such a special case of that idea as to suggest a completely different intention. In Musorgsky’s memory, at least, the simpleton (“Vanya-of-God,” people called him) regaled Savishna in the manner of a crazed automaton, in rapid, even phrases, scarcely taking breath, pleading, urging, nagging, bullying. Savishna, one supposes, was trying to escape; perhaps Vanya-of-God was clutching her arm, or perhaps she merely stood her ground and laughed at him. This is a slice of life not only in time but in space; the camera is on the speaker, with his interlocutor outside the frame. What is remarkable, and in due course typical of Musorgsky, is that one so vividly imagines the scene; this almost eidetic property of his vocal music is something we shall encounter again and again.
Musically, “Darling Savishna” is an extreme example of the adaptation of the folk manner to a special artistic need. Vanya-of-God, being an idiot, sings in five-four time throughout, and every bar is rhythmically identical, five even crotchets in unbroken, fairly quick tempo without any rests—a primitive example of a device later called “monometrics” by Igor Stravinsky. The only rhythmic variation is in the piano part, which splits the second crotchet of every bar (including the introduction, and the postlude except for the very last bar) into two quavers. Melodically, the song is a string of variations on the five-beat figure of the first bar, as if Vanya were all the time repeating himself but with changing degrees of urgency. The overall form, too, is by no means random. In effect there are four verses in an A-B-B-A design, the A sections in the Dorian mode on D, the B sections switching to Dorian on F, a move to the dark side for the two verses that refer to Vanya’s miserable state, while the outer verses are mainly about his love for Savishna. The simplicity of this whole scheme is not the least touching thing about the song, completely devoid as it is of the remotest hint of sentimentality or condescension. The scene is observed, and the observer passes by. Vanya moves out of earshot, but, for all we know, his pleadings continue.
Back in St. Petersburg in September, Musorgsky developed this genre-painting technique in two further scenes “from life”: “Oh, You Drunken Sot!” (“Akh tï, p’yanaya teterya!”) and “The Seminarian” (“Seminarist”). Both are studies in one or another form of human depravity, based on texts (one would hesitate to call them poems) composed, like “Darling Savishna,” by Musorgsky himself. The drunkard in the first song was apparently the historian he had met at Lyudmila’s, Vladimir Nikolsky, who had quickly become a close friend, with the mysterious but typically Stasovian nickname “Pakhomich.” In the song, he arrives home at dawn, drunk and incapable, and is threatened by his wife with the oven prongs. No doubt the story grew with the telling, but it was always meant to be a private joke. We know this because, whereas Musorgsky went to immense lengths to have “The Seminarian” printed after it was banned by the censor in 1870—even publishing it in Germany, then having copies smuggled back into Russia by friends—he never seems to have taken any step toward publishing the Pakhomich satire, which remained unknown until it was discovered and brought out by Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov in 1926.
Just as the style of “Savishna” was set by the idea of the gabbling simpleton, so “Oh, You Drunken Sot!” takes its cue from the relentless patter of the nagging wife, eight quavers to the allegro bar with monotonous regularity except when she rises to a climax of rhetorical fury, at which point crotchets are required (or perhaps these are moments when Pakhomich tries unsuccessfully to get a word in edgeways). The melodic style is a highly individual blend of nursery rhyme and awkward distortions bred, presumably, by the stress of the situation. But by far the most intriguing aspect of the whole song is the piano part, which if anything gets even crosser than Mrs. Pakhomich, is littered with sforzando accents on unexpected beats, and is soon breaking out into harmonies that very likely gave the straitlaced César Cui a nervous fit.
Musorgsky’s technique is simple but brilliantly effective. His harmonies are framed by “correct” preparations and resolutions. For instance, the opening D minor is set up by a perfectly legitimate cadence, though the piano texture is mildly unorthodox; the song ends in the right key, and so forth. But in between the harmonies become increasingly wayward, partly following the voice, partly exploring avenues of their own, directed as
much as anything, one suspects, by the shape and position of the hands on the keyboard. Eventually, at the point where the wife rages against Pakhomich for abandoning his children, the piano hammers out a stack of white-note discords over a dominant, then tonic, pedal, in a superb ecstasy of recrimination that only a pianist could devise.
Whether or not Musorgsky thought of this kind of writing as a study for larger, perhaps theatrical, works, we shall never know. But it certainly served that purpose. Several aspects of this particular song reappear in his opera Boris Godunov, including some of its actual music, another piece of evidence that he had no intention of publishing the song. Halfway through, the wife leaves off scolding and becomes pleading and tearful: “Have I not begged you, Pakhomich; have I not reproached you, my dear?” Here the female voice is doubled in the bass by the piano left hand, and perhaps it was this sudden darkening that suggested reusing the music for the scene where the dying Boris warns his son against the machinations of the boyars. “Don’t trust the slanders of the seditious boyars,” he urges, suddenly animated; “keep an eye on their secret dealings with Lithuania.” And now the voice itself is in the bass, no longer comically tearful but minatory and grimly foreboding.
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 21