Within a few days of completing “Oh, You Drunken Sot!” Musorgsky composed “The Seminarian,” again on a text of his own perhaps derived, like “Darling Savishna,” from personal observation. A young novice is reciting the list of third-declension-masculine Latin nouns (“Panis, piscis, crinis, finis / Ignis, lapis, pulvis, cinis,” and so on); but his thoughts are rather on the feminine, in the shapely form of Styoshka, the daughter of Father Semyon. The good father caught him the other day making eyes at Styoshka, slapped his cheek three times, and punished him with this wretched Latin. “That’s what happened to me,” he concludes, “in tasting the fruits of love in the Lord’s house.”
The text, accordingly, is macaronic: the Latin nouns, in the form of a verse mnemonic, alternate with the novice’s deviant thoughts in Russian. And Musorgsky naturally makes the contrast musical as well: a rapid mechanical patter on one or two notes for the Latin, a much bolder, folk-song-like melody for the wandering thoughts, which are never allowed, however, to break the fixed tempo. It’s as if what the listener “sees,” in that vivid Musorgskian way, is the novice with his head bowed continuously over his grammar book, while the music takes us inside his head and reveals what he is actually thinking. And as in the Pakhomich song, the piano has its own wandering thoughts, harmonies that sometimes behave themselves, sometimes stray. We are, of course, in church; so the harmony (as in the Goethe setting the year before) is churchy, with block chords in root position, like the harmonized chant of the Orthodox liturgy, even, or perhaps especially, when the novice is thinking about Styoshka’s breasts and his ardent desire to kiss every part of her body. Briefly, when Father Semyon delivers his slaps, the chords are jolted into a whole-tone configuration, as if the music itself were momentarily stunned by the blows. Here and there, as before, Musorgsky has the piano and voice in unison or with parallel chords, as if deliberately to avoid conventional harmonization. And at the end he creates a dissolve by means of a falling chromatic scale, fading out, as it were, on the novice still reciting his nouns.
After presumably trying the song out at Balakirev’s or Shestakova’s, Musorgsky decided it was too long and made changes and substantial cuts before submitting it to the censorship, who rejected it, the composer told Stasov, “because of the Seminarian’s concluding confession that he ‘had happened to receive temptation from the devil in the Lord’s house.’ ”10 The odd thing about this supposed reason, which may have been guesswork on Musorgsky’s part, is that the original ending of the song (as quoted above) had a much milder form of confession to exactly the same music, with no mention of the devil or temptation. Furthermore, it’s clear from the Stasov letter that it was the copies printed in Leipzig that got into trouble with the censor and were eventually allowed to be brought in only as a limited edition of ten, for distribution to named individuals. Yet the censor must already have banned the song in its revised form (or German publication would have been unnecessary). If so simple a change might have enabled the song to be cleared for publication in Russia, one wonders why Musorgsky didn’t think—or choose—to make it.
A more interesting question arising out of these three brilliant life studies is what Musorgsky actually thought he was about in writing them. In the normal way such questions hardly need to be asked of music. But with this kind of originality, in this kind of context, they pop up unbidden. Obviously Musorgsky had begun to be fascinated by the relationship between the visual and the musical—the seen and the heard. But that was hardly anything new: song, to look no further, had routinely depended on the connection, whether it was Beethoven on his hillside in An die ferne Geliebte sending messages to his distant beloved, or Schubert’s wanderer communing with the brook in Die schöne Müllerin, or even the humble “Ash Grove” or “Sumer Is Icumen In.” But these are mostly conceits (of the pathetic-fallacy variety), or they are conventional settings of texts that happen to have a strong visual content, or they are onomatopoeia of one kind or another. With Musorgsky there seems to be a new kind of intention. For one thing, he nearly always begins with some particular turn of speech—the idiot pleading, the housewife nagging, the novice reciting—and from this he fleshes out an entire scene, never losing contact with the original idea, and insisting that the music maintain that contact as well. Certain things follow from this approach. The most obvious is the informal character of much of the writing, its lack of subservience to standard textbook formulae, its contempt for the normal rules of balance, linkage, and closure. For Musorgsky the precision of the image starts to take precedence over beauty of form or elegance of expression. Melody becomes a function of situation and psychology, not a lyrical essence in its own right. Beauty goes out of the window; realism, that much abused, much misrepresented concept, comes in.
Not that Musorgsky was impervious to the beautiful. Toward the end of 1866, he made a somber but powerful setting of another passage from Shevchenko’s Haydamaki, Prince Yarema’s invocation of the river Dnieper before leading the Cossacks into battle against the Poles. Here the composer adopts the formal structure and idiom of a Ukrainian bïlina, or ballad song, with a slow invocatory introduction and conclusion (based on an actual Ukrainian folk song) and a risoluto middle section colored by strange melodic leaps: augmented (in place of perfect) fourths, alternating minor and major seconds, and minor sevenths in place of octaves. The whole character of the setting is “epic”—sturdy melody, square-cut rhythm and phrasing—yet curiously subdued, especially the accompaniment, which seldom rises above pianissimo even when the voice is forte. It’s as if heard from a great distance, a distance that the singer, however, can arch across through some magic of personality, like the voice-over on a film soundtrack.
A good deal has been written about what one scholar has called “Musorgsky’s realist aesthetics,”11 but in fact there is little evidence in his correspondence before 1867 of any clearly conceptualized interest in realism as an aesthetic goal. Composers rarely indeed theorize in advance of their work (Wagner is a massive exception, but an exception nonetheless). No doubt they had all read their Chernïshevsky; but as for applying his very limited ideas about music to their own work, they seem barely even to have discussed the matter. Stasov, as we saw in chapter 2, had taken on board Belinsky’s idea of art as “the immediate contemplation of truth, or a thinking in images,”12 but at the time he had interpreted it as a recipe for criticism, not creative work. Even Dargomïzhsky had only found out about the artistic “truth” he was now going on about from Serov’s review of Rusalka. It may well be that Musorgsky’s 1866 songs owed most to the fact, precisely, that Dargomïzhsky was at that moment so full of his Stone Guest experiment. But when he subtitles “The Seminarian” “A Picture from Nature” (“kartinka s naturï”), we have surely to understand this as ironic, or at the very least as hanging on a double sense of the word “nature”: not only, that is, the real world untainted by man, but that part of our inner selves that drives us to act against the normal assumptions of civilized life.
If Musorgsky was not riding any aesthetic hobbyhorses in these songs, he was most certainly not riding any sociopolitical ones. When Richard Hoops describes the composer’s pictures of folk life (narodnïye kartinki) as “songs of social criticism,” he is begging a huge question about the motivation and subject matter behind these pieces.13 Hoops quotes Stasov’s remark about “the aching feeling of indignation and pain” that Musorgsky, and the painter Vasily Perov (with whom Stasov was comparing him), were supposed to have felt about “what they saw in the world around them,” without pointing out that the notoriously revisionist Stasov was writing in 1883, two years after Musorgsky’s death. In fact very few of Musorgsky’s songs have a political angle, even though their subject matter is often the life of the poor and deprived, who, after all, constituted the vast majority of the population of Russia in the late 1860s. Exactly what radical social message can be extracted from “Darling Savishna,” “Oh, You Drunken Sot!” and “The Seminarian” is hard to imagine, yet this does no
t prevent Hoops from describing them, by clear implication, as “realistic genre scenes that take a sharply critical or satirical attitude towards social inequities.”14
The truth is that Musorgsky, like Stasov, was not essentially a political animal at all. He supported emancipation in theory (like nearly all his class), though it harmed him in practice, and he was shocked by the behavior of his fellow landowners at the time of the emancipation. He was a humane man. But none of this turned him into a political radical. Certainly he was fascinated by the quirkish and picaresque aspects of Russian street life. Not surprisingly, he found the rough and ragged types, the dirty children and gnarled workers that he encountered in the city and the countryside, more interesting and amusing as artistic subject matter than the comfortable bourgeoisie and minor aristocracy with whom he passed his time socially and professionally. No doubt in his kindlier moments he wished their lives could be better. But what he really loved about them was precisely those things that, for them, made life unendurable; and it was out of this conflict that he would in due course devise his greatest works.
While Musorgsky was busy studying deviant corners of the Russian character, Balakirev had been casting his gaze outward in the direction of his brother Slavs. Lyudmila Shestakova had asked him to go to Prague to supervise the productions of her brother’s operas, and he had duly set off early in June 1866 and arrived in the Czech capital on about the 12th. It was unfortunate timing. Two days later the Austro-Prussian War broke out, the Prussians advanced on Prague, and Balakirev was suddenly transformed into a refugee. But before leaving Prague, he witnessed the arrival by train after train of large numbers of wounded Czech soldiers; he observed the waves of popular sympathy for these fellow Slavs injured by German guns—some of it, he was touched to discover, transferred to him as another fellow Slav—and in the end, as he wrote to his father, he was “abandoning with sadness a city that in the course of two days has become no less dear to me than St. Petersburg and Moscow.”15
These two days had had an artistic as well as emotional outcome. He had had discussions about the possibility of staging the Glinka operas, and he must have convinced the directorate of the Provisional Theatre, and in particular its conductor Jan Nepomuk Maýr, that these works were of sufficient merit to justify production on the Czech national stage, since some time before his return to Prague at the end of the year A Life for the Tsar was actually presented there under the theatre’s newly appointed chief conductor, Bedrich Smetana. When Balakirev arrived back in Prague just before Christmas, this production was the first thing he saw. But if two days had been long enough to trumpet the work’s virtues, they clearly had not been long enough to elucidate its character. “At last I’ve seen A Life for the Tsar here,” he wrote to Lyudmila. “What a horror it was! I haven’t quite come to my senses yet. The overture was so-so. But the curtain rises and oh! Horror, what costumes. The peasants were waving some kind of peaked caps and wore overcoats with white buttons, and they had beards, but not Russian ones, Jewish ones!”16
Balakirev was convinced that the production had been sabotaged by Smetana, who (the singers informed him) “deliberately gave them the wrong tempi in performance in order to put them off.” Smetana was supposed to be in league with the large local Polish community (whom Balakirev might have forgiven for disliking a work in which Poles are so roundly demonized) and was said to be organizing a claque “in order to hiss A Life for the Tsar off the stage” when it was eventually revived. “Smetana and I,” he added for Lyudmila’s benefit, “are no longer on speaking terms. We only bow to one another.”17
Exactly what took place between the two composer-conductors is by no means clear, but it seems unlikely that the difficulties were quite as one-sided as Balakirev makes out. As we have seen, he was himself a notably authoritarian character, and may well have rubbed the recently appointed Smetana the wrong way. Probably, as John Clapham suggests, he made no attempt to conceal his irritation at the way A Life for the Tsar had been performed.18 He may also have failed at first to take sufficient account of local ethnic and political issues, the touchiness of recently emancipated Czech nationalism, Smetana’s equivocal position as a German-speaking Czech whose own music had a reputation for awkward modernism, and the conservatism of the German-language press. On the other hand, Smetana does seem to have behaved toward his Russian guest in a bizarrely inhospitable way, the climax of which was the mysterious disappearance of the vocal score of Ruslan and Lyudmila just before a crucial rehearsal—a piece of sabotage, if such it was, that failed dismally, since Balakirev was able to accompany the entire run-through from memory.
Whatever Balakirev’s troubles with the Provisional Theatre directorate, and whatever his endless difficulties with the musicians (spelled out in laborious detail in a letter to Cui),19 Ruslan enjoyed something of a triumph when it finally opened on 4/16 February. “You can’t imagine,” he wrote to Stasov, “what a stunning effect the whole of Ruslan produces without Lyadov’s emasculations.”20 The first act provoked audible cries from the parterre, and afterward they were singing Bayan’s song in the streets. Even the German press were friendly, though Balakirev was quick to attribute this to their desperate desire not to diverge from the popular view. And this time even the production pleased him. “The curtain went up,” he reported to Lyudmila, “and I myself was staggered. Before my eyes, real Russian costumes and décor, not at all badly done.”21 (Had there been no dress rehearsal?) Altogether he conducted Ruslan four times, each time with undiminished success; and after the third performance the directorate persuaded him to conduct A Life for the Tsar, which he had to prepare on a single rehearsal, a previous one having been cancelled because nobody turned up. Not surprisingly, the performance was wretched, but nobody seems to have minded, so pro-Glinka had they all become as a result of Ruslan. And Balakirev was the proud recipient, he told Stasov, of two wreaths from the public “as the representative of Glinka and Russian music.”22
He came away from Prague in mid-February full of warm thoughts about the Czech people (“Slavs through and through,” he said: don’t judge them by their newspapers), but with no illusions about the place of Russia in the wider European world. The Polish papers in Prague had alleged that the Glinka operas had only been put on thanks to a fifty-thousand-ruble backhander from the Russian government. “But I won’t enlarge on that,” he told Stasov,
since all those things one constantly comes across in foreign countries are double dutch to you. Your naïve childish view of these matters, which with time fossilize into senility, prevent you from seeing things as they really are, and for that reason you view everything through a cosmopolitan pince-nez. But I don’t yet despair of you. Judging by what’s going on in Europe, we should expect frightful upheavals, which will soon pose the question: Russia—to be or not to be.23
Within weeks of Balakirev’s return from Prague, the whole question of Russia’s identity, both within its own multi-ethnic empire and in the wider European context, was brought sharply into focus by the All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition (Vserossiiskaya etnograficheskaya vïstavka), held in the Manezh, the former Alexandrine riding school, in Moscow from April to June 1867.
Entering the Manezh, the visitor was transported into a virtual Empire, a symbolic space defined by the diversity of its inhabitants. From the Aleuts of Alaska to the Mazurs of Central Poland, the peoples of the Empire were laid out like tiles in a mosaic depicting Russia’s vast expanse and human variation. Over 300 mannequins, meticulously rendered to convey characteristic physical features, constituted the focal point of the exhibition. Divided into almost sixty national and regional groups, the mannequins were adorned in genuine native costumes and surrounded by artifacts of everyday life, most sent directly from the regions by local enthusiasts.24
In recognition of this event, and no doubt with his recent Czech experiences in mind, Balakirev put on a “Pan-Slav” concert of the FMS at the Duma in St. Petersburg in the middle of May. His own contribution was an
overture on Czech themes that he had assembled in Prague; and he also persuaded Rimsky-Korsakov to write a new work for the occasion, his Fantasia on Serbian Themes, composed in a hurry on themes supplied (needless to say) by Balakirev. In addition the program included Glinka’s Kamarinskaya, Dargomïzhsky’s Kazachok, some arias from the operas of Moniuszko (representing Poland), and Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy, which for the purposes of the Pan-Slav concert was deemed to be actually based on Slovak themes. Balakirev’s overture is an attractive, well-made piece rather along the lines of his Russian overtures, but the Rimsky-Korsakov is a more basic piece of writing, dependent for its effect on spectacular scoring (which the composer polished up a good deal when he revised the work twenty years later).
Stasov spent most of his review in the Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti describing the scene, with its colorful drapes and flags, its rows of Slav visitors, its warm, appreciative atmosphere. When the more important Slav delegates arrived late from a dinner with the minister of public enlightenment, they were greeted by waves of applause and shouts of welcome, which only died down after they had solemnly bowed to the audience. Stasov was nevertheless particularly concerned to end on a note that drew attention to the importance of the Russian contribution, which he may perhaps have thought would have surprised some of the visitors, and in so doing he unwittingly gave the Balakirev circle a sobriquet that stuck.
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 22