Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  “We conclude our remarks,” he wrote, “with a wish: may God grant that our Slav guests never forget today’s concert, and may God grant that they forever preserve the memory of what poetry, taste, talent, and skill reside in a small but already mighty heap (moguchaya kuchka) of Russian musicians.”25 The kuchka they became, and have remained.

  CHAPTER 13

  Symphonic Pictures and an Abstract

  No one would dispute that Glinka really was a remarkable musician who was prevented by circumstances, both inner and outer, from becoming the founder of the Russian opera; but no, that’s not good enough! He must at once be promoted to a commander-in-chief, a lord marshal of music, and other nations must be put in their place: they, if you please, have nothing like it. And one is immediately told of some “mighty” home-grown genius whose works are merely a pitiful imitation of second-rate foreign composers—second-rate ones are the easiest to imitate. Nothing like it, indeed! Oh, poor silly barbarians, who don’t understand what tradition in art means, and who imagine that artists are something like the strong man Rappo: “A foreigner,” they say, “can lift only thirteen stone with one hand, and our man lifts twenty-six!”1

  Ivan Turgenev had just published his novel Smoke (Dïm) when he attended a concert of the Free Music School in the Assembly of the Nobles in St. Petersburg on 6 March 1867, and met Vladimir Stasov for the first time. Stasov remembered Turgenev’s reaction. “What terrible music! It’s sheer nothingness, sheer ordinariness. It’s not worth coming to Russia for such a ‘Russian school’! They’ll play you that kind of stuff anywhere you like: in Germany, in France, at any concert … and no one will pay the slightest attention … But here immediately it’s all great works, an original Russian school! Russian, original!”2 And after the concert he wrote to Pauline Viardot: “This evening I went to a grand concert of Russian music of the future, for that too exists. But it’s absolutely pitiful, devoid of ideas or originality. It’s nothing but a bad copy of what’s done in Germany. And along with it a pre-sumptuousness bolstered by all the lack of civilization that marks us out. Everyone is thrown into the same bag: Rossini, Mozart, and even Beethoven … Come! It’s pitiful!”3

  To some extent, Turgenev was merely expressing the grown-up opinion of the sophisticated Westernizer who spent half his life in France and Germany and the other half on his country estate in Russia, with only an occasional, brief descent on St. Petersburg or Moscow. It was the view also of his alter ego, Sozont Ivanich Potugin, in Smoke. He had, all the same, struck unlucky. The March FMS concert had originally been planned to include music from Glinka’s operas, but it had had to be withdrawn at short notice on the insistence of the publisher, Fyodor Stellovsky, because Balakirev declined to pay a fee. This weakened an already scrappy program, which included a Fantasy on Russian Folk Themes by the FMS’s founder, Gavriyil Lomakin; a chorus of nuns from Boris Fitingof-Shel’s opera The Demon; and a chorus by Nikolay Afanas’yev—works that Cui, in his review of the concert, described as “so bad that it’s not even worth talking about them.”4 The fugal chorus from A Life for the Tsar was replaced by a women’s chorus from Dargomïzhsky’s unfinished opera Rogdana, and the dances from Ruslan by Balakirev’s King Lear Overture. Then there was a Bach chorus, Berlioz’s Carnaval romain Overture, and a new chorus by Musorgsky, “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (“Porazheniye Sennakheriba”), a free setting of part of the Byron poem. By any standards, the program ended up a mess. But above all the sheer provincialism of the attitudes it embodied was shown up—even allowing for natural bias—by the fact that Cui felt able to praise the Balakirev overture at the expense of Carnaval romain, which he found “effective and interesting” but ultimately not very good. No wonder Turgenev was bewildered by the image of this New Russian School.

  Compared to his recent songs, Musorgsky’s chorus is conventional but well made and highly singable. Cui found it similar to the Assyrian music in Judith, adding waspishly that “if it were included in Judith, it would become its crowning glory and virtually its best number.”5 But he found fault with the slow hymnlike setting of the verse about the angel of death, comparing it to a Jewish chorale—an error of style or taste, exactly which is unclear. (Musorgsky seems in any case to have agreed with this criticism, and completely rewrote the middle section, including the text, when he revised the chorus six years later.) One can reasonably see “The Destruction of Sennacherib” as a dry run for the choruses in Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina: the work of a composer with an instinctive feeling for the musical impulse of a crowd of people. But it barely hints at the psychological tension of those operas; the sheer terror of that famous opening line, “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,” is matched only by a brisk, mildly uneasy march in E-flat minor, with the central chorale in B major/G-sharp minor—keys that may have warmed Balakirev’s heart, but were insufficient to turn the piece into a beacon of what Turgenev was ridiculing as “the Russian music of the future.”

  Of course, nobody would seriously expect a six-minute choral work to be much more than bread-and-butter music. The real answer to Turgenev had to come through large-scale orchestral or theatrical works, but as usual with the Balakirev circle there was little sign of anything of the sort on the public platform. As ever, there was no shortage of ideas. Rimsky-Korsakov had written part (or possibly all) of an allegro in B minor and a scherzo in E flat intended for a Second Symphony, in B minor; Cui had composed about half of his opera William Ratcliff; and Balakirev had yet again shelved his own Firebird opera as well as his C-major symphony, but had for some time been talking about a symphonic poem he was planning to base on Lermontov’s poem Tamara.6 He was in the habit of playing excerpts or even just the themes of works-in-progress at circle evenings. Rimsky-Korsakov remembered him playing melodies he had brought back from the Caucasus three or four years before, including a tune by the name of “Islamey.” And that winter of 1866–7 he often (again according to Rimsky-Korsakov) played substantial chunks of Tamara, apparently improvising the music, with nothing written down.7 There had been another Lermontov plan, a program symphony called Mtsyri, based on a longer poem by the great writer, but this too had died the death.8 Whether or not any music from Mtsyri found its way into Tamara is a matter for conjecture.

  The one significant work that was now complete, though still unknown to anyone outside the circle, was the E-flat symphony that Borodin had been writing for the past five years. Exactly when he finished it is uncertain, but it was probably during the Christmas holidays at the end of 1866. An undated letter to Balakirev from about that time announces the work’s completion, and invites him to act as its “godfather”—meaning, no doubt, to come round and look the score over. “I am free every day,” Borodin announces uncharacteristically, from which Dianin (editing the correspondence) craftily deduces that it was holiday time.9 Balakirev later told Stasov that “each bar [of the symphony] was examined and criticised by me,”10 but this was probably an exaggeration, since Borodin these days (like Balakirev himself) was not in the habit of writing his music down systematically, but tended to mull it over, play sections extempore and not necessarily in their eventual sequence, and only write up at his infrequent moments of leisure or when ill in bed. Their relationship was emphatically not like Balakirev’s with Musorgsky, if only because Borodin was so rarely free from other cares.

  There is nevertheless something of the journeyman about this First Symphony, which starts off, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphony and Musorgsky’s chorus, in the Balakirevan key of E-flat minor, before settling more conventionally in the major. And as with Rimsky-Korsakov, there is a goody-goody aspect to the form, with every section, every key correctly placed, plenty of motivic dialoguing between instruments, thematic links between movements, smooth transitions, and so forth. Here too the hand of Schumann lies at times rather heavily, especially on the finale, whose main theme is a little too obvious a variant of a favorite pattern in the German master’s symphonies (first movement of no. 1, final
es of nos. 3 and 4). The clear intention seems to have been to write as well as possible on the basis of certain models and with certain precepts always in mind. Under the circumstances, it’s amazing how well Borodin survived these restrictions.

  He did so, as is evident from the start of the symphony, by sheer talent. The essential energy of Borodin’s imagination comes out at the start of the allegro section of the first movement, where the syncopated main theme triggers conflicting patterns of threes and twos which he sometimes contains within the basic three-four time by an unambiguous rhythmic accompaniment, but sometimes allows to drift into six-eight (two long beats instead of three). Borodin obviously liked these strong rhythmic characters. The second subject makes an issue of the crotchet pulse, with heavy string downbows on each beat, a physical process for the players which involves retaking (carrying the bow back to the heel) on every stroke, and guarantees a degree of violence in the execution. (A well-known parallel case is the second subject of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture: the rhythm itself is similar.) In the finale the first subject and its extension may be derivative, but the second theme is again rhythmically idiosyncratic, with half-bar accents which effectively redivide the four-beat bars into out-of-phase fours and eights. The idea is slightly self-conscious and looks like a studied attempt to complicate a perfectly regular melody. But this proves all the more, of course, how aware Borodin was of the possibilities of rhythmic experiment.

  The scherzo second movement suggests one source for this idea. The sparkling, deftly scored main theme, obviously indebted to Berlioz’s “Queen Mab,” is essentially regular in its patterning. But the trio is quite another matter. Here the model is folk song, and the irregular meter characteristic of the protyazhnaya. Each of the first two phrases is extended by one beat in the form of an extra upbeat to the next phrase. The third phrase is shortened by one beat, while the fourth phrase is unmodified in the first statement (oboe) but shortened by a beat the second time round (flute). These may seem trivial modifications, but the device has such remarkable consequences in later Russian music that its occasional appearance in the music of the sixties is well worth noting. The lyrical main theme of the andante third movement is rather ordinary by comparison. Though not without some individual touches (especially the little quasi-Oriental twiddles), it perhaps doesn’t quite deserve the buildup Borodin gives it to a grand peroration, which again may have been suggested by Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette.

  With Tamara the difficulty is to know exactly how much was composed (if only in the sense of improvised) by Balakirev at this period. Rimsky talks about “a significant part of Tamara” having been improvised in 1866–7, but he does not say which parts.11 Twelve years later, after Balakirev had for three years or so been working again on the sketches, Stasov told Borodin that “a few days ago Balakirev played us the whole of Tamara, straight through, with big new inserts and a wonderfully poetic introduction depicting a deserted landscape and the quiet noise of a river. This is incomparable! Now all that are needed are the last brush-strokes, and the orchestration.”12 So the long and highly original opening—the first four or five minutes of the finished work—was only added in the late seventies. By the same token, though, it’s obvious that the main allegro, which Rimsky-Korsakov said was based on a melody he and Balakirev had heard played on balalaikas by guards at the royal barracks in Shpalernaya Ulitsa, was already known to Stasov and had probably always been part of the work since its early improvisations. As for the other insertions, it seems idle to speculate what they might have been. Tamara is by its nature an episodic work, to the extent that it picks up the elements of Lermontov’s sinister vignette of the Caucasian princess—“beautiful as a celestial angel, treacherous and evil as a demon”—who lures travellers into her tower in the gorge of the river Terek, and after a night of passionate love has them murdered and their bodies thrown into the river. Quite informally constructed, the work is a kind of free fantasy on a pair of themes representing Tamara herself, varied, so to speak, from the lure, through the passion, to the death and disposal. One can well imagine Balakirev sketching ever more colorful images of this situation and splicing them into the work. But the composition is so skillful that the chronology of the process is virtually impossible to reconstruct in hindsight.

  This question is of more than academic interest, because Tamara was a key work for the kuchka, and plainly influenced them long before it was even so much as written down. In a sense Balakirev invented a whole musical vocabulary for a particular kind of sensuous so-called Orientalism. (The Terek gorge in fact lies due south of Balakirev’s birthplace, Nizhny-Novgorod, and Lermontov was a native of Moscow.) You have only to compare Tamara with Rimsky-Korsakov’s much better-known Sheherazade, written after the eventual first performance of Balakirev’s symphonic poem in 1883, to grasp the extent of the debt. Not only several of Rimsky-Korsakov’s themes, but also rhythmic, instrumental, and decorative ideas, are unashamedly copied from Tamara, which in turn owes something to Glinka’s Ruslan, at least for the concept of an exotic Eastern music, if not for much of its detail. Mostly these ideas are not “Oriental” at all, but merely stand for that aspect of the East which frightens or entices Westerners, that aspect which is “mysterious” because civilized in ways of which the West is ignorant. Musically this might mean strange chromatic melodies like the oboe second subject of Tamara, or it might be a matter of instrumental coloring, like the wheedling high bassoon (figure 4 in the first subject, repeat of the second subject), or the soft tambourine accompaniment to that same oboe and bassoon melody. It might be the wild “Scythian” compound rhythms that dominate the main allegro music almost from start to finish. All these features reappear, sometimes not much altered, in Sheherazade; but not only there. Borodin also knew how to adapt them to his own needs; and they can be traced through Russian music up to The Rite of Spring and even beyond.

  Most of these elements (though obviously not the orchestral coloring) will have been present in Balakirev’s improvisations of the late sixties. We can test this because they are already partly present in the virtuoso piano work (Islamey) that he wrote soon afterward and whose main themes Rimsky-Korsakov recalls being part of Balakirev’s keyboard repertoire when Tamara was first on the stocks. In other words, they were very much in the air at circle gatherings in 1867. What might not have been apparent at that time was exactly how Balakirev would meld these elements into a coherent whole. After all, the question of large-scale form had usually come back to sonata modelling of one kind or another, which was all very well for a symphony or an overture, but might not suit a program work like Tamara, which had a narrative basis that was bound, in the end, to influence the musical design, particularly if your hero was Liszt, whose symphonic poems are models of sui generis form controlled, if not by an actual story, at least by concepts derived from one. It seems to have taken Balakirev fifteen years to solve this problem by means of a complex and carefully thought-out mechanism of tempo transitions (a technique later known as metric modulation). For instance, at the point where the first allegro theme (the doomed traveller) subsides into the seductive music for Tamara herself, Balakirev works a neat transition, from a bar of twelve quavers (four units) to one of six crotchets with a triplet subdivision, which maintains a rhythmic link with the allegro while reining in its tempo in a structured way. Scene change without loss of momentum is brilliantly engineered. But since, in its uncodified form, this is essentially an improvisatory technique—a way of passing smoothly from one thing to another—it may well be that Balakirev was experimenting with these types of continuity as he sat at the piano in his apartment, or at Cui’s or Shestakova’s, in 1867. The evidence of Islamey, again, is that he was.

  While Tamara remained in a half-formed state, Musorgsky was back at work on his witches. Early in the year he had been sick with influenza and an attack of his old nervous fever. Then at the end of April, for reasons not precisely known, he lost his job at the ministry (it says something about the Russ
ian imperial civil service that his dismissal came only four months after he had been promoted in the table of ranks from collegiate secretary to titular counselor). It left him, of course, more dependent than ever on his brother, with whom he was still living, and with whom he returned to Minkino in June. But even with Filaret’s support he found himself unable to live a normal life in the capital, and after a brief return to St. Petersburg in August, he was forced to leave again for Minkino, and there he spent the entire two months of September and October. “My means have shrunk, it’s true,” he wrote in reply to an anxious letter from Balakirev,

  but not so far as to deprive me conclusively of the possibility of independent existence. Accustomed as I’ve been to a life of ease and a certain amount of luxury, the future seemed to me, in my present circumstances, not completely settled, and it’s no wonder that I made a sour face; at first blush anyone would do the same in my place.—I can well understand the alarm that shows in your friendly letter and I am more convinced than I can say of its genuineness.—But it’s precisely in the interests of sincerity that I do not ask, but implore you to calm yourself on my account and calm all those dear to me, since their fear for me places an unbearably heavy weight on me, and my situation doesn’t merit it.—It’s all the more painful for me in that more than anything I fear deception. Believe me, my dear Mily, that living in a family and having got used to it these last two years, rather spoilt in the family than restricted in it, and entirely settled in my domestic way of life, I had to consider well how to behave with reduced means.—After serious discussion of the matter and an arithmetical calculation of my finances I came to the conclusion that the shortfall deprives me of the possibility of living in Peter from the beginning of October (as I wanted) and commands me to skip this month of the Peter budget … As regards a job, if I bothered with that I’d be looking for a fixed post (as being more secure), but one can only think of such a thing after the New Year, since in all ministries there are cut-backs and upheavals up to New Year …13