Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  In the event it would be more than a year before he was able to secure a new post, in the Forestry Department. Meanwhile he was free to compose.

  His first task at Minkino was to complete St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, as the witches piece was to be called. Exactly how much of it he took with him to the country is in fact far from certain. He had, as we saw, written the first section a year before, but on the other hand he tells Rimsky-Korsakov, early in July 1867, that the score is finished and that he has written it in a fortnight of mid-June, directly into fair copy without drafts and “without sketches of any kind.” The wording is mildly ambiguous: for instance, he says “wrote” (napisal), which might conceivably mean “wrote up,” rather than “composed” (sochinil); and the absence of sketches might simply mean the absence of orchestration sketches. But all this is rather laborious, and it seems reasonable to conclude that he essentially composed most of the piece straight into orchestral score in those two weeks, “not sleeping at night and finishing the work precisely on St. John’s Eve” (23 June).14

  None of these details would be of any importance if it were not for the fact that he had previously composed virtually nothing of significance for orchestra. What there was of Salammbô was largely unscored, and probably the same was true of the symphony he had been composing for Balakirev. He had scored up his various choruses—Oedipus, “The Libyans,” “Sennacherib”; he had composed the nondescript B-flat scherzo (no doubt orchestrated with Balakirev’s help); and he had orchestrated his “Little Star” song. Now he was writing a twelve-minute orchestral work of a particularly colorful type, and composing it straight into score, rather than as a piano piece that he would then orchestrate. It would hardly have been surprising if the result had been a complete failure, a prime example of the ineptitudes catalogued with such clinical ruthlessness by Rimsky-Korsakov long after Musorgsky’s death: “absurd, incoherent harmonies, ugly voice-leading, sometimes strikingly illogical modulation, sometimes a depressing absence of any, unsuccessful instrumentation of orchestral pieces, in general a certain impertinent self-satisfied dilettantism, at times moments of technical adroitness and skill but more often complete technical feebleness.”15 Of all the Musorgsky works Rimsky-Korsakov edited, St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain was the one he subjected to the most radical recomposition. His edition, compounded of elements of the 1867 score and two later versions Musorgsky made to insert in theatre works that were themselves never completed, was for nearly a hundred years the only one known to concert audiences; and when Musorgsky’s own original score was performed for the first time in the 1970s, the general reaction was that Rimsky-Korsakov’s judgment had not been far wrong.

  It would certainly be hard to deny that the original symphonic poem—or “intermedia,” as Musorgsky initially described it on the manuscript title page, then crossed the word out in thick pencil—is a flawed work, somewhat unvaried in character and, in its conclusion, decidedly perfunctory. The problem of structure is better solved in the version he made as a choral intermezzo in the opera Sorochintsï Fair, which ends beautifully with the chiming of morning bells and the rising sun breaking through clouds, an ending Rimsky-Korsakov adapted for his own version, whereas Musorgsky was content to conclude his intermedia, as Berlioz had done his Symphonie fantastique, with the witches’ sabbath itself, but without quite finding and controlling the necessary additional frenzy to overtop that of the preceding music. After finishing the score, he described the program to Rimsky-Korsakov: the witches assembling, Satan’s arrival and cortège, the glorification of Satan, and finally the sabbath itself. He also discussed the music at some length, even giving details of the key structure (perhaps in a studentish desire to demonstrate his credentials), and including a pair of music examples which in fact show that the work as completed in June was subsequently revised, since neither of the quoted passages appears in the surviving manuscript. This may have been due to negative remarks by Balakirev, who, as we learn from Musorgsky’s September letter, had reacted “evasively” to the work and apparently criticized its design and tried to get his young colleague to modify it. “Whether or not you agree, my friend, to perform my witches,” Musorgsky responded, “that is, whether or not I hear them, I will not change anything in the general plan and treatment, closely connected with the contents of the scene, and executed sincerely, without sham or imitation.”16 Balakirev did not conduct the work, and Musorgsky never heard a note of it.

  In view of the inferior works he was prepared to conduct, one wonders what it was about the piece that turned Balakirev against it. Unsatisfactory the form might be; but the music contains so much that is brilliant and original that one is forced to the conclusion that he was simply too disconcerted by it to want to risk it in the public arena. From start to finish the writing is utterly fearless. Musorgsky had plainly been impressed by the sheer diabolism of Liszt’s writing in the Totentanz, and at the same time by the way he explores this property by means of a set of variations which, so to speak, excuse him from the need to constantly invent new material—never, after all, Liszt’s strongest point. St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain is in the same way a set of variations on a group of themes which sprout new elements while never straying far from the controlling material of the opening pages. But Musorgsky’s variation technique is superbly promiscuous. He keeps coming up with new ways of playing with his material, no doubt thinking of the witches and their sexual pranks (shashni)17 without too much concern for formal process. The variations in scoring and texture also recall Glinka’s Kamarinskaya method. But Glinka never attempted an orchestral work on quite this scale, nor did he monkey with convention to anything like the same extent.

  Musorgsky’s originality is best measured against the changes Rimsky-Korsakov saw fit to make, not so much to the work’s structure (which he unquestionably improved) as to its detail. The ferocity of Musorgsky’s opening, complete with timpani tuned eccentrically to the adjacent pitches G-sharp, A, and B-flat and horns growling away on their bottom A, is partly sacrificed by Rimsky-Korsakov in the interests, one assumes, of good conservatory practice; and in general Rimsky’s scoring favors well-behaved family groupings over Musorgsky’s stark, Glinka-esque spotlighting of tearaway subsections. For instance, the wild staccato countertheme at bar 13 of the original (bar 12 in Rimsky), which Musorgsky allocates to flutes, oboes, cornets, and trumpets, is completely revamped by Rimsky-Korsakov for woodwind and strings (with bass drum), a “better” solution in every respect except the crucial one of the graphic effect required. In general, the Rimsky-Korsakov of 1886 nearly always plumps for the best scoring from the “brilliance” chapter of the orchestration manual, whereas Musorgsky, as he told Balakirev, always had the specific picture in his mind’s ear, and wrote the sounds he saw.

  Much the same applies to the main parameters of the music, especially its melody and harmony. In essence, Musorgsky’s variation technique, like Glinka’s, is based on the idea of continuous modified repetition. But whereas Glinka had tended to operate within the normal constraints of tonal grammar, keeping the shape of the tune while varying the harmony and texture, Musorgsky tinkers with the melody, adopts a freewheeling approach to countermelody (the “underneath” parts), and often seems to let the harmony go hang. A good example of this is his treatment of the folk-song-derived second theme at figure 4 in the original score, letter B in the Rimsky-Korsakov version. Musorgsky continually tweaks this melody, changing flats to naturals, naturals to sharps, apparently at random, like a schoolboy trying his cap at different angles just for the fun of it. He also extends bars from four to six beats, presumably to accommodate the witches’ shrieks, like the shouts of “Vot kak!” and “Vot shto!” in the Shevchenko “Gopak.” Such procedures are beyond Rimsky-Korsakov’s comprehension, and he invariably “corrects” the accidentals to fit the tonal context and the bar lengths to fit a regular scheme. But Musorgsky hasn’t bothered too much about the tonal context, either. At one point, nine bars after figure 5, he
has the melody going against two countermelodies, one rising chromatically, the other falling chromatically at half-speed, and the “harmony,” such as it is, held together by a pedal (repeated) D on horns and cornets. Rimsky-Korsakov simplifies the passage by cutting out one of the countermelodies and making sure the pedal notes move toward a logical closure, with clear G-minor harmonies for the end of the passage (letter E; figure 6 in the original). All this is a big improvement, if what you want is an orderly design that broadly does what it’s told. If, however, what you want is a musical image of a disorderly saturnalia, then Musorgsky hardly needs improving. In such cases genius is practically incapable of error; it has its own rules of which, to misquote Pascal, the rules know nothing.18

  At the time, long before he became a conservatory professor, Rimsky-Korsakov was a good deal more sympathetic to Musorgsky’s symphonic poem, which admittedly he knew only from the composer’s own description and memories of early play-throughs of the opening pages. Their exchange is revealing. “In the general process of composition,” Musorgsky had written, “I’ve done a lot that’s new, for instance in the filthy glorification there’s a bit for which César [Cui] will dispatch me to the Conservatory” (here he quoted half a dozen bars not found in the eventual score); later he described a sequence for which “they would expel me from the Conservatory to which César will have banished me.” He talked about his (extensive) use of what he called “a chemical scale,” by which he meant Glinka’s whole-tone scale, used here especially for dissolves from one scene to the next. And he concluded: “In my view St. John’s Night is bound to make a good impression on a thinking musician for what’s new in it … Let’s agree that I’m not going to start redoing it; with whatever defects it was born, with them it will live, if it will live.”19 “The glorification of Satan,” Rimsky-Korsakov replied, “must certainly be most filthy, and for that reason all kinds of harmonic and melodic filth are permissible and fitting, and no grounds for sending you to the conservatory. The conservatories will of course be horrified by you, but then they themselves can’t compose anything decent.”20

  In the past few months, these two youngest members of the circle had drawn closer together, and were freely exchanging information about their work. With the symphonic poem finished, Musorgsky was now orchestrating his “Intermezzo in modo classico” and composing the new middle section which was supposed to represent the young girls singing and laughing in the snow. “The piece itself,” he assures Rimsky-Korsakov (without saying a word about the alleged program), “is nothing but a tribute to the Germans,” a remark which suggests some mild embarrassment at the music’s conventional idiom by comparison with St. John’s Night.21 Hastily he moves on to set out a new plan for an orchestral work about Podebrad, the fourteenth-century Hussite leader and regent of Bohemia (another stab at the Germans, in the shape of the Holy Roman Empire and the German king of Bohemia whom Podebrad ousted); he describes the music in some detail and quotes several themes, before passing on to discuss Rimsky-Korsakov’s own latest orchestral project.

  This is the long-delayed fulfillment of Stasov’s old idea of a work based on the legend of the Novgorod gusli-playing merchant Sadko. Stasov, as we saw, had originally pressed this story on to Balakirev, who had eventually passed it on to Musorgsky, who seems to have thought about it for a while, then lost interest and proposed it to Rimsky-Korsakov. This pass-the-parcel aspect of the kuchka was the reverse side of their dependence on each other’s opinion of their work; it reflected both their lack of confidence in their own ability to complete large-scale projects and their willingness to abandon or at least shelve work—as Musorgsky had just done—of which the others disapproved. But Rimsky-Korsakov was perhaps the least afflicted in this way, and he was rapidly becoming the one member of the circle who could decide to write a work, then get on with writing it, and then quickly get it performed. Admittedly he was not much less addicted to revision than Musorgsky (his Sadko tone poem, for instance, exists in three different versions); but this was largely due to his becoming a conservatory professor at the age of twenty-seven, after which he tended to view the sins of his youth with a certain pedagogical severity—a severity he also applied, as we have just seen, to the work of his deceased colleagues.

  The twelve-minute Sadko illustrates his growing self-assurance. He started writing it at the end of June 1867 at his brother’s house near Viborg, in Finland (at that time a guberniya of the tsarist empire), and despite having to spend a whole month on a naval cruise in the Gulf of Finland, he completed the full score at the end of September. By the second week of July he is able to describe the first two sections to Musorgsky in laborious detail, with the same rather self-satisfied cataloguing of key schemes and scale formations, orchestration, and several music examples.22 At the start of the work (in Balakirev’s beloved D-flat major), Sadko has already been thrown into the sea from the becalmed ship, and is floating on a plank on the rolling waves. Very soon, however, he is being dragged down to the seabed so that he can play his gusli at the wedding of the Sea King’s daughter. We picture the swell of the sea, graphically portrayed in the gently rotating string figures, then the moment of supernatural intervention and Sadko spiraling down, down into the deep waters, where a decorous wedding feast is in progress, scherzando in D major, with flowing limbs and fluttering eyelashes. The composer goes on to outline his intentions for the rest of the work. Sadko’s gusli playing (D-flat major again) sets off a vigorous trepak which soon becomes so violent that it triggers a storm that sinks many ships. At the climax, Sadko is to be visited by St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, and asked to stop playing and break his gusli. Rimsky-Korsakov has a “church theme” ready for this moment (he quotes it). But Musorgsky takes against the theme and begs his friend to change it.23 Finally, the St. Nicholas idea is abandoned; after all, Rimsky admits, “Sadko himself could have the sense to smash the gusli … And Nikolay would spoil the impression of the dance with his church theme, and indeed his appearance in the midst of the pagan world is somewhat ridiculous”24 (though it is exactly what happens in the original bïlina).

  The composer is at pains to describe the technical devices involved in all this.25 At first the waves rise and fall in terms of both the melodic figuration and the harmonic motion; and when Sadko descends to the ocean floor, the music carries him down another of those “chemical” scales, like the whole-tone scale of Lyudmila’s abduction or Musorgsky’s witches, but this time a more complicated affair of alternating tones and semitones, eight notes to the octave instead of seven—hence its modern name, the octatonic scale (Rimsky-Korsakov called it the gamma ton-poluton, the “tone-semitone scale”). As with Glinka, the idea is one of dissolution and disorientation. The whole-tone scale, lacking the semitones which point us toward the keynote, is effectively atonal, musically weightless and directionless. Rimsky-Korsakov’s scale, on the other hand, has an equal number of whole tones and semitones, equally distributed, so that the semitones point us in four possible directions. It sacrifices weightlessness in favor of complexity. We are in a square room with a door in the middle of each wall, all or none of which may lead us to our unknown destination. Rimsky-Korsakov seems already to have understood that this kind of pattern had harmonic possibilities not offered by the whole-tone scale, which is, so to speak, a room without any doors. Harmony comes from a sense of direction, however ambiguous; and for direction we require choice, and criteria for choosing.

  Like Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov was consciously indebted to Liszt for many aspects of Sadko. Images of water abound in Liszt’s music, especially flowing water as something at once mobile and unchanging. The discarded idea of St. Nicholas visiting Sadko on the seabed irresistibly recalls Liszt’s “St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves.” But the most striking derivation is the technical one. Octatonic scales crop up here and there well before Liszt (Taruskin found them in Scarlatti and Bach),26 but Liszt seems to have been the first to employ them in any systematic way. In his memoirs,
Rimsky-Korsakov acknowledges his debt to Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, the first of Liszt’s symphonic poems, where octatonics are prominent, though he avoids mentioning the scale, but merely refers to one of its properties: namely, that it lends itself to harmonic motion by descending minor thirds. He also incidentally itemizes a number of other allusions, including Balakirev’s “Song of the Golden Fish,” Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka, and Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz.27 Reading all this is rather like eavesdropping on a confessional. The aging master is quite hard on his youthful work: he finds it derivative, unbalanced, and short-winded, but he praises the freshness of the material and “the orchestral coloring, caught by some miracle, in spite of my impressive ignorance in the matter of orchestration.” The whole impression is that if the young midshipman had had the advantage of tuition by Professor Rimsky-Korsakov, all would have been well; and of course the same applied to Musorgsky.

  Whatever its technical novelty, virtues, and defects, Sadko is not a work that makes great waves outside its own subject matter. Like his symphony, but in a more individual manner, it achieves what it sets out to achieve attractively and with a certain elegance of surface and style, some of which comes from a revision of 1892. It quite lacks the roughness of St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, but it also lacks the sheer thrill of that work, its sense of adventure and danger. A better work it undoubtedly is, but a more limited one. When Balakirev conducted its first performance in an RMS concert on 9 December 1867, it was well received, at least, by an audience not always noted for its receptiveness to radical masterpieces. Rimsky-Korsakov’s talent was clearly of the kind that wore its individuality lightly, the sort that adapted itself well and quickly to known idioms and methods, while adding just enough flavor of personality to mark him out as a composer above the common herd. Balakirev, according to Rimsky’s own typically candid memoir, “paid my work a certain tribute of patronizing and encouraging admiration, but characterized my compositorial nature as female and in need of impregnation by alien musical ideas.”28 For once the guru may not have been entirely wrong.