Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  CHAPTER 14

  A French Guest and a Stone One

  Balakirev’s appearance on the rostrum of the previously scorned RMS was the outcome of a swift succession of events that shone a bright light on the parish-pump world of St. Petersburg music.

  Rubinstein’s resignation in the summer of 1867 both as director of the conservatory and as conductor of the RMS was not strictly a surprise; he had been muttering for some time about political interference in the management of the conservatory and had been openly talking about leaving at least since January. But while the Balakirev circle chortled among themselves about his imminent departure, nobody in any official position seems to have believed he would go, and no provision was made for a replacement until he announced in July, from Germany, that he had no intention of returning to the Russian capital that autumn.1 There at once ensued a scurrying in the rafters of power that precisely illustrated Rubinstein’s reason for resigning. The RMS board, of which Dargomïzhsky was president and which included Dmitry Stasov and Rubinstein’s friend Vasily Kologrivov among its directors, came down in favor of appointing Balakirev to conduct the RMS concerts in the coming season. But alas, their decision was subject to the approval of Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovna, who admittedly was a mere amateur musician herself but who happened to have recently heard Balakirev conduct, in her opinion, rather badly at an FMS concert, and was unwilling to allow him more than four of the winter concerts. For the rest, she insisted on the appointment of an internationally famous musician to conduct, suggesting to Prince Dmitri Obolensky, the vice-president of the RMS, that “in this way we would satisfy the public’s eagerness for novelty and make it easier to forget Rubinstein’s absence.”2

  For Balakirev to take the RMS baton at all must at first have seemed a bitter pill. He disliked Rubinstein as a musician, disliked his choice of repertoire, disliked the whole past image of the RMS. The idea of sharing that particular rostrum with some foreign dignitary would hardly have sweetened the medicine for this unblushing xenophobe. On the other hand, he desperately needed the money. And of course the opportunity to promote the music of his own circle was too good to resist. Accordingly he accepted the post, such as it was, on the condition that he would have choice of repertoire for the concerts he himself was conducting; and at the same time he expressed a strong preference on the subject of celebrities from overseas. The choice might well have fallen on Liszt. In fact it was decided to invite Berlioz, and this, according to Rimsky-Korsakov, was on Balakirev’s insistence.3 For the kuchka, Berlioz was the supreme living icon of modern music, a genius who had beaten the Germans at their own game, who wrote brilliant symphonies that broke free of academic forms, dramatic works that did not pretend to be Wagnerian music dramas, vocal works of a lightness and fantasy that no German could match. As an original master of the orchestra he was the nearest thing to Glinka in Western Europe. And he was an outstanding conductor, especially of his own music, which, for all its notoriety, and despite the impact of his previous visit to Russia in the 1840s, was far from well known in the empire.

  Berlioz duly arrived in St. Petersburg in mid-November 1867 and stayed until mid-February, with a brief side trip to Moscow in the first half of January. In St. Petersburg he conducted six concerts in all, based mainly on his own music, Beethoven, and Gluck. “Hector Berlioz,” Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in his autobiography, “came to us already an old man; alert when conducting, but weighed down by illness and therefore absolutely indifferent in his attitude to Russian music and Russian musicians.”4 This memoir, written nearly forty years after the event, perhaps reflects a certain desire to play down the imagined importance of the New Russian School, as Stasov called them, in the eyes of the sophisticated world. But David Cairns has shown that it was quite untrue. Old and ailing Berlioz certainly was, but he was evidently rejuvenated by his contact with this new and enthusiastic audience, and by the stimulus of conducting once again music that was so close to his heart. The orchestras he found excellent, and far better acquainted with his music than he had feared, and he was thrilled by his own reception, which inspired him, he wrote, to “conduct as I have perhaps never conducted before.”5 It seems clear that he spent time with the young Russian musicians. He rehearsed the conservatory choir painstakingly with Balakirev, who had charge of it as one of his new duties. Some at least of them attended a birthday dinner given for him by the RMS on 11 December. And from time to time Berlioz received visitors in his apartment in the Mikhailovsky Palace. Stasov found him in bed a few days before the dinner, “a real corpse, moaning and wheezing, ripe for instant burial.” But at other times the great composer was in better form. His visitors certainly included Cui and Borodin, possibly Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.6 And of course they went to his concerts. Cui reviewed them at length in the Vedomosti, and, while characteristically grumbling at some of the repertoire (“three very weak pieces by Mozart”; Beethoven’s “Pastoral,” which “has by now lost much of its freshness and novelty and perhaps counts as the least successful of Beethoven’s symphonies”), nevertheless praised Berlioz’s conducting to the skies.

  The highest stage of artistic development—a stage to which even the most happily regulated natures very seldom rise—is simplicity. This priceless quality Berlioz possesses in the highest degree. What is most striking of all in his performances is the complete lack of affectation or exaggeration alongside the most refined, varied, colorful communication of nuance. There is nobody who would respect someone else’s ideas more religiously than Berlioz; nobody more angered by the cutting, alteration, distortion of the concept or expression in the work of others, no conductor who would perform more faithfully, with greater understanding of a work’s spirit, or more complete preservation of all the author’s nuances … And what simplicity of manner, what sobriety, yet at the same time what wonderful precision of gesture, what modesty! When after his performance of the first piece the audience called Berlioz out with loud cries, he came out and with a charming gesture indicated that the credit for the performance belonged to the orchestra, not to him. Of all the conductors Petersburg has heard, there is no doubt that Berlioz is the greatest …7

  Amid all this kerfuffle, Balakirev’s own series of four concerts inevitably sounded a subdued note. As a conductor, it seems that he possessed many of the virtues Cui praised in Berlioz:

  Simplicity, precise observation of all the composer’s indications, not permitting any sort of exaggeration, undue emphasis or inappropriate hurrying up or slowing down … There was no false expression, pretentiousness or artificiality about him. His tempi were correct, exact, unexceptionable. But his performances were never dry or lifeless. The warmth of his nature was transmitted to his performances without detracting from their high artistic value.8

  His programs, though, were an idiosyncratic blend of works by Russian composers (nearly half the items)—such as had enraged Turgenev earlier in the year—and works by Western composers who happened to meet with Balakirev’s highly selective approval. So there was Beethoven but no trace of Haydn, Mozart, or anything earlier, Schumann but no Mendelssohn or Schubert, Liszt but no Wagner apart from the early and uncharacteristic Faust Overture, which for some reason Balakirev admired. The Russian pieces were the usual motley array, including excerpts from Ruslan and Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka, songs by Glinka and Balakirev himself, and the two “star” works from the Slavic concert, Rimsky-Korsakov’s hastily written Fantasia on Serbian Themes and Balakirev’s Overture on Czech Themes.

  In this company, Sadko shone out as a significant and substantial novelty. For Cui (who was not always generous to his kuchka colleagues in print), it showed that “Korsakov’s talent is maturing and strengthening rapidly; in less than two years he has given us four beautiful orchestral works, of which the most recent, Sadko, is noticeably superior to the others and occupies a highly prominent place among contemporary symphonic compositions.”9 Even Serov praised Rimsky-Korsakov’s material and his handling of the orchestra (“a boundless wea
lth of what is not just common-Slavonic but also truly Russian … the composer’s palette sparkles with distinctive, original richness”), but then proceeded to devote the rest of a longish review to an attack on the young composer for having selected one episode from the Sadko legend instead of composing the entire bïlina—a bizarre complaint, one might think, from the composer of Judith.10 Meanwhile the recently appointed, ultra-conservative music critic of Golos, Alexander Famintsïn, used the Sadko concert as a pretext for a broadside against so-called nationalist music in general and the Balakirev circle in particular. “Many people,” he wrote, “seem to think that we already have Russian instrumental music and even call it ‘national.’ But is music national just because it uses as themes for composition trivial dance tunes that automatically remind one of disgusting scenes in front of a saloon?… If that is ‘nationalism,’ then we can indeed boast of Russian national instrumental music, since we have quite a few trepak dances of various kinds in this form.”11 Balakirev’s Czech overture and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko both include trepaks.

  Famintsïn was himself a (Leipzig) conservatory-trained music historian, a professor of history and aesthetics at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and a composer in his own right. When Balakirev’s appointment to the RMS had been announced in September, Famintsïn had referred to him in Golos as “a young and very talented composer and conductor,” but this may have been at least partly because he hoped to persuade the talented conductor to program his recently composed incidental music to Schiller’s William Tell. He also treated Balakirev’s Czech overture with caution in his review of the December concert. Balakirev did duly conduct Famintsïn’s work two months later in a private RMS tryout that also included a scrappy run-through of Borodin’s E-flat symphony. But the good professor’s remarks about the new Russian music were too much for Musorgsky, who promptly penned a musical lampoon in the form of a song to a specially composed text which he called “The Classicist—Concerning a Number of Musical Articlets by Mr. Famintsïn” (“Klassik—po povodu nekotorïkh muzïkal’nïkh stateyek g-na Famintsïna”).

  As a professional colleague and de facto ally of Rubinstein, Famintsïn naturally opposed what he saw as the dilettantism of the New Russian School, along with the modernism that Rubinstein himself rejected in the composers of the so-called New German School, including Wagner and Liszt. But what sort of music did he like? Musorgsky had his own answer. “I am simple,” he has Famintsïn declare, “I am lucid, I am modest, polite, I am beauteous … a pure classicist.” The music has the hesitant charm of a diffident visitor stepping into an eighteenth-century drawing room, until the song’s middle section, where courtesy turns to rage against “the newest devices” and “all innovations,” especially (the accompaniment reminds us) the ones in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko. “The Classicist” is not a great song, but nor is it quite a failure. The tease against Famintsïn is of course as meaningless now as the place occupied by that personage in history; but to some extent the satire is generic—a neat, wittily crafted send-up of those (still to be found) who believe that music came to an end with Beethoven, or who wish it had.

  One of the reasons why Musorgsky was able to hit off the self-conscious purist so accurately was that he himself had been composing a series of studies based on the comedy of simplicity and the childlike. They followed on from the tragic humor (as he saw it) of the simpleton in “Savishna,” the novice in “The Seminarian,” and the husband in “Oh, You Drunken Sot!” Even the romance-like “Yevreyskaya pesnya” (“Jewish Song”), a setting of a very free paraphrase of the opening verses of chapter 2 of the Song of Solomon, preserves a kind of languorous purity, with its suggestion of a harp accompanying an antique folk melody colored by apparently random chromatics. Mey’s poem tweaks the biblical text into a dialogue between male and female lovers, which surely can’t be why Musorgsky, who was still dependent on his brother and sister-in-law for the roof over his head and (presumably) the food and drink in his stomach, dedicated this exquisite song to them.

  “Jewish Song” had been composed in June 1867, just after the Musorgskys had arrived at Minkino, and just before the composer finished off St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain. The rest of the summer had produced exactly three songs, but they are of an originality of style and precision of aim and method that belie any suggestion of slow or lazy working. All three are studies in monometrics—composition in single, unvaried rhythmic units, as for the simpleton’s patter in “Darling Savishna.” Here, though, the simpleton is replaced by children and peasants, and his mindless desperation turns into the ritual incantations beloved of the very young and those whose lives are governed by nature and routine. Thus the magpie in “Chattering Magpie” (“Strekotun’ya beloboka”) is turned initially into a pretext for a game of mimicry, while in “Mushrooming” (“Po gribï”) a mechanical counting rhythm serves as conveyor belt for a petulant tirade against some temporary enemies of the young girl doing the collecting.

  The magpie song, for all its childish tone (and its subtitle: “shutka,” “A Joke”), is a subtle and intricate piece of work. The text is a fusion of two quite separate poems by Pushkin, done in such a way as to create ambiguities of meaning that Musorgsky then uses as a basis for musical cross-cutting. Pushkin’s eight-line fragment about the magpie already throws together seemingly unrelated images: a bird by the gate, a prophecy of guests, an imagined bell, dawn light silvering the snowy earth (perhaps he intended to expand the poem into a coherent narrative, though in fact the rhyming scheme works well as it is). The other poem (“Kolokol’chiki zvenyat,” “Little Bells Are Ringing”) picks up the bells, adds a drummer, a crowd of people, and a little Gypsy girl, who jumps up and down waving a handkerchief. It seems that for Musorgsky this array of images was like an additive folk poem whose incoherences were simply an aspect of the palimpsest of history; but at the same time, the linkages are suggestive. The people are (let’s say) the expected guests; the Gypsy girl is the magpie, who also jumps up and down, foretells the future, and pronounces herself a songster.

  The music reflects this pattern of sequitur and non sequitur. The magpie chatter (staccato quavers) is soon colored by bell sounds (semiquavers) high on the piano; but as rosy dawn gleams on the snow, the sounds glow like church bells, in even crotchets that are then taken up by the bells of the second poem, and run through like a steady chime until the final couplet, at which point the music augments into a solemn peroration to the Gypsy girl’s “I’m a songster, I’m a singer, I’m a mistress of fortunetelling.” The whole is then repeated (with one abridgment). There is something mysterious about this linking of mundane observation to church bells, like the deification of folk wisdom. It was essentially a Slavophile idea: the divine to be sought in the lives of rural folk. But it took a Musorgsky—no Slavophile, no more than a routine Christian if one at all, but an artist without baggage—to realize its particular musical potential.

  Mey’s “Mushrooming” is more obviously coherent. The girl gathering the mushrooms is young, but not too young to marry, and it seems that she plans to poison her parents-in-law, her husband’s grandfather (presumably), and finally her husband, lying down beside him in her widowhood. But Musorgsky typically sees this not as a drama but as a character study. Clearly the girl is not going to kill anyone, she is merely in a rage about some domestic tiff, and vents her fury by thinking poison while actually picking edible. This is the only possible sense of the music’s relentless joviality, discolored here and there by sinister chromatic harmonies as the girl mutters dark threats and (one imagines) snaps off the mushrooms with unnecessary vehemence. As usual with Musorgsky, the vagrant harmony is expressive rather than grammatical, enhancing the picture of a girl who is spirited but no murderess. She will go home and cook a perfectly palatable supper, and the song ends with the same bouncy offbeat rhythm with which it began.

  The last of these late-summer songs is a setting of a poem by Koltsov called “Pirushka” (“Little Feast,” or, perhaps better,
“Peasant Feast”). Musorgsky subtitled this “rasskaz” (“Story”), but once again the focus is less on narrative than on the painting of a scene. Guests (a current preoccupation of his, for perhaps obvious reasons) arrive, are solemnly led into the house and, after praying before the icon, are served home-brewed bitters and strong beer in home-carved ladles. The song is like a genre painting by Perov: the rich simplicity of the scene, the image of hospitality as a devout ceremony, the charm of the host and hostess and of their daughter as she dispenses honey “with maidenly kindness”—for all these details Musorgsky finds a music that captures their integrity and timeless dignity.

  That he was proud of the song is shown by the fact that he not only mentioned it in a letter to Rimsky-Korsakov but quoted its main theme and described it as specifically Russian. Rimsky-Korsakov, in response, refused to judge the piece “until I can hear the whole song.” Yet in a sense the whole song—“its whole chic,” as Musorgsky described it—is already present in the theme, with its solemn eleven-beat tread (a constant six-plus-five) and, once more, unbroken crotchet rhythm, which places a duty on the singer to maintain the pulse and not add stray half-beats at the end of each phrase, since the point about the steady flow and the irrational beat count is to deny the usual tendency of music to advance from A to B via some kind of climax and a rhetorical close. Musorgsky’s feast neither climaxes nor ends in the normal sense. It merely comes to a halt on a plagal (Amen) cadence, as the guests depart, as calmly as they arrived.