Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Back in St. Petersburg in December and January, he composed another five songs, four of which (including “The Classicist”) are life studies in the same sense as the summer pieces. “The Ragamuffin” (“Ozornik”), unlike the earlier songs, sets a text (again one could hardly call it a poem) by Musorgsky himself, in which the lines or half-lines are for the most part pentasyllabic, and because the subject is a naughty little boy making fun of an old crone, the music comes out as a rapid childish incantation mainly in five-four time. This is an extension of the idea of “Darling Savishna,” with its obsessive, infantile fives, and “The Little Feast,” whose sixes and fives had also been the result of a strict syllabic setting of the poem’s couplets. But just as, in verbal play, a child will deliberately distort the normal accents of speech in order to preserve a mechanical pattern, so Musorgsky’s urchin sometimes misaccentuates the fives, routinely dividing them as two-plus-three, regardless of where the natural accent falls, or extending unaccented syllables to make an apparently random six-beat bar. The setting of the text, that is, is governed by the picture the composer wants to paint.

  The same is true, in a rather different sense, in “Sirotka” (“The Orphan”), also to a text by the composer. A homeless, starving boy pleads for alms from a well-to-do passer-by, and the whole song is dominated (almost in the manner of a baroque Affekt) by the strongly downbeated dactylic rhythm of the first phrase: “Barin moy, milen’kiy”—“Please, good sir, please be kind.” This accent, already strong in Russian as in English, is intensified by the child’s desperation, which Musorgsky stresses not only through the persistent rhythmic motive, but with dynamic emphases in almost every bar—either forte downbeats or piano downbeats followed by hairpin crescendos and decrescendos. The result is a musical picture of quite extraordinary vividness and poignancy. A few years later Turgenev was present at a soirée of the great operatic bass Osip Petrov, at which his wife, Anna, sang “The Orphan,” and Turgenev, by his own report to Pauline Viardot, was “moved to tears.”12

  By contrast, “The Billy Goat” (“Kozyol”) is more in the nature of a charade, the sort of thing one can imagine Musorgsky having improvised on the spot. Yet again the text is his own, but now there is a brief narrative—a little ironic comedy that might, fifty years later, have served as a revue sketch. The composer subtitled it “Svetskaya skazochka”—“A Society Tale.” A girl goes walking in the fields “to show herself off” (delicate, tripping melody in A major), but meets a horrid old billy goat (grumpy C-sharp minor), runs away and hides in the bushes (A major again, but quicker and with a scurrying semiquaver figure in the piano); soon, though, the girl marries (delicate A-major music as at the start), and whom does she marry? Naturally, a grumpy C-sharp-minor old goat of a moneybags. And of course she doesn’t once run away, but cozies up to him, swearing fidelity, etc., etc. (tripping A-major finish). Musically the song is trivial to a degree, but Musorgsky brings it off by the sheer pithiness of the treatment, like that of a comic strip.

  The single exception to these life studies is the little romance “Along the Don a Garden Is in Bloom” (“Po-nad Donom sad tsvetyot”), to another poem by Koltsov. Strictly speaking, it is a romance that partakes of the composer’s realist method. Again there is a girl out for a walk, along the garden path outside the poet’s window. But the song is more about her feelings than her appearance, and it is the empathy that makes the romance: the delicacy of her step, her lovelorn sighs, the hint that she is watering the flowers with her feelings. This is an increasingly rare glimpse of what Rimsky-Korsakov regarded as “that ideal side of [Musorgsky’s] talent which he himself subsequently trampled in the mire,” and which “lacked a suitably crystalline transparency of finish and graceful form … But when in spite of his prejudices, he did manage a beautiful and flowing succession, how happy he was! I witnessed this more than once.”13

  Rimsky-Korsakov was naturally prejudiced by the fact that his own bent was precisely in the direction he was regretting the rarity of in Musorgsky. His own songs of this period are romances of exquisite refinement and entirely conventional character, like the fluid setting of the Pushkin lyric “My Voice for You Is Sweet and Languorous” (“Moy golos dlya tebya”), one of the four songs published in 1867 as opus 7, or the languid Orientalisms of the Lermontov romance, “Like the Sky Your Glance Shines” (“Kak nebesa, tvoy vzor blistayet”), in the same set. It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to see this lyrical quality in Rimsky-Korsakov as necessarily hostile to any kind of radical thinking. “Dargomïzhsky commissions me to invite you to his place on Wednesday evening (the 1st May): they will sing all he’s composed of Don Juan so far.”14

  Stasov’s emphasis on the word “sing” (pet) in his note to Balakirev might suggest that previous samplings of The Stone Guest had been more in the nature of piano fragments, perhaps with the voiceless Dargomïzhsky groaning the parts; or it might just be a mildly ironic joke about the work’s speech-melody idea. It seems probable, in fact, that not much actual music had been on offer at all, but that the circle’s knowledge of the work was largely through conversation about the underlying idea. In January 1868 Dargomïzhsky wrote to his friend Konstantin Velyaminov that “I am now returning again to The Stone Guest,” adding that “it has given great delight not only to the Cui-Balakirev circle, but also to [his musician friends] the Purgolds and [the singer Yulia] Platonova.”15 But how much of it they had actually heard at that stage remains a mystery.

  Dargomïzhsky’s health had taken a severe turn for the worse, and it may well have been his realization that his heart disease was slowly killing him that lent urgency to the task of composing the opera he had been talking about for so long. Between late January and early April he wrote most of what became the first act (the first two of Pushkin’s four scenes). “Despite my grave condition,” he informed Lyubov Karmalina, “I have started up my swansong; I am writing The Stone Guest. It’s a strange thing. My nervous state calls forth one idea after another. There is hardly any effort on my part. In two months I have written as much as would formerly have taken me a whole year … Of course, this work will not be for the many, but my own musical circle is pleased with my labors.”16

  In fact there had been at least one serious run-through of a significant part of the work at Dargomïzhsky’s apartment early in March. This was a performance of the second tableau, most of which is a dialogue between Laura (Pushkin’s Donna Elvira equivalent) and her lover, Don Carlos. The May run-through to which Stasov invited Balakirev will have included the first two tableaux, at least as far as Don Juan’s entry in scene 2 and the fatal duel with Don Carlos that ends the scene.

  Up to this time, Dargomïzhsky had been a regular guest at Shestakova’s evenings, but otherwise had tended, according to Rimsky-Korsakov, to surround himself “with admirers consisting of amateurs or musicians notably his inferiors.”17 The implication, not openly stated by Rimsky-Korsakov, is that Dargomïzhsky had preferred not to have his failure to produce worthwhile work since Rusalka exposed by association with the highly critical aspirants of the Balakirev circle. They could, as we know, be ruthless in their assessment of each other’s activities. When Dargomïzhsky’s old opera-ballet The Triumph of Bacchus (Torzhestvo Vakkha) had recently been premiered without success in Moscow, Musorgsky had positively gloated over its failure in a letter to Balakirev.18 But now that The Stone Guest was making rapid progress, to distant shouts of approval from the kuchka, its composer began to feel the confidence to display his work and to discuss it openly in their company. He accordingly dumped most of his old amateur admirers, and instead once more invited Balakirev, Stasov, and the rest of their circle. Of his own former associates, only two sisters survived: Nadezhda Purgold, a gifted pianist, a pupil of Musorgsky’s teacher Anton Herke, and her elder sister, Alexandra, a fine, talented mezzo-soprano.

  Dargomïzhsky was destined never to hear his last opera performed on the stage or with orchestra. But the renditions with piano must have been highly theatrical in
their own way. “It would scarcely be possible,” Stasov wrote later, “for anyone to hear the great works of Dargomïzhsky in the theatre in such a perfect performance.”19 The composer himself would croak the part of Don Juan “in the hoarse voice of an old man,”20 but with vivid dramatic effect; Musorgsky took the roles of Leporello and Don Carlos, Alexandra (Sasha) Purgold sang Laura and Donna Anna, Velyaminov sang the small bass parts—the Monk in scene 1 and the Commander in the final scene. Nadezhda (Nadya) Purgold was invariably the pianist, “our dear little orchestra,” as she came to be known. These would not have been occasions for connoisseurs of the voice. Musorgsky was himself a decent singer with a pleasant baritone; but his main talent in this department was as a vocal actor. His qualities reflected those of his most characteristic songs. He had an ability to personify the role he was singing with a comic or tragic wit and precision that could reduce his audience to laughter or tears or sometimes both at once. Sasha Purgold likewise was at her best in character roles. She had, Stasov recalled, “little talent for the performance of formal operatic arias, but on the other hand was inimitable in the realistic and lively declamation of all those musical works where the foreground quality was their genuine truth-to-life, realism, the ardor of the soul, or comedy and humor.”21

  Dargomïzhsky’s writing served these talents well. Starting with the idea of setting Pushkin’s little play more or less word for word, he adopted a style that entirely avoided conventional vocalisms. Instead the vocal lines are a compromise between the contours of speech and the lyrical requirements of singing. They nearly always respect the natural accents of the spoken Russian, and they never lapse into any kind of vocal display: there is no melisma, no roulades or cadenzas, and few extremes of vocal range. So for example, though the part of Don Juan is written for a tenor, it hardly ever strays outside the range defined by the treble clef: low D to high G—an extremely limited tessitura for an operatic tenor. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the other roles. But this (obviously deliberate) restriction on the singer’s natural athleticism is matched by the syllabic setting of the text, which in the same way restricts any tendency to expressive vocalization. The music, like Pushkin’s verse, moves along in steady, even values, without the variety of rhythm and pulse that composers usually, with good reason, impose on the texts they set. The writing leaves the singer free to nuance the words in marginal ways. But it allows hardly any room for the sorts of expressive freedom to which opera singers are accustomed, while at the same time it denies them the liberties of timing that an actor takes for granted. On the face of it, The Stone Guest has all the disadvantages of music and of speech, and none of the advantages of either of them.

  The obvious question is: what did Dargomïzhsky think he would achieve by setting Pushkin’s play in this consciously restricted way? His watchword, as he had told Karmalina, was “truth”; but it was truth defined in a highly specialized way, defined, that is, in terms of the spoken word, which might not seem the most obvious criterion for judging the truth value of music. One might as well assess the “truth” of the spoken word according to its musicality, which would plainly be ridiculous. Musorgsky, who was as excited as any of the kuchka about the idea behind The Stone Guest, had actually been working on a somewhat different assumption, that music could take us to the heart of an individual or a situation by isolating some particular aspect of speech or sound and turning it into a musical motive: the breathless declarations of the simpleton, the mindless declensions of the novice, the pleading dactyls of the orphan, the vengeful mutterings of the mushroom picker. All these were treated, in the end, as musical material. Of course, there were other aspects to what amounted, with Dargomïzhsky, to a concept of operatic reform. Like Gluck and Wagner before him (Wagner’s theories were known, his relevant works not yet), he wanted to do away with the artificialities of traditional opera: the vocal display, the big arias, the huge galumphing choruses sung by Wagner’s “scenery that has learned to march and sing.” He wanted the music to be wedded to the text in a way that would fully justify the old label of the Florentine Camerata: dramma per musica. But he was also influenced by Chernïshevsky’s theory of art as an aspiration to the condition of reality. He thought that by making the music as much like the spoken text as was consistent with its still being music, he would be producing something more real and hence, by definition, artistically superior.

  The argument is hard to sustain in the face of the work itself. The Stone Guest is musically a frustrating piece of work, neither as radical nor as sterile as the theorizing that surrounded it might lead one to expect. Taruskin quotes Paul Henry Lang on the subject: in both Rusalka and The Stone Guest, Lang asserts, “the purely musical element is totally submerged in abstract dramaturgical doctrines and the lyric drama emerges as a forbidding new stile recitativo of arid monotony, even though this recitative occasionally reaches remarkable pregnancy.”22 But Lang had probably heard neither work. There is very little that is forbidding about The Stone Guest. As Taruskin shows, its prevailing tone is lyrical, and if its music is indeed sometimes monotonous, this has nothing to do with aridity, everything to do with the simple limitations of expressive range that Dargomïzhsky imposed on himself. If he had been a greater composer, he might have produced something startling out of his root concept, if only by sometimes ignoring it, as Wagner had done when working on The Ring a decade before. In fact what he produced was a minor, though by no means worthless, score, to some extent trapped by its concept. As we shall see, it cost a greater composer a good deal of effort to release the artistic potential in this idea, by teaching himself how to forget it.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Child and an Aborted Wedding

  That March evening at Dargomïzhsky’s, the Purgold sisters observed Musorgsky closely. It was their first meeting and, according to Nadya, they had previously known nothing at all about him, which, if true, argues that Dargomïzhsky had not been promoting the Balakirev circle among his own set. Her recollection was not unduly flattering. “Musorgsky’s personality was so original,” she wrote,

  that once you had met him, it was impossible to forget him. He was of medium height, well-built; he had elegant hands, beautiful, shapely wavy hair, quite large, slightly protruding light-gray eyes. But his facial features were not at all attractive, particularly his nose, which was always rather red, as he explained, because it had once got frostbitten at a parade. Musorgsky’s eyes were not at all expressive, one could even say they were almost like tin. In general his face was not very mobile or expressive, as if it were hiding some enigma. In conversation Musorgsky would never raise his voice, but would rather lower his speech almost to a whisper. His manners were refined, aristocratic, and one saw in him a well-bred man of the world.1

  But Musorgsky’s personality “impressed both my sister and me. No wonder: he was so interesting, so original, talented and mysterious.” Sasha Purgold, in particular, was struck; in fact she fell in love with the elusive young man. But though herself pretty and talented, she seems never to have got through his emotional guard. Soon Nadya would note in her diary that Sasha “sees only coldness in the man who might inspire passion in her if only he would show a little more interest in her. Not seeing what she would like to see in him, she exaggerates, and refers to his attitude as almost hatred, and says that he doesn’t even like her singing, and that his visits are not for her sake.”2 Then: “I still can’t quite understand his relation to Sasha. Anyway it seems to me that she interests him, and that he sees her as a puzzling, original, capricious but powerful nature. But whether he is able to be attracted by her, to fall in love with her, I don’t know. He is an egotist, a terrific egotist!”3

  The reflex explanation of this impenetrability has been, as we saw, that Musorgsky was homosexual. But the evidence for this is thin. Everything about Nadya’s description suggests, rather, sexual repression, and this is borne out, surely, by his lifelong preference for older, often married women, and otherwise in general for male company.
The sisters’ nickname for him was “Yumor” (“Humor”—they called Rimsky-Korsakov “Iskrennost’,”—“Sincerity”), which might suggest, in the circumstances, that he was in the habit of parrying sentimental engagement with flippancy. “He has his own kind of brain,” Nadya recorded, “original and very witty. But he sometimes misuses this wit. This may be either a pose, to show that he is not like other people, or it may be just the way he is. The former is more believable …”4 There was something about Musorgsky’s use of language that seemed to reinforce this idea of his protecting his true feelings behind a shield of artifice. “Simple, commonplace words repelled him. He even contrived to change and mangle surnames. The style of his letters was unusually original and piquant; the wit, humor, and precision of his epithets sparkled so much. In the last years of his life, this originality of style was already becoming mannered … [and] incidentally, by then this mannerism and unnaturalness sometimes manifested themselves not only in his letters but in his entire way of behaving.”5

  Not the least striking thing about this unmistakably convoluted quality in Musorgsky’s letters is that it went with an intense and growing interest in the natural properties of ordinary Russian speech. Up to now he had been painting portraits that treated speech habits as an aspect of some particular situation: the simpleton or the orphan pleading, the novice reciting, the ragamuffin taunting. The idea of setting words in general according to the contours of ordinary speech must have been suggested by Dargomïzhsky’s approach in The Stone Guest. And yet this was not exactly what Dargomïzhsky was doing. Pushkin’s play, after all, is written in (admittedly blank) verse, and the composer’s task—or at least what Dargomïzhsky saw as his task—was to find a lyrical equivalent of reciting it. The text is set word for word as it stands, but hardly as if it were normal conversation. Musorgsky, having sung the music and no doubt discussed the philosophy with its composer, comes to a slightly different conclusion. He will take a prose text, if necessary written by himself, and try genuinely to capture its precise nuances in a form that will be music only in the sense that each syllable will be represented by a single pitch, whereas in speech the pitch is normally in constant motion within the syllable. You can try this out for yourself. Say the simplest phrase: “I’ve lost my ticket”; “There’s a man at the door”; “What’s the time?” The pitches will be indefinable, whatever expression you adopt. The minute you try to hold the pitch on each syllable, you will be singing, and this applies however terrible your singing voice. Musorgsky, it seems, now made up his mind to get as close as possible to speech in that sense without actually quitting the territory of song. The consequences of what might seem an almost frivolous decision were to prove, in due course, momentous.