Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  So, he turns to page 1, composes half a dozen bars of somewhat inconsequential introduction (for piano—he never got round to the orchestration), and brings the curtain up on Podkolyosin reflecting on the pros and cons of marriage-by-broker and nagging his manservant, Stepan, about his new tailcoat and the boot polish. As in “With Nyanya,” the music is essentially subject to the text. Musorgsky pays careful attention to the contours of the words as they might be spoken, bearing in mind the element of caricature in Gogol’s portraiture, which he brings out by enhancing the strong Russian tonic accent with sharp rises and falls in pitch and pointed dynamic emphases. The Russian habit of discarding weak end syllables is precisely caught: for example, “da takaya, nakonets, | skvernost’ stanovitsya” (“and in the end it’s such a horror”), with a swell and chord on the accented high E of “takaya,” fading triplet quavers on “nakonets” (unaccompanied) and “stanovitsya,” on both of which the accents are actually misplaced, but so faintly as to escape notice (correct would be “nakonets” and “stanovitsya”). The effect, though, is clinical rather than arresting. In Gogol, Podkolyosin’s languid indecisiveness and Stepan’s resigned, monosyllabic replies are funny because of the sheer ludicrous irrelevance of the preoccupation with buttonholes and the obsession with rank (“Whichever way you look at it, a court counselor is equal to a colonel! Only without the epaulets”). But put to music, even dialogué, they are simply slower; and if the music aspires to the condition of speech, the listener is likely to wonder why not simply stick to speech. Later on, Musorgsky’s answer would be (echoing the German theorist Georg Gottfried Gervinus) that since “human speech is strictly regulated by musical laws,” it was logical for music to retrieve and reassert that dimension in its original, authentic form.16 In 1868, though, it seems unlikely that he had read Gervinus, whose main contribution to the theory of music and language, a book called Händel und Shakespeare: Zur Aesthetik der Tonkunst, only came out in Leipzig that same year. The clear impulse for Marriage was still the quest for realism, or “truth,” prompted by the discussions surrounding The Stone Guest, and as an extreme version of the vivid portraiture in Musorgsky’s recent songs.

  Theory aside, the main consequence of his way of working in Marriage is that the music is almost entirely anecdotal. It reacts to words and situations, but has little structure beyond what is provided by the often absurd action of the play. The dominating mode is accompanied recitative. Lyrical melody is almost entirely lacking. In its place is musicalized speech, cleverly and often wittily composed but seldom of actual musical interest. As Taruskin has pointed out, most of the music would be meaningless without the words.17 The accompaniment occasionally throws in what one might call mood music: snatches of sentimental lyricism (for instance, when Fyokla is describing Agafya—“Like a sugar lump! White, rosy, the picture of health. I can’t tell you how sweet”—the piano supplies an insinuating fragment that tells us, of course, that it’s a lie and Agafya will be anything but a demure wallflower, though Musorgsky never got as far as composing her music); dissonant harmonies that touch in the characters’ gestures but lead nowhere; scherzo flurries for Fyokla and for Kochkaryov, whose impatience to get Podkolyosin married off is in sharp contrast with the latter’s procrastination. Here and there a figure will act as a reminiscence motive; the grumpy opening music comes back a few times, as a reminder of Podkolyosin’s impenetrable bachelorhood. But these are references, not leitmotifs; of musical development as understood by Wagner, or even Balakirev, there is none.

  When he finished what he called his act 1, Musorgsky had been at Shilovo for just over two weeks. The weather had been bad, and he had spent most of the time indoors, composing. Now, with the act finished, the weather improved and the composer stepped out into the sunshine and looked about him. He began to roam the countryside and enjoy what he called the rustic life. He helped with the haymaking, made jam and pickles, and observed the local peasants. Perhaps for the first time, he began to write down his impressions, even made musical notes of the intonations of peasant speech. He studied their faces and imagined them as characters in books. One of them reminded him of Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “a very clever muzhik, malicious and original.”18 “How many fresh aspects swarm in the Russian nature, untouched by art,” he exclaimed to Lyudmila, “oh how many! And what juicy, splendid ones … A small part of what life has given me I have portrayed in musical images for those dear to me, and talked my impressions with those dear ones. If God gives me life and strength, I shall talk something big.”19 And to Nikolsky—the infamous, drunken Pakhomich—he remarked gnomically:

  Supposing a reproduction by artistic means of human speech with all its subtlest and most capricious nuances, a natural portrait, as a man’s life and mentality commanded—would this come close to a deification of the human gift of the word? And if it were possible to clutch at the heartstrings by the simplest means, while strictly obeying one’s artistic instinct in the quest for the intonations of the human voice, shouldn’t one work at that? And if at the same time one could capture the intellect in a vice, then wouldn’t it be right to devote oneself to such a task? Without preparation you can’t boil a soup. Which means: in preparing oneself for this activity, even if it’s Gogol’s Marriage, the most capricious thing for music, won’t one be doing something good, i.e. drawing nearer to life’s cherished goal? To this one can say: why only ever preparing oneself—it’s about time to do something. I’ve prepared myself with small things, I’ve prepared myself with Marriage, but when, finally, will something be ready? To this there’s only one answer: the force of necessity; perhaps some day that will be ready.20

  So Marriage, too, was merely a trial, a dry run, and in all probability by mid-August he was no longer seeing it as an ongoing project, even though, with a piano again at his disposal, he probably revised what he had already composed.21 Concepts such as “the deification of the word,” “clutching at the heartstrings,” “capturing the intellect in a vice,” hardly sound like Podkolyosin and his anxieties about tailcoats. They have an altogether grander, more abstract, but also more theoretical flavor. At the same time the sudden enthusiasm for the peasantry and their ways of thinking and speaking might seem a rather oblique offshoot from Gogol’s play, whose characters are urban merchants, civil servants, and their hangers-on. We seem much closer to the world of Platon Karatayev in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the peasant soldier who restores Pierre Bezhukov’s faith in the human spirit out of the shattering impact of his wife’s infidelities and the vacuous response of Petersburg society to the French invasion. Whether or not Musorgsky had read the serialized parts of the first two books of War and Peace in the Russkiy vestnik a year or two earlier, there is a sense in his remarks to Nikolsky of a readiness for a project of comparable range, one that would set individual lives against a backcloth of momentous historical events.22

  Musorgsky returned to St. Petersburg toward the end of August, and since his brother’s family had stayed on at Shilovo, he now moved in with Nadezhda Opochinina and her brother Alexander in their apartment in the so-called Engineers Castle on the Fontanka Canal. As usual, he sidestepped any suggestion that he might set up house on some regular basis either on his own or with a friend. A month or so later Marriage was performed complete, as far as it went, at a soirée in the Cui apartment, with the composer himself as Podkolyosin, Sasha Purgold as Fyokla, Dargomïzhsky as Kochkaryov, and Nadya Purgold at the piano. The response was characteristic in a variety of ways. There was a good deal of laughter, Stasov recalled, “because the exact intonations of Gogol’s comic genius were so truthfully caught at every turn.”23 Stasov liked the piece, he later claimed, for its “astounding truth of expression, that proximity to ordinary, everyday human speech, which cannot fail to be considered a great step forward in the matter of art.”24 But privately he called it “an unsuccessful thing, an exaggeration, a monstrosity and a blunder on Musorgsky’s part.”25 The pure-minded Rimsky-Korsakov liked the recitatives bu
t was “perplexed by certain chords and harmonic progressions.”26 Borodin reported to his wife (in Moscow) that the work was “an unusual thing, curious and paradoxical, full of novelty and in places very funny, but as a whole—une chose manquée—impossible for performance.”27 Balakirev (who was not present at the first run-through) and Cui himself “saw in Marriage a mere curiosity with interesting declamatory moments.”28

  In his heart of hearts Musorgsky probably agreed with them; but he retained a soft spot for the work and never rejected it entirely, though he equally never made the slightest attempt to complete it or even to orchestrate what he had written. Early in 1873 he presented the manuscript to Stasov as a fifty-ninth-birthday present. “Take my youthful work on Gogol’s Marriage,” he wrote, “examine this attempt at musical speech, compare it with Boris [Godunov], confront 1868 with 1871, and you will see that I am giving you myself irrevocably … I can’t stand darkness and I think that for a connoisseur, Marriage will reveal much as regards my musical audacities. You know how dearly I value it—this Marriage … So take me, my dear, and do with me what you wish.”29

  CHAPTER 16

  Outsiders

  While Musorgsky had been passing his time with children and peasants, Rimsky-Korsakov had made his way from the bottom of the sea to the heart of the Syrian desert and the ruins of Palmyra. Having finished with the merchant Sadko, he turned to the adventures of a disillusioned Bedouin prince called Antar, as told in 1832 by the myth-making Polish-born Orientalist Osip Senkovsky (alias Baron Brambeus).

  As with Sadko, the subject was passed on to him by Balakirev via Musorgsky, though in this case there is no sign of the original suggestion having come from Stasov in any form. Senkovsky’s tale, after all, is not based on a traditional story but is an invention of his own, drawing vaguely on a romantic notion of old Arabic epic poetry but without specific models (it evidently has no connection with the sixth-century poet Antarah ibn Shadad). This was not quite Stasov’s territory, though he seems to have been happy enough with the outcome. It coincided with at least two of his predilections: it offered a detailed program, and it was set in what, in the Russian mind, passed for the Orient.

  Senkovsky’s hero is an Arab chieftain who has abandoned his tribe in favor of a nomadic life in the desert. He “has taken leave of humanity forever. He has shed his blood for them, sacrificed his property, lavished his love and his friendship on them—and they have betrayed him!” Later we discover that he has been defrauded of his inheritance by those who were appointed his guardians when he was a child. But now a strange thing happens. He sees a gazelle and gives chase, intending to kill it; but suddenly a huge bird of prey appears overhead, itself pursues the gazelle, and is about to seize it when Antar, his protective instincts overcoming his blood lust, hurls his spear into the monster’s throat. The gazelle turns out to be the beautiful peri Gul-Nazar in disguise. The Palmyra ruins are transformed into an exquisite palace, Antar awakes on a satin couch, waited on by slaves and eunuchs and “fifty maidens veiled in white,” and Gul-Nazar, concealed by a richly patterned red curtain, offers him a reward of the three greatest pleasures of life: revenge, power, and (here, toward the end of the story, the curtain parts and she reveals herself) love. Antar tastes revenge but returns to Palmyra embittered by “the salt taste of human blood … and the aroma of death”; he tastes power, but returns “haunted by pale ghosts of suspicion, danger, and betrayal”; finally he enjoys the love of Gul-Nazar, but fears the poison at the bottom of the heart “when the sweetness evaporates.” He implores her to end his life “the instant you perceive that bitterness has begun to creep into it.” One day she indeed notices that his thoughts are wandering, that he is bored by her charms, and “with her last kiss the peri breathe[s] in his soul and unite[s] it with her own.”1

  There are certain striking parallels between this yarn and Lermontov’s Tamara: the beautiful princess, the traveller trapped by her magic, the love-death motif. It is tempting to suppose that Rimsky-Korsakov may have expressed enthusiasm for some such topic, and that Balakirev duly obliged from the storehouse of his own researches. The differences are in the detail, and particularly the quantity of detail. Lermontov’s poem is a vignette in a dozen short quatrains, whereas Senkovsky’s tale is a twenty-page novelette, tricked out with narrative archaisms (“Fair is the desert of al-Sha’m, and fair are the ruins of Tadmur which lie therein,” etc., etc.), but also replete with pictorial and conversational minutiae: the pursuit of the gazelle, the shooting of the terrible unka bird, the transformation of the ruins of Palmyra into the wondrous palace of Gul-Nazar, her lengthy account of the origins of the city of Tadmur, and the concluding story of Antar’s love and death.

  Rimsky-Korsakov duly embarked, in January 1868, on what was planned as a narrative program symphony in four movements, in the spirit of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy. He pictured Antar, in a dark F-sharp-minor motto theme, morosely surveying the great ruins of the ancient city; he pictured the gazelle and the swooping bird, the flight of the arrow and the wounded bird’s departure. Within a week he had composed an entire first movement, taking the story to Antar’s awakening in Gul-Nazar’s palace and her promise of the three great “sweetnesses” (sladosti). At this point one senses a momentary hesitation. The formal idea was to devote one movement to each of the pleasures. But it was by no means obvious how to handle the first one, revenge, since Senkovsky is vague about the objects and character of Antar’s vengeance. We learn, for example, that he has “slain those who slandered me and then sat among them as the sand smoked with their blood, holding converse with them as with bosom friends.” But narrative detail is suddenly, painfully lacking. Similarly with the second sweetness, power. Antar describes the pleasure of ruling over everyone and everything: “Nothing,” he admits, “is more delightful than to see thousands upon thousands of creatures like yourself acting according to your word, drawing their will from the common spring of your will, gladly sacrificing their thoughts, property, and life to carry out your wishes.” But once again, no details are vouchsafed. Both sweetnesses end in bitterness, in circumstances that are not revealed.

  Perhaps blocked by this lack of focus in the story, Rimsky-Korsakov turned instead to the fourth movement, the third sweetness: love. Here Senkovsky touches in more detail, and of course the subject itself is more obviously up music’s street. By mid-February this finale was complete and Rimsky-Korsakov was turning his attention back to the revenge movement. He swiftly composed a breezy, mildly sinister four-minute scherzo in B minor, based on swirling tremolo quavers with menacing versions of the motto theme on trombones. But the piece is thin; and when Rimsky-Korsakov played the three movements through one spring evening at Borodin’s apartment, Musorgsky must have pointed out that he had unwittingly purloined the main quaver theme from his own St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain. In his memoirs, Rimsky-Korsakov notes only that the movement “proved a total failure” with the circle, which it might well have done even without this rather glaring act of homage. The other movements, he insists, “earned the praise of my friends,” though he admits that Balakirev liked them only “with reservations”: what these may have been, we shall consider in due course.2

  He seems all the same to have been discouraged, either by the general reaction or by the problems posed by these two somewhat abstract sweetnesses, and for the next three months he put the work to one side and concentrated instead on orchestrating Schubert’s four-hand Grande Marche héroïque, D. 885 (composed, for some unknown reason, in 1826 “on the occasion of the coronation of His Majesty Nicholas I, Emperor of all the Russias”), for a concert Balakirev was conducting at the Mikhailovsky Manège in May. This was, Rimsky-Korsakov reports frankly, “a more difficult task than the orchestration of works of my own imagination,” and “the instrumentation came out lifeless, pallid and good for nothing.”3 But there were distractions. The soirée at Dargomïzhsky’s in March, which included the first proper run-through of The Stone Guest, w
as Rimsky-Korsakov’s first encounter with the Purgold sisters, as it was also Musorgsky’s; and it would affect him more, and more directly. Later that month there was a still more momentous encounter for them all with a young composer from Moscow who turned up at a Balakirev evening and played through the first movement of his symphony in G minor.

  Pyotr Tchaikovsky had been one of the first graduates from the new St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1865, but he had gone to Moscow to teach in the new conservatory there early in 1866 and had thus avoided close contact with the Balakirev circle at a time when he might easily have fallen under their influence. As a music student he must have been aware of the circle’s activities. He attended the premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s First Symphony in December 1865, and ten days later his own graduation cantata, K radosti (a setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”), had been premiered in a public examination concert in the conservatory and reviewed with acid contempt by Cui. But there is no evidence of any actual meeting. David Brown claims that Tchaikovsky met Stasov at the time of Berlioz’s visit, but he is vague about the details.4 The first certain contact was with Balakirev, who travelled to Moscow for the Berlioz concerts there in January 1868, met Tchaikovsky, and discussed with him the possibility of including his “Dances of the Hay Maidens” (“Tantsï sennïkh devushek”) in an RMS concert in St. Petersburg. They were soon corresponding on this and other subjects. So when Tchaikovsky visited St. Petersburg at the end of March, it was natural that Balakirev should invite him to his evenings and encourage him to play some of his music.