Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  This situation suddenly changed early in October 1868, when for the first time a Wagner opera was presented on the St. Petersburg stage. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, the Maryinsky production of Lohengrin under Konstantin Lyadov “was greeted by us with utter contempt and by Dargomïzhsky with an inexhaustible torrent of humor, ridicule, and venomous cavilling.”20 Balakirev, who missed the first night but attended a later performance, complained that it gave him a headache and he dreamed of geese all night.21 Cui duly reviewed the production in the Vedomosti but made no bones about his disdain for the work (“a more colorless and boring opera” he never had heard) or the composer (“completely without talent, no creative ability”).22 In general, though, the opera was well received in the press, and Serov predictably greeted it with enthusiasm in an open letter to Wagner in the French-language Journal de St. Pétersbourg, followed by a more conventional review in Noroye vremya, in which he claimed that Lohengrin had “scored a complete victory and met no opposition at all,” adding that “this is a remarkable event in the chronicles of Slavonic art and has great significance for the fate of musical drama in Russia.”23 All this was more than Vladimir Stasov could bear, and he quickly penned a lengthy reply to Serov, including an extended critique of the Russian translation of Wagner’s libretto (by Konstantin Zvantsev), but culminating in a violent denunciation of Serov’s Wagnerism and a contemptuous dismissal of the whole idea of Wagner’s importance for Russian composers. “At first,” he wrote,

  the public went to Lohengrin because curious to see an opera by a new composer about whom there had long been so much talk, and who they were persuaded was an art-reformer of genius; but then, when the initial curiosity passed, they began to go to Lohengrin more lazily and reluctantly, because it didn’t suit anyone’s taste. Boring! boring! Unimaginably boring! some say. Absurd subject, talentless music! say others. Well it’s nothing much, only so-so, say a third lot, precisely those who are afraid of somehow missing out in their estimation of the great genius and appearing insufficiently up-to-date. So this is the sum of Petersburg opinion, its entire verdict on Wagner’s Lohengrin. Perhaps besides there are still people like Messrs. Serov and Zvantsev, to whom Wagner’s music seems the summit of human genius, and his operas the final thrust of contemporary creativity, intelligence and poetry … Almost with tears in his eyes, Mr. Serov grumbles to Wagner that the performance of his opera on our stage was a little too realistic and prosaic. Poor unhappy Mr. Serov! What a model for us all of how far artistic coat-tailing can go with “a celebrated friend” (as Mr. Serov calls Wagner in his letter), and of the wax-like capacity for taking on the imprint of any old stamp.

  No, no. Let Mr. Serov not ruin our artists with his notions and instructions, let him not confuse them with opinions picked up from some dreadful Germans whose word for him is law, and let him not think, in fact, that Wagner’s music is capable of taking root with us, or, even more of a joke, that “the success of Wagner in Russia (!) is an event of huge importance for the fate of our music drama and the musical education of our public,” that this success is “an event that will play a huge role in the history of Slavonic art and civilization.” No, we don’t need these ideas and oracles of Mr. Serov …24

  The curious aspect of the kuchka’s rage against Lohengrin is that in many respects it adhered to their own ideas about the way forward for Russian composers and for opera in general. A historical drama with big choral scenes and an explicit nationalist background (in the very first scene Heinrich calls on the Brabantians to “defend the empire’s honor …; Let any land that calls itself German assemble its troops, so that none shall ever again insult the German empire”), it also evolves ways of writing that to some extent fit in with kuchka ideas about the relation between words and music. For instance, Wagner’s having written his own libretto, and his obviously careful integration of the text and the music, ought to have pleased Cui, the supposed operatic expert in the Balakirev circle, who had criticized Serov’s Rogneda for its alleged inadequacy in this department, and who had argued for precisely the kind of “melodic recitative” (as he called it) that Wagner had composed to such powerful effect in the dialogue between Ortrud and Telramund at the start of his second act, and for Lohengrin’s narration in his third. Cui ought also to have approved of Wagner’s rich involvement of the chorus in the dramatic action, including complex passages where the chorus splits into antiphonal groups and responds to the situations contrapuntally. “The chorus in our [Russian] operas,” he had written in 1864, “plays a more important role than in all others. It’s no longer a mindless crowd brought together purely to sing; it’s a collection of people who act consciously and independently; from this, music acquires a new element of depth and breadth of scope.”25 It is no longer, in other words, singing, marching scenery.

  Above all Cui might well have praised in Lohengrin the handling of “an intense personal drama unfolding against a rich historical or genre background.”26 Of course, there was nothing particularly new about this idea. It was fundamental to Meyerbeer, as well as various operas of the Italian school that Cui routinely despised for other reasons. The truth is that Wagner could have composed The Stone Guest and he would still have been reviled by the kuchka, because their loathing (fear) of him—like their loathing (fear) of Serov—was an article of faith unconnected with actual taste or disinterested critical values. Fortunately, this meant that they could quietly take what they needed from his work—as also from Serov’s—without moderating their abuse in the very slightest.

  Exactly when Musorgsky decided to compose an opera on Pushkin’s Shakespearean drama Boris Godunov is uncertain, but there are good grounds for supposing that it was after seeing Lohengrin that October. The idea seems to have come from Nikolsky, no doubt as a response to Musorgsky’s cri de coeur—“When will something finally be ready?”—in his August letter from Shilovo. Nikolsky was a regular at Lyudmila Shestakova’s evenings, and Shestakova herself was evidently involved in the discussions about possible opera subjects, since it was she who supplied Musorgsky with a copy of Pushkin’s Boris with blank pages tipped in to enable him to compile his libretto directly from the play. This was probably toward the end of October.27 By 4 November he had completed the first scene (in the courtyard of the Novodevichy Monastery) and ten days later the coronation scene was also complete. “The power of necessity,” which he had told Nikolsky would be the trigger for whatever he had been preparing with Marriage and the recent songs, was suddenly asserting itself with a vengeance.

  CHAPTER 17

  History for the Stage

  One might think it had taken the kuchka a surprising length of time to get round to composing operas on historical subjects since Balakirev and Musorgsky had raved about old Moscow in 1859 and Stasov had talked endlessly in the early sixties about the histories of Solovyov and Kostomarov and “our beloved Novgorod which you [Balakirev] and I have loved instinctively for so long.”1 To some extent it was probably a question of readiness, as Musorgsky himself had put it. To us now it seems obvious what form a historical opera would take that met the requirements of Stasovian realism and that elevated the Russian people to the level of the ruling classes as subject matter. We know the eventual solutions. But in the 1850s and ’60s historical drama still meant the romantic epics of the French and Italian stage: the plays of Victor Hugo, the spectacular grand operas of Meyerbeer, and the singer-based quasi-historical operas of Donizetti and Verdi. It was true that Glinka had provided what looked like a better precedent in A Life for the Tsar. But for Stasov this was by no means a suitable model. Its image of the Russian people was the image of a sycophantic crowd of happy peasants; and as for Susanin himself, far from being a hero, he was a mere “low serf, loyal as a dog, narrow as an owl or a capercaillie, sacrificing himself for some urchin he has no reason to love, whom there is no need to rescue, and on whom it seems he has never even set eyes.”2

  Stasov’s historical ideal was the medieval veche, the popular assembly which had
acted as a kind of ad hoc parliament in the administration of independent cities such as Novgorod, Pskov, and Kiev. “In both pagan and Christian times,” he had assured Balakirev in the same letter, “the essential Russia was democratic in its heart and nature, constantly fragmenting into millions of bits, families and precincts.” Russians, he maintained, were as hostile to the single monarchical principle as they were (he likewise maintained) to a centralized despotism in matters of religion. It was symbolic for him that the veche in Novgorod and Pskov had been stamped out by the Muscovite proto-tsars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the ancestors—in title at least—of the autocratic tsars of his own day, who were still throttling independent thought and expression, whatever their feeble efforts at liberalizing the Russian economy and rural life. But there was not much suggestion at this stage that such ideas might form the basis for operatic or even symphonic treatment. He might even have agreed with Serov that “music, by virtue of its open, candid nature, is but a poor elucidator of political and diplomatic intrigue.”3 As musical subject matter, he apparently saw more future in Russian folk tales, with their color and magic, their aura of mystery and romance.

  Meanwhile, the straight theatre in St. Petersburg was suddenly flooded with plays on Russian historical subjects, inspired no doubt by the steady publication of the volumes of Solovyov’s history. In February 1867 Alexey Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan the Terrible was staged for the first time, almost simultaneously with Alexander Ostrovsky’s Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky. Tolstoy swiftly followed up his play with two sequels, Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1868) and Tsar Boris (1870), the first of which was immediately banned from performance and was in fact never staged at all in the nineteenth century, while the second was simply blocked by the Imperial Theatres’ directorate. Lev Mey’s Maid of Pskov (Pskovityanka), about Ivan the Terrible’s menacing but ultimately benign entry into Pskov in 1570, had been published in 1859 but was still, in 1868, under a stage ban. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, though published in its final form in 1831, had been cleared for performance only in 1866, and eventually reached the stage, reportedly in an atrocious production and heavily cut, only in 1870. One of the striking things about the kuchka’s almost unanimous decision to start writing historical operas in the late sixties is that they began by basing themselves on plays that either were or had until very recently been banned by the censorship. Another, more explicable, is that—like all of the plays mentioned above—they dealt exclusively with the pre-Romanov tsars. So long as historical drama, like school history, meant “kings and queens,” this was unavoidable, because it was strictly illegal to represent members of the Romanov dynasty (to which the nineteenth-century tsars also belonged) on the stage.4

  As it happened, it was not Musorgsky but Rimsky-Korsakov who first took the plunge and embarked, in the summer of 1868, on an operatic version of Mey’s Maid of Pskov. He probably already knew the play, as he had set a lullaby from its first act as a separate song (op. 2, no. 3) two years before. Oddly enough, he says in his autobiography that the operatic idea—like the idea for Antar—actually came from Musorgsky and Balakirev, which if true may be significant, since it suggests that as late as the spring of 1868, Musorgsky was not himself thinking of composing such a work. Naturally this did not prevent him and the rest of the circle from interfering in the process of composition. From the start the project was the subject of discussion at group meetings, apparently with Rimsky-Korsakov’s approval, since he notes the fact without the irony that creeps into his reports of Balakirev’s “sharp paternal despotism,” which he admits was beginning to get on his nerves at this same time.5 With the opera, the initial issue lay with the libretto. Presumably, with The Stone Guest constantly in their eyes and ears, there was talk of setting the play as it stood. But there also existed an independent libretto, originally written by a certain Vsevolod Krestovsky for Anton Rubinstein, and passed on to Rimsky-Korsakov by Tchaikovsky, perhaps as a result of their meeting or meetings at Balakirev’s in the spring.6 Whether or not Krestovsky’s version was considered by the circle is unclear from Rimsky-Korsakov’s account, which asserts, ambiguously, that “The idea was that I would write the libretto myself as need arose!”7 The exclamation mark seems to express incredulity, but in the end this is more or less what he did, using Krestovsky as a starting point, but basing himself more generally on Mey, with the inevitable cuts and compressions, and in due course incorporating folk-song texts supplied by Musorgsky for some of the choruses.

  Mey’s drama is historical in its setting and in the crucial events that serve as frame for an invented human tragedy which might, nevertheless, serve to explain certain puzzling aspects of the known history. In 1570, having laid waste the city of Novgorod and massacred thousands of its inhabitants as punishment for supposed conspiracy with Poland-Lithuania, Tsar Ivan the Terrible marched on Pskov with, its inhabitants not unreasonably feared, similar intentions. In the event, Ivan stayed for only a short time and left without incident, even though Pskov was closer than Novgorod to the Lithuania he so much feared, and closer still to Izborsk, where there had been clear treachery (and consequent reprisals) the previous year. Mey imagines a romantic explanation for the sparing of Pskov. On a visit to the city some years ago, Ivan had an affair with a certain Vera Sheloga, the sister-in-law of the city’s governor, Prince Yury Tokmakov. Unbeknown to Ivan, Vera gave birth to a little girl called Olga who—after Vera’s death—was brought up by Tokmakov as his own daughter. At the time of this second visit, Tokmakov is planning to marry Olga off to an elderly boyar by the name of Nikita Matuta, but she is passionately in love with the son of the posadnik (mayor), Mikhail Tucha. Alas, on Ivan’s approach, while Tokmakov and the people decide to welcome him “with bread and salt,” Tucha and a few young men opt for guerrilla tactics and make off into the surrounding forest. In Pskov, Ivan meets Olga and realizes, from Tokmakov’s explanations, that she is his daughter. He at once declares, “Pskov khranit Gospod’!”—“Let God preserve Pskov!” But Tucha, unaware of the altered situation, attacks Ivan’s camp outside the city, and in the ensuing gunfight is shot dead. Olga, in despair, commits suicide.

  One can well imagine that the circle discussed the operatic possibilities of all this with a certain excitement. As a subject it was conventional enough for them to be able to relate it to existing Western operas that set powerful human dramas against a backcloth of historical events, while at the same time it had the added appeal of being purely Russian. Unlike the obvious precedent, A Life for the Tsar, it sets the people against the autocrat, showing them cowed and acquiescent, but only out of fear for their lives; and Tsar Ivan is made to pay the price of his habitual cruelty, since the daughter he is just beginning to love dies because of the actions of those who take it for granted that he will continue to behave in character. Perhaps it was the circle, in conclave, who decided that Olga should not commit suicide in the opera, but should be caught in the crossfire and accidentally shot. They certainly were responsible, as a group, for the decision to cut out Mey’s first act, which dealt with Vera Sheloga at the time of Olga’s birth (Krestovsky had also excluded this act).8 Since the rest of the action takes place in Pskov at the time of Ivan’s second visit, the effect was to impose a certain pseudo-Aristotelian unity of time and place on the drama, which at least suited its tragic outcome.

  One remaining aspect of the play must have excited Stasov, and through him all the other members of the circle: the veche scene in the second act, in which the citizens meet to discuss how to respond to the tsar’s impending arrival. Stasov knew perfectly well that the Pskov veche had been abolished by Ivan the Terrible’s father, Vasily III, sixty years before (along with the rank of posadnik, supposedly held by Tucha’s father). But just as Mey had evidently thought the idea far too good as theatre to be rejected on tedious historical grounds, so its musical potential will have been an irresistible attraction for the opera composer. Whether Rimsky-Korsakov, in his sublime inexperience of writing for
the theatre, had any clear image at this stage of how he would handle such a scene might be doubted. It hardly mattered, in any case, since Antar still lay on his desk demanding completion; and meanwhile the fair maid of Pskov would have to wait her turn.

  It came gradually and in typical kuchkist bits and pieces. He had just finished the new second movement of Antar, in the middle of June 1868, when Nikolay Lodïzhensky sent him a note inviting him to their Tver estate, and suddenly there welled up in his mind what he later called “a rush of indefinable love for Russian folk-life, for her history in general and for The Maid of Pskov in particular.” He sat down at the piano and promptly improvised the main theme of the chorus of welcome in act 3 of the original version of the opera9—presumably just the theme, not the whole fairly elaborate movement. Serious composition only began after the completion of Antar in August. For some reason he started with the long duet for Olga and Tucha toward the end of the first act, then turned back to the earlier part of the act, the curious tale of Tsarevna Lada told by Olga’s nurse, Vlas’evna (or rather, not told, as she is interrupted by the arrival of Tucha), and the preceding genre scenes, the game of gorelki (catch) and the conversation between the nurses about events in Novgorod, punctuated by verses of the chorus of girls picking raspberries and currants. He was able to play some or all of this music at Cui’s one evening in late September, amid gasps of delight, no doubt, from his fellow kuchkists. “Well,” Borodin reported to his wife, “I can tell you that this is something of such fragrance, such youthfulness, freshness, beauty—I was simply weak with pleasure. What a heap of talent this man has! And how easily he creates!”10