Some of these controls are lyrical in character. The choral dialogue, as we saw, is interspersed with set pieces of a broadly expressive or ceremonious type, hinting at folk song or even liturgical chant, as in the beautiful entreaty of the crowd outside St. Basil’s imploring Boris for bread (“Kormilets batyushka”—“Father benefactor”)—needless to say the same crowd, the men at least, who five minutes before were muttering excitedly about the Pretender and baying for Boris’s blood. This scene also contains the greatest lyrical moment in the entire opera, the wonderful lament of the Simpleton, set first to Pushkin’s nonsense verse about the moon and the kitten (slightly extended), then to lines about the sorrows of Russia and her people—lines not in Pushkin. But the original Boris is not predominantly a lyrical work. The recitative settles often into brief songlike episodes, in and out of focus, so to speak. But solo song, as such, is largely absent. The one clear exception, the monk Varlaam’s bibulous song about the attack on Kazan (at which he, unlike Pimen, was obviously not present), is a drunken outburst that opens a window on his character, but is quite devoid of lyricism; rather, it explodes out of a context almost entirely dominated by unadulterated musical dialogue: a real-life pub song in a real-life pub. In Pushkin, Varlaam breaks into song a number of times, and Musorgsky, too, gives him a second song (“Kak yedet yon”—“How he goes on”), tipsier and more nonsensical than the first, which serves, however, the dramatic purpose of covering Grigory’s discreet inquiry of the landlady about the way to Lithuania.20 This is one of only two actual folk tunes in the first version of the opera (the other is the “Slava” melody in the coronation scene). But of song as a decorative or genre element, without specific dramatic function, the first version is more or less innocent.
It took Musorgsky just over a year to compose and orchestrate the two and a half hours of the first version of Boris Godunov, which for a composer who had never previously managed to complete anything longer than the twelve-minute Night on Bald Mountain was a remarkable feat of concentrated effort. More significantly, in composing it he effectively discovered himself as a creative artist. Nearly everything he had written before had been either small-scale, or in some sense experimental, or theoretical, or else simply stylistically unformed, like the “Intermezzo in modo classico,” or Salammbô (some of which he was able to incorporate in the final, death scene of Boris). His best songs, of course, were brilliant; but they were all to some extent style sketches, explorations of single images, rather in the manner of instrumental studies. Night on Bald Mountain had been an isolated exception, an indication rather than a fulfilment of a more extended and wider-ranging conception. On the other hand, Marriage was an essentially theoretical undertaking—music, that is, based on an idea of what music ought to be rather than a musical impulse as such: music, for instance, as a reflection of social reality, music as “a reproduction, in an artistic medium, of human speech with all its most refined and capricious nuances, a natural reproduction, as the life and mind of man demands.”21
It is perhaps significant that Musorgsky did not regale his friends about Boris Godunov while and after writing it, as he had done about Marriage. He simply composed, and more than usual he kept himself to himself. “Musoryanin,” Stasov wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov at one point, “obviously cannot be enticed from his lair with any kind of gingerbreads” (such as might be served by the Purgolds).22 No letters of Musorgsky’s survive from the period of composition, up to July 1869, and only one from the subsequent months when he was orchestrating the opera, and that letter (to Balakirev) is unconnected with the opera and doesn’t even mention it.23 Nevertheless, he sometimes appeared at circle evenings. He was at Dargomïzhsky’s on 15 November for what its composer called the first complete run-through of The Stone Guest (though it was still not in fact quite finished), and sang the parts of Leporello and Don Carlos. He went to concerts, including one probably at the end of November, at which Stasov recalled giving him the text of Varlaam’s Kazan song and remarked “with what avidity he began to skim through it then and there in the hall, during the music.”24 And he brought work in progress to the evenings, singing all the male parts himself while Sasha Purgold somehow deciphered the female roles. They were all, of course, in raptures over it. At the finish Stasov told his brother Dmitry that “Pimen’s story [in the death scene] is so magnificent that it equals Finn’s ballad [in Ruslan and Lyudmila], and the best places in the first and second acts of Boris, i.e. the popular scene with the weeping and wailing of the women under the knout, and the scene at the inn with the police officers.”25
A good deal has been said and written about the supposed political tendencies of Boris Godunov. It is easy enough to interpret Musorgsky’s sudden interest in popular speech and individualized crowds as motivated by a love of liberty, fraternity, and equality. The most comprehensive study of Musorgsky’s aesthetics is tainted by the assumption (characteristic, of course, of Soviet musicology) that they were “exclusively conditioned by his socio-ethical views on social goals and musical problems.”26 But the evidence of the composer’s own remarks on the subject, and of the music itself, is that his interest in people was more anthropological than ideological or sociological. He was inspired by types rather than theories. There is plenty in Boris to indicate a fascination with poor, ragged individuals as such, little or nothing to suggest a political program for feeding or clothing them. By and large his people are cowed and brutish, and they sometimes behave badly. They are ignorant, pious and superstitious. There are no noble peasants like Tolstoy’s Platon Karatayev, and no saints like Dostoyevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova. Even the yurodivy (holy fool), though pure in spirit, is harsh in manner, and he speaks, not for the people, but for God; he is an advocate of poverty, not its enemy. And if he laments over Russia, it is its spiritual desolation, not its political injustice, that grieves him.
What the first Boris shows clearly is Musorgsky’s vision of art as the representation of human reality in all its varied colorings (the natural world interested him less: he was a portraitist, not a landscape painter). Above all, he had no time for received forms and procedures; Boris is almost wholly devoid of such things. But he had evidently realized, through Marriage, that reality, too, had its artistic forms, that it was not enough simply to reproduce what one heard and saw, it was necessary to distill it in ways that had their own kind of artifice. The image of Musorgsky as some kind of rustic amateur, struggling ineptly but with flashes of genius in a medium that he only half-understood—the image perpetuated after his death notably by Rimsky-Korsakov, from his professorial chair at the St. Petersburg Conservatory—will not survive a sympathetic and open-minded examination of his work on its own terms. On the contrary, he was astonishingly successful at perfecting what is arguably one of the most difficult kinds of art: art that is sui generis, that creates its own forms and procedures out of its subject matter. He quotes the Russian philosopher Matvey Troitsky on the virtues of observation as against the supposed Germanic love of abstract theorizing.27 The extraordinary achievement of Boris Godunov was that it not only put these ideas into practice—something, after all, that Musorgsky had been doing successfully for some time in individual songs and choruses—but did so on the grandest possible scale, and with apparently unwavering confidence. The fact that the opera’s completion, in December 1869, was by no means the end of its creative life is not necessarily a criticism of it as a work of art. Circumstances would force the composer’s hand, and drive him to transform it into something in many ways different, whether or not superior.
CHAPTER 18
An Opera Performed, an Opera Abandoned
The first performance of Cui’s William Ratcliff at the Maryinsky on 14 February 1869 shed a curiously oblique light on all this operatic activity. While Musorgsky was chiselling away at a purely Russian subject treated in a specifically Russian manner, and Rimsky-Korsakov had temporarily shelved his own Russian historical opera in order to orchestrate The Stone Guest, with its studiously idiomatic
setting of Pushkin, the kuchka were represented on the stage for the very first time by a blood-and-guts romantic melodrama based on a German play set in Scotland. It was, of course, a relatively old project. But there was no sign of the kuchka themselves disowning it or in any way seeking to excuse it on these or any other grounds. On the contrary, they rallied behind it as if it were not only the very embodiment of their own thinking and aspirations, but on all counts a major contribution to world opera.
Rimsky-Korsakov reviewed the work in Cui’s place in the Vedomosti and, perhaps inevitably, praised it to the skies with only a few minor qualifications, no doubt put in, as Taruskin suggests, for the sake of credibility.1 The overture, he claimed, broke new ground by setting the dramatic scene rather than merely introducing the best tunes—as if the operas of Meyerbeer and Verdi (to say nothing of Serov) were completely unknown in St. Petersburg. The final love duet was without equal in any other opera, an opinion that Rimsky-Korsakov later tried to justify by moderating it to any “contemporary musical literature,” which still looks a pretty tall claim in the shadow of Wagner’s Tristan, a work not yet known in St. Petersburg in 1869, but perfectly familiar there by 1905, when Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the relevant chapter of his memoirs.2 A few weeks later, Vladimir Stasov weighed in with an enormous article in the same newspaper, in which, after an extended and characteristically polemical survey of the press reaction to Cui’s opera, he predicted that it would soon come to be recognized as one of the most brilliant products of the Russian school.
True, not everything in this opera is yet valued at its real worth, and its profoundest, most precious details are still not fully recognized. Thus, for example, even the best section of the public have still not quite accepted that the scene at the Black Stone (Act 2 of the opera) is among the highest things in music; that in general there has never yet been in any opera an expression of the most mysterious, deep-lying heartstrings conveyed with more staggering force, passion, and fascinating beauty; that Douglas’s narration is a wondrous specimen of pictorial description; that the roles of Mary and Margaret contain inexhaustible treasures of beauty and dramatic effect; that the scene of Ratcliff and Mary is the first love duet in the world; finally, that William Ratcliff occupies in Russian music a place in direct succession to the great works of Glinka and Dargomïzhsky.3
Needless to say, this was not the general opinion of the fourth estate, nor perhaps of those other sections of the public that Stasov would not have included among the best. From the audience point of view, William Ratcliff was a failure; it ran for only seven performances, after which (taken off at the offended Cui’s own request) it vanished from the stage for more than thirty years. The press reaction was for the most part hostile or worse. But this of course has to be seen in the context of Cui’s own bloodstained career as a music critic, which had included some of his composer-critic colleagues among its victims. Most prominent among these was the critic of Golos, Alexander Serov, whose Rogneda Cui had dismissed barely three years before as “a sequence of scenes … without the slightest organic connection between them,” and who, like Stasov, came on the scene with a late review after the opera had ended its short run. Serov would have had to be a much grander spirit than it was reasonable to expect to resist the temptation to get his own back on the composer of William Ratcliff. After somewhat dangerously ridiculing his fellow critic’s efforts at passing himself off as a composer, he launched into the work itself. “The most significant ‘bravura’ aria by Donizetti or Verdi,” he suggested, “is a veritable colossus of dramatic truth—in its own way—beside this absurd jumble of syncopations and disharmonies expressive of nothing because they strive to express too much.” Soon he was more or less admitting his parti pris: “With such exponents as Messrs. Stasov and Balakirev our musical maturation cannot get very far; we can already admire one operatic product of their camp. From there one could have expected nothing for the theatre except monstrosities and lo!—the monster is before us! It is a totally failed attempt, exuding overwhelming ennui, and it is therefore no wonder that after its sixth [sic] performance came the final death-throes.”4
In general the press, though largely negative, avoided Serov’s vindictive tone and concentrated on the perceived weaknesses in the work itself: “perceived” because, with reviewers as conservative as most of these, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between thought-through judgments and gut reactions to what still seemed, in sixties Petersburg, a disconcertingly modern approach to operatic form and musical style. One reviewer compliments Cui on his harmony and orchestration, but complains of the “predominance of rhythmic effects.” Another grumbles that the voices are entirely sacrificed to the orchestra. The critic of Notes of the Fatherland, Rostislav (pen name of F. M. Tolstoy), accuses Cui of “harmonicide” (ubiytsey garmonii), on the strength of a few idiosyncrasies such as the occasional use of the whole-tone scale and a general richness of harmonic texture that actually scarcely goes beyond the norms of Western composers such as Schumann or even late Beethoven, whose music was perfectly well known in Russia.5 Yet it was quite reasonable to criticize William Ratcliff on dramaturgical grounds. It was erratically paced and dramatically implausible, poorly characterized on the whole, and with an inadequate grasp of orchestral writing. It was, after all, a first opera (at least, on the public stage): an Oberto (Verdi), a Die Feen (Wagner). Tchaikovsky’s own first completed opera, The Voyeroda, had had its premiere in Moscow a fortnight earlier and had flopped completely, running for a mere five performances. Tchaikovsky soon withdrew the work and destroyed the score.
The premiere of William Ratcliff was by far the biggest public manifestation to date of the work of the Balakirev circle, but it gave a very imperfect idea of what the rest of them were up to by this time. Borodin, for instance, had been so excited by the performance of his E-flat symphony in January that he embarked almost immediately on another one, this time in another favorite Balakirev key, B minor. However, he had barely had time in his overcrowded schedule to do more than sketch an outline for the first movement before Stasov’s fertile brain produced The Lay of Igor’s Host (Slovo o polku Igoreve)—yet another operatic subject from Russian history. No doubt there was a connection between these two projects. After the composer’s death, Stasov reported that Borodin had explained the Second Symphony to him as a kind of bardic depiction of medieval Russian knights in battle. Stasov himself claimed that the first movement made him think of the “clashing of the swords of bogatyrs [heroic knights],” and he admitted that the whole idea had been Borodin’s. So one assumes that Borodin was already talking about the symphony in these terms that spring, and that the opera-loving Stasov promptly tried to persuade him to do it for the stage, long before the symphony itself existed beyond a few jottings. “I’ve found more details in the chronicles (about Vladimir Galitsky and Konchak),” he writes in mid-April, “so that I’ve had to change one thing and add another.”6 With the letter he encloses a lengthy three-act scenario. “Your scheme is so complete and detailed,” Borodin replies, “that everything comes out as clear as daylight; the only changes that may be needed will be shortenings … The subject is terribly to my liking. But will I have the strength? I don’t know. If you’re afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest. But I’ll try.”7
It was by no means his first operatic project. Apart from his satirical piece The Bogatyrs, he had also in 1867 toyed with setting another Mey drama about Ivan the Terrible, The Tsar’s Bride (Tsarskaya nevesta), and had even composed what Stasov called some “first-rate scenes and choruses,” but seems never to have written anything down.8
With Prince Igor his initial approach was quite different. He started by spending the summer of 1869 with his wife on the estate of a distant cousin, Prince Nikolay Kudashev, a few miles from Kursk, not far from the modern Ukrainian border. Just over the (at that time nonexistent) frontier was the small town of Putivl’, from whose walls the Kievan Prince Igor of Seversk set out on his ill-fated campaign against the Polovts
ian tribes of the southern Don in the year 1185. Back in St. Petersburg in September, Borodin composed, and wrote down, a first version of Igor’s wife Yaroslavna’s arioso in the opening scene—her anxiety at her husband’s departure and her forebodings about the outcome, prompted by a terrifying nightmare. But his music soon once again fell prey to the circumstances of his life. As before, his wife was compelled by her chronic asthma to spend the winter in Moscow, while her husband settled back into his bachelor existence in the Academy of Physicians, taken up with lectures and administration, his own chemical research work, musical evenings when he could spare the time, and writing her long, newsy letters two or three times a week. Dianin asserts that he also found time for “serious work on his opera,” and Rimsky-Korsakov says that he was studying The Lay and the Hypatian Chronicle.9 But there was precious little to show for it in any finished form. A version of “Yaroslavna’s Dream” (as he called it) he played to the circle, and they liked it. He also probably at least drafted a cavatina for Khan Konchak’s daughter. Later, on a trip to Moscow, he composed a vividly dramatic ballad, “The Sea” (“Morey”), about a young man in a boat swallowed up in a storm with his young wife and all his worldly wealth. But Prince Igor made no further progress, and by the end of February 1870 he had made up his mind to abandon it altogether.10 “After all,” he asked his wife rhetorically,
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