Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  what’s the point of my getting mixed up with opera? A lot of trouble and a huge waste of time; performance even more unlikely; and if they did perform it, where would I find the time for all that heap of petty troubles and unpleasantnesses with managements and performers and rehearsals and so forth? And meanwhile the subject, however well suited to music, is hardly likely to please the public. Not much dramatic effect, almost no stage movement. In the end, to do a libretto that meets both the musical and the scenic demands is no joke. I haven’t the experience for it, or the ability or the time … I reached this conclusion after many attempts at several numbers from the materials that were ready. In the end, opera for me is not dramatic in the strict sense, and it seems to me something unnatural.11

  For Stasov, he softened the blow by dedicating to him his latest song, perhaps himself feeling a bit like the young sailor and his wife, lost at sea.

  Balakirev had long since rejected the latest attempt (by a certain Dmitry Averkiyev) at a libretto for his Firebird, and it must by now have been apparent that he had no real intention of ever composing this or any other opera. Of all the kuchka he was the one who would most have sympathized with Borodin’s sudden—and in his case essentially defensive—hostility to the stage. Quite simply he disliked opera, and sometimes found his colleagues’ obsession with the genre hard to accept. But his creative problems ran deeper than this. He had composed practically nothing since the Czech overture of May 1867. Tamara still hardly existed in written form, though bits of it were constantly in the air at circle gatherings, along with other improvisations that teased the ear but never seemed to find their way onto paper. Of course there were purely practical, as well as psychological, reasons for his unproductiveness. Since the beginning of 1868, when Lomakin resigned as director of the FMS, he had been in sole charge of the school and its concerts, as well as conductor of the Russian Musical Society. He had to plan the programs, organize rehearsals and publicity, and worry about the availability of performance materials, for works that were often far from mainstream. In fact his obstinate refusal to program standard repertoire—in a city where, after all, there were few opportunities to hear the great classical masterpieces—was the cause of more trouble than mere inconvenience. It probably cost him one of his posts, and it greatly increased the difficulties of the other one.

  Exactly why the éminence grise of the RMS, Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovna, turned against him in the course of 1868 is hard to establish precisely. But he had never been her man; when Rubinstein had first set up the society, Balakirev had been the opposition, and when he, Balakirev, took over from Rubinstein, it had been distinctly faute de mieux. Even so, had he been prepared in any way to moderate his programming, all might still have been well. In himself he was a more than adequate conductor, no showman, but musically authoritative in his way, respected by serious musicians and the amateur singers who formed the RMS and FMS choirs, and liked by audiences. Alas, his obsessive distaste for much of the standard German repertoire annoyed and eventually antagonized the conservative-minded musicians who made up the committee of the RMS, and who naturally had the grand duchess’s ear. They included Nikolay Zaremba, Rubinstein’s successor as director of the conservatory, a stickler for orthodox method and a confirmed enemy of modernism in all its forms, including, of course, the Russian variety; also the critic Alexander Famintsïn, who had written scathingly about Sadko, loathed the Russian school in general, and had probably been disappointed in his hope that Balakirev would program a work of his.

  The machinations might have made a good subject for the opera Balakirev did not want to write. As soon as he left St. Petersburg for the Caucasus in the early summer of 1868, Yelena Pavlovna told the RMS board that she intended to invite a German conductor by the name of Max Seifriz to take over the RMS. Balakirev thought that Zaremba had put her up to this piece of jiggery-pokery, but he may not have known that Seifriz was a former teacher of Famintsïn’s at Löwenberg, and incidentally a respected conductor of the Hohenzollern orchestra in that town, described by Liszt as “one of the most intelligent and experienced conductors in Germany”12 and by Berlioz (who was there in 1863) as “a conductor and trainer of rare skill and thoroughness.”13 The grand duchess had duly requested references for Seifriz from Liszt and Berlioz, but also, less tactfully, invited Berlioz to provide a negative reference for Balakirev, which he categorically declined to do. Balakirev had been informed by Vasily Kologrivov—one of the directors favorably disposed toward him—that there had been a terrible quarrel, and that a majority of the board had refused to countenance his dismissal. The Seifriz idea faded away, and for the time being Yelena Pavlovna and her Germanophile directors had to face up to another season of Balakireviana: yet more Berlioz, Liszt, and Schumann, new works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky (his symphonic poem Fatum), plus the usual bits and pieces of Glinka and Dargomïzhsky, and hardly a trace of Mozart or Haydn.

  At the end of April 1869, after the final concert of the season, the grand duchess at last had had enough and summarily dismissed Balakirev, appointing the Czech-born Eduard Nápravník (who had also recently become principal conductor at the Maryinsky) in his place. It was the start of a difficult phase in Balakirev’s life. The loss of the RMS post was a severe blow to his finances, shaky at the best of times; and to crown his misfortunes his father died in June. When the new season began in October 1869, he was forced to give more and more piano lessons to supplement his income, while at the same time, as Borodin reported to his wife, having to expend time and energy canvassing support in his ongoing guerrilla war with Yelena Pavlovna.14 Yet he appeared to be in high spirits. Borodin described with some glee the scenes in St. Petersburg that autumn. The RMS had sold so few tickets for their opening concert that it had had to be postponed, while the first FMS concert of the season—conducted, of course, by Balakirev—drew a decent audience and was a fair success. This so enraged the grand duchess that she embarked on a policy of luring away the students who formed the ballast of the FMS chorus by offering them free RMS tickets and free classes with tea and sandwiches, all of which they accepted with relish, while nevertheless remaining loyal to the FMS.

  Meanwhile, the eventual first concert of the RMS was more like a salon. Yelena Pavlovna had drummed up an audience of guards officers and courtiers, lawyers and headmistresses, assorted civil servants, “and other such musical connoisseurs,” Borodin sneered; and to keep them happy she had brought in the coloratura soprano Désirée Artot from Moscow to sing some vocal potboilers—a Chopin mazurka arranged by Pauline Viardot, Pierre Rode’s G-major variations, an aria from Handel’s Alcina—which for Borodin turned what was supposed to be a serious symphony concert into something more like The Barber of Seville. He consoled himself by totting up what it was costing the grand duchess to be horrid to Balakirev, including a fat honorarium for Artot, even fatter payments for replacement conductors, a bribe for Serov, and the cost of tea and sandwiches for the FMS students. He had to admit that Nápravník, though somewhat cold and mechanical, was generally an improvement on Rubinstein as a conductor. But the most remarkable incident came after the RMS concert when the epaulets and impossible décolletages had departed, the hall was taken over by Balakirev himself for a late-night rehearsal of the FMS, and the fading echoes of the Moroccan March and Artot’s roulades were drowned out by “the mighty sounds of Berlioz’s Lélio.”15

  Through all these tribulations, Balakirev was by no means without support, public or professional. Yelena Pavlovna’s antics were even beginning to annoy the conservatory professors, who were far from natural friends of the kuchka, and Anton Rubinstein went so far as to forbid his students to accept the grand duchess’s handouts. But Balakirev was clearly his own worst enemy when it came to professional success. His reluctance to program any kind of normal popular repertoire, his flat refusal to play the piano in public, his almost total silence as a composer, his constant willingness to sacrifice his own interests to the interests of others: all t
his exasperated his friends at least as much as his domineering attitude to their work and his tendency to sulk when they ignored his instructions. Stasov had heard that Balakirev was planning to hand over his teaching at the Maryinsky Institute for girls, and implored him not to do so, protesting at his “never satisfied need to do good to others and to stop at nothing in helping those who need your help—whether material or intellectual.”16

  Perhaps he had also heard that Balakirev had been using up his creative energies mapping out the future work of their Moscow friend Tchaikovsky. Balakirev had conducted Tchaikovsky’s Fatum in an RMS concert in March, but he had formed a very low opinion of the work and had not hesitated to communicate this fact to the composer (though he had hesitated to send his first letter, and eventually rewrote and sent it in a softened form).17 Then, when they met and spent time together in Moscow in August, Balakirev proposed a symphonic poem on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Tchaikovsky seems to have liked the idea and soon started work. But by early October he was telling Balakirev that “I’m completely played out, and not one remotely tolerable musical idea is coming into my head. I’m beginning to be afraid that my muse has flown off somewhere far away (perhaps visiting Zaremba).”18 For Balakirev this was red rag to a bull, and he quickly fired off a lengthy reply describing in detail how he had set about composing his King Lear Overture and suggesting how Tchaikovsky might do the same with Romeo and Juliet—even offering a few bars of actual music as an opening idea.19

  By a supreme irony, at almost exactly the same time, Stasov was doing his best to galvanize Balakirev into composing some major new work of his own and, by a worse irony, failing dismally. Since his Czech overture, Balakirev had completed only one work, the so-called “Eastern fantasy” Islamey, an eight-minute piano piece of such staggering virtuosity that when Nikolay Rubinstein played it at an FMS concert at the end of November, the audience cheered it to the rafters but, according to Borodin, were puzzled by it and unable (he seems to imply) to see the connection between the technical bravura and the thematic design, which in fact is essentially that of Glinka’s Kamarinskaya: multiple repetitions of a pair of folk themes with elaborate variations in texture and color. Balakirev probably had been playing these or similar variations as improvisations at circle meetings for the past two or three years; the themes in question are Kabardian tunes that he had picked up on one of his trips to the Caucasus, most likely in 1863. But he seems to have written nothing down until his Moscow visit in August 1869, and it’s even tempting to imagine that he may have been provoked into it by some response of Tchaikovsky’s to his bullyings about his, Tchaikovsky’s, compositional failures. One day that month, Balakirev heard a Tartar melody sung at Tchaikovsky’s house by the Bolshoi singer Konstantin de Lazari, and soon afterward he wrote Islamey out, very rapidly, with a new, slower middle section based on the Tartar theme.

  Whatever he may have thought of Islamey, Stasov had more ambitious ideas about the sort of music Balakirev ought to be writing. He reminded him of the subjects he had given him before. There was King Lear and there was the at first modestly titled Second Overture on Russian Themes, recently published for the first time with the resounding title 1000 Years, a work they had supposedly thought of after reading Herzen’s article “The Giant Awakens” (“Ispolin prosïpayetsya”) in Kolokol’ in 1861. “From all sides of our enormous fatherland,” Herzen had written, “from the Don and from the Urals, from the Volga and the Dnepr a moan is growing, a rumble is rising—it is the beginning of a tidal wave which is boiling up, attended by storms, after a horribly fatiguing calm.”20 No doubt significantly, Stasov misremembered the title of the article as “Bogatïr’ prosïpayetsya” (“The Knight-Hero Awakens”). While Herzen’s sense of Russian destiny combined a hatred of its present political structure with the expectation of its overthrow by sheer weight of numbers, Stasov’s populism was more romantic in character and linked to a mystical idea of Russianness embodied in remote periods of history and myth. He admits to Balakirev that “you are a Slavophile, and I don’t share your convictions. But to each his own, and anyone’s strength lies only in that which constitutes the very roots of his soul.” And he goes on to propose what might be the subject of a four-movement symphony that “breathes a passionate longing for the triumph of the Slav people, that breathes a passionate hatred of the German oppressor, and finally that breathes a fanatical renunciation of love, of peace, of the beauty of life—if only to achieve the apotheosis of the most tormenting and fulfilling idea.”21

  The subject in question is the early-fifteenth-century Hussite general Jan Žižka, who helped defeat the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 and subsequently led the Hussites to a succession of victories over the largely German forces of the Holy Roman Empire. The precise point about Žižka, of course, was that he was a Slav walloping Germans. Stasov lays out a detailed program for the imagined symphony, adding somewhat ambiguously that the subject “concerns not only the Czechs, but all peoples of the new Europe, where the majority go or want to go forward to freedom, and only the great individual renounces everything, in order simply to deliver the victory to others.”22 The proposal tells us a lot about Stasov’s highly un-Tolstoyan view of popular movements. But as far as one can tell it drew no response from Balakirev. He still had the partly composed first movement of a C-major symphony in his bottom drawer; and as for program music, no doubt the lovely Tamara was still calling from the banks of a very different river from the ones listed by Herzen. Once or twice at circle gatherings during 1870, Balakirev would play through as much of Tamara as existed. But it would be many years before either work got finished, and meanwhile Balakirev lapsed into a more or less total creative silence.

  The completion of Boris Godunov in December 1869, and its submission to the Imperial Theatres directorate the following April, left Musorgsky in an unfamiliar condition of creative fulfillment without any fresh project in view. Stasov, of course, had been active here too. Even before Boris was finished he had discussed with Musorgsky the possibility of an opera based on a short story called “Leshiy” (“The Wood Goblin”) by Alexey Pisemsky, the author of the influential novel A Thousand Souls (Tïsyacha Dush). Nothing came of this idea. Stasov next devised a whole libretto freely based on a novella called Hans und Grete by the German writer Friedrich Spielhagen, converting the sentimental original into a Gogolian comedy called The Landless Peasant (Bobïl’). Stasov described the plot in some detail in a letter to his brother, Dmitry (whose wife, Polixena, had provided the book), and added that “as you can see, the whole subject has now turned out very rewardingly, and since Musorgsky’s talent is purely Gogolian, it fits his needs and abilities like a glove.”23 Perhaps for a time Musorgsky agreed with him. At any rate he swiftly composed music for the scene in the second act in which a crowd of people visit the fortune-teller, who arranges for them all to meet in the forest at full moon, where she intends to unmask the thief who has been poaching the local landowner’s elks. But soon afterward he turned to other ideas, the fortune-telling music went into a drawer, The Landless Peasant was put on one side, and no more was heard of it.

  Some months earlier, Musorgsky had been forcibly and somewhat painfully reminded that while he may just have completed a big, big opera, it was as a songwriter that he was becoming known to St. Petersburg music lovers, and in particular to the St. Petersburg press. After all, hardly anything of his had been performed in the concert hall. But his songs were beginning to be published, and in February 1870 the music journal Muzïkal’nïy sezon had printed a lengthy review of the two sets of, in all, seven songs published thus far by Johansen. The review, by the doggedly anti-kuchkist Famintsïn, took what must have seemed a studiously asinine line on the more idiosyncratic elements in these songs. Famintsïn liked the “Jewish Song” and, guardedly, the early “Tell Me Why.” Also, significantly, he thought the start of “Mushrooming” “very graceful and beautiful,” but could not get on with the grating dissonances of the middle
section or, apparently, understand why “graceful and beautiful” harmonies might lie oddly with a text about poisoning your grandpa. In the other songs, “Darling Savishna,” “Gopak,” “The Feast,” and “The Billy Goat,” he could detect little beyond “an inordinate desire to be, or at least seem to be, original in defiance of aesthetic feeling, to the detriment of musical beauty.” He was outraged by Musorgsky’s habit of ending his songs “not through the dominant as pieces usually end, but in some other way just so long as it isn’t how other composers would end. People usually leave their houses,” Famintsïn continued, “through the door, which in no way excludes the possibility of climbing out through the window … Mr. Musorgsky, at the end of his songs, usually leaps out of the window.” To Famintsïn, this was tantamount to musical suicide.24

  It may have been this review, among other provocations, that gave Musorgsky the idea for another satire along the lines of his earlier Famintsïn parody, “The Classicist.” Stasov later claimed that the original idea was his, and it’s true that he had had his own go at Famintsïn in a Vedomosti article the previous year (“Musical Liars,” “Muzïkal’nïye lgunï”), about the reporting in the newspaper Golos of Balakirev’s relations with the RMS and the reasons for his dismissal. The article had characterized the various Golos critics as “a whole nest; ensconced there are Messrs. Famintsïn, Serov, and Rostislav, with a certain Mr. I, brooding on all the things they hold dear.” And it was precisely this group (apart from the mysterious Mr. I), all of them composers as well as critics, together with the director of the conservatory, Zaremba, that Musorgsky took as targets for his poisoned arrows in “The Peep Show” (“Rayok”).25