Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  “The Peep Show” is a long and, for modern performers and listeners, largely pointless lampoon of a series of figures who were of some—albeit aggravating—importance on the St. Petersburg musical scene in 1870, but are now almost completely forgotten. It starts with the fairground caller’s “roll up, roll up” routine (labelled by Musorgsky “I myself”—“Ya sam”), before launching into the parody of Zaremba and his pedantries by way of Handel’s “See, the conquering hero comes,” marked piano and “tainstvenno” (“mysteriously”). Next comes the Golos critic Rostislav (F. M. Tolstoy), notorious for his addiction to Italian opera and especially to the diva Adelina Patti. The main part of Musorgsky’s Rostislav spoof is a “salon waltz” harping somewhat laboriously on the Patti motif (“Patti, Patti, O Papa Patti! Wonderful Patti, divine Patti,” etc., etc.) and ending with a vocal cadenza written, it may be observed, in the bass clef. Famintsïn is portrayed this time through a studiedly boring slow song labelled “one of the pieces”—supposedly a piece by him. Last comes Serov, “shaggy, fearsome, on the Teutonic Bucephalus, the overworked Zukunftist,” in the form of an extended spoof on themes from “the celebrated opera” Rogneda.

  Musorgsky sang and played “The Peep Show” for the first time within a few days of completing it in mid-June, and it soon became a regular party piece of his within the circle. He was a gifted performer of such things: an easy, fluent pianist, and a singer who could do voices comic and serious. For those who knew the work’s targets, it was an irresistible display, witty in detail and hilarious in its sheer excess. It undoubtedly had them rocking in the aisles, and Stasov claimed later that “even those ridiculed laughed till they cried, so talented and infectiously jolly and amusing was this original little novelty.” Unfortunately, the musical content is almost zero, and since the satire is as dead as last year’s market reports, the work now has no more than curiosity value. It reminds us, perhaps, of the difference between targeted and generic parody—between jokes about individuals and jokes about types and situations, like “Darling Savishna” and “The Seminarian.”

  One can readily see how talent for the one would go with talent for the other; so it is no great surprise to find Musorgsky treating “The Peep Show” as a launching pad for a new series of genre settings along the lines of “With Nyanya,” his nursery song of two years earlier. In the last three months of 1870 he added four more songs, evidently with the intention of creating a cycle; and the five songs were duly published as the original version of Detskaya (The Nursery) eighteen months later.

  Each one is a genre picture along the lines of the original song. In “In the Corner” (“V uglu”) the child has unwound Nyanya’s wool, dropped the stitches and spilled ink on the sock she was darning, so she puts him in the corner. He is at first piteous, then becomes spiteful (“Nyanya is mean and old and has a dirty nose”). Musorgsky divides the song in two: the brusque, angry Nyanya—quick, short phrases with big, emphatic leaps—and the child, crying (piano left hand), then vengeful, with snappier phrases (all quavers) and insistent final-word emphases, just like a sulky child, and ending “So there!” (“Vot shto!”). The next song, “The Beetle” (“Zhuk”), is the child’s own account of being hit on the head by a large beetle while building a sand castle, then opening his eyes and finding, to his astonishment, that it’s the beetle and not him that’s dead. Here Musorgsky distinguishes between the child’s breathless chatter (“Nyanya, what do you think happened?”) and his vivid description of the beetle on the roof (“huge, black, and this fat”), where the mood becomes more secretive, faintly sinister, childishly overplayed. The last two songs are about bedtime. “S kukloy” (“With Dolly”) is a lullaby sung by the little girl to her doll, an inspiration of striking simplicity and economy. Finally, in “Na son gryadushchiy” (“Time for Bed”), the child herself is put to bed but has first to say her prayers: God bless Mummy and Daddy (sincerely prayerful), Granny and Grandpa (slight harmonic pout), then a despairing rattle through the aunts and uncles and servants, until … “Nyanya, what else?” Then a sharp reminder and: “God have mercy on me, a sinner! Is that right? Nyanyushka?”

  These verbal details are important, because Musorgsky’s portraiture is so bound up with the exact turn of speech (always to his own texts) and the precise tone of voice. The songs are solidly made, and melodious in an unassuming way. Unlike “The Peep Show,” they last not a second too long. But what makes them live, perhaps more than any other music ever written about childhood, is the penetration of mood, the power of images that are more truthful than casual observation, that hit off the character of the moment so vividly and unsentimentally that the listener finds himself actually laughing in recognition. To understand the technique involved, it helps to think of each song as a kind of revue sketch or vignette. The singer acts out the story in a way that freely mixes song and declamation, while the piano has the task of binding everything together, paying attention to the action, but keeping a hold on themes and motives. One could imagine that if Musorgsky had been asked to sing and play some anecdote or other off the cuff, the result might have been like this. In terms of musical manners, a certain informality—even irregularity—of harmony and rhythm would be a natural part of the proceedings. Where the songs in The Nursery differ from such a description is in the artistic precision with which the “informality” is handled. “Realism” becomes an artistic category like any other, subject to rules of balance, coherence, and well-formedness, but dependent like all art on (and there is no other word) inspiration. The idea that to write good music, all you had to do was follow the dictates of a good text, had been well and truly scotched by Marriage. The Nursery shows that, pace Chernïshevsky, truth is relative to the medium through which it is expressed. The medium cannot be reduced to some category of truth imposed from outside, without reference to its own particular nature.

  Experience has proved that The Nursery is by no means easy to perform. Musorgsky himself, a baritone, was a talented vocal actor who not only sang and played his own songs to brilliant effect but also took leading roles in circle run-throughs of operas like The Stone Guest and William Ratcliff. But the cycle is problematical for the male voice in general, and particularly for basses of the heavy Russian variety, who can only imitate children in a style of comic mimicry. The songs are in fact notated in the treble clef, and were first sung—after the composer—by Sasha Purgold, herself a gifted character singer rather than a lyric soprano. Her sister, Nadya, wrote in her diary that “some of Musorgsky’s pieces would never have been written were it not for Sasha. Without realizing it, he wrote his ‘kids’ only because of her and for her, because he knew very well that she was the only one who could perform them as they should be performed.”

  Sasha was at this period in love with Musorgsky, and Nadya thinks he was aware of the fact and allowed it to affect his behavior toward her sister. She observed that Modest was able to talk in a normal, serious way to her, but invariably adopted a jokey or even openly rude manner with Sasha—a sure sign of emotional unease and a repressed character. It went with his love of older women, his ease with children, above all his ability to empathize with invented or observed characters as compared with the difficulty he sometimes had behaving in a natural and open way with the people in his own circle. Hence, no doubt, the foppish, overcultivated drawing-room manner; hence the footloose, free-loading attitude to accommodation; hence, in the end, the addiction to drink. In his case a certain inability to confront reality was a bitter concomitant of his genius for representing it in his work. Finally, music’s gain would prove to be his tragedy.

  CHAPTER 19

  A Shared Apartment …

  In July 1872, Musorgsky wrote to Lyudmila Shestakova: “The circle’s past is bright—its present is overcast: gloomy days have begun. I do not accuse any one of the members, ‘because my heart holds no malice,’ but thanks to my inborn good-natured sense of humor I can’t help honoring the circle with a quotation from Griboyedov: ‘Some have been pensio
ned off, others, you see, have been killed off’.”1

  Artistic circles, thought of as hives of creativity, rarely exist for more than brief periods, though they may survive much longer on a purely social level. As a rule they come together at times of shared artistic immaturity and when general ideas about the purpose of art or the forms it ought to take predominate over the compelling urgency of individual work. Once the members of the circle get immersed in their own projects, the identity of the group will at best begin to blur, at worst become a source of tension and disagreement, of accusations of betrayal and disloyalty. Alas, the work of art is an unruly beast, deaf to the dictates of theory, ideology, even friendship; and the artist himself must either be its slave or become its victim.

  For Balakirev, as 1870 faded into 1871, this painful truth was growing harder and harder to ignore. For more than a decade he had dominated the kuchka by right, not of seniority, but of technical expertise backed up by an instinctively autocratic nature. He had guided his acolytes along the pathways that he himself, as a brilliant instrumentalist, had trodden. He had inducted them as best he could into the mysteries of instrumental composition and of effective—if not textbook—form; where necessary, he had written or rewritten parts of their work for them, and when this no longer seemed appropriate, he had at least made clear to them his approval or disapproval of this or that aspect of what they had composed. He had disliked Musorgsky’s St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain and had refused to conduct it; he had disapproved of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar in general and detested its second movement in particular, but had nevertheless conducted it and had the grace to change his mind. He had bullied Tchaikovsky into composing and recomposing Romeo and Juliet, leaving his only-just-younger and much-better-taught colleague in no doubt about what he did and did not like in the end product. All this vicarious activity had sapped his own creative energy; or perhaps it had merely provided him with the necessary explanation of its decline.

  At the heart of the problem, from Balakirev’s point of view, was the underlying weakness of St. Petersburg concert life. His battles with the RMS were an obvious symptom. He had tried to use his position as conductor of that institution to promote the kind of music he wanted his Russian colleagues to write; but there simply were not enough concerts, nor a strong enough native repertory, to justify such a policy in the face of the subscribers’ understandable desire to hear the masterpieces of the Western classical tradition. After losing his RMS post, he had concentrated harder than ever on the FMS. But the school’s finances were so precarious that by the end of the 1869–70 season the coffers were empty and for the following season no concerts could be slated at all. Balakirev’s own position was no better. In June 1870 he gave a fund-raising piano recital in his home city, Nizhny-Novgorod, but hardly anybody came, and Balakirev returned to St. Petersburg practically destitute. For the 1871–72 season, the FMS announced five concerts, with the usual mixture of Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann, and an assortment of contemporary Russiana; but they too were so unsuccessful that the final concert had to be cancelled.

  Meanwhile, Balakirev’s fellow kuchkists had for some time been composing operas, a genre of which he was more than a little suspicious, and authority in which he had long ago ceded to the circle’s official opera composer, César Cui. After abandoning Prince Igor early in 1870, Borodin started work on his Second Symphony, and soon afterward noticed a curious change in Balakirev’s manner. “For a long time,” he told his wife, “he has been offhand with me and openly cool, cross, and inclined to carp. I arrive at Lyudmila’s—Mily unrecognizable: tender and soft, gazing at me with loving eyes, and in the end, not knowing how to express his affection, carefully took my nose between two fingers and gave me a smacking kiss on the cheek. I couldn’t help laughing! You’ve naturally guessed the reason for this change: Korsinka has told him that I’m writing a symphony … ”2 No wonder Balakirev had cooled toward Musorgsky, so preoccupied with Boris, and no longer attentive to the master’s pronouncements. But there was something excessive in Balakirev’s behavior, beyond the merely theatrical demonstration of an autocratic preference. One day in November 1870 at Shestakova’s he suddenly remarked, in a malicious tone, that Boris had been rejected by the Imperial Theatres directorate. Yet Boris had not been rejected, was not in fact rejected for another three months. Balakirev must have heard some rumor, and chosen to stir up trouble over it rather than keep his peace until the facts were known.

  Early in 1871 matters came to a head. Balakirev had been invited in December to conduct a concert in aid of a fund for the production of The Stone Guest. But two months later it was apparent that he had taken and was taking no steps toward organizing this event. Stasov wrote to him in despair, but Balakirev eventually replied only that “I am very busy at the present time with my own affairs and have absolutely no possibility of occupying myself with concerts.”3 This was an evasion. The truth was that he had become so depressed at the apparent futility of his existence, the failure of his FMS concerts, the decline in his creative impulse, and the loss of faith in his circle, that he had come close to suicide. He had sat at home on the anniversary of his mother’s death in early March, a prey to bleak reflections; and at that very moment he had undergone some kind of religious experience, an experience he himself described, to his friend Vladimir Zhemchuzhnikov, as a “conversion.” He implored Zhemchuzhnikov to keep this to himself. “I myself will tell only those I find necessary, and for the rest I’ll stay as I was.”4 Stasov, a confirmed nonbeliever, he did not at first “find necessary.” A few days later they met; Stasov observed him closely and noticed only something upsetting which reminded him of death. “In his appearance,” he told Rimsky-Korsakov,

  it was as if everything were the same and nothing had changed: voice the same, figure, face, words—all the same, yes—but actually everything had changed, and of the past not one stone stands on another … Can you imagine, from time to time silence would suddenly set in and continue for several minutes … I tried, in this way and that, to begin anew, starting first from one end and then from the other, carefully skirting anything that might be unpleasant, such as the concert for The Stone Guest—nothing helped me; he would answer in a few words and again silence. When has anything like this ever happened? Why, it’s fifteen years that I’ve known him! No, this is an entirely different man; it was some sort of coffin before me yesterday, not the former lively, energetic, restless Mily …5

  Somehow Balakirev pulled himself together. He conducted the FMS concerts of the 1871–72 season. But he began to absent himself from circle meetings, and to speak slightingly to outsiders about its members and their work. Borodin paid him a rare visit in October 1871 in order to retrieve the manuscript of his First Symphony, which Nadya Purgold intended to transcribe for piano; but Balakirev was reluctant to give it up, insisting that he would make the arrangement himself. When he finally handed the score over, Borodin found it marked up with corrections to alterations that he had made a few months earlier precisely at Balakirev’s suggestion. It was pure arbitrary despotism. No longer able to control his erstwhile pupils, the master had acquired a new set of acolytes, who were completely under his thumb and whom he treated like a nyanya with her charges. Meanwhile, he disparaged Boris Godunov and The Maid of Pskov to anyone who would listen. “If he goes on like this,” Borodin told his wife, “he could easily end up isolated, and that, in his condition, would be a kind of moral death.”6

  Musorgsky was hurt by the remarks that got back to him from Balakirev about Boris. Yet, curiously, he had been less upset than anyone expected about the opera’s rejection by the directorate. No reason had been given, but it was variously supposed that the absence of significant female roles, the damaging portrait of the tsar, the satirical treatment of the Orthodox monks Varlaam and Misail, the generally unconventional idiom and design of the opera, even the unorthodox scoring, were to blame. In fact, since all these elements survived into the revised version except the gender problem, it looks a
s if all that was needed was a good, solid prima-donna role to reconcile the crusty members of the directorial panel to the oddities of this strange and suspiciously novel musical drama. Of course, arts committees are not necessarily so rational; they take to things or they don’t. Next time, having made their point, they may take the opposite view. They may, like Pontius Pilate, have been set upon by enlightened wives; they may have received advice or instruction from some previously passive source. The most striking thing about all forms of censorship is the arbitrary power it places in the hands of mediocre, unproductive, and sometimes embittered individuals. Such people, unlike historians, are not necessarily motivated by strict considerations to which they adhere with scrupulous fairness and consistency.

  Whatever the reasons for the opera’s rejection, Musorgsky reacted with a sweeping energy that showed very clearly what improvements he thought necessary to his original conception. After all, the original Boris had been composed somewhat on the rebound from the essentially experimental Marriage. It had moved on from that work with astonishing assurance and inventiveness. It might seem practically certain that as work proceeded, Musorgsky would have continued to evolve as a composer, continued to understand his still emerging method in new ways. Just as the change from Marriage to Boris had entailed a measure of retreat from a doctrinaire, theoretical position, so he might well have gone on reinstating hybrid or corrupt ingredients previously outlawed by the purity of the doctrine. The self-confident artist can act in this way precisely because he no longer needs a dogma to argue his originality. He no longer needs to exclude things in order to prove his adherence to advanced thinking. Probably he no longer even needs advanced thinking. It so easily gets in the way.