Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  After the veche, The Maid of Pskov has its disappointments. The third act (to stick to the numbering of the original version) is dominated at first by choruses of apprehension, as the crowd nervously awaits the tsar’s arrival, and welcome, whose main theme Rimsky-Korsakov had improvised at the piano back in June 1868. Both are fine, if essentially static, pieces of choral writing, separated by a scene for Olga and her old nyanya, Vlasyevna, and followed by an extended scene between Ivan himself (at last) and the governor, Prince Tokmakov, Olga’s supposed father. As in the first act, Olga is depicted in essentially lyric terms: a passionate young girl in love with a freedom fighter and uncertain of her parentage. The portrait is extremely touching and beautifully composed in a flowing style which, as before, moves freely between aria and arioso. But the character of Ivan remains indistinct. It is, after all, hard to find the right music for a tyrannical maniac in a rare mood of sweet reasonableness and, later, sentimental affection. Musorgsky, one feels, would have found it. But in Rimsky-Korsakov the character hangs fire; his conversation with Tokmakov and eventually Olga herself is long and somewhat featureless (apart from the chorus of maidens that Ivan, perhaps also a shade bored, commands in praise of his as yet unrecognized daughter: the folk text for this was supplied by Musorgsky).

  Similarly, in the final act Rimsky-Korsakov’s lyrical instincts prove a sure guide in the superb love duet for Olga and Tucha in the forest, before their kidnapping by Matuta’s men, but less helpful in the again very long scene in which Olga, still unaware that she is the tsar’s daughter, is brought to his tent and pleads with him for Tucha’s life. On paper this is a moment of high psychological drama. Ivan is torn between his growing love for the girl he now knows to be his daughter and his determination to crush Tucha’s insurrection; Olga very finely confronts him, not without warmth on her own part born of some obscure intuition of closeness to this historic monster. But the music just fails to ignite, so that the swift closing scene of Tucha’s abortive attack on the camp and the accidental killing of Olga lacks the climactic force it needs if the tragic irony of Mey’s drama is to be realized in musical terms. Rimsky-Korsakov revised this scene heavily on two occasions (in the mid-seventies and early nineties), but without really solving the problem. Here and elsewhere, the final revision would introduce elements from his later operatic experience, notably his encounters with the mature Wagner, still largely unknown to the kuchka in 1870. But the original score is in a sense sharper and more characteristic, and the work’s essential strengths—the veche, the choral writing, the portrayal of Olga and Tucha—are already present.

  Yekaterina Borodina was once again forced by her sickly lungs to spend the winter of 1871–2 in Moscow, while her husband sent her regular bulletins on his bachelor existence in St. Petersburg. In September he visits Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky in their apartment and updates himself on their operatic work and their personal relationship. They are, he moralizes, “a wholesome influence on each other,” and being “diametric opposites in musical values and methods, they as it were complement one another.” The Maid of Pskov, he reports (not quite accurately), is finished; Boris, with all its changes (which he describes), is now “simply magnificent,” and he notes with surprise that it seems to affect nonmusicians more powerfully than the Rimsky-Korsakov opera. The Maid of Pskov, he admits after hearing a complete run-through at the Purgolds’, is “unimaginably beautiful, but somewhat chilly and passionless, apart from the veche scene, which is amazingly fine in power, beauty, novelty, and impact.” He also reports on Cui’s latest project, just begun: an opera based on Victor Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue, for which Cui has already composed an entire scene. The scene, it will transpire, is part of the work’s fourth and final act, since Cui—true to the typical kuchka working method, if not to its characteristic idioms—has started at the end, perhaps out of some obscure superstition about finishing. Borodin also mentions a set of three “lovely” choruses Cui has written. Probably they include two early pieces (op. 4) written in 1860 but not previously put on show, together with a striking new Dante setting, “Chorus mysticus,” for female chorus and orchestra—a piece adventurous in harmony and imaginative in texture beyond anything in Cui’s operatic music to date.13

  For a composer who has not long since abandoned his own operatic ambitions, Borodin is attractively enthusiastic about his friends’ efforts in the genre. In his remarks there is no trace of envy or mean-mindedness, but genuine delight at their success as he sees it. His own musical activity is now firmly in the symphonic field. By October he has completed the first movement of his new B-minor symphony, at least in piano score, and it seems that the finale was also finished during that month. Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Lodïzhensky all came round to hear the not-quite-complete finale and raved about it, and when, two or three weeks later, it was actually finished, Cui impressed Borodin by calling on him specifically to hear the ending. Only Balakirev, Borodin reminds his wife, “stays aloof from this family of share-and-share-alike.” There was the episode of the First Symphony score, which Balakirev tried to avoid giving back. And on the same visit, Borodin showed him the finished parts of the Second. It seems that Balakirev had seen the first movement in the spring, had insisted on various changes, but now—exactly as with the E-flat symphony—completely changed his mind and demanded that Borodin change everything back. Borodin charitably explained this as “eccentricity,” but he knew in his heart of hearts that it was an advanced symptom of Balakirev’s despotic nature thwarted by increasing distance from its targets.

  Borodin would certainly still have been amenable to constructive criticism. Exactly how much of the symphony he had actually composed by this time is by no means clear, but what is certain is that its progress was blighted not only by his disorganized way of life but by the symphony’s own confused origins. As we saw, he had abandoned Prince Igor with only the single scene of “Yaroslavna’s Dream” composed. But there must have been other sketches as well, fragmentary no doubt, but with sufficient profile for Stasov to have “lamented the waste of the wonderful musical ‘materials’ already composed by him for Igor.”14 At the time Borodin had assured him that everything would go into the symphony. What the symphony took over above all from the opera was its historic, bardic atmosphere, its flavor of “Russian warrior-heroes … feasting to the sound of guslis and amid the exaltation of a great host of people”;15 and no doubt this flavor was carried over in specific musical ideas, including some that, in true kuchka fashion, Borodin had sketched for Stasov’s epilogue, which describes a wedding banquet for Prince Igor’s son in language taken from The Lay of Igor’s Host, but which, in the end, was never composed. A few other ideas are actually shared with the opera as eventually written, or to be exact, as eventually left in a disordered state. Borodin may not have considered Prince Igor a dramatic enough subject for an opera. But the stage picture surely survived in his mind and laid its hand generously on his symphony.

  The scene is set unmistakably by the pugnacious opening theme, in brusque unison (like the one in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), but with an antique coloring supplied by the prominent flattened intervals—the Phrygian C natural, the D natural “correcting” the D-sharp, the descent through B-flat to A in the final phrase. Borodin also engineers punch-ups between string chords (F-sharp major, dominant of B minor) and fortissimo brass chords (G major/E minor). The whole opening is marked by brutal contrasts, abrupt changes of character and key; even the more fluid second subject, in the relative major, feels uneasy in its lyricism and never settles down harmonically, is always poised over expectant dominant pedals, waiting for the next outbreak of violence. Strange and interesting that the urbane, civilized, soft-natured Borodin was so taken with this turbulent imagery—imagery, admittedly, not without a certain celebratory ebullience, in which sword strikes on sword but blood is not shed.

  Balakirev, as we saw, had had a hand in this movement. He had persuaded Borodin to change the key in which the second s
ubject comes back in the recapitulation, from the already unorthodox G major to the still more irregular E-flat (then tried to make him change it back, which he declined to do). The very key of the work, B minor, is a Balakirev fingerprint, and so is the key of the andante, D-flat major; Balakirev had bullied Tchaikovsky into the same improbable relation in Romeo and Juliet. And according to Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev was also responsible for the brassy minor ninth chord which takes us from B minor to the remote F major of the scherzo. All this suggests (as Dianin points out) that these decisions were taken in 1871, while Balakirev was still on the scene and before Borodin visited him in the autumn. Probably the middle movements were only sketched, and possibly not fully composed for another two or three years. Instead Borodin carried on with the finale, a movement of even greater exuberance, if possible, than the opening allegro.

  No wonder his friends were excited by what they heard of the symphony that October. By classical standards it is by no means a sophisticated work. It follows formal guidelines rather than processes, and looks analytically like a typical product of the circle’s rather academic approach to textbook form. But in the face of such creative vigor, these things seem of trivial importance. As in the First Symphony, the sheer energy of the writing is irresistible, and in effect it braces the architecture. Moreover, the quality of the invention is superb. Whenever he needs a strong lyrical theme, he seems able to pull one out of the hat. The allegro material buzzes with invention. The ideas, it’s true, have a family, rather than motivic, resemblance; for instance, the elegant second theme of the first movement draws on the same repertoire of notes as the sumptuous main tune of the andante: the six notes of the major scale (without the leading note), with a prominent descent to the lower relative—B-flat minor in the andante’s key of D-flat—a tendency that Borodin may have derived from the folk-song device of peremennost’. Also folklike, in a way, is the floating, free-rhythmic character of these tunes, a faint memory, perhaps, of the flexible protyazhnaya. But this is not a folksy work. Its remoteness is that of heroic antiquity, symbolized above all by the bardic harp that introduces the slow movement and figures prominently throughout. This is the gusli of Glinka’s Bayan in Ruslan, and it reminds us that the symphony started with Prince Igor and will eventually lead back to it.

  CHAPTER 20

  … and a Shared Commission

  While Balakirev was slowly removing himself from the circle of which he had been founder and presiding musical genius, its youngest member was taking a very different sort of step, one that might well, nevertheless, have had much the same general effect. In July 1871, Rimsky-Korsakov had been invited by Mikhail Azanchevsky, who had just succeeded Zaremba as director of the conservatory, to join its staff as professor of practical composition and instrumentation and conductor of the orchestra. To accept such an appointment might have seemed to run counter to everything that had ever been argued about such institutions within earshot of Balakirev or Stasov. A loathing of academic teaching and pedagogical authority had always been one of the cornerstones of Stasov’s thinking about the nature of Russian music. When Rubinstein was setting up the conservatory ten years before, Stasov had gone so far as to assert that “academies and conservatories serve only as breeding grounds for talentless people and aid the establishment in art of harmful ideas and tastes.” Now, according to Rimsky-Korsakov himself, his friends (presumably including Stasov) were in favor of his accepting the post, even though he must have pointed out to them how totally unqualified he was. Balakirev “insisted on my answering in the affirmative, with the main object of getting one of his own men into the enemy Conservatory.”1

  Barely twenty-seven, Rimsky-Korsakov was young for such a post. But more to the point, he was hopelessly untaught in the things that, for better or worse, it is usually assumed conservatory teachers will communicate to their pupils. His memoirs are superbly candid on this point. Of course, he had shown an instinctive grasp of musical procedures and method in his own works. But when it came to explaining or demonstrating such matters to young students, he was hamstrung by his ignorance of the most basic theoretical terminology or the logical structure of musical grammar and form. “To be sure,” he acknowledges, “it is more important to hear and recognize an interval or a chord than to know what they are called … more interesting to compose an Antar or a Sadko than to know how to harmonize a Protestant chorale or write four-part counterpoint.… But it is shameful not to know such things and to find them out from one’s own pupils.”2 He also admits that, after finishing The Maid of Pskov, he experienced a creative block which he attributed to his own technical deficiency, and which he maintains was eventually released precisely by the technique which he was forced to acquire in order to stay ahead of his students. Borodin, for one, seems to have grasped this at once. “Korsinka,” he reported to Yekaterina, “is in seventh heaven over his new job … And actually his ‘orchestra class’ will be just as useful for him as for his pupils.”3

  Amid these new responsibilities, Rimsky-Korsakov managed to finish The Maid of Pskov that autumn, urged on, no doubt, by his new flatmate. The question then arose: what next? Just at that time a folk rhapsode (bïlina narrator) by the name of Trofim Ryabinin visited St. Petersburg and gave a series of recitations, including probably the bïlina of the bogatyr Dobrïnya Nikitich, a kind of Kievan St. George, who slayed the dragon and rescued Princess Zabava Putyashina. Musorgsky certainly attended one of these performances, and soon afterward conceived the idea of an opera based on the Dobrïnya story. But as with The Maid of Pskov, he seems not to have wanted the new subject for himself, but instead set to work devising a scenario for Rimsky-Korsakov. Meanwhile, Nadya Purgold, who had just got engaged to Rimsky-Korsakov and was taking his interests peculiarly to heart, had been reading Gogol and looking for new subjects in that somewhat more promising arena. She read “Sorochintsï Fair,” one of the stories in Gogol’s Evenings on a Farmstead near Dikanka, and thought it “good and even suitable for an opera, perhaps, but not for you, and not in general as good as ‘May Night’ [in the same collection] would be, for example.” She was unimpressed with the Dobrïnya idea, and felt that “nothing very good will come out of all this cutting and remaking. In Dobrïnya there is so little of artistic value …” Nevertheless, she added magnanimously, “the main thing in this matter is that you have to follow your personal taste.” Instead she persuaded her sister to propose “Sorochintsï Fair” to Musorgsky; but he, in his turn, was on another tack altogether. “I know the Gogol subject well,” he responded, “I thought about it some two years ago, but the subject-matter doesn’t fit in with the direction I’ve chosen—it doesn’t sufficiently embrace Mother Russia in all her simple-hearted breadth.”4

  Just at that moment Vladimir Stasov came forward with an idea that might seem to have had the disadvantages of all these suggestions and the advantages of none. The idea had originated with the director of the Imperial Theatres, Stepan Gedeonov, who had devised a scenario based on the ancient Baltic Slav fairy tale of Prince Yaromir and the murdered Princess Mlada, a story neither Russian nor historical, yet no less fantastical than Dobrïnya, and hardly more coherent or vividly characterized. What Gedeonov envisaged was a mixture of opera and ballet, with spectacular stage effects, magical transformations, a witches’ sabbath, and guest appearances by Morena, the goddess of darkness, the black god Chernobog, Attila the Hun, and assorted ghostly Kievan princes. His first intention had been to commission Serov to compose Mlada as a ballet. But Serov’s death had put paid to that idea; and Gedeonov now presented the scheme to Stasov in the form of an opera-ballet which, in the absence—presumably—of an obvious, dependable single composer, he proposed as a joint project to be offered to the members of the kuchka as a collective. The libretto, based on Gedeonov’s scenario, was by Viktor Krïlov, Cui’s old librettist for The Mandarin’s Son and A Prisoner of the Caucasus, and the ballet music was to be provided by the Imperial Theatres’ official ballet composer, Ludwig Minkus. Rather curious
ly, one might feel, the four operatic (and available) kuchkists accepted this unlikely project without demur. There was a meeting at which the various parts of the libretto were allocated, then they all set to work, it seems, with little or no further discussion.

  Nobody who has ever edited a collaborative publication of any kind will be surprised to learn that the Mlada project came to nothing, even though it inspired a significant quantity of music before it foundered, at least partly because Gedeonov himself was unable to find the cash needed to stage this complicated and extravagant spectacle. Rimsky-Korsakov later remembered Mlada as “a most grateful subject for musical treatment.” Yet he himself got no farther with his contribution (a share of the second and third acts with Musorgsky) than a few sketches for choruses in the festival scene of act 2 and for the apparitions of the dead at the start of act 3, before deciding that the scenario was too vague to form the basis of properly considered work. Musorgsky achieved rather more, partly, it’s true, by adapting existing music from works incomplete or as yet unperformed. For the second act he composed a vigorous market scene, partly based on traders’ cries, and a strikingly individual march for the entry of the princes and (in a somber middle section) the priests. Between these two sections he seems to have planned what he called a “fistfight” (kulachnïy boy), based on his hard-worked Oedipus chorus. And for the Chernobog scene in the third act he made a major adaptation for chorus and orchestra of his St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, with extra material lifted from Salammbô, and a beautiful new ending as day dawns, a cock crows, and the evil spirits hurriedly disperse. Yet for all the brilliance of these musical images, Musorgsky soon wearied of what he called “the hired farm labor” (batrachestvo) of the collaboration. “My dear, kind friend,” he wrote to Stasov,