Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  you know that I can’t lug rubbish around inside me and care for it; accordingly I must switch to an active mode—it’s both simpler, more direct, and better. I explained (as openly and delicately as I know how) to Korsinka and Borodin that in order to rescue the circle’s maiden chastity, and to avoid their making a prostitute of it, I shall in the matter of our labor prescribe, not listen, I shall put the questions, not give the answers (and this of course only with Korsinka’s and Borodin’s permission) on their behalf and mine, and the contractor can please himself.5

  He was working on his Bald Mountain adaptation, which, he admitted, was going well. But thereafter he seems to have put the project to one side, and only returned to it several weeks later and composed the market scene, after a run-through at Cui’s at the start of May, when presumably he had to endure some teasing about his high-minded inertia.

  The other two kuchkists were at least better organized in their approach to the commission, if with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Cui had been allotted act 1—a nice but presumably unintentional joke at the expense of his usual inability to begin anything at the beginning. He accordingly polished off act 4 of Angelo by the middle of April, then settled down to Mlada. We are among the ancient pagan Slavs in the Polabian city of Retra (on the river Elbe) in the ninth century; Prince Mstivoy and his daughter Voyslava have murdered Prince Yaromir’s bride, Mlada, at their wedding, with the intention of arranging for him to marry Voyslava. Unfortunately for them, Yaromir is still in love with Mlada, so Voyslava sells her soul to the black goddess, Morena, to secure his love. But Mlada appears to Yaromir in a dream and reenacts her murder, thereby revealing to him its perpetrators. Yaromir is appalled by the vision, but at the end of the first act is called away to the hunt.

  According to Rimsky-Korsakov, this was the most dramatic act in the work and was allocated to Cui on account of his supposed expertise as a dramatic composer. Rimsky’s view may have been influenced by the fact that, by the time he wrote his memoir of this period, he had himself composed an entire opera based on an adapted version of Krïlov’s libretto, and knew from personal experience what the dramatic demands of this scene were in relation to the rest of the drama. But why Cui should still have been regarded as the circle’s dramatic specialist after the completion of The Maid of Pskov and Boris Godunov, both of which they all knew well from private run-throughs, is hard to imagine. More likely it was felt that the composer of William Ratcliff was the best qualified to find the right sort of music for the magical apparition of the dark goddess and Yaromir’s vision of the murder, and perhaps also the most likely to produce a score in good time and get the opera off to a sound start. In the event Cui satisfied the latter requirement but hardly the former. His music is bland and conventional, and gives the impression of having been composed rapidly and without real engagement in the task. Most disappointingly of all, his treatment of the big melodramatic scenes is perfunctory at best, while the musical characterization is rudimentary, everyone having more or less the same kind of essentially lyrical music whether they are an evil princess, an elderly witch, or a tormented hero (the dream-Mlada herself was meant to dance but not sing).

  None of this would call for particular comment, given the character of the project, if it were not for the fact that Borodin, with the task of composing the fourth and final act, was excited by it in a way that he had specifically not been by Prince Igor. Stasov would call on him from time to time that spring (1872) and find him “in the morning standing at his high writing-table, at the moment of creation, his face blazing and inspired, his eyes on fire, his physiognomy transformed.” On one occasion “he had been slightly unwell, had stayed at home for the past two weeks, and the whole of that time he had hardly left the piano. It was during those days that he above all wrote the most capital and amazing things for Mlada.”6 The middle acts had been dominated by ensemble tableaux: the Festival of Kupala (John the Baptist), and the witches’ sabbath of St. John’s Night (Midsummer Night). But the final act resolves the drama amid cataclysmic scenes of natural and supernatural intervention. Yaromir goes to the temple and asks the High Priest to interpret his dream; he is visited by a succession of spirits of ancient Slav princes, each of whom announces that Mlada was poisoned by Voyslava and must be avenged. Voyslava confesses and begs Yaromir to love her; but instead he draws his sword and kills her. In response the dark goddess Morena appears and sets off a Götterdämmerung-style climax in which a storm inundates the temple and the whole city, and Mlada and Yaromir are seen rising to the realm of light locked in each other’s arms.

  For some reason, Borodin was inspired by this hocus-pocus, and composed at high speed a quantity of brilliant music that in integrity of atmosphere and inventive richness far outstripped any of the other contributions, whatever might be said about this or that individual piece by Musorgsky. For once, Borodin wrote an entire score from start to finish, apparently uninhibited by the dramaturgical problems he had sensed with Prince Igor. No doubt it helped him that the situations and characters were given, having presumably been established and justified in the preceding acts. So he could treat the scene of the apparitions, for example, as a tableau vivant, a self-contained vignette, with mysterious, vagrant harmonies and an incantatory, quasi-ritualistic tone, as the four spirits repeat the same mantra: “Voyslava poisoned Mlada. Take your revenge!” He could compose a desperate, one-sided love duet for Voyslava and Yaromir, an inundation scene, and a romantic apotheosis for the genuine lovers, Mlada and Yaromir, as if they were set projects in a composition prize, without needing to worry about how these situations came about or what kinds of personage these characters really were. He also, of course, had at his disposal the music already composed for the abandoned Prince Igor. He probably at least worked the original version of Yaroslavna’s arioso into the scene of Yaromir with the High Priest, though the state of the manuscripts makes this hard to establish beyond doubt.7

  The irony of Borodin’s Mlada was that his work was abortive partly because of the failure of others to fulfill their side of the commission. Its corresponding virtue was that it left him with a body of first-rate music and a number of bankable themes and motives that he was able to put to good use when he eventually returned to composing Prince Igor.8

  Just when they were variously turning their minds to Mlada, The Stone Guest at last reached the stage of the Maryinsky Theatre, more than three years after its composer’s death, its loose ends tied by Cui, its orchestration supplied by Rimsky-Korsakov. There had been difficulties bringing the performance to fruition, partly because of official restrictions on the amount of money permitted to be paid as a one-off royalty to the composer (or estate) of a new opera. But the production, when it came on 16 February 1872, was a first-rate affair, with leading singers in the main roles: Fyodor Komissarzhevsky as Don Juan, Yulia Platonova as Donna Anna, and Osip Petrov, the original Susanin and Ruslan, as Leporello. The performance was generally praised, but the work, predictably enough, divided opinion more or less along party lines. It was naturally understood as a manifesto of the Stasov tendency; Cui had made sure of that by plugging it in advance as “the first conscious experiment in creating contemporary opera-drama without the slightest concession,… dramatic truth brought to its highest expression, combined with intelligence, experience, and mastery of craft, along with a musical beauty that bears in many places the inimitable stamp of Dargomïzhsky’s originality.”9 In fact, as we saw, and as Taruskin has argued at some length, The Stone Guest, whatever may be said about its musical quality, is by no means simply an arid experiment in unremitting recitative, and its advance apologists did it no favors by what Serov called their “comically inflated advertisements [which] sooner hurt the as yet unknown work than worked to its advantage.”10 The Stone Guest is better described as a conversation piece, whose “true domain,” as Hermann Laroche, another hostile but highly intelligent critic, observed, “is the salon, its true orchestra, the pianoforte”—a remark that must have been read w
ith mixed feelings by Rimsky-Korsakov and his betrothed, “our dear orchestra,” as Musorgsky called her—“for which reason,” Laroche continued, “there is no pretense to musical drama.”11

  It must in any case have been a strange experience to turn from this humble masterpiece of speech-song whose sole incursion from the other world is its living statue, to the apparitions, the devil worship, and supernatural cataclysms of Mlada, “this offspring of delirium tremens,” as Musorgsky described it to Stasov in a moment of exasperation.12 Mlada had been one aspect of Stasov’s enthusiasm for antique Slav culture; but there was another, very different aspect that was more and more claiming Musorgsky’s attention. It may have been as a result of a play-through of Boris Godunov for the benefit of the historian Nikolay Kostomarov, in the early spring of 1872, that Stasov set himself the task of finding a new historical subject for a Musorgsky opera. “It seemed to me,” he wrote subsequently in his biography of the composer, “that the battle between the old Russia and the new, the departure of the former from the stage and the entrance of the latter, was a rich soil for drama and opera, and Musorgsky shared my opinion.”13 This was an understatement. Musorgsky was soon obsessed with the whole subject of the power struggle in late-seventeenth-century Moscow between what Stasov called the “ancient, dark, fanatical, impenetrable Russia” of the old boyar families and the Raskolniki, the so-called Old Believers, on the one hand, and the various modernizing, Westernizing forces on the other, the followers of the regent Sofia and those of her young half brother, the future Peter the Great, the bicentenary of whose birth fell, as it happened, that very June. Not only did Musorgsky enthuse, in a series of long confessional letters to Stasov, he began speaking in tongues, expressing himself in circuitous, quasi-biblical language about “the power of the black earth” and “thunder over Mother Russia.”

  Not for the first time I begin to plow the black earth, and I want to plow not the fertilized but the raw earth, thirsting not to know the people but to become their brother: terrible, but good!… The black earth’s power will become manifest, when you plow it to the very bottom. One can plow the black earth with tools wrought of alien materials. And they did plow Mother Russia at the end of the seventeenth century with such tools that she did not immediately recognize with what they were plowing, and how the black earth expanded and began to breathe.14

  Stasov’s interest in the Raskolniki went back more than ten years to his reading of Kel’siyev and Kel’siyev’s idea of the schism in the Orthodox Church as “a great pledge of the future development of Russia” and an image of the Russian people’s perennial and confused strivings toward dimly glimpsed political goals.15 In fact the schism had originated in the mid–seventeenth century as a conservative reaction to the church reforms of Patriarch Nikon, superficially trivial in themselves, but symptomatic of a broader attempt to centralize the power of the church hierarchy by reference back to the Greek origins of Orthodoxy. But as successive Roman Catholic and Protestant authorities had discovered in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, ordinary people were not so readily wooed from long-standing religious practices that they had been brought up to believe necessary for their personal salvation; and in the same way resistance to the reforms often took on an extreme character and swiftly came to be associated with anarchism and various brands of millennial politics. The so-called Old Believers, the most identifiable group of schismatics, adopted the ultimate form of resistance to Nikon’s changes. They fled in large numbers into the remote Russian forests, nailed themselves up in coffins, and even committed mass suicide by self-immolation. When Peter I became sole ruler in 1696, and embarked on a policy of suppressing the outward manifestations of Orthodoxy, the Old Believers took him for the Antichrist, whose coming heralded the end of the world. Mass immolations increased; the sense of the Raskolniki as a politically, as well as spiritually, dissident group intensified.

  For the different intellectual movements of nineteenth-century Russia, the Raskolniki offered a flexible model for their own various ideologies. The Slavophiles were sympathetic to them because they stood for opposition to the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great and his successors. For liberals like Stasov, they were an interesting, if equivocal, example of systematic, organized opposition to autocratic government. For anthropological nationalists like Musorgsky, they were one manifestation of the soul of Russia, its spiritual essence, misguided perhaps, but untainted by foreign values. To be more exact, just as in Boris Godunov Musorgsky had avoided taking sides but had portrayed all his characters as human beings in the grip of forces beyond their control or comprehension, so in Khovanshchina, as the new project was called from the start, it was the collision of historic forces, rather than this or that faction or individual, that seized his interest. To adopt his own image, it was these forces that plowed the black earth so deep that they could no longer see their own tools; but as they plowed, the true nature of Russia was revealed, a nature that it was the task of those who would reassert a Russian identity to discover and embrace.

  While Stasov saw the dramatic potential of this material, he did not immediately come up with anything approaching a detailed scenario. Even less than with Boris was there an obvious narrative. The dramaturgical problem was complicated by the legal impossibility of representing either Peter himself or the regent Sofia—both members of the Romanov dynasty—on the stage, and instead of trying to resolve this difficulty ab initio (simply assuming that Peter and Sofia would nevertheless appear), Musorgsky plunged into a program of study, compiling a list of sources on the accession of Peter the Great and the troubles that accompanied it, and presumably starting to read. “I am bathing in information,” he informed Stasov, “my head is like a cauldron, just keep adding to it. Zhelyabuzhsky, Krekshin, Count Matveyev, Medvedev, Shchebalsky and Semevsky I have already sucked dry; now I am sucking at Tikhonravov, and then comes Avvakum—for dessert.”16 His enthusiasm for the subject led him to treat it as a research project rather than a drama. He spent many hours in the public library, reading up about the Deeds of Peter the Great, the History of the Vygovsky Old Believers’ Hermitage, the archpriest Avvakum, who was burned at the stake in 1682 for his persistent opposition to the Nikon reforms, and so forth. But still there was no sign of a coherent scenario, and certainly nothing remotely resembling a libretto. Musorgsky seems to have had in his mind a succession of episodes, rather than a structured narrative of the fate of individual characters against a historical backcloth, even to the extent that this had been the case with Boris Godunov. Episodes came and went, characters were inserted or removed. As yet there was no music; but when it began to flow, it did so more or less at random, so that even when he started composing, in late 1872 or early 1873, he seems to have had no very clear picture of the trajectory of the opera as a whole.

  Grand projects evidently had a centrifugal effect on Musorgsky’s brain; it was an aspect of his rasseyannost’, his mental tendency to stray. At first, thinking about Khovanshchina, he imagines for Stasov’s benefit the Moscow of Peter the Great as the outcome of the yurodivy’s prophecy at the end of Boris: “Soon the enemy will come and darkness will descend: darkness, impenetrable darkness.” The city is a children’s work camp. Innocent boys exercise in the streets “with the help of carefully tooled muskets in the application of the Malthus theory”—that war is an effective means of controlling population. He next finds in one of his library sources a mythical account of the diabolical origin of the Teutonic race and the satanic birth of Peter himself, led from the womb by Lucifer during a thunderstorm at Epiphany. Envisaging a poor press reception for Khovanshchina when it eventually gets written, he identifies the usual critical suspects—the Golos critic, Hermann Laroche, Famintsïn, and the rest—with “the German musical guild,” and from here proceeds to a disquisition on the matter of technique and the tendency of musicians toward a certain kind of academic pedantry in discussing their art. “Why, tell me,” he asks, “when I hear a conversation of young artists—painte
rs or sculptors … can I follow their train of thought, their ideas, aims, and seldom hear anything about technique—except when necessary? Why, do not tell me, when I listen to our musical brethren, do I seldom hear a living idea, but mostly stuff from the school-room—technique and musical vocab?” “Maybe I’m afraid of technique,” he admits, “because I’m bad at it.” But after all, when you eat a pie, you don’t want to be told the ingredients, still less the conditions under which it has been cooked. One doesn’t mind food, only cookery. “I’m not against symphonies, but only symphonists.” And he lists some recent paintings and sculptures of the Wanderers school—works by Ilya Repin, Vasily Perov, and their sculptor friend Mark Antokolsky—and inquires why these works live, “and so live, that you get to know them and feel that ‘you are what I wanted to see,’ ” whereas the latest music, however good, never has that effect.

  Explain this to me, only leave out the boundaries of art—I believe in them only in very relative terms, because boundaries of art in the religion of the artist amount to inertia. What if someone’s wonderful brains didn’t come up with anything; but somebody else’s brains did think and come up with something—where then are the boundaries? But relatively speaking—yes! sounds can’t be chisels, brushes—well, of course, as every best thing has its weakness and vice versa—even children know that.17

  Musorgsky, as we saw, got on well with children and understood childhood, and there certainly are aspects of his own mentality that remind one of the wayward, lateral, even naughty, tendencies of a very bright schoolboy. As it happened, his Nursery song cycle had just been published by the firm of Bessel, and perhaps it was this momentous event (by far his most significant publication to date), as much as the boys with their muskets or the child who could tell a hawk from a handsaw, that prompted him to turn aside from his operatic researches and compose two more songs that look like a deliberate supplement to the published cycle and that would, long after his death, find their way into an expanded version of it.18