Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The two did become close for a time, as is clear from Musorgsky’s letters, gushing, affectionate, at times emotionally indiscreet. Some have read them as evidence of some kind of homosexual relationship or impulse at least, but this is surely to make too much of that extreme intimacy of tone which occurs elsewhere in Musorgsky’s correspondence and which goes with the romantic artist’s tendency to blur the boundary between emotional and artistic confession. Musorgsky thought highly of Kutuzov’s gifts and wanted to encourage him. Probably in November 1874, the young poet took rooms next door to Musorgsky’s on Shpalernaya, where the composer had been living for the past year and a half, and for the next few months—except for several occasions when Kutuzov visited his mother in Tver—they lived in close proximity, at first on Shpalernaya, then for a month or so in the summer of 1875 in an apartment Kutuzov had taken on Galernaya, near the Admiralty.11 Early in August 1875 Kutuzov left in unclear circumstances, locking the apartment and, according to one account, leaving Musorgsky’s belongings on the doorstep. A few months later, to the intense annoyance of the composer, who like many confirmed bachelors disliked his close friends tying the knot, Kutuzov married the fifteen-year-old Olga Gulevich.

  At the time of his intimate friendship with Musorgsky, Kutuzov attended circle gatherings and by his own admission completely accepted their ideas and prejudices about art. But soon after Musorgsky’s death in 1881, he produced a lengthy memoir which painted a very different picture of the composer’s work and its relation to Stasov’s doctrines. In essence, Kutuzov maintained that the progressive tendencies in Boris Godunov and in songs like “Darling Savishna,” “The Seminarian,” and “The Billy Goat” were in fact artificial, put on to please Stasov and his circle, but that by nature Musorgsky was a lyricist whose best and most personal work was to be found in romances like the Pushkin setting “Night,” the lyric-dramatic “King Saul,” and the more conventional romantic scenes in the Polish act of Boris. Kutuzov reports that when Musorgsky sat at the piano and improvised, the result was always more spontaneously beautiful than when he wrote it down, at which point it would take on the attributes required of it by the kuchkist circle.

  The fact is that Musorgsky the artist improvised, but the Musorgsky who wrote was a member of the circle, a musical innovator who above all took account of his mentors’ opinions, whose tastes he knew and whose approval he sought. Above all, whenever possible one had to confuse and conceal the beauty and tunefulness of a theme in order to avoid the accusation of “sugariness and sticky sweetness,” as was their usual expression at that time, and meanwhile simplicity would vanish, to be replaced by “harmonic originality.” The breadth of theme and organic consistency of sound that had flowed naturally in the original act of creation also suffered reworking, since that organic consistency of sound and breadth of theme needless to say represented in the aggregate something correct, which smelt of the “classicism” of the “conservatory.” It was necessary at all costs to exterminate this “retrograde spirit.”12

  About Boris Godunov Kutuzov was of two minds. That it contained “many good musical points,” as he condescendingly put it, he did not deny. But on the whole he found it regrettable that Musorgsky chose to accept the enthusiastic popular verdict, rather than the generally negative opinion of the “competent judges” (that is, the newspaper critics). “Such a hastily accepted view on Musorgsky’s part was a great and regrettable mistake,” he argued. “Not only did it for a long time hold back the development of his talent and impede his inward labor of artistic self-improvement, it alienated Musorgsky from his fellow composers, who, for all their ardent sympathy for the composer of Boris Godunov, could not credit this work with the perfection demanded by its mentors, and in many respects agreed candidly and honestly with the critics.”13

  One would hardly give this analysis a moment’s consideration if it were not for the fact that Musorgsky himself was probably, for a short while at least, influenced by the personality behind the opinions, whether or not the opinions themselves were, at the time, openly expressed. Kutuzov’s judgment on the kuchka is, after all, understandable. There is no particular need to accuse him, as his Soviet editors have done, of systematic lying.14 He was, simply, a minor poet of limited vision. His preference for Musorgsky’s romance style is that of a conventional mind, not a mendacious one. And if he sometimes remembers Musorgsky agreeing with him about the defects in Boris, we may recall that Musorgsky himself had bent over backwards to accommodate Nápravník’s cuts, and later, when the opera was revived in October 1876, even apparently consented without protest to the omission of the entire Kromy Forest scene. As Stasov, who did protest, pleaded: “Ah, don’t talk to me about ‘consent’! What does an author’s consent mean? When you have an author in a vise, in your power, he’ll probably consent to anything you like, he has no defense, no protest; and you’d consent willy-nilly if they could simply strike out your entire opera with all its performances. Not everyone has the courage of a Beethoven or a Schubert, and would rather withdraw his work than agree to its mutilation.”15 Yet it does also seem to have been an aspect of Musorgsky’s personality to agree too readily, in conversation, with other people’s opinions, even to express opinions himself that he supposed congenial to his interlocutor. So, while it seems unlikely that he “fully agreed,” as Kutuzov claimed, “that this last act was obviously superfluous to the course of the whole drama and had the character of something stuck on in haste,” it is less unlikely that he said as much to Kutuzov, simply out of a desire not to disoblige a fellow artist for whom he felt deep affection, whatever he may have thought of his views on music.16

  He was soon, at all events, turning to Kutuzov for poetry to set to music, and the music he wrote does undoubtedly mark out a new direction in his work, as compared with his most recent things since (and including) Boris—admittedly a rather unfocused bunch of pieces, some fragments of Khovanshchina (notably Marfa’s song in act 3, the vocal score of which had actually been published in the autumn) and a new middle section for the “Destruction of Sennacherib” chorus, which Rimsky-Korsakov had orchestrated with Musorgsky’s approval, and conducted in a famine-relief concert three weeks after the Boris premiere. The Kutuzov songs, begun in May 1874 and completed in August after a break for other work, formed a cycle of six with the somewhat forbidding title Bez Solntsa (Without Sun, or Sunless). Musically they are essentially unlike anything Musorgsky had written before. When he performed five of them at Rimsky-Korsakov’s in September, Borodin heard them as a by-product of Boris “or the fruit of a purely intellectual inventive process that makes a highly unsatisfactory impression.”17 But for once Borodin, who was at the same time busy admiring the first two acts of Angelo, missed the point. Sunless owes comparatively little to Boris, and hardly anything to brain work. Unusually for Musorgsky, it is the direct response, not to a visual impression, but to an imagined state of consciousness. Exactly as in Schubert’s Winterreise, the darkened mind conjures up a series of images to reflect its own bleakness of spirit. Unlike in Winterreise, however, the imagery remains for the most part intangible and, with a few exceptions, lacks the picturesque or narrative dimension of the earlier masterpiece. If the triple sun of Schubert’s “Die Nebensonnen” stands for his hero’s fading grip on life, Musorgsky’s absent sun is the ultimate blackness of accidia, that negativity which denies the purpose of everything, including death.

  What inspired him to write in this way? The Soviet musicologist Vera Vasina-Grossman thought that Sunless was a direct expression of his personal loneliness, and an indirect projection of the despair felt by thinking Russians in the 1870s after the collapse of the liberal hopes raised by the reforms of the early sixties.18 Gerald Abraham argued that Musorgsky was affected by “the hostile and uncomprehending criticisms of Boris, and by the boredom of the work in the Forestry department.”19 But great music is not composed in a state of depression; and in any case, after interrupting work on Sunless to compose Pictures from an Exhibition, a
score of surpassing vitality, Musorgsky was able to return to the song cycle and recapture its atmosphere of languid negation apparently without difficulty, just as Schubert could happily sandwich the joyous, beatific “Lied im Grünen” between the two books of Winterreise. One might suggest, instead, that the new friendship with Kutuzov prompted him to look at the young poet’s work, most of it lyrical in manner and modest in scale; that Kutuzov, who was unsympathetic to Musorgsky’s character-sketch style, encouraged him to set some of these lyrics as conventional romances; and that Musorgsky, no longer very interested in the romance as a genre, looked for a way of capturing the lyrical essence of Kutuzov’s poetry by adapting his speech-melody technique to simple, scanned verse. In this sense the first song, “Within Four Walls,” feels like an experiment. The short poem’s regular scheme of internally rhymed dactylic tetrameters is rigorously echoed by the music until the very last line, where the final two feet are briefly drawn out to form a rhythmic cadence. At the same time, the melody studiously reflects the contour and accent pattern of the spoken verse. But the point is not just a technical one. The relentless musico-poetic scheme is an image in sound of the “cramped little room” and the enclosing darkness of the poet’s “lonely night.” The image is achieved without the usual nocturnal graphics: no growling dissonances or scurryings in the musical undergrowth, nothing but a slow procession of soft, mysterious chords over a persistent D pedal (another discreet image of entrapment), with some unobtrusive crotchet movement here and there in an inner voice of the accompaniment—interior music in every sense.

  Having set this tone of dark quietism, far from counteracting it, Musorgsky persists with it. The second song, “You Didn’t Know Me in the Crowd,” is in the same D major and at virtually the same andante tempo. Its meter is more relaxed, though still regular, but Musorgsky now uses the scansion against itself, so to speak, speeding up the second and fourth lines, in which the poet seems to accuse his uncaring lover: “Your look expressed nothing” (dismissive triplets); “but I felt strange and fearful when I observed it” (triplets again); then prolonging the accent on the words “no ver’ mne”—“but believe me.” But the key to the song lies in the opening chord and its relation to the home tonic. The chord is an augmented sixth (German form), which is like a dominant seventh with a different resolution or exit. The previous song having ended in D major, the new one starts with what sounds like an oddly laid out dominant chord in E-flat, a semitone up. But read as a sixth chord, it resolves back to D major, with the pedal D acting not as the leading note of E-flat but as a D-major anchor. In this way Musorgsky undermines any sense of progress or upward motion, and throughout the song he equivocates superbly between the two implications, even combining them in a wonderfully vagrant series of descending chords to the words “in it [that moment] I endured the delight of all our past love,” before ending, with brutal tenderness, on the opening sixth chord, pianissimo, without its dissonant G-sharp (the actual augmented sixth in the original chord), but still with the pedal D at the bottom.

  These technicalities are hard to describe in bearable language. The crucial point is Musorgsky’s lordly disregard for normal harmonic procedure in the interests of emotional precision, a method he originally evolved in the context of musical portraiture. To suggest he was too untaught to understand the “mistakes” he was making is simply ridiculous. A clever child can learn such things in a week. It may, however, be true that having missed out on the formal study of theory, Musorgsky was less indoctrinated with the virtues of good practice, and was more prepared to trust his own ear and his own hands on the keyboard. This he did to marvellous effect in the much longer third song of Sunless, “At an End Is the Futile, Noisy Day.” The poet—still, it seems, in his lonely, darkened room—broods sleeplessly over long-lost hopes and joys, “as if once again inhaling the poison of passionate spring dreams”; and the memory drifts past in a sequence of slowly oscillating descending chords so haunting that they were subsequently copied both by Debussy (to suggest drifting clouds in “Nuages”) and by Stravinsky (to set a nocturnal forest scene in The Nightingale). Later the poet seems to reject these memories, “bored with their dead throng and the noise of their ancient chatter”; but for the composer the shadow of past love brings a momentary radiance and a passionate surrender to it “in silent tears.” Suddenly this is music that does briefly recall Boris Godunov, especially the Boris of the monologues, though it is not particularly close in detail.

  Musorgsky composed one more Sunless song before breaking off in early June to write Pictures from an Exhibition. This is the brief “Be Bored” (“Skuchay”—the hard-to-translate imperative of the Russian verb meaning “to be bored”). The eccentric chord sequence in the opening two bars—mainly simple triads (B minor, D minor, B minor, A major, E major, G minor, B minor, but with all their flats spelled as sharps as if they were passing dissonances in B minor)—makes a curiously listless, inconsequential, but hardly tragic effect. The cadences are nearly all major, which might imply that true boredom undercuts misery as much as happiness. But when he returned to the cycle in late August, he rounded it off with a pair of more substantial and in some ways more conventional songs. Both “Elegy” and “On the River” support the voice with piano figuration that at least looks on paper as if it might descend from the Schubert of the late Heine settings in Schwanengesang, though it takes only a few seconds of each song to undermine the comparison. “Elegy” even yields here and there to pictorialism, of a kind largely avoided by the preceding songs. We picture the night “slumbering in the fog” (rocking piano chords), the silent, twinkling star, the tocsin of “cheerless death.” But the most telling image is that of the night clouds that drift above the poet’s head like his own changeable, uneasy thoughts, in the form of a vagrant quaver melody in piano right-hand octaves (incidentally the only quick music in the cycle), winding its way “without goal or purpose” from memory to memory, idea to idea: the face of the beloved, the “noise of disorderly life,” the “insidious murmur of hatred and worldly trivia.” Here at last the piano has a chance to color in a musical picture.

  Piano figuration is just as crucial to “On the River,” whose deep, nearly motionless waters conceal every secret of the heart, every passion, every dark fear. Like a sluggish river, the accompaniment is turbid and muddy-bottomed, stuck fast on a persistent C-sharp pedal articulated by deep left-hand triplets that vary their form but never their anchorage. Above it the voice sings the most purely lyrical melody in the whole cycle, somehow finding in the key of C-sharp major all kinds of chromatic byways without at any point breaking the steady tetrameters of the poem, which give more space than those of “Within Four Walls” since they rhyme alternate whole lines rather than every half-line. At the end, the poet considers suicide, but in an oddly dispassionate, insouciant way, very different from Schubert’s journeyman rocking himself to sleep in the brook of Die schöne Müllerin. Like Eliot’s hollow men, he stands on the beach, too passive to cross to death’s other kingdom.

  Something of the same air of hopelessness infects one other Kutuzov song Musorgsky wrote in the early stages of work on Sunless. That March the war artist Vasily Vereshchagin had exhibited a series of paintings of Konstantin von Kaufman’s Turkestan campaign the previous year, including a number of images that General Kaufman, when he saw the exhibition, pronounced unpatriotic and insisted on their removal from the exhibition. One of them, entitled Forgotten (Zabïtïy), depicted a dead Russian soldier lying unburied in the Asian sands, his body pecked at by crows. Kutuzov’s eponymous poem, evidently prompted as much by the Kaufman incident as by the actual subject matter, overinterprets in the direction of pathos and adds a young widow at home in Russia, nursing her baby son and promising him that “Daddy will come home and I’ll bake a pie.”

  The poem may have been written at Musorgsky’s request, since one on the same subject by Nikolay Shcherbachev (a minor composer in the Balakirev circle) survives among Kutuzov’s papers, decorated
with ironic marginalia in Musorgsky’s hand. His Kutuzov setting was made soon after “Within Four Walls” (the start is actually on the back of the manuscript of that song); but that is no reason to suppose that it was meant as part of the cycle, which anyway may not yet have been in the composer’s mind. For all its melancholy E-flat-minor tone, “Forgotten” would not have suited Sunless as it turned out, being much more in Musorgsky’s objective-realist vein, a sinister dead march with augmented seconds in the melody hinting at the poor soldier’s Eastern resting place. Sunless, moreover, though a work of negation, is predominantly in major keys. Even sorrow, it seems to assert, is not worth the candle. As for “Forgotten,” a late Schubertian model once more suggests itself, the Heine song “Ihr Bild” in Schwanengesang, with its image of loss in a dark unison opening and hesitant dotted rhythms.

  Although things seen had figured prominently among Musorgsky’s sources in the past, “Forgotten” is his first work directly inspired by a painting. Within a few weeks, however, it was joined by another, altogether more ambitious, and a still more direct response, for piano solo without the mediation of words. The exhibition in Pictures from an Exhibition was a memorial show for the painter and architectural designer Viktor Hartmann, a close friend of Musorgsky’s, who had died suddenly at the age of thirty-nine in July 1873. Hartmann had first been introduced to the circle a few years before by Stasov, who was interested in Hartmann’s work, not so much for its architectural significance as for its character as design. Hartmann was not only or even primarily a functional architect. He was at his best drawing monumental fantasy buildings that might never be built or utilitarian objects transformed into richly elaborate or grotesque objets d’art. There are parallels between his work and that of William Burges and William Morris in England, or Christian Jank—the original designer of Neuschwanstein—in Germany. He combined a talent for showcase building projects with a fascination for peasant artifacts and idioms, which he would transform into contexts or onto a scale apparently quite alien to their original purpose. For instance, his design for the Russian Naval Pavilion at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 resembled nothing so much as a glorified peasant izba, richly decorated, framed by Russian naval standards and crowned by a fantastically ornate imperial eagle. His design for a ceremonial gate to the city of Kiev was topped off by a peasant woman’s hat (kokoshnik) and a cupola in the shape of a Slavonic helmet. He drew a clock in the form of the witch Baba-Yaga’s hut and a nutcracker in the form of a misshapen gnome. These references were a foretaste of what soon became a nationalist movement quite distinct from the socially conscious realism of the sixties to which, in part at least, the kuchka had subscribed. Hartmann’s work in a small way prefigured the neonationalism associated with art patrons such as Savva Mamontov (whose house at Abramtsevo he designed) and with the World of Art movement—a nationalism focused on design and the revival of rural arts and crafts, and only peripherally, if at all, concerned with social questions and the plight of the peasantry.