Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  The scenario that Stasov had handed over in 1869 was a detailed and reasonably coherent distillation from The Lay of Igor’s Host, a typically rambling bardic poem rich in brothers, cousins, ancestors, lamenting wives, abducted maidens, blood-stained soil and rivers, and assorted birds of the air and beasts of the forest. At the core of the scenario is the tale of Igor, son of Sviatoslav, prince of Novgorod-Seversk, who sallies forth from the city of Putivl against the Don tribes, is defeated and captured together with his son, Vladimir, but in due course escapes (without Vladimir, who has fallen passionately in love with the daughter of their captor, Khan Konchak), and returns in somewhat qualified triumph to his grieving wife, Yaroslavna, who, in his absence, has had to endure the abuse of her debauched but ambitious brother, Vladimir Galitsky, and his henchmen.

  From the composer’s point of view, the beauty of this plot was that it offered a number of strong individual portraits, especially of Yaroslavna and of Konchak—an intriguing mixture of civility, fraternal warmth, and sheer bloody barbarism—against a broad backcloth of Russian history in both its epic and exotic modes. Its difficulty lay in a certain narrative vagueness and an almost total absence of dramatic stage action. In the lay, Igor’s defeat and escape are culminating events in a long history of triumph and disaster amid the feuding of Russian princes and the incessant to-and-fro of battle, carnage, and rapine. But in Stasov, Igor has already departed on campaign, and the first time we meet him he is already a prisoner reduced to hanging his head and declining Konchak’s offer of freedom on the unacceptable condition that he promise not to attack the Polovtsï any more. Even in escape, Igor is essentially a beaten character, and one who, unlike Musorgsky’s Boris, lacks the psychological prehistory that might have given his defeat an authentically tragic meaning. The “triumph” of his return to Putivl is empty, not least because he has left his son in the arms of his enemy’s daughter. To get round this problem, Stasov contrived an epilogue in which Vladimir and Konchakovna are married with spectacular operatic ceremony in Putivl. Borodin eventually discarded this idea, but without it the ending seems provisional and dramatically perfunctory. Vladimir is forgotten, Galitsky unpunished, the pagan Polovtsï victorious. Borodin might in due course have found a way of solving these problems. But his lifestyle and working method made that unlikely, and his sudden death at a fancy-dress ball in 1887 finally ruled it out.

  Unlike Musorgsky composing Boris Godunov, Borodin seems never to have imagined Prince Igor as a whole. He made changes to the scenario as he went along. He devised a prologue in Putivl, in which Igor’s departure on campaign is interrupted by an eclipse of the sun, throwing the city into a darkness that is at once interpreted as a divine omen, though whether good or evil no one can tell (in Stasov these events are merely related to Yaroslavna by a party of merchants bringing news of Igor’s defeat). He introduced a comic element, along the lines of Musorgsky’s vagrant monks, in the form of the gudok-players, Skula and Yeroshka, who support Galitsky but adroitly change sides on Igor’s return.8 But he never wrote or commissioned a libretto; he merely compiled text, number by number, as he needed it. And since his way of composing the music was to seize on individual characters or situations that happened to excite his interest at this or that moment, regardless of narrative sequence, it is hardly surprising that his legacy was a mess of incomplete and disconnected scenes, uncertain intentions, and amorphous drama. The remarkable fact is that, despite these apparently insuperable obstacles, what he did write includes some of the most brilliantly conceived, most superbly executed, most sheerly beautiful and thrilling music in any nineteenth-century opera, Russian or otherwise.

  It had been like this almost from the outset. In opting to compose “Yaroslavna’s Dream” in 1869 he had begun at the beginning of Stasov’s scenario: Igor’s wife brooding on her anxiety at his absence, on the menacing behavior of her brother, and on a frightening dream she has just had in which Igor is beside her, beckons her to follow him, but then fades away out of sight. But after this he had turned to the start of Stasov’s second act in the Polovtsian camp and invented a song for Konchakovna, a call to her Russian lover, similar in idea but not style to the Pretender’s invocation to Marina at the start of Musorgsky’s second Polish scene. Clearly he was drawn by the emotional concentration of these two utterly different situations and personalities. Yaroslavna’s song in its revised form of 1874–5 (based on material from Yaromir’s scene with the High Priest in Mlada, itself possibly, though not certainly, derived from the now inaccessible Yaroslavna original) is a free-flowing, lyrical arioso, syllabic in setting, but of a character very different from the parlando style of The Stone Guest or Boris Godunov.9 The vocal line is effortless, tender, devoid of rhetoric, but carefully constructed around two or three simple melodic figures which seem to arise out of the nature of the voice at least as much as from the contours of the language. The harmony is flexible, mobile, but conventional; it converses with the voice, so to speak, but never imposes on it, never gesticulates.

  Yaroslavna’s femininity is distinct but unselfconscious. Konchakovna, by contrast, is entirely the Oriental seductress of the Western imagination. Her line is sensuous, chromatic, ornate, twisting and turning like the body of a snake dancer to the accompaniment of insinuating woodwind solos—oboe, then clarinet, then flutes (the orchestration here is by Borodin himself). This is the purest form yet of Stasovian Orientalism—purer, certainly, than anything in Ruslan (apart from a few woodwind swirls in the lezghinka), purer even than Antar or (so far as it yet existed) Tamara. Borodin’s instant picture had been the drastic contrast between Western and Eastern sensibilities, and when he took the work up afresh in 1874 he pursued this idea. He wrote a chorus for the Polovtsian girls in Konchakovna’s retinue, sinuous in melody like her cavatina, and rich in those augmented seconds which, in Western music, serve as an insignia of the mysterious East. He also wrote them a dance, wild and untamed, like some kind of Scythian tarantella, and then followed this up by sketching a sequence of choral dances for the girls and the men, music of such startling originality and vitality that it was destined to become perhaps the single most famous icon of Russian musical barbarism before Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Finally, there is a brisk march for the victorious returning Polovtsian army, plainly modelled on Chernomor’s march in Ruslan and Lyudmila.

  This is all act 2 music in Stasov’s scheme, but the precise order of composition is hard to establish, not least because Borodin still appears to be thinking in terms of set images, tableaux vivants, rather than dramatic narrative. He imagines Khan Konchak himself upbraiding Igor, in his rough, generous way, for declining to accept his captivity as a form of hospitality; Konchak’s aria (largely based on the duet of Voyslava and Yaromir in Mlada) is a masterly portrait of offended masculine clubbability. But the composer also, a few months later, imagines Igor brooding on his captivity in a superb introspective monologue, also based on Mlada, especially the scene of the visitation of spirits (what Borodin called his teney, his “shadows” or “phantoms”), with its mysterious chromatics and bold vocal declamation. Unfortunately, Borodin allowed himself to be swayed by Stasov and company, who told him, as he reported to his wife, that the shadows “took on a completely different character in the new version, to the music’s detriment.”10 So he dutifully discarded this whole monologue, and in due course replaced it with the more brilliant, extrovert aria that found its way into the eventual published score.

  Meanwhile, there is a beautiful lament for Yaroslavna, intended for the start of the final act before Igor’s unexpected reappearance in Putivl, and introducing for the first time the elegant tune that will later form the second subject of the overture and a vital component of Igor’s aria in act 2, earlier in the work but several years ahead in the sequence of composition. Many of these items are listed by Borodin, in a letter of April 1875 to Lyubov Karmalina, as work composed or at least drafted while officially off sick. “But I’m at a loss as to when I’ll manage to complete i
t all. The summer’s my only hope. But in the summer I have to finish orchestrating the second symphony, which I promised to deliver ages ago and, to my shame, haven’t done so yet.” He is also supposed to be making a piano reduction of the symphony for the publisher, Vasily Bessel. And then there’s the string quartet …11

  Under all these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Prince Igor was, and was to remain, an episodic work, vivid in its portraiture of emotional moments and its colorful, spectacular tableaux, but largely devoid of narrative coherence or psychological development. Igor is the sorrowful chieftain, Konchak the violent, openhearted barbarian, Yaroslavna the abandoned queen in her tower, Galitsky the incorrigible scoundrel, and so forth. Skula and Yeroshka change, admittedly; but changeability is their set character. Even within individual acts, it is possible to arrange the musical numbers in a variety of orders without noticeably damaging their continuity. Borodin did not think through or forward. He responded to flashes of inspiration; and certainly inspiration hardly ever failed him. The consistent quality of the music is astonishing. How was it possible for a man clever and gifted enough to do original research in a field as complex as organic chemistry, and sufficiently focused to run a major scientific faculty in one of Europe’s main capital cities, also to compose music on an ambitious scale that regularly meets the highest standards of invention and often, indeed, of method? For we should not pretend that Borodin’s amateurism extended to his technique. Within the demands of what he wrote, he wrote well, with style and a certain polish, a fine ear, and unfailing good taste. He seems to have understood his own limitations; whether from choice or circumstance, he avoided complexities in the way he conceived his music. His symphonies are direct, incisive, strongly gestural works, rather than profound or in any sense “difficult.” His string quartets, as we shall see, are lyrical, beautiful but in the best sense weightless, even when they venture, as the first does, into fugal territory. None of this is work that embraces the late-classical German concept of instrumental music as an intellectual or profoundly spiritual exercise; nor does his writing for voice explore the borderlands of human experience, as Musorgsky’s does. Radical elements there are. The violent ostinato writing of the Polovtsian Dances may hark back to the Glinka of Kamarinskaya or the Oriental dances in Ruslan, but it goes far beyond him in sheer Dionysian power. The Orientalisms in Prince Igor may be essentially decorative, but for as long as they last they involve the whole music, not just one component of it. In the end, though, what Borodin composed of his opera shows that he was driven, not by any theory of what kind of music a Russian composer ought to be writing in the year of grace 1874, but by the simple desire to create artistic beauty. In the end this is, after all, a classical impulse, and at bottom somewhat remote from the kuchkist enthusiasm for the real, the eccentric, the ugly, and the true.

  Musorgsky, meanwhile, had been turning his attention once again to Khovanshchina and was at last beginning to think in terms of a coherent scenario, though, like Borodin, he seems not to have thought of writing anything of the kind down on paper. In true kuchka fashion he had told Polixena Stasova back in the summer of 1873 that “the opening moments of the action are ready, but not written down,” while filling his letters—to her and Vladimir Stasov—with reflections on the immolation scene in the final act, and actually composing music for Marfa and Susanna in act 3. Now, however, in 1874, he starts to think through the first act as a whole, and by the summer of 1875 he is able to announce to Stasov—far away in Paris at a geographical congress—that “the first act of our Khovanshchina is finished.”12 If so, it was no mean achievement. Audiences have always had difficulties with the narrative thread of this opera; but the difficulties were there from the start and were clearly felt by the composer.

  The key figure in the drama is Peter the Great; but he, as we saw, could not be represented on the stage, nor (for the same reason) could the other controlling character, Peter’s half sister, Sofia, who acted as regent for seven years (1682–9) of the dual sovereignty of Peter (who was ten in 1682) and his older, but feeble-minded, half brother, Ivan. It was as if Handel had had to compose Giulio Cesare without Julius Caesar, or Mozart Don Giovanni without the Don. In spite of the law, there had been an intention to include the two rulers; but in the end practical good sense prevailed.

  The main dramatis personae in Musorgsky’s opera relate to one another by way of the throne or its agents, and their behavior is hard to understand in its absence. To recapitulate: at the start of the first act we meet various members of the imperial guard, the so-called streltsy, and later we meet their commander, the brutish, reactionary but popular Prince Ivan Khovansky. The streltsy were technically in the service of the crown, but with two tsars and a regent they had assumed what might euphemistically be termed a roving commission. They had supported the diarchy of Ivan and Peter and had set Sophia up as regent. But there was a subtext. The Orthodox hierarchy had wanted the intelligent Peter as sole ruler, and Khovansky’s support of Ivan went with a rooted opposition to the church reforms of Patriarch Nikon. Khovansky was hardly an Old Believer of the self-immolating variety, but rather, perhaps, a Russian seventeenth-century equivalent of the twentieth-century defenders of the Latin mass, who resented having to abandon the religious practices of a lifetime. At the end of Musorgsky’s first act, he meekly accepts the elder Dosifey’s authority, like a schoolboy obeying his headmaster, but only for as long as he is in his sight.

  Before Khovansky, we meet the boyar Shaklovity, who commissions the official Scribe to write out a proclamation denouncing the Khovanskys (Ivan and his son, Andrey) as agitators and traitors. Shaklovity is a shadowy figure in Musorgsky’s drama. He seems to act (like his historical self) on behalf of the regent, who in fact had Khovansky executed in 1682 on the pretext that he sought the crown and was using the streltsy in support of that aim. But Shaklovity also appears, later in the opera, as the voice of suffering Russia, like the yurodivy in Boris Godunov, which would, if anything, argue support for Peter, who was widely regarded as the best hope for political stability.

  In all this one detects the influence of the historian (Stasov) more than the dramatist (Musorgsky). The amount of open-ended factual detail, though vivid and fascinating in itself, constantly threatens to choke the narrative. Before the end of the first act we have also encountered Andrey Khovansky, a young Lutheran girl called Emma, and the ambiguous invented figure of Marfa, an Old Believer whose piety is colored from start to finish by a blighted passion for Andrey. The fact that Musorgsky made Marfa a contralto has sometimes led to her representation as a dowdy middle-aged woman. But Stasov had thought of her as “a Potiphar’s wife,” youthful and passionate, and Musorgsky had imagined her as a boyarina—Princess Sitskaya, “who has run away from ‘the top,’ that is from the stuffy incense and the feather-beds of the terem,” a character reminiscent of the boyarina Morozova in Vasily Surikov’s famous painting.13 In another letter to Stasov he describes her as “a complete, strong, and loving woman [we perhaps recall Musorgsky’s own preference for women of a certain age] … an extremely sensual but at the same time passionate alto.”14 Stasov had grumbled about Marfa and Dosifey (Prince Mïshetzky) “being downgraded aristocrats.”

  What is this in the end but an opera of princes, while you were always specifically planning an opera of the people.15 Who finally out of all your characters will not be a prince or an aristocrat, who will be directly from the people? No, no, I strongly protest with all my might and … I implore you that they should both of them abhor every kind of aristocracy and remember it with due hostility. Let them both be genuine people from the soil, from the izba, from the village and the field, from the plow and the distaff, from hard, oppressive labor and with callused hands. That’s what will be more interesting and better!16

  Musorgsky agreed, rather lamely. But he made no significant change, and while Marfa and Dosifey ended up untitled, they are also, one feels, uncallused.

  Despite the eventful and som
ewhat diffuse nature of the first act, work on the music was at last, in the early part of 1875, going well. In fact it was probably for this reason that by April Musorgsky was announcing to Karmalina that he had given up the idea of a Gogol opera, though he told her (and may actually have believed) that it was because of “the impossibility of a Great Russian posing as a Little Russian [that is, a Ukrainian], and consequently the impossibility of mastering of the Little Russian recitative.”17 Khovanshchina was turning out in many respects like a continuation of the Kromy scene in Boris. It had the same proto-cinematic character, the same swift sequencing, the same skillful manipulation of small and large blocks of people, the same sharpness of portraiture, the same rough violence. As in Boris, the chorus sometimes splits up into groups who converse with each other and discuss courses of action; at other times they come together and sing as a collective. Musorgsky’s handling of this kind of discourse is as brilliant as ever. The whole scene in which the newly arrived settlers from Muscovy bully the Scribe into reading the pillar inscription, with its string of denunciations, then systematically dismantle his booth, is a masterly example of the kind of choral montage that Musorgsky had first invented for the Novodevichy and St. Basil’s scenes in the original Boris. At the climax of this scene, the chorus (all male at this point) come together in what amounts to a chorale, as in a Bach Passion, reflecting on the sufferings of Mother Russia from internal strife, just as the distant trumpets of the streltsy announce the approach of Khovansky, one of the chief engineers of that strife.

  Splendid as such moments are, both as music and as dramatic spectacle, they cannot altogether make up for the lack of a clear narrative thread in the libretto of this act as a whole. Shaklovity’s scene with the Scribe is an exciting vignette, but since the subject of their conversation (the proclamation against the Khovanskys) leads nowhere without the character of the tsar or the regent, it remains dramatically unexplained. Khovansky’s entrance is likewise a thrilling set piece; but one needs expert knowledge of Russian history to grasp the basis of his popular support, and when his son bursts on to the stage, not as a participant in the “Khovansky trouble”—the Khovanshchina of the title—but in crude pursuit of the young Lutheran girl, the audience may well begin to wonder where the focus of the drama is meant to lie. Finally the appearance of Marfa adds one further layer of narrative and psychological complexity to an already sufficiently intricate weave. Stepping between Andrey and Emma, she upbraids him for his infidelity to her, yet talks in mystic language about her aching heart “divining the pronouncement of fate” and seeing “in the heavens a marvellous dwelling radiant with light.” With Marfa we understand that physical passion has transmogrified into a metaphysical impulse; but again the context is ambiguous, since Andrey is presented as a young man of uncontrolled sexual appetite prepared to have his way, if necessary, through extreme violence. This conflict of motivation will remain a problem to the very end of the opera. Here it is resolved temporarily by the calming influence of Dosifey, the third solo bass in the act (after Shaklovity and Khovansky). But Dosifey is not only a moderating force, as we shall discover in the second act.