The composer may or may not also have noticed the parallel between the opening of his tune and one of the folk songs in the Balakirev collection, “U vorot, vorot, batyushkinïkh,” with the same trepak rhythm (the tune is famous for its later appearance in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture). Then, as the snow gradually covers up the sleeping peasant, Death lulls him with a beautiful countermelody, alternating with snatches of trepak, the whole passage anchored by a pedal D beneath wistful, sliding chromatic harmonies. Finally the piano intones a solemn amen over the frozen corpse.
“Trepak” was in fact the first of these songs to be written, in February 1875. At that time the cycle seems to have been without a clear plan, but when he had completed “Serenade” in May he grouped the three songs in their eventual order, titled them, added dedications, but then announced to Kutuzov that “the first installment of the second album is ready,” which was certainly untrue but at least indicated a definite intention to add further songs. At the end of the year he was contemplating the theme of the returning exile, but probably wrote no music, while the following year he played fragments of “The Monk” to Stasov, who pronounced it “very good” in a letter to Rimsky-Korsakov and mentioned that Musorgsky was also starting a fifth song on the subject of the legendary bogatyr Anika the Warrior, who recklessly challenged Death to a duel but was defeated and killed. Alas, not a note of either song was ever written down.
Not until 1877 did he fully compose a fourth song, “The Commander,” to complete the cycle as we know it. The battle rages throughout the day, but as the sun goes down the armies retreat, leaving the Commander in sole possession of the battlefield with his army of the dead. As with the other songs, the piece starts with scene setting: the thunder of battle (“Vivo—alla guerra”), the setting sun, the retreat. Death appears on his warhorse and surveys the terrible scene by the light of the moon, and gradually the march that constitutes the “dance” in this particular song takes shape, as the Commander takes stock of his triumph. Like “Serenade,” the piece is in two distinct parts, somewhat in the manner of a recitative and aria, if less clear-cut in the division. And it follows the same tonal path, dropping down by a semitone for its second section (E minor down to E-flat minor in “Serenade,” E-flat minor down to D minor in “The Commander”). Since D minor is also the key of “Trepak,” and the first song, “Lullaby,” had moved from F-sharp (= G flat) minor to A minor, the minor dominant of D minor, the whole cycle has a kind of tonal coherence, though Musorgsky’s way with harmony generally is so unorthodox that the listener probably responds to the connections as a matter more of architecture than of process. More noticeable, perhaps, is a certain family resemblance in the thematic and metric character of the four songs. This may partly be an accident of style. But essentially it must be deliberate. In the dance sections especially, Musorgsky invents striking figures based on melodic commonplaces, often involving simple rising or falling scales clinched by fifths or fourths in the opposite direction: compare the fully formed tune of “Serenade” at the words “Slukh tvoy plenilsya moey serenadoy” (“Your ear is captivated by my serenade”) with the main “Trepak” melody or the march theme in “The Commander” (at “Konchena bitva!”—“The battle is over!”—based on a Polish hymn, “Z dymem pozarów”), and then notice how Musorgsky has regularized their meter, dance-fashion, even though the poetic rhythm and meter are different in each case.
This genius for the defining melodic and rhythmic figure once again recalls Schubert; and it’s true that the Songs and Dances of Death are the closest thing in Musorgsky—perhaps in any Russian music—to that fusion of folk simplicity with richness of thought and imagery that is the mark of the German lied in the hands of its greatest exponents. What they have that lieder for the most part lack is an almost tangible element of theatre. In Schubert or Schumann the image, with occasional exceptions (“Erlkönig” is one), is a vehicle, sometimes a metaphor, for emotional reflection. In Musorgsky we are in the presence of something like a tableau vivant. The mother pleading with Death for her son’s life is just that: a pleading mother faced with Death in person. She is not a metaphor, and we are not invited to reflect on her feelings, any more than a child listening to a fairy tale is aware of anything except the story and the characters in it, however much grown-ups may theorize after-the-fact about its hidden psychological or atavistic meaning. It is no doubt significant that the great nineteenth-century lied composers (with the solitary late exception of Strauss) either did not write for the theatre or did so unsuccessfully. Musorgsky, by contrast, was a theatrical genius who knew how to transfer that talent to the miniature scale of the song, a born storyteller with a flair for character and situation. Perhaps his distractability was what constantly drew him back to the compact, self-contained form of the song. Meanwhile, his operatic work, though driven by the same flair, continued diffuse and unplanned, sprouting new elements, discarding old, but seldom, if ever, glimpsed as a whole, and doomed, alas, to incompletion.
Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, had been finding new ways of avoiding original composition altogether. Toward the end of 1874 he had added the directorship of the Free Music School to his conservatory and navy-band posts; and a year or so later he complemented his obsessive work on fugal counterpoint with a sudden enthusiasm for the collecting and arranging of folk songs.
Exactly why, at that specific moment, he should have felt drawn to a subject so seemingly remote from his academic and technical studies is a little hard to divine. Perhaps he simply felt the need for fresh air. In his autobiography the question pops up in the same paragraph as his somewhat weary description of the board meetings of the FMS, an activity he loathed and for which he admits he had no talent. At first, he implies, the idea of making a collection of his own came from nowhere in particular. Then Tyorty Filippov, a music-loving civil-servant friend of Balakirev’s with a particular knowledge of Russian folk songs and an ability to sing them from memory, suggested that Rimsky-Korsakov write the tunes down at his dictation, provide piano accompaniments, and publish the result. Eventually the composer took down forty songs in this way. But he was disappointed to find that some of the songs had been corrupted by what he calls “military and factory elements,” and more especially that there were no songs of the kind he was specially interested in: that is, “ritual and game songs,” being “the most ancient to have come down to us from pagan times and to have been preserved in essence in the most inviolate form.” Accordingly, he made up his mind to make a collection of his own, partly from his own memory of songs that he had heard as a child from the mouths of his mother and uncle, partly from songs remembered by close friends such as Musorgsky, Yekaterina Borodina, and others “in whose musical ear and memory I had confidence,” and partly from the published but long-out-of-print collections of Lvov/Prach and Stakhovich. He worked on this collection with typical application during 1875 and 1876, and the result was published in 1877 by Bessel under the title Collection of 100 Russian National Songs (Sbornik 100 russkikh narodnikh pesen).17
Like Balakirev ten years earlier, Rimsky-Korsakov took considerable pains to write down the songs in authentic versions and to compose accompaniments that fitted their native character. By a curious irony, it didn’t occur to him to think polyphonically, though it turned out not long afterward, in the work of Yuliy Melgunov, that the peasant way of enriching folk tunes was, precisely, to accompany them with variants of themselves—the heterophony, or podgoloski, mentioned previously.18 But the real clue to the relevance of this work to his academic studies lies elsewhere. Unlike his predecessors, he approached his collecting in a taxonomic spirit—in the spirit, that is, of a scientific researcher wanting to classify and catalog his findings. Specifically, he was interested in the purpose of each song. There were bïlini, dance songs, game and ceremonial songs relating to the different seasons of the pagan or folk-Christian year. There were songs for Shrovetide, Whitsun, Trinity, Ascension, wedding songs, “glory” songs (velichal’nïya), and m
any others. In a way his attitude to this material was not so very different from his attitude to the instruments in the bands he was inspecting, or the procedures in the fugues he was writing. He wanted thorough, organized knowledge. He wanted to know not only the character of the tunes he was assembling, but their history and cultural significance. Soon he would find a way to use this knowledge in a creative, musicianly way. But for the time being he was content, it seems, with the study for its own sake.
Needless to say, all these varied activities effectively blocked out serious composition altogether. Apart from a few short piano pieces and a number of choruses rather obviously tied in with the counterpoint exercises, he wrote nothing during this time, and none of what he did write displays the slightest spark of individuality. Instead, he occupied himself—in what must have been his few free moments—with revising and editing existing work. He took down the manuscript of Antar, which was still unpublished, reorchestrated it, in his own phrase “harmonically purified” it, and conducted the new version at an RMS concert in January 1876.19 Not long afterward he got involved in editing the full scores of Glinka’s two operas for publication, a process that involved a certain amount of instrumentation of stage music for which Glinka had given only general indications, and also the correction of a large number of mistakes in the manuscript. And this arduous labor seems to have inspired in him the desire to revisit his own solitary opera, The Maid of Pskov, substantially rewrite it, and compose a new prologue and additional music later on.
The meticulousness of all this editorial work is simply astonishing, not least because it involved so much more than the regularization of an existing text. Starting with his own music, Rimsky-Korsakov, the young composition professor, clearly saw it as his task to recompose in the light of his newfound theoretical knowledge, to smooth out the humps and hollows of his own untutored youth, to rethink the music as he might have thought it after years of studying harmony, counterpoint, and fugue. That was no doubt his prerogative with his own work. It was when he turned his attention to the work of others that he began to invade a territory where he was not, as the Russians say, u sebya: not in his own home.
CHAPTER 25
A Chaos of Operas
The first performance of Cui’s Angelo at the Maryinsky on 1 February 1876 was a moment of truth for the kuchka comparable to that of William Ratcliff seven years earlier. In their different ways they had reacted positively, even warmly, to the various scenes the composer had presented at circle gatherings. Stasov had a qualified admiration for the work, though he had come to dislike its composer.1 But faced with the work’s four-act totality, it was more difficult to see it as a significant contribution to their collective agenda, however vaguely that might be defined. “How intolerable are the old-believer artists,” Musorgsky grumbled to Stasov a few days after the premiere, “stagnating in their closet labor and their four-walled dreams. O Angelo!” And a week or so later there was a confrontation at one of Shestakova’s evenings, the exact cause of which is uncertain but may have been some remark of Musorgsky’s to the same effect. Afterward Lyudmila herself must have written him a sympathetic letter, siding with him over the issue of truth and falsehood in art. He replied bitterly:
You are right, golubushka! Among people, there must remain genuine people, when “playing false” weighs you down and makes you ill. Everything (almost) “plays false” in our enlightened age in which whatever you like progresses except humanity. Not behind one’s back, but right before one’s eyes has been perpetrated an impertinent treason à bout portant [point blank] of the best, vital, omnipotent conceptions of art in that very home where, once upon a time, boiled new life, where new powers of thought were united, where new tasks of art were discussed and evaluated. But let’s not bother about C. Cui and N. Rimsky-Korsakov: “the dead do not feel shame.”2
Rimsky-Korsakov’s “death,” needless to say, was his continuing obsession with technical study and his (consequent?) failure to produce work of creative value or interest since (as Musorgsky probably felt) The Maid of Pskov or since—as he may have felt but will hardly have said—getting married. Musorgsky had been struggling to reconcile himself to Kutuzov’s marriage only a few weeks before, and with his candid views on the incompatibility of wives and art he may well have been tempted to equate the study of fugue with the compilation of shopping lists and all those other horrors of domesticity that he himself had managed so effectively to dodge. At this very moment, Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov was bedridden after an agonizing labor with her second child, Sofia Nikolayevna. It was not her fault, of course, but it was just the kind of distraction that marriage tended to throw up; and when recently wedded men showed signs of organizing their lives, it was often a case of cherchez la femme.
Borodin was a different matter. You could accuse his wife of many things, but not of trying to impose order on his existence. In any case, he was inclined to be sympathetic to Musorgsky’s point of view; at least he refused to take sides against it. “Borodin mustn’t betray us,” Musorgsky insisted; “it’s too late and there’s no reason. Oh, if only Borodin could get angry.”3 But the great chemist in his laboratory was the least factious and doctrinaire of men. Thank God we all have our individuality, he would say, and can work in our own way without falling out as human beings. Perhaps it was easier for him. He had his scientific work, and for him music was a private matter, “a relaxation, a diversion, a caprice that takes me out of my actual work,” while “for others it’s a goal of life.”4 Since his prime occupation was the blending and separation of chemical elements and the study of their effects on one another, he liked the idea that his musical compositions had become a kind of nexus of everything that the kuchka stood for. “It’s curious,” he remarked to Karmalina,
that in my Igor all the members of our circle meet: both the ultrainnovator-realist Modest Petrovich [Musorgsky] and the innovator in the field of lyrical-dramatic music César Antonovich [Cui] and the strict in outward forms and musical traditions Nikolay Andreyevich [Rimsky-Korsakov] and the violent champion of the new and strong in everything Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov. For the time being they’re all pleased with Igor, though where other things are concerned they strongly disagree.
He himself had never really got on with what he called the “pure recitative style.”
I lean toward song and cantilena rather than recitative, though in the opinion of knowledgeable people I don’t handle this badly. I also tend toward more finished, rounded, more extensive forms. My own way of dealing with operatic material is different. In my opinion, in opera, as in design, trivial forms, details, small change, have no place. Everything must be written in bold strokes, clear, vivid, and as far as possible practical for performance, both for the voice and for the orchestra. The voice must be in the foreground, the orchestra in the background. Insofar as I achieve my aim—this I can’t judge—but by intention my opera will be closer to Ruslan than to The Stone Guest, more than this I can’t guarantee.5
In fact he could guarantee next to nothing where composing was involved. It wasn’t as if he resented the demands of his scientific work; on the contrary, he loved it all—the research, the teaching, the students, even the desk work—and he was even a little scared of his musical talent for its ability to distract him from what he saw as his main task in life. As a composer, he had always wanted to keep a low profile. But alas for any intention he might have had to keep Prince Igor out of the public gaze, he had acquiesced to a performance of what he called the “Chorus of Glorification” (“Khor slavleniya”), which opens the work in the published score but which he had originally planned as its epilogue, at an FMS concert conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov in March 1876. And now the world knew that he was writing an opera, and would naturally start expecting its completion and a fully staged performance. He suddenly felt like “a young girl who has lost her innocence and reputation, and has thereby gained for herself a notorious kind of freedom.” The implication that completing the opera despite the
demands of his regular calling might be a form of prostitution was perhaps more than he intended by the image. But the freedom was clearly a temptation as well as a threat; and like many an unwanted temptation, it could rapidly become a compulsion.
As usual, he had composed the chorus while ill in bed (with influenza) during the Christmas holidays. But there is nothing in the least sickly about its inspiration. Stasov’s original idea for the epilogue was, as we saw, to tie the blatantly dangling threads of the narrative by having Vladimir Igorevich marry Konchak’s daughter in a spectacular ceremony in Putivl, which he probably envisaged as a grand tableau along the lines of the final scene of A Life for the Tsar. Borodin’s chorus, with its stark parallel chords and bold block rhythms, is plainly meant to invoke a rougher, more primitive, if not more warlike, time than the Time of Troubles. We are in the year 1185, the era of the bogatyrs in their chain mail and spiked helmets (as in the paintings of Viktor Vasnetsov). The melodies, of both the main section and the middle section, are the most basic type of folk tune, somewhat in the manner of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” “Ey, ukhnem!,” which Balakirev had picked up in Nizhny-Novgorod a dozen years before. Dianin suggests a parallel with the protyazhnaya “You Hills, My Sparrow Hills” (“Uzh’ vï gorï moy gorï Vorob’evskiya”) in the recently published collection of Vasily Prokunin (1872). But there are also significant connections with the chorus of idolaters in Mlada, where the context is pagan rather than proto-Christian. And over the whole piece hangs the shadow of the Second Symphony, which was on Borodin’s desk as he composed Mlada and, for that matter, was still on his desk when he transferred so much of Mlada to Prince Igor. So even this fairly short, straightforward chorus is a microcosm of the confused, confusing working methods of this great composer who could not find time to compose. One can only assume that his work as a professor of chemistry was better regulated.
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 46