During the first reading of the 2nd act of Sorochintsï I became convinced of a radical lack of understanding of Little-Russian humor on the part of the musicuses of the crumbling “heap”: such a frost emanated from their looks and demands, that “the heart went cold,” as Archpriest Avvakum says. Nevertheless I have come to a halt, taken thought, and tested myself more than once. Having rested from this hard work on myself, I shall resume work on Sorochintsï. I can’t have been completely wrong in my aspirations, I simply can’t …18
Stasov’s remarks about Khovanshchina had stopped him in his tracks; now his colleagues’ opinion of Sorochintsï Fair had the same effect. For a year he wrote almost nothing for his Gogol opera. And while there were other causes of the loss of impulse (chief among them Osip Petrov’s death in March 1878, which upset him terribly and deprived him of a vital father figure), the true reason was surely the too-freely expressed reservations of the circle. The conductor Mikhail Berman was present on one occasion when Musorgsky played excerpts from Khovanshchina. “It was pitiful to observe,” he recalled, “the way those present (especially Cui) would incessantly pester him with demands for all kinds of cuts, changes, abbreviations, and so on … To worry and poke at a newborn piece like that, and not just face to face but in public, is not only the height of tactlessness, but an out-and-out act of cruelty. But the poor, modest composer keeps still, assents, makes the cuts.”19 No doubt they treated Sorochintsï Fair in much the same way.
If, however, one can agree that the Ukrainian opera was in some respects a wrong turning for Musorgsky just at that stage of his work, there is other evidence of uncertain drift in his music in 1877. Early in the year, before compiling the Gogol scenario, he had written a series of songs, mainly to texts by Alexey Tolstoy, the author of The Death of Ivan the Terrible and its still unperformed sequels, and the co-creator of Koz’ma Prutkov, the fictional civil servant and poet whose career as a government pen pusher must have struck a chord with Musorgsky, even though, sadly, he never set any of Prutkov’s poems. The poems he did set are a moderately bland collection of lyrics, the most piquant of which is “Is It Right for a Young Man to Spin Flax?” (“Oy, chest’ li to molodtsu lyon pryasti?”), which includes, among its catalogue of activities unworthy of a real man, the all-too-pertinent image of “the minstrel-singer awaiting his orders and idling his life away.” But Musorgsky ignored the polemical slant of these questions and instead treated the poem as a series of images, including rolled chords and arpeggios for the minstrel and his gusli, and soft tremolos for the vision of the stream and the nightingale and the shady garden where, in the poet’s opinion, the young man should be feeding his romantic soul.
In general, though, these songs are not notable for their musical imagery. Musorgsky seems to have been at pains to “recite” Tolstoy’s verse in an even, measured way, without the kind of volatile response to verbal incident or narrative that had made The Nursery or, in their different way, the Songs and Dances of Death so vivid. “Not with divine thunder did grief strike” (“Ne bozheem gromom gore udarilo”) runs one first line, and Musorgsky composes, so to speak, the negative: no thunder and a very subdued grief. In another song (“Rassevayetsya, rasstupayetsya grust’ poddumami”), “the melancholy in my thoughts disperses and parts, breaking into my dark soul like the sun through clouds,” but the stately piano chords notice neither spiritual nor meteorological change. The tone is literally that of Sunless, but without the intensity of experience. There is one other Kutuzov setting of this year (apart from “The Commander,” composed in June, after the scenario): this is “The Vision” (“Videniye”). Here the personification of night as a young woman in black who seems to be enticing the poet, summoning him “to love and delight,” does have a certain intensity of atmosphere, which, however, Musorgsky fails to capture with his slow opening of vagrant piano harmonies or the curious final page, where the poet walks on ahead of the “magical creature,” his voice doubled by heavy left-hand tremolo octaves. After all, we have just learned about the girl’s “light and transparent figure,” and the “inviting murmur of her invisible lips.” It may seem pedantry to criticize a song on such anecdotal grounds, as if one were Cui or Balakirev. But Musorgsky was usually so punctilious in this way; it was his specialty. With him, more than with others, one notices the disjuncture.
In any case his failures mark out the growing differences within the circle almost as clearly as his successes. Taken together, these songs and the two operas that were vying for his attention in 1877 are a virtual conspectus of everything the kuchka had ever stood for.20 They offer history and folk legend and song, realism and dramatic “truth,” naturalistic, syllabic word setting, deviant harmony and meter; and above all they at no point so much as hint at a learned or taught method. Even Borodin was unable to continue to evade good practice as comprehensively as Musorgsky at this time. As for Rimsky-Korsakov, he seemed to have given up the struggle altogether. His theoretical studies had most recently borne fruit in some choral settings of Lermontov and Pushkin (op. 16), dominated by imitative techniques of various kinds, including fugue, canon, and variation. Then in the summer of 1876 he composed in rapid succession a string sextet and a quintet for piano and wind, and entered both works in a chamber-music competition organized by the RMS. History doesn’t relate what Stasov and Musorgsky thought of these pieces; but the composer himself was quite pleased with them, and irritated that they failed to win the prize, which went to a piano trio by Nápravník.
Both works are lively, likable, skillfully written, but limited in reach and rather impersonal in character. The five-movement sextet, which has a fugal rondo as its second movement and another fugue in the trio of its scherzo, is otherwise quite unsophisticated, full of simple, square-cut melodies, and distinctly formulaic in its approach to the mechanics of classical form. Its most beautiful moment is the cello solo that forms the main theme of the andante fourth movement, an inspiration worthy of (and perhaps indebted to) Schumann. But it never approaches—or attempts—the richness of texture or subtlety of development of the two Brahms sextets, which Rimsky-Korsakov had surely studied. The problem is essentially one of organic continuity. Rimsky has good, attractive themes, but they tend to fall into neat, symmetrical phrases that, at their plainest, suggest the jaunty scansion of nursery rhymes—not a good recipe for extended musical discussion. This is notably true of the first-movement second subject of the quintet and also of the main theme of its finale, which, in the nature of rondo form, comes much too often to survive its insistent tone of light-headed whimsy.
The quintet is, however, superbly written for the ensemble, with a fine ear for the blend and balance of these disparate instruments. So much listening to wind bands had had its effect, though one wonders why Rimsky-Korsakov, who must have known Mozart’s great E-flat quintet, K. 452, substituted a flute for Mozart’s oboe, and thereby effectively ruled out his work being programmed on the rare occasions that wind and piano are brought together in concert. In the next year or so he added three more works to his tally of wind scores: a trombone concerto, a set of variations for oboe (on Glinka’s song “Shto krasotka molodaya”), and a Konzertstück for clarinet, all three works with band accompaniment, and conducted them at the band concerts on the naval island of Kronstadt. These are all pièces d’occasion, and their only real interest lies in the mere fact of their having been written at all. They mark Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrival as a professional composer, and as such effectively signal his departure from the spiritual ambience of the kuchka, though by no means, as we shall see, from their physical or musical presence.
CHAPTER 26
Drowning in the Waters
By the late seventies the kuchka were an established presence in St. Petersburg music, but only in the largely negative sense that they were known about and regarded, at least in professional circles, with disdain bordering at times on open hostility. In general, the press favored them with varying degrees of vituperation or at best damned them with faint
praise. Hermann Laroche, in an article in Golos of June 1876, had ironically thanked the composers of the kuchka for “so favourably align[ing] your creative activity with my critical strengths,” then proceeded to bombard Musorgsky’s Sunless from the fortress of the conservatory graduate who knows the rules and can monitor their breach. “There is nothing special here,” he remarked of the third song, “At an end is the futile, noisy day.” “But everything is nice and euphonious while there is no composer. The composer appears and, as if with a magic wand, the scene changes. From the keys of the accompanying piano there flows a kind of stream of musical sewage, as if a girl in a boardinghouse were trying out a new piece without having noticed how many flats there were in the key signature.”1 And a good deal more in the same, wild metaphorical vein. He even managed a fresh sideswipe at Boris Godunov, music “such as only Mr. Musorgsky is able to write: music of Bedlam,” while the work itself continued to be revived, tickets sold, curtain calls demanded by the composer’s fellow inmates, apparently out of Laroche’s field of vision.
Others, not burdened with the reviewer’s theoretical baggage or his professional dignity, were better able to adjust their critical compass. Turgenev, for example, had been rude about Glinka in Smoke, and had reacted with derision to the so-called Russian School at the concert he attended with Stasov in 1867. Later he had told Stasov that “among all the ‘young’ Russian composers there is some talent, to be sure: in Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. But all the rest of them—not as people, obviously (as people they are charming, but as artists)—in a bag and into the water! The Egyptian king Rampeinit XXIX is not as neglected now as they will be in 15–20 years.”2 But after attending a soirée at Petrov’s in May 1874 he had changed his tune. He reported on the evening to Pauline Viardot:
Dined with Petrov … who still adores you, as in the past. He has a bust of you crowned with laurels, still a good likeness. I also saw his wife, who is sixty and has not a single tooth in her upper jaw. Well! After dinner she sang two romances, quite odd but touching, by M. Musorgsky (author of Boris Godunov, who was present), in a still adorable voice, youthful in timbre, expressive, charming! I was open-mouthed and moved to tears, I assure you. This Musorgsky played to us and, I wouldn’t say sang, but groaned some fragments from his opera and from another that he’s writing, and this struck me as characteristic, interesting, upon my honor! Old Petrov sang his drunken, scurrilous old monk (Varlaam …) to perfection. I begin to believe there’s a future in all this. Musorgsky is misleadingly like Glinka, but with a completely red nose (unfortunately he’s an alcoholic), pale but fine eyes, and small lips squeezed into a large face with flabby cheeks. I liked him; he’s very natural and unaffected. He played us the introduction to his second opera. It’s a bit Wagnerian, but fine and pointed. On, on, the Russians!3
Turgenev, of course, had no musical axe to grind, but was merely caught in the toils of the operatic and musical conventions in which, in her way, Viardot had ensnared him. On the other hand, he had an instinctive sympathy with the quest for an authentic Russian speech, and once this particular penny dropped he had no difficulty responding to a music that had little in common with anything he encountered on the Viardot circuit. “I am mainly a realist,” he told Mariya Milyutina, “and what interests me above all is the living truth of human physiognomy.”4
For trained musicians like Laroche or his fellow graduate Tchaikovsky, this sort of thing was much harder to swallow. But Tchaikovsky’s assessment, though severe, was at least devoid of the blockheaded arrogance of his erstwhile colleague. In fact, with due allowance for the natural bias of the well-schooled, his portrait of the group for the benefit of his patroness Nadezhda von Meck is remarkably perceptive, and worth quoting at length:
All the newest Petersburg composers are very talented, but they are all infected to the core by the most awful self-importance and a purely dilettante conviction of their superiority to all the rest of the musical world. A recent exception is Rimsky-Korsakov. He is self-taught, like the others, but in his case there has been an abrupt reversal. His is a very serious, very honest, and conscientious nature. As a very young man he fell in with a group who, first, convinced him that he was a genius, and then secondly told him that it wasn’t necessary to study, that schools kill inspiration, dry up creativity, etc. At first he believed this. His earliest works are evidence of a strong talent devoid of any theoretical development. In the circle to which he belonged, they were all in love with themselves and with each other. Each of them tried to imitate one or other product of the circle that they regarded as wonderful. As a result the whole circle soon sank into a uniformity of method, into impersonality and affectation. Korsakov is the only one of them to whom it occurred, five years ago, that the ideas preached by the circle were without any foundation, and that their contempt for the schools, for classical music, their hatred of authority and models, were nothing but ignorance. I have kept a letter of his from that time. It both touched me deeply and shook me. He had gone into deep despair on seeing how many years had gone by without any benefit, along a path that led nowhere. He asked what he should do. The obvious answer was that he had to study. And he did begin to study, but with such zeal that academic technique soon became his necessary atmosphere. In one summer he wrote an incalculable number of contrapuntal exercises and sixty-four fugues, of which he at once sent me ten to look over. The fugues seemed faultless in their way, but I noticed at the time that the reaction had produced in him too sharp an about turn. From contempt for the schools, he had gone over at a stroke to a cult of musical technique. Soon after that, his symphony and quartet appeared. Both works are full of a multitude of tricks, but as you so rightly observe they are imbued with a character of dry pedantry. At this moment he is obviously going through a crisis, and how this crisis will end is hard to predict. Either he will emerge as a great master or he will get terminally bogged down in contrapuntal trickery. Cui is a talented dilettante. His music is devoid of originality, but elegant and graceful. It is too coquettish, too smarmy, so to speak, so that it pleases at first hearing, but quickly palls. This comes from the fact that Cui is not a musician by trade but a professor of fortifications, very busy with a mass of lectures in practically every military academic institution in Petersburg. By his own admission to me, he can’t compose without picking out tunelets at the piano, with background chords. When he comes across a nice little idea, he fiddles about with it, takes it to pieces, adorns and greases it in every conceivable way, and all this takes a long time, so that, for example, it took him ten years to write his opera Ratcliff. But I repeat, he has talent all the same; at least he has taste and flair. Borodin is a fifty-year-old professor of chemistry at the Academy of Medicine.5 He, again, has talent, even great talent, but a talent that has died from lack of attention and a blind fate that took him to a chair in chemistry instead of to a vital musical activity. On the other hand, he has less taste than Cui, and his technique is so weak that he can’t compose a single line without somebody’s help. Musorgsky you are quite right to call unteachable [otpetïm]. In terms of talent he is perhaps superior to all the above. But he has a narrow nature, devoid of the desire for self-improvement, with a blind faith in the absurd theories of his circle and his own genius. In addition it’s some sort of low nature that loves the coarse, the uncouth, the rough. He is the direct opposite of his friend Cui, who swims in the shallows but is always decorous and graceful. By contrast, Musorgsky flaunts his illiteracy, prides himself on his ignorance, botches any old how, blindly trusting in the infallibility of his genius. But with him there are flashes of real, as well as not unoriginal, talent. The outstanding personality of the circle is Balakirev. But he has gone silent, having done very little. He has a colossal talent that has perished because of some kind of fatal circumstances that made him go all pious after having long taken pride in complete atheism. Today he never leaves church, he fasts for the sacrament, genuflects to the relics, and nothing else. Despite his great gifts, he has done a lo
t of harm. For example, he ruined Korsakov by convincing him that study did damage. In general he is the architect of all the theories of this strange circle, which unites so many untouched, misdirected, or prematurely blighted powers.6
In fact Balakirev had begun to resurface some time before Tchaikovsky wrote this letter. It was true that he had become something of a religious recluse, had taken to vegetarianism and various forms of strict Orthodoxy, not to mention an element of pure mumbo jumbo. The few friends who called on him found him depressed and unresponsive. He seems to have suffered what would later have been called a nervous breakdown. As we have seen, he allowed his conducting posts to lapse and completely abandoned composition and attendance at circle gatherings. To supplement his paltry income from teaching he took a job as a clerk in the goods section of the Central Railway Company, but soon gave that up as well, on some unexplained pretext. The one member of the circle who retained any influence with him was Lyudmila Shestakova, who persuaded him to lodge his musical manuscripts with her, while at the same time seeing to it that her brother’s piano, which had been in Balakirev’s possession, was moved to the conservatory for safe keeping. The composer of King Lear became in certain respects a poor copy of his Shakespearean hero, disposing of his worldly goods and abandoning his family and titles. But in his case, the condition turned out to be temporary.
Already in 1876 there were signs of his emerging from purdah. After conducting the King Lear Overture in his FMS concert that March, Rimsky-Korsakov had taken the trouble to drop its composer a letter of appreciation, with added greetings from Borodin and Stasov. Balakirev was touched, and told Lyudmila so, adding a definite promise to at last write out his much-considered, long-awaited Tamara. “It means,” Stasov told Borodin, “that he’s not yet a complete corpse, and I haven’t yet lost all hope of his resurrection.”7 Borodin may merely have been reporting this letter when he told Karmalina a few weeks later that “on the insistence of the ever energetic and passionate Lyudmila Ivanovna, Balakirev has begun to write down his unfinished Tamara.”8 But by January 1877 the picture is more sharply drawn. “Balakirev,” he told the singer, “dear, gifted Balakirev, is rising again for music! He’s again almost the same Mily Alexeyevich, passionately disputing and fighting over every D-flat major and B minor and the smallest details of musical works that previously he didn’t want to hear.”9 He was now once again to be seen at Shestakova’s and the Stasovs’. One day at Christmas 1877 he played fragments of Tamara to Dmitry Stasov, then soon afterward called on Vladimir Stasov, in vain, to wish him happy birthday (2 January), which prompted what seems to have been Vladimir’s first letter to him for almost five years. “So you haven’t completely forgotten me,” he wrote, “haven’t entirely shut me out of your heart.” In Balakirev’s absence, he has been listening to his music: Islamey (which Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov has been learning), the “Georgian Song,” and “The Dream,” sung by a good new tenor, Pyotr Grigoryev. “But it was particularly bitter for me to think yesterday, one more time, how long I’ve gone without hearing your marvellous Tamara. And you see I not only could but must hear it. No one loves both you and it more than I do. If others have been able to hear it today, then I have deserved to a hundred thousand times more.”10
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 48