Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  In the event, release from this latter fate came through the composition of a completely new opera, based on a Gogol story to which his attention had been drawn by his then fiancée, Nadezhda Purgold, more than six years before. This was “May Night” (“Mayskaya Noch’ ”), in the same collection—Evenings on a Farmstead near Dikanka—as contained “Sorochintsï Fair.” At the time that he and Nadezhda read this story together he had just been appointed to the conservatory, and his thoughts were turning toward the technical demands that, one way or another, had preoccupied him ever since. But by 1878, when virtually all his May Night was composed, his studies had taken a fresh turn. Putting together his folk-song collection, he had taken an interest not only in the tunes and the words for themselves, but also in their specific ceremonial or seasonal associations. May Night offered the possibility of incorporating this kind of material in an actual drama, making sure that the songs sung at particular points of the tale were the right ones in the right place and at the right time.

  Gogol himself tells us only the month in which his story happens, but this is quite enough of a clue for Rimsky-Korsakov to color in the rituals for that time of year in rural Ukraine, where all the Dikanka stories take place. For Gogol, spring is the best time for the flowering of love on warm nights when “the earth … is suffused with silver light; the marvellous air is cool and heady, full of sweetness, and awash with an ocean of fragrance.”27 It is a time for serenading, but also a time for all kinds of strange and sinister manifestations, genuine magic, not just the counterfeit sorcery of the Gypsy in “Sorochintsï Fair.” Levko, Gogol’s hero, is in love with the fair Hanna, but his father, the village mayor, who also has designs on her, is forbidding their marriage. Levko tells Hanna the story of a strange house by a nearby lake whose owner had married a witch after the death of his first wife, and the two of them had driven his daughter out of the house. The girl (Pannochka) had thrown herself into the lake and turned into a rusalka—a water nymph—dragging her evil stepmother into the water after her. That night Levko is walking near the old house, singing and strumming his bandura (Ukrainian archlute), when suddenly the drowned girl appears, the rusalki all play a game of raven, and the unhappy girl implores Levko to identify the stepmother, who continues to haunt her while herself disguised as a nymph. When he does so, she rewards him with a letter for his father, purporting to be from the Commissar, and instructing him to permit his son’s marriage. Gogol locates this jiggery-pokery clearly as genre within actual village life—the unpopular mayor and his sister-in-law, the drunken charcoal burner, the distiller who now lives in the old house, the village lads and lasses—and he positively begs for the whole thing to be turned into an opera, so plentiful is its musical imagery:28 Levko with his bandura, the young villagers “pouring out their cheerful souls in song,” the charcoal burner and his tipsy gopak, the boys’ song about the Mayor, the round dance of the rusalki. The composer had only to follow Gogol and his libretto fell into place, song, dialogue, and all.

  Whether or not he was in any way influenced by Musorgsky’s current on-off engagement with Sorochintsï Fair, there is obvious common ground between the two operas, starting of course with Gogol’s own inimitable style of storytelling, his wonderful sense of place and character, his particular way of mixing down-to-earth reality with flashes of magic and witchcraft. Both works have a folksy air, derived from the unconcealed use of authentic folk songs; both employ folk tunes as a basic material also for arioso and even recitative. Both seem now to embody what Taruskin calls “not a progressive but a retrograde tendency,”29 even if one confines oneself to questions of musical and narrative style, and avoids discussing the somewhat ambiguous politics of aligning oneself in the troubled, populist 1870s with the increasingly right-wing and antiprogressive author of Dead Souls, who had died in 1852. They belong, rather, to some pre-kuchka epoch of folk vaudeville, or the early operas of Weber or Lortzing, or (in the case of May Night) the multitude of early-romantic water-sprite operas, from Hoffmann’s Undine to Wagner’s Die Feen and, of course, Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka. Of the novel elements of Boris Godunov or The Maid of Pskov they are largely innocent. May Night is a pretty opera with atmospheric moments, some effective orchestration, but, in operatic terms, mostly stock characters. An obvious (and much-cited) parallel is with Smetana’s Bartered Bride, composed in the early sixties and first staged in St. Petersburg in 1871. But Smetana’s work sounds much deeper psychological tones than Rimsky-Korsakov’s, and even for a time veers toward tragedy, of which there is no real trace in May Night.

  Apart from its easy charm, the main interest of May Night lies in its careful placement of its folk materials, their precise application. Sorochintsï Fair has as many authentic tunes, but their use is nonspecific in relation to ceremony or ritual. By contrast, Rimsky-Korsakov’s method tends toward a kind of ethnographic purity, with folk materials entirely taken from an unimpeachable source, Alexander Rubets’s collection of 216 Ukrainian Folk Songs, published in 1871. His opera starts, after the overture, with a millet-sowing game for two “teams” (double chorus); later he combines two songs for Trinity Sunday (in the chorus “I wind garlands on every feast day,” “Oy! Zav’yu venki na vsye svyatki”—svyatki is Christmastide, but here it refers to Trinity, the so-called “Green Christmas”); and in the final scene, the offstage chorus approaches singing a rusal’naya pesnya (connected with the fast days between Whitsun and St. John the Baptist’s Day) and another song about the Green Christmas, the zelonïye svyatki. There are other, less specific folk songs, and there are beautiful melodies that are pure Rimsky-Korsakov: Levko’s first aria, for instance, is a Ukrainian folk tune out of Rubets, but his song by the lake in act 3 is original, pentatonic to be sure (you can play its main theme, transposed, on the black keys of a piano), but too rangy to be a folk song. In general the tenor, Levko, has the best solo music in the whole work. But the most touching moments are the folk choruses, especially the offstage rusal’naya, which counterpoints and, so to speak, reprimands the comic scene of the reading of the “Commissar’s” letter with its “Dust on the road, commotion in the oakwood, a father is murdering his daughter.” Rimsky-Korsakov was proud of the counterpoint in May Night, which he felt at last escaped from the schoolroom and became simply one element in a sophisticated compositional technique. He also claimed that he had written podgoloski—Russian folk heterophony—a year before Melgunov described the phenomenon in his folk-song collection of 1879.30 In the Trinity song in act 1 of May Night the chorus sopranos and altos sing different variants of the same melody in two-part harmony that sometimes is, and sometimes is not, actually in two parts. No doubt podgoloski in its natural habitat was less elegant and well-bred than this; but the idea is right.31

  Thus this attractive but unremarkable opera turns out to mark a significant stage in its thirty-four-year-old composer’s development. Just when folk-song collecting was becoming scientific, and taxonomy was starting to replace beautification, Rimsky-Korsakov showed that art, too, could be precise about the reality on which it drew. At least in one aspect of his work he acts like a photographer, recording the living environment even while his drama is acted out by pasteboard figures such as never walked a real street or a forest path. From now on, for him, opera would be a realism of context rather than narrative, a trawl through ancient customs and rituals and their associated tales, poems, and music, often attached to stories as remote as could possibly be imagined from the kind of historical or contemporary truth espoused by Belinsky or Stasov. Day-to-day realism ceased to appeal. “It’s wearisome somehow,” he complained to Vasily Yastrebtsev years later, “to listen to these fools—the Mayor, the Scribe, and the rest—after the rusalki and Pannochka, whom I love and will always love as much as I do Snegurochka [the Snow Maiden], Mlada, and the Sea Queen.”32

  May Night reached the stage quickly, in January 1880, and, being tuneful and easily grasped, it went down well with the audience, badly with the press. Cui grumbled in his Vedomos
ti review that the only decent ideas were the borrowed folk tunes, and Rimsky-Korsakov reports that when he ran into Malvina Cui soon afterward she sneered at him: “Now you’ve learned how to write operas.”33 He understood the remark as a stab at the opera’s popular success. But perhaps it was also adding opera to the inventory of techniques that Rimsky-Korsakov, in defiance of best circle practice, had mastered by study. If so, it was a curious complaint to level at May Night, whose weaknesses, whatever they may have been, hardly included erudition.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Chemist in His Laboratory

  In the early months of 1879 it was suddenly possible to hear some of the latest, and some of the not so latest, music by the kuchka. Boris Godunov was still in repertory at the Maryinsky, though now even more heavily cut than when first put on. On the other hand, the FMS was once again able to mount a concert series in January and February, after a silence of almost two years for lack of funds, and Rimsky-Korsakov seized the opportunity to program the cell scene from Boris, which was still excluded from stage performances of the opera and in fact had never been heard in any form in public. He also conducted excerpts from Prince Igor and May Night (a complete novelty, of course), Balakirev’s Czech overture, and Borodin’s B-minor symphony with its revised scoring. A casual visitor, unfamiliar with the history of these various works, might well have formed the impression of a hyperactive group of composers. He might have been struck by the power of the symphony, the dramatic intensity of the cell scene, the sheer brilliance of the Polovtsian Dances and the Rimsky-Korsakov choruses. Stasov, though, had his own slightly eccentric preference, influenced, perhaps, by the demands of renewed friendship. “I was literally driven mad with delight,” he wrote to Balakirev, “by your Czech overture. And I wasn’t alone.… It’s simply a masterpiece of beauty, strength, energy, and fantasy.”1 Even Balakirev, who was still not attending concerts, must have blushed at such praise of what he certainly knew to be a minor, if effective, work. “They say the Czech overture went splendidly,” he remarked modestly to Rimsky-Korsakov, but then quickly switched to Liszt’s Hamlet, which Rimsky had called “a headache, mechanistic, and heavily scored.” “Even Liszt’s weakest things should be performed at least once,” Balakirev insisted, “since listening to them is extremely instructive for Russian composers, and no less necessary for the public.”2

  Musorgsky, who had assiduously attended Maryinsky Boris rehearsals, also put in an appearance at Rimsky-Korsakov’s rehearsal of the cell scene. But he was of strictly limited usefulness. He was either drunk or acting drunk, and “often made,” Rimsky recalled, “obscure and involved speeches.

  At the rehearsal in question, he listened with great intensity to what was being played, for the most part carried away by the performance of individual instruments, often in the most ordinary and indifferent musical phrases, now pensively hanging his head, now haughtily raising it and shaking his mane, now lifting his hand with the theatrical gesture that he had often made in the past. When at the end of the scene the tamtam representing the monastery bell sounded pianissimo, Musorgsky made it a deep and deferential bow, with his arms crossed on his chest.3

  But the critics, of course, had their own brand of irony. “I am not in the least exaggerating,” one wrote, “if I say that the best place in this music is the blows on the beautiful tamtam. Just imagine, Mr. Musorgsky could not find anything wittier for this scene than to give the orchestra a figure from everyday five-finger exercises,” as if, he muses, Pimen were doing his piano practice.4 Hermann Laroche was more direct. “A very tender love is necessary,” he asserted, “to give the inspirations of [Musorgsky’s] muse a place on a concert program between Weber and Beethoven … I do not hear any spark of poetry in this declamation, so extolled by the composer’s adherents.”5

  The composer himself was still acting as unpaid accompanist for every kind of charitable concert, while composing little or nothing of his own. He apparently wrote no music at all before late June, when he signed and dated a fragment of Marfa’s scene with Andrey before St. Basil’s—in act 4, scene 2—of Khovanshchina. Exactly when he composed the rest of this scene, in which Dosifey and Marfa decide that self-immolation is the only recourse for the Old Believers, while the streltsy enter the square carrying their own execution blocks, only to learn that Tsar Peter has reprieved them, is not known. Meanwhile, in March, he had accompanied Leonova in a mixed concert of Russian music including, for once, music of his own (the song “Gopak” and Marfa’s song from act 3 of Khovanshchina); and three weeks later he played at an “artistic evening” which included readings by Fyodor Dostoyevsky from The Brothers Karamazov and a performance by Fyodor Stravinsky of Musorgsky’s song “King Saul.” Early in July he again moved into Leonova’s Peterhof dacha, and there he composed the heroine Parasha’s song (her so-called dumka) in the final act of Sorochintsï Fair, and possibly also the scene of Marfa with Andrey in the final act of Khovanshchina, before the self-immolation.6

  But it was a brief interlude. A fortnight later he and Leonova set off on a three-month concert tour of southern Russia that would take him farther from St. Petersburg than he had ever previously travelled, would leave him weakened in health and little if at all strengthened in his finances, and would ensure that work on both operas ground to a complete halt until the end of the year.

  Needless to say, Stasov was in despair over this tour. “Our poor Musoryanin,” he grumbled to Borodin, “your Siamese twin in point of originality, is quite lost.

  On 21 July he went off on a tour of Russia, imagine who with—with Leonova, in the guise of her accompanist!! Useless to argue with him or try to dissuade him from this servile, lackey role as stooge to our Gypsy Patti. No, he digs in his heels and won’t understand. He says, “Rubinstein also accompanies; he also goes and gives concerts!” What a comparison!!!!! Of course, instead of the 1000 rubles he hopes for to pay his debts, he’ll scarcely get a few kopeks, and he’ll get more drunk than ever, entertaining all those merchants and vice-governors. Poor ex-Prometheus!7

  The Gypsy and her ex-Prometheus were heard in Poltava and Elizavetgrad, in Nikolayev and Kherson, in Odessa, Sevastopol, Yalta, Rostov-on-the-Don, Novocherkassk, in Voronezh, Tambov, and Tver. Their programs were hybrid. There would be a song by Schubert, a song or two by Musorgsky himself, some Dargomïzhsky or Serov or Glinka, perhaps a group of folk songs. And in between vocal items, Musorgsky would play a solo or two. But though he had been a good pianist in his time, these days he was little more than a keyboard functionary. He had, Rimsky-Korsakov notes, “no repertory whatsoever.” Drunk or sober, he could sight-read in musicianly fashion anything you cared to put in front of him, but he could not play you a Beethoven sonata or a Chopin study remotely to a concert standard. His Leonova solos, therefore, had to be knocked up mainly from his own music, or even out of his head on the spur of the moment. He would play excerpts from Khovanshchina or Sorochintsï Fair (including the recently composed gopak) in piano reduction, or the coronation scene from Boris (“with the Great Pealing of Bells”) or a piano arrangement of Jesus Navin. Doubtless he modified these pieces to suit his technique or even his whim of the hour, since the music must have been mostly quite unknown to his audiences. Occasionally he improvised from scratch. In Odessa he played a fantasy on Jewish melodies heard that same day in the local synagogue; but not a note of any such music ever got written down. Two somewhat juvenile pieces that he did eventually manage to get down on paper—“On the Southern Shore of the Crimea” (“Na yuzhom beregu Krïma”) and “Near the Southern Shore of the Crimea” (“Bliz yuzhogo berega Krïma”)—plainly began life in the same way; and there was another piece, “a rather long and extremely confused fantasy that was meant to depict a storm on the Black Sea,” which he played at a Rimsky-Korsakov soirée but apparently never did write down.8 Anyone who has ever had to extemporize at the piano (as opposed to the organ in church) will recognize the signs at once: the babyish themes, the simple, repetitive figuration, the elementary ha
rmonies, the total absence of counterpoint.

  What the provincial audiences thought of such stuff is not recorded by any objective observer. Musorgsky’s own letters home, to a skeptical readership, are naturally inclined to present everything in the most glowing terms. The audiences are not large, but they are “representative” or “select”; the takings “good, but less than we expected”; the artistic triumph is “unquestionable,” “tremendous”; Leonova herself is “beyond comparison,” and her voice “not only has lost none of its force and freshness, but has gained in power.” He talks about the significance of their tour as a service to art. “Ukrainian men and women,” he tells Stasov (who dislikes the whole idea of Sorochintsï Fair), “have recognized that the character of the Sorochintsï music is thoroughly national.” “Life calls for new musical labors, broad musical work,” he enthuses to Lyudmila Shestakova; “further, still further on the good road; what I am doing is understood; with great vigor toward the new shores of art, which so far is limitless!”

  It is hard to relate such biblical pronouncements to the reality of Leonova’s scrappy, potpourri programs or the likely character of her audiences, which consisted mainly of provincial civil servants and their wives, stiffened by military families from the local garrisons. The landowners were for the most part away on their estates. In the home of a certain Captain Yurkovsky, in Nikolayev, they were greeted “with sincere cordiality,” and Musorgsky sang his Nursery cycle to the captain’s children. Nothing so substantial figured in Leonova’s public concerts. Nor were they always so well received. In Yalta, which they reached from Sevastopol in a springless, horse-drawn tarantass, they were set down “in some mud-hut [in fact, an ill-kept private house] along with centipedes that bite and a kind of snapping beetle, which also bites, and other insects that justify their earthly existence by an ideal of making life nasty for people.” By some miracle, in Yalta lived Vladimir Stasov’s daughter Sofia Fortunato, and by an even greater miracle she owned and managed a clean, comfortable, well-run hotel (the Rossiya: “a large house, with baths and a garden, on the harbor”),9 into which she promptly moved them as her guests. But her own account of the circumstances is revealing.