Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  He lived, in fact, for a month. Sometimes he seemed to be recovering, under the strict but beneficent hospital regime. He wrote to Shestakova that he was feeling so well that he was thinking of discharging himself and paying her a visit. In the final stages of his illness, like Violetta in La traviata, he told everyone that he felt his vitality returning. His appearance improved, and with it his mood and outlook. The day after the assassination of Tsar Alexander (1 March), Ilya Repin came to paint his portrait, and found him “in an especially healthy, sober condition,” whatever the eventual portrait may suggest to the contrary.20 When Arseny Kutuzov visited him, they talked projects. “You know,” Musorgsky said, “I should like something completely new, something I haven’t yet touched. I’d like to take a rest from history, and in general from any kind of prosiness, which in life, too, doesn’t let one breathe … And I’ll tell you something else—up to now you and I have concentrated only on trivia. Let’s work instead on something big—you write a fantastic drama and I’ll clothe it in sounds.”21 Perhaps he was, not for the first time, telling Kutuzov what he wanted to hear; or perhaps Kutuzov—as his Soviet critics alleged—was simply making it up. But it was easy enough for Musorgsky to fantasize. He must have known, in his heart of hearts, that it would not happen.

  On 9 March, a Monday, he celebrated his forty-second birthday. Soon afterward there was a sudden and rapid deterioration. His arms and legs became paralyzed, and the paralysis started working its way through his entire body. By the following weekend his condition was hopeless. According to the music critic Mikhail Ivanov, there was some slight improvement on the Sunday. He was helped into an armchair, saying, “I have to be polite, ladies are visiting me; what are they going to think of me?” But when Ivanov called in the next morning, 16 March, he was met at the door by Kutuzov. “You want to see Musorgsky?” he inquired. “He’s dead.”22

  CHAPTER 29

  Heirs and Rebels

  In the immediate aftermath of Musorgsky’s death, Vladimir Stasov’s pen was active. The next day Golos printed a short, largely factual obituary including an account of the ebb and flow of the composer’s health in his last days, a brief biography referring to his most important works, a mention of the Repin portrait, and an assessment. “Musorgsky was one of those few who direct their activity among us toward distant and magical, unprecedented and incomparable ‘new shores.’ And people sensed this. The musical conservatories and reactionaries honored him with their persecution, but at the same time the mass of incorruptible, fresh, right-minded youth sustained him with their love.”1 Stasov’s account of the funeral on 18 March appeared in Golos on the 19th: the procession from the hospital to the Alexander Nevsky Cemetery; the wreaths and their inscriptions; the impressive list of those taking part—the surviving kuchkists, naturally; the conservatory director, Karl Davïdov; Nápravník; the leading Maryinsky singers (Ivan Melnikov, Fyodor Stravinsky, and others); members of the orchestra; and a whole crowd of musical amateurs and music lovers “who deeply sympathized with Musorgsky’s original and nationalist talent.”2 The May and June issues of the Vestnik Evropï carried Stasov’s much longer and more considered biography, a vital source of primary information on Musorgsky’s life and work.3 Finally, at the end of 1882 there began, in the Vestnik, the serial publication of his immense Twenty-five Years of Russian Art, culminating in the section on music, “Our Music in the Last 25 Years,” itself a sixty-page study apparently prompted by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Glinka.4

  Stasov’s entire view of Russian music had long been predicated on the central tradition of what he called the New Russian School, descending directly from Glinka himself by way of Dargomïzhsky and the Balakirev circle, to the recent emergence of certain younger figures, pupils—by an irony that he preferred not to dwell on—of Rimsky-Korsakov at the conservatory. “The lofty activity of the ‘comrades,’ ” he insisted, “continues to this day. Only one of them is no longer with us—Musorgsky, carried off by an early death. All the others, now in their maturity, are continuing, perfecting themselves, along the path already marked out for them in their youth.”5 The remark is a spectacular tribute to Stasov’s Housmanesque ability to see the world as the world’s not. Of the four chief surviving members of the circle, Rimsky-Korsakov had notably deviated from the youthful path and was now a respected professor of the hated conservatory; Balakirev had composed nothing for the past dozen years; Borodin was still struggling with an opera of similar vintage; Cui had written nothing but salon pieces since finishing his own latest opera seven years before. As a functional, not to say historic, group, in fact, the kuchka had long ago ceased to exist.

  As for “perfecting themselves” in the 1880s, the list of works is both unimpressive and devoid of any but the most trivial coherence. Balakirev at last completes Tamara, but then retreats into his shell and in the entire decade does nothing but revise early works and compose two or three Chopinesque piano pieces and a handful of choruses.6 Rimsky-Korsakov is superficially more active. After the first performance of The Snow Maiden in January 1882, he composes a compact, somewhat Lisztian piano concerto, a number of songs and choruses, and some occasional instrumental pieces. But none of it amounts to much artistically until, in the late eighties, he suddenly produces a set of brilliant orchestral works—the Capriccio espagnol, Sheherazade, and the Russian Easter Festival Overture—that will largely define him for a posterity preoccupied with Russian glitter, but that are hard to reconcile with Stasov’s vision of “lofty activity.” Throughout this time César Cui—whose main qualities, according to Stasov, are “poetry and passion, combined with an unusual sincerity and heartfeltness that go to the deepest recesses of the heart”7—composes salon pieces of one kind and another, at their best music of genuine charm, but hardly ever marked by noticeable individuality or even Russianness. A Suite concertante for violin and orchestra, and a couple of purely orchestral suites, at least stray beyond the confines of the drawing room, in scale if not technique or aesthetic reach. Of the four survivors, only Borodin produces new work of the front rank until, to be generous, Rimsky’s Sheherazade of 1888.

  The chemistry professor’s Second String Quartet, in D major, composed, for once, entirely in the single summer of 1881, is a lyrical pair to its predecessor, but if anything still stronger and more distinctive in the quality of its material, of which the lovely melody of the nocturne is by far the best known but by no means the sole example. In music of this kind, Borodin’s method is simple and effective. He balances his movements carefully as regards texture and rhythmic contrast, attempts nothing overambitious in terms of counterpoint or motivic development, and writes effortlessly for the instruments, whose melodic character, after all, suits his own gifts to perfection. Like Schubert, Borodin makes chamber music sound like a natural emanation of the heart and the body: in this sphere he is, to tell the truth, Stasov’s description of Cui made flesh. His later music bears out this comparison. On the face of it, the seven-movement Malenkaya syuitai (Little Suite) for piano solo is not unlike Cui’s various sets of salon pieces from the mid-eighties. But with Borodin a distinctive idea invariably surfaces to lend individuality to even the most conventional imagery. As usual with him, the main problem lies with the lack of continuity, which, in the suite, he tries to conceal by an artificially concocted program (artificial because three of the pieces were actually composed at some time in the 1870s, while the suite was assembled only in 1885 as a gift for his new patroness, the Belgian Comtesse Louise de Mercy-Argenteau). The work is subtitled “Petit poème d’amour d’une jeune fille,” which Dianin speculates may be a reference to some incident in the comtesse’s youth.8 It certainly has little direct bearing on the music, which is for the most part sentimental in the best sense, but without narrative shape (of the kind supplied by the texts in, for instance, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben). The one exception to this tone is the first piece, “Au couvent” (“Under the vaults of the cathedral one thinks only of God”), which expe
riments interestingly with bell chords in unusual spacings as a frame for the simple chanting of the choir. It’s a striking musical picture, but its connection with young girls in love is, to say the least, oblique.

  During the eighties Borodin worked spasmodically on Prince Igor, but never came within sight of finishing it or even leaving it—like Khovanshchina—in a clearly articulated form. Soon after composing the D-major quartet, he wrote a completely new version of Igor’s aria to replace the “shadows” monologue, discarded under pressure from circle colleagues in 1875. Later he settled finally on the form and content of the prologue, and he revised and reformulated much else that he had already composed. But of new material there is precious little: a chorus here (part of the act 3 finale), a recitative there (Konchak and Igor, before the Polovtsian Dances). To some extent the opera had become an albatross round his neck, a compulsion that he could neither avoid nor confront. One day early in 1887, he dined with his medical friend Alexander Dobroslavin and his wife, and they talked about Prince Igor. But “as usual this was disagreeable for him, and he began to lose his temper. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to play you something, but because you torment me with Igor, I shan’t play.’ ”9

  What he did eventually play was the variation slow movement of a third symphony, which he had been writing, on and off, for the past three years. It was an intense piece in C minor, based on a hymn tune Borodin had unearthed in the village of Pavlovsky, near Moscow, where he spent the summer of 1884. Alas, though the movement was complete, Borodin never got round to writing it down. Nor did he write down the symphony’s first movement; but in this case Glazunov felt able to reconstruct music that he had heard the composer play and for which sketches existed. He also assembled a scherzo movement from a D-major scherzo in five-eight time that Borodin had composed for string quartet in 1882, adding a trio section based on music originally intended for the merchants’ scene scrapped from the opera’s first act. This all seems to have been in accordance with Borodin’s known intentions. And yet one can hardly regard the two movements of the A-minor symphony, deeply attractive though they are, as strictly representative; too much of Glazunov’s memory is involved. At least with Prince Igor there were large swaths of authentic music that only needed tidying up, and some that barely needed that much. For a lot of the time Borodin’s voice is clear. Of course, the opera’s provisional state is a tragedy; but it is a tragedy with consolations.

  Borodin died in February 1887. For the past few years his life had proceeded in the same disorderly fashion as before. His wife’s health had continued to deteriorate, and in 1885 he himself went down with what his biographer, Serge Dianin, calls “a mild form of cholera [cholerine]” which, paradoxically, was “so severe that the patient was only saved by an injection of a physiological solution of culinary salt.”10 The key to his general condition was clearly exhaustion, mental as well as physical. The pressure of his professorial duties, anxieties about his beloved Yekaterina, her destructive, self-centered lifestyle, his own inability to refuse help or favors to others, above all his dedication to two demanding and mutually hostile vocations, destroyed his health as surely as it undermined his music. That February he had organized a fancy-dress dance in one of the academy lecture rooms, and appeared himself as a Russian peasant in baggy trousers, high boots, and a red woolen shirt. He was in conversation with Marya Dobroslavina and one of his fellow professors when his speech suddenly became indistinct, he started to sway, then crashed to the ground, striking his temple on the corner of the stove. He had suffered a rupture of the aorta, an event that, the autopsy revealed, might have happened at any time, so thin was the artery wall. He was fifty-three years old.

  A year almost to the day after Musorgsky’s death, on 17 March 1882, a symphony in E major by the now sixteen-year-old Glazunov received its first performance at a concert of the FMS conducted by Balakirev, who had resumed the directorship of the school after Rimsky-Korsakov’s resignation the previous September. The symphony made an extraordinary impact on audience, critics, fellow composers alike. It took César Cui back to 1865, the year of Glazunov’s birth and the year of the premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s own First Symphony. “Then as now a young Russian artistic débutant has embarked on a musical career; then as now there has fallen to the lot of the critic the gratifying task of welcoming a remarkable new-born talent and wishing him the furthest possible development, maturity, and success.” But Glazunov was even younger than Rimsky-Korsakov had been, and in Cui’s opinion his symphony was more mature and still more gifted. It was technically strong and accomplished. It was inventive and even original. Of course, Cui had his reservations. Glazunov was too wedded to the repeated four-bar phrase, and this led him into a certain prolixity of form, a tendency to drag things out longer than strictly necessary. The slow movement was attractive and poetic but inclined to drift. Still, the symphony as a whole was “a fine, remarkably talented work with the most serious musical virtues notwithstanding Glazunov’s youth. Taking into account its composer’s seventeen [sic] years, it’s an exceptional phenomenon.”11

  Also in the audience that evening was a very different kind of music lover from the normal patrons of St. Petersburg concerts, a rich timber magnate by the name of Mitrofan Belyayev. Belyayev belonged superficially to a class of Russian society known as the kupechestvo—that is, the merchant class, but with a much more specific and self-contained identity than that of the business class in Western Europe at that time. Because of the general rigidity of Russian society and the backwardness of Russian trade even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, the kupechestvo had preserved a character of their own, a character derived from their peasant background but somehow culturally intensified toward a profoundly conservative, inward-facing, atavistic view of life, dress, speech, and education. By the 1850s the gradual emergence in Russia of a fully fledged capitalism had started to generate fantastic wealth in the trading community. And these nouveaux riches, as Taruskin calls them, began to emerge from their mercantile ghetto, to acquire education and a taste for the rich things of life, the entertainments, both high and low, the style and the ostentation. They bought and built, they sponsored and patronized. But they never completely shed their aura of old Russia, their Slavophilia and religious Orthodoxy, and for that reason, Taruskin explains, “merchant patrons were more inclined than the aristocracy to lend their support to native talent.” So Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a Baltic railway tycoon, supports Tchaikovsky; the textile millionaire Pavel Tretyakov collects and commissions Russian paintings and builds a gallery in Moscow (in the style of a Russian fairy-tale palace) to house them; Savva Mamontov, another railway tycoon, founds an arts colony at Abramtsevo and fills his house with peasant designs and fabrics and with artists who base their work on such things. Belyayev had derived his money from a family timber business (which also probably to some extent meant railways), but he was fundamentally better educated than most of his industrial peers, and in particular he was more musically literate. He was a decent violinist who played chamber music and in good amateur orchestras, and who held regular string-quartet evenings on Fridays at his St. Petersburg home. Borodin probably composed the scherzo that eventually found its way into his A-minor symphony for a Belyayev Friday in 1882.12

  Belyayev was so impressed by Glazunov’s symphony that when it was premiered in Moscow in August of that same year he travelled there specially to hear it again. At the concert he introduced himself to Rimsky-Korsakov, and either then or soon afterward he broached the idea of publishing the symphony at his own expense. It was a suggestion that would have consequences far beyond anything any of them could have foreseen. In effect, Belyayev was setting up a publishing house, and he did so like an instinctive kupets. By establishing the business in Leipzig, he bypassed the lack of copyright protection in Russia and at the same time ensured German quality of production, which went with his determination to print immaculate full scores, properly and thoroughly edited, together with all individ
ual orchestral parts, and four-hand piano transcriptions. Likewise in true kupechestvo spirit, he proposed to publish only works by Russian composers, starting with Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov. It was a resolution he kept. Two years later he paid for run-through performances of Glazunov’s symphony and his D-major orchestral suite, and this in turn led in 1885 to the initiation of the Russian Symphony Concerts, an annual series like those of the RMS, but devoted, like the publications, exclusively to Russian music, much of it, in the nature of things, newly composed.

  Richard Taruskin has shown, in an exhaustive and riveting account of the environment from which Igor Stravinsky emerged, the extent to which Belyayev’s initiative overlaid St. Petersburg music with a rigid template of what did and did not conform to the training and aesthetic preconceptions that lay behind Glazunov’s own early work. Glazunov appeared as a kind of well-taught kuchkist, able to write symphonies that no longer sounded like exercises written to meet Balakirev’s requirements but were nevertheless stylistically indebted to the circle. They reflected Rimsky-Korsakov’s growing contempt for the lack of application and craftsmanship in the work of the kuchka, but they also echoed his distaste for the wilder shores of (in particular) Musorgsky’s imagination, which he was at that very moment doing his best to tame by editing and smoothing out what he regarded as the music’s artistic absurdities. Bearing in mind that Belyayev invariably asked Rimsky-Korsakov’s advice on the acceptance or otherwise of new works for publication or performance, and eventually constituted him and his two star pupils, Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov, into a formal committee for that purpose, it is not hard to imagine how difficult it would have been for any sort of maverick composer (say, a Russian Debussy or Hugo Wolf, not to mention Schoenberg) to make headway in the Petersburg of the 1880s or 1890s. It would perhaps be too much to argue that the system of regulation that survived into Soviet times and eventually ossified into the concept of socialist realism was essentially a reconstitution of the Belyayev-Rimsky regime. Yet it is a fact that several of the most influential composition teachers in the early decades of the Soviet Union were former pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, including Stravinsky’s contemporary Maximilian Steinberg, who would torment his pupil Dmitry Shostakovich with “the sacred traditions of Nikolay Andreyevich [Rimsky-Korsakov].”13