Thus, at the very moment that Stasov was issuing what masqueraded as a progress report on the work of the Balakirev circle, what was left of the circle was being displaced by a highly professional tendency that drew on aspects of its work but echoed little if anything of its spirit. Glazunov and Lyadov were only the most gifted of an expanding dynasty of conservatory-taught composers, pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov himself or, in due course, of his pupils, who accepted without question the authority of the master, adhered to the values that he had espoused so assiduously when first appointed to his professorship, and aspired to nothing grander or more challenging than to be published by Belyayev, performed in his Russian Symphony Concerts, or, after his death in 1903, awarded the Glinka Prize established under his will and under the stewardship, specifically, of Rimsky-Korsakov. “From Glinka on,” Stasov wrote in 1882, “all the best Russian musicians have put very little faith in academic learning, and have not at all regarded it with the servility and superstitious awe with which it is still regarded to this day in many parts of Europe.”14 It was pure bunkum. For more than a decade Rimsky-Korsakov had been instilling into his students the very opposite view. As for Stasov’s ideas about nationalism, they were not entirely submerged, but merely lost their radical thrust. “In order to be national,” he asserted, “in order to express the spirit and soul of a nation, [music] must be directed at the very roots of the people’s life.”15 And on what he called “the Oriental element”: “The new Russian musicians … shared the general Russian love of everything Eastern. This is not surprising, since so much of everything Eastern has always been an integral part of Russian life and all its forms, and has given it such a particular, characteristic coloring.”16 The musical insignia of the Orient, the snake-charmer aspect, the sinuously ornamented melodies and hip-waving chromatic harmonies, are still there, but they no longer breathe the alien, perfumed air of Antar or Prince Igor. Folk song, folk legend, ritual, and myth all raise their heads from time to time; there are ancient modes and strange scales. But the danger has gone out of these ingredients; they are merely so many stylistic resources, part of the repertoire of the well-bred, well-taught composer. A good example is the gamma ton-poluton—the tone-semitone, or octatonic, scale—which Rimsky-Korsakov first used in his Sadko tone poem of 1867 to suggest the suspension of the laws of nature as Sadko descends to the Sea Kingdom. By the 1890s this scale has become such a standard expedient with Rimsky and his pupils as to amount to a shibboleth—a passport of group membership. It no longer registers as a disruptive force. It draws our attention to an oddity we might otherwise not notice.
Rimsky-Korsakov himself was a big enough artist to survive this general drift into academicism. The dozen or so operas he composed after Sheherazade have never entered the repertoire outside Russia, with the possible exception of the last one, The Golden Cockerel (Zolotoy petushok). On any count, they are an uneven body of work. But at their best they are the only significant pan-Russian heirs to kuchkism before the early ballets of Stravinsky, which are inconceivable without Rimsky’s influence but which, as dance works (a genre he despised) written for performance abroad by a company dominated by artists rather than musicians, elude his direct authority. Musically the Rimsky operas are full of interest; they are colorful, inventive, often witty, and they even here and there hark back to Belinsky’s ideas on the social significance of the artwork, though the political connotations of, for instance, The Tale of Tsar Saltan and The Golden Cockerel (both based on narrative poems by Pushkin) are not always easy to disentangle from the frequently ludicrous goings-on on the stage. As dramas, though, they are often sluggish when not actually obscure, the characterization is flat, and the music patchy: at times dazzling, melodious, vital, at other times routine and foursquare. Stravinsky found Rimsky sans reproche, regretting that he was not more “reproachable”—that is, artistically adventurous.17 And indeed there is something a shade too respectable about Rimsky, a slightly self-satisfied correctness of musical deportment which shouts out as a limitation. One thinks of J. Alfred Prufrock, who measured out his life in coffee spoons. Listening to the beautiful but slightly too comfortable opening of The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Rimsky’s penultimate opera, one wonders if this can have been quite what Musorgsky had in mind when he issued his perennial clarion call “Toward new shores!”
What Stasov would have thought of Kitezh, with its curious mixture of pantheism and Christianity, is matter for speculation, since he died in October 1906, four months before its premiere. But he would probably have approved of it. He had adored The Snow Maiden, which has more discreet elements of the same mixture. The more one looks at Stasov’s musical judgments, the more one feels that they were under the sway of general ideas at least as much as good taste: or rather, that they tended to emerge from a somewhat eccentric reconciliation of those very different criteria. On what other grounds could he have praised Balakirev’s attractive but irretrievably minor overtures or his King Lear music or a moribund project like Musorgsky’s “Nettle Mountain” so extravagantly while obstinately refusing to see any merit in Verdi or Wagner? Behind such hierarchies lies a straightforward agenda. Stasov wanted Russian music to do well on its own terms, in the way that a mother wants her children to shine with their own light and will loyally, lovingly refuse to see them as the world sees them. All his geese were swans. But it was also a question of ideology. Stasov, as we have noted, saw Russian music in terms of categories: historical subject matter, legend, folk song, geography (East versus West), rejection of the academy. But he was factious, and could decline to notice these categories in the works of composers of whom, for whatever other reason, he disapproved. All this is naturally a poor basis for durable artistic judgments, and while, of all the Balakirev circle, Stasov was beyond question the most broad-minded, in that he never sought refuge in convention when confronted with the new or the radical, it seems very doubtful whether he had a clear picture of the lasting artistic differences between the various works that, on ideological grounds, he chose to praise.
From our distant point of view, we can distinguish the landmarks more clearly. They are not particularly numerous. Boris Godunov stands out as a masterpiece by any reckoning, and a handful of other finished works by Musorgsky confirm the quality of his genius while hardly adding up to the rounded or consistent output of a great master. Borodin had a God-given talent, yet produced scarcely any completed work of the front rank: one symphony, a short tone poem, a pair of string quartets, and a few songs. Balakirev eventually wrote more, but only a single large-scale work, Tamara, plus two or three songs of unquestionable stature. Cui wrote a few operas and many salon pieces, all of which have faded—for the most part rightly. Only Rimsky-Korsakov produced what looks, on paper, like a respectable harvest of finished, high-quality music, much of which is still regularly played in Russia, though mostly unknown in the West. Of course, there are circumstantial reasons why the kuchka’s work is not much performed abroad. Their most characteristic music is vocal, and non-Russian singers tend to be put off by the unknown language and the Cyrillic script. Much of Borodin’s best music, and some of Musorgsky’s, is in unfinished operas whose performance involves compromises of an inhibiting kind. At bottom, the crude fact is that these interesting composers talked a lot but composed rather little; and often what they composed does not measure up to what they said about it.
The basis of their interest lies nevertheless, of course, in the sheer brilliance of their finest works, however meager their quantity. Boris Godunov and Prince Igor, in its fragmentary state, would be landmarks even if their composers had written nothing else. But isolation of this kind is unhistorical. Musorgsky, Borodin, and the rest belonged to a process that took the halting character it did specifically because of the conditions under which it evolved. Glinka wrote two utterly disparate operas and a lot of second-rate work because his enormous talent fought a mostly losing battle with circumstances that encouraged idleness and devalued technique. Dargomïzhs
ky went through long periods of creative silence and eventually struggled to complete a work whose main impulse was theoretical because there was little or no practical compulsion on him to write at all. If it had not been for Stasov’s ideological tendencies and Balakirev’s bullying nature, the young composers in their circle might well have vanished without trace. Even when they did not strictly, or even approximately, reflect the circle’s ostensible motivating ideas in their work, they thought of themselves as doing so, and this sustained them through those difficult times for an artist when inspiration languishes and technique serves as an engine to keep the car on the road. But the key to all these composers’ music is precisely the lack of compulsion, the feeling that in the end nobody minded what, or whether, you wrote, nobody outside your own small group was waiting for the next product of your genius. One has only to compare the profile of their music in the sixties and seventies with the steady productivity of the conservatory-taught Tchaikovsky or of Rimsky-Korsakov in his years as a conservatory professor to understand the importance of preparedness and expectation in the work of the creative artist.
But if the tempo of the kuchka’s writing stuttered, its focus shifted from side to side like that of the leisurely traveller who does not have to get to any particular town by nightfall. And such wayfarers notice and are drawn to things that the regular tourist or the commercial traveller is likely to reject or overlook. The waywardness of much of the Balakirev circle’s work has often been put down to plain incompetence. But as I have argued earlier, ineptitude is a weak explanation of artistic originality. A stronger account would suggest that the absence of compulsion—both of the kind imposed by good schooling and of the kind imposed by other people’s expectations—freed them to follow their ideas into terrain not mapped by conventional theory, and in turn forced them to evolve their own methodologies to deal with the situations that arose when they got there. Here, though, one must be selective. Cui, whatever his intellectual interest in the circle’s ideas, derived hardly anything from them creatively; his music (like his criticism) is simply that of a limited mind. Balakirev composed with flair but soon lost heart; his period of withdrawal, followed by a protracted “old age” spent revising early works and composing piano miniatures, suggests a psychological inability to confront the perils of absolute freedom. It is in the work of the other three composers that one finds the gems of originality that not only in themselves justify all the theorizing about Russian history and the people, all the tirades against the conservatory and German professors, all the backbiting at Serov, Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and the rest, but also lead on toward new shores, as Musorgsky dreamed, in the work of their successors.
Some but by no means all of these beneficiaries were themselves Russian. Musorgsky was a political hero in the Soviet Union on account of his supposed populism; but his musical influence seems to have been spasmodic at best, perhaps because his unorthodox style was hard to take further without infringing the narrow criteria of Soviet arts policy. It comes out most clearly in the darker vocal works of Shostakovich, his From Jewish Folk Poetry and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth symphonies. Under socialist realism, Rimsky-Korsakov was an easier path to follow. He naturally influenced his pupils, not always for the better. Many of them, from Lyadov and Glazunov onward, were as inhibited as he became by excessive regard for correct procedure. But nearly all of them profited from his brilliant grasp of the orchestra; Prokofiev, one of Rimsky’s last pupils, was impatient of his teaching but admired his late operas and learned lessons from them that are hard to detect amid the fire and fury of his early piano works but are more noticeable in his lush student opera, Maddalena. None of this, however, would have given Rimsky-Korsakov more than passing significance in one particularly murky phase of twentieth-century Russian music. His great claim to more than parochial influence is through the work of a pupil who specifically did not study at the conservatory but whom Rimsky-Korsakov took on as a private student and to whom he never gave formal tuition in theory but taught only by precept and through direct engagement with musical scores—his own and the pupil’s.
This was Igor Stravinsky. It was Stravinsky’s good fortune never to be subjected to the grind of conservatory course work or examination, never to be surrounded (and probably crushed) by what he himself later called “these ephemeral, prize-winning, front-page types” who tend to dominate musical academies in all countries. In a sense Stravinsky was the negative proof of Stasov’s theory that conservatories destroy creative talent. Rimsky seems to have taught him much as Balakirev might have done, by setting him graded tasks, going through his scores with him, tinkering with them, adding details in his own hand. But the kuchka-like appearance was deceptive. Rimsky-Korsakov in old age was a systematic, well-organized teacher who did not encourage his pupils in dilettante habits of work.
His musical influence on Stravinsky was almost painfully evident from the start. The young man imitated Rimsky’s orchestral method, which he had studied at close quarters in working on the scores of the master’s late operas Pan Voyevoda and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. His first mature orchestral works, the Scherzo fantastique (1907–8) and Fireworks (1908), are orchestrally chips off the late-Rimskian block, with much the same glitter and wizardry of scoring that Rimsky himself was deploying at that very time in The Golden Cockerel. More importantly, the harmonic language of these sparkling works is no less derivative. Both make heavy use of the octatonic (ton-poluton) scale that had been a standard device with Rimsky for depicting magical or supernatural events for the past forty years, and both adopt the slithery chromaticism of his portraits of evil sorcery in another recent opera, Kashchey the Immortal, and of the weird, lunatic court of King Dodon in The Golden Cockerel. Stravinsky’s own Kashchey work, his ballet The Firebird (Zhar ptitsa) composed for the Ballets Russes just after Rimsky-Korsakov’s death, derives a good deal from the same works, though it takes ideas from other Russian sources as well. In any case, much of the idiom of Firebird goes back to Glinka, the magical writing in Ruslan, and the folk-song variation treatments in Kamarinskaya.
None of this would be of particular interest if the influence had been confined to Stravinsky’s early works. But though the Rimsky sound quickly vanishes from his music, the effects of the method remain. Stravinsky continued to use octatonic harmony in one way or another for the rest of his life, particularly (but by no means exclusively) in works with a traceable Russian angle. Petrushka, his second ballet, has long stretches of pure octatony, again standing for the magical, transformational aspects of the story—the coming to life of the puppets—exactly as in the original Sadko. In The Rite of Spring, the complex inner structures of the octatonic scale underlie the peculiar layered texture of the score (something that can be seen on the page as well as heard in performance). Later—in works like the Symphony of Psalms and the Symphony in Three Movements—the scale loses its magical associations altogether and instead often seems to hark back more generally to the composer’s Russian origins. At the same time what started as an essentially coloristic device with a particular dramatic symbolism turns out to be a powerful resource with far-reaching implications for a modern harmonic palette.
Stravinsky’s harmony, however, like that of any well-organized composer, cannot be understood in isolation from the linear (melodic) and rhythmic aspects of his music. As a melodist, Stravinsky starts out as a true kuchkist. In Petrushka there are so many folk songs—both urban and rural—that Russian musicians and even audiences tended to regard it as a set of arrangements, and were astonished by the Western view of it as an original masterpiece. The Rite of Spring is likewise heavily dependent on folk song, but more disguised and fragmented, and with irregularities that lead in turn to the sorts of rhythmic convulsion that are perhaps the most famous thing about the work. Stravinsky was soon investigating these kinds of irregularity in smaller, more intimate works—songs and choruses—as well as in dance works with sung texts. He had discovered, he tells us, that “o
ne important characteristic of Russian popular verse is that the accents of the spoken verse are ignored when sung,” and “the recognition of the musical possibilities inherent in this fact was one of the most rejoicing discoveries of my life.”18 But the idea that the manipulation of textual accent might have interesting musical consequences was not Stravinsky’s discovery. It was another kuchkist idea, and it had first cropped up in the songs and operas of Musorgsky.
Of all the kuchka composers Musorgsky was the most inclined to ignore the normal rules and procedures of textbook composition. Rimsky-Korsakov had always been a systematic worker who wrote as correctly as he knew how, which he admits was not very correctly until he became a conservatory professor and embarked on a serious program of theoretical study. Borodin was neither a pedant nor a natural innovator, but a gifted, civilized musician who saw no reason not to explore unusual colorings within a broadly conventional discourse. But Musorgsky had a naturally exploratory mind and no special brief for best practice. His songs, in particular, often go their own way in search of what he regarded as the true or the real. Sometimes they model themselves on ordinary speech rhythms and contours; sometimes they mimic the eccentricities of the child, the simpleton, the drunkard, or the merely distracted. His songs can be obsessively even in their values, like “Darling Savishna” or “The Seminarian,” or they can be almost anarchically free, like “With Nyanya,” where the bar lines are determined by wayward verbal accents. Always his harmony reflects the mood or context. It can be perfectly regular and by the book, or it can be volatile and unpredictable, or it can be a wonderful, disconcerting combination of these qualities.
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 55