Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  As for the floating accent exploited by Stravinsky in his Russian songs and the ballet Les Noces (among various other works), this is already a feature of the folk choruses in Boris Godunov. In the very first chorus, Musorgsky sometimes moves the verbal stress onto a weak beat of the bar, usually with a melodic accent of some kind, while placing the bar line counterintuitively on an unaccented syllable; for example:

  The actual barring of course reflects the fact that folk song knows no such boundaries, but moves freely according to its own internal melodic and verbal patterns.19 But even these often do not coincide with each other, perhaps because over the years different words have been fitted to the one tune without too much concern for anything as inhibiting as correct scansion or prosody. On the whole, Musorgsky’s way of handling this device feels quite relaxed and natural, whereas Stravinsky treats it more self-consciously, accenting the one word in different ways, and adding multiple metric patterns in the instrumental accompaniment. In fact one might even argue that the so-called polyrhythms of The Rite of Spring (a work that preceded the “rejoicing discovery”) are in part a product of this kind of floating accent, though their direct origin lies in the habit—also folk-song based—of shortening and lengthening individual figures in a given melody. Behind this, in turn, lies the idea of endless repetition, which is such a feature of peasant music, with its singing games, its verse-after-verse storytelling, and its dance-till-you-drop fiddle tunes. Mechanical repetition is a feature of all folk-based music, and Russian music is no exception. From Glinka (the wedding chorus and Finn’s aria in Ruslan, as well as Kamarinskaya), through the Polovtsian Dances, Pictures from an Exhibition, Tamara, the finales of Sheherazade and Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, up to the final scene of Stravinsky’s Firebird, the device is more or less routine. Stravinsky himself transformed it into a new form of rhythmic discourse by applying to it the mobile accents and the shortenings and lengthenings he found in Russian folk poetry: hence the “Danse sacrale” and the whole of Renard and Les Noces, and on from there to music of his that no longer has anything to do with ethnic culture, but cannot shed its Russian ancestry.20

  All the three main kuchkists have had their admirers and imitators both in and out of Russia. But it is Musorgsky who has been most praised and studied by composers who have found themselves consciously at odds with the conservatory and its routines. Of these by far the most significant is Debussy. As a young man in the early 1880s Debussy had spent consecutive summers in Russia as pianist to Tchaikovsky’s patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, and a few years later he borrowed, but probably did not study, a vocal score of Boris Godunov that Saint-Saëns had brought back from St. Petersburg. But his close acquaintance with Musorgsky’s music probably dates from the 1890s. He perhaps heard the first French performances of various songs, including The Nursery, in Paris in February 1896, and five years later he published a short article on The Nursery. “It is,” he wrote, “a masterpiece …

  Nobody has spoken to that which is best in us with such tenderness and depth; he is quite unique, and will be renowned for an art that suffers from no stultifying rules or artificialities. Never before has such a refined sensibility expressed itself with such simple means: it is almost as if he were an inquisitive savage discovering music for the first time, guided in each step forward by his own emotions. There is no question of any such thing as “form,” or, at least, any forms there are have such complexity that they are impossible to relate to the accepted forms—the “official” ones. He composes in a series of bold strokes, but his incredible gift of foresight means that each stroke is bound to the next by a mysterious thread. Sometimes he can conjure up a disquieting impression of darkness so powerful that it wrings tears from one’s heart.21

  To trace Musorgsky’s effect on Debussy’s music is by no means easy, because stylistically they have rather little in common. One can say that the free declamation in Pelléas et Mélisande was influenced by Boris Godunov, but in the end the fundamental differences between the accent structures of French and Russian—the one accent-light and even, the other heavily accented, with clusters of discarded syllables—inevitably mean that the flavor of the two works differs radically even before one considers the contrasts in sensibility. One has to remember, too, that even as late as 1902, when Pelléas was first performed, Debussy had heard not a note of Boris, whether or not he had seen the score.

  Where he can be said to have used Musorgsky, if not as a model, at least as an excuse, is in precisely those areas that he singles out in his Nursery article: the willingness to avoid “official” forms, to compose in a seemingly episodic, fragmentary way that nevertheless creates its own intricate forms sui generis. Such forms are a particular feature of Debussy’s piano music: for instance, “Hommage à Rameau” in the first book of Images, or “Et la lune descend” in the second book, or several of the preludes. Elsewhere in the article he makes pointed observations about harmony. “For Musorgsky,” he notes, “one chord is often sufficient (although it would have seemed poor to M. What’s-his-name). Or else he uses a modulation so individual that it wouldn’t even have been in the books of M. So-and-so.” These remarks not only suggest Debussy’s own harmonic practice, they also recall a series of conversations he had had with his old Conservatoire professor Ernest Guiraud at the end of the eighties, before he had more than glanced at any music of Musorgsky’s. At one point, Debussy had gone to the piano and played a series of intervals. “What’s that?” Guiraud asked. “Incomplete chords, floating,” Debussy replied. “You have to drown the tonality. One can travel where one wishes and leave by any door.” “But when I play this [he plays a dissonant, French sixth chord] it has to resolve.” “I don’t see that it should. Why?” Finally, Guiraud tries out a string of parallel triads (as if anticipating Debussy’s own “Sirènes” or “La Cathédrale engloutie”). “Do you find this lovely?” “Yes, yes, yes!” In the end the broadminded Guiraud concedes: “I would agree with you in regard to an exceptional person who has discovered a discipline for himself and who has an instinct which he is able to impose. But how would you teach music to others?”22 As a description of Musorgsky and a catalogue of his harmonic methods, by a musician who had probably never heard of him, this would be hard to beat.

  Certain things in Debussy’s early songs suggest, not Musorgsky, but Borodin: for instance, the clashing whole tones at the start of the late-eighties Baudelaire setting, “Le Jet d’eau,” a memory perhaps of Borodin’s “Sleeping Princess,” a song Debussy may have found himself accompanying during his von Meck summers. But one finds much more undigested Russianism in the music of Debussy’s younger contemporary Maurice Ravel. Ravel, like his great compatriot, was susceptible to the naturalism of the word setting in The Nursery, which seems clearly to have had an impact on his Histoires naturelles (1906) and the opera L’Heure espagnole (1907–9), though as with Debussy the effect is blunted by the more liquid character of the French language, just as Musorgsky’s brusquely dissonant harmonies translate into something smoother and more insinuating under the Gallic touch. Ravel, of course, famously made a brilliant orchestration of Musorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition (1922), and he also orchestrated two large chunks of Khovanshchina (in collaboration with Stravinsky) for Diaghilev’s Paris production in 1913. But the technique he brought to these exercises owed more to Rimsky-Korsakov than to Musorgsky, whose less showy orchestral manner would have been largely unknown to him at that time. On the whole, Ravel was more inclined than Debussy to appropriate elements of style or technique that happened to take his fancy. For instance, his Rapsodie espagnole of 1907–8 unashamedly borrows orchestral effects from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Christmas Eve, excerpts from which the composer had himself conducted at the Paris Opéra the previous May; and the influence of the finale of Rimsky’s Sheherazade on the concluding “Danse générale” of Daphnis et Chloé is overt to the point of plagiarism. Yet curiously, Ravel is able to absorb these thefts into his own style without disrupting it. As wit
h Stravinsky, there was a streak of kleptomania in his creative process. But the stolen objects sit happily on his musical mantelpiece like the objets trouvés of the world traveller (which, as it happens, Ravel was not).

  Echoes of the kuchka have been heard in many other corners of twentieth-century music. It is a critical commonplace that Leoš Janácek was influenced by Musorgsky, both in the dialogue character of his operatic word setting and in the fact that he derived his technique partly from a field study of demotic speech. But though a passionate admirer of Russian literature and lover of all things Russian (he wrote two operas on Russian subjects), he seems to have been ignorant of Musorgsky before 1910, and did not hear Boris Godunov until 1923, five years before his death. A year later he told the New York Times critic Olin Downes that he “admired it very much,” but denied any influence.23 Oddly enough, he had always displayed more enthusiasm for precisely those Russian composers least admired by the kuchka: Tchaikovsky and, of all people, Anton Rubinstein. His biographer John Tyrrell argues that the late emergence of Janácek’s individual manner in the late nineties was a direct outcome of a trip he made to Russia in the summer of 1896. But specifically of the kuchka there is no sign. As for the circle’s impact on English music, I have noted a similarity between the early orchestral music of Balakirev (specifically his King Lear music) and certain works of the English ruralists, Vaughan Williams in particular. But Vaughan Williams was already writing in this style before he can have known any of the folk-song-based works of the kuchka, so the resemblance must be largely coincidental.

  In any case, to judge an art by its influence, supposed or otherwise, is a vain exercise. The detectable traces are almost by definition the most superficial, whereas the way in which an artist of any subtlety will process those experiences that touch him most deeply is an impenetrable question of creative psychology. At best we can know what the artist wants us to know, which is about as likely to be the whole truth as any other confession of the inner soul, even assuming that the artist himself has much idea of what actually makes him tick. The surest external evidence of the power that resides in the spasmodic, often unsatisfactory, and frustratingly incomplete work of this extraordinary group of dilettante geniuses lies in the sheer quality of their admirers, at least as much as in what the admirers made of their admiration. To have enabled a Stravinsky (as Rimsky-Korsakov palpably did, and the others did by example); to have been praised and copied by a Debussy or a Ravel: these would be accolades that would take most composers to their graves happy.

  But their true monument remains their own music, which, amid much that is fragmentary, poorly considered, or frankly second-rate, also includes some of the most powerfully original and brilliantly executed works by any nineteenth-century composer. As already suggested, if Musorgsky had written nothing but Boris Godunov he would still be a towering figure; but in fact he also composed more than sixty songs, of an inventive richness that has gone substantially unrecognized because their texts are in (and depend on) a language strange to Western singers and audiences. Partly for the same reason, Rimsky-Korsakov’s fifteen operas are largely unknown in the West, even though their musical and dramatic interest is at least the equal of that of some operas that are regularly staged here. For The Maid of Pskov or The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh not to have been mounted by any professional British company since the Second World War is a sad comment on the limited view of repertory planners. Few, certainly, would argue the same way for Cui’s William Ratcliff or Angelo. Yet many worse pieces have been staged by fringe companies of the Opera Rara type and have proved to be as bad as their neglect has implied. Prince Igor and Khovanshchina are problematical, of course, but even in their scaffolded state they contain whole stretches of music—even whole acts—that one longs to experience more often in the theatre. Balakirev’s Tamara is a masterpiece, seldom programmed. His songs, and Borodin’s, are not numerous, but they include some of the most beautiful and refined lyrical utterances by any nineteenth-century composer.

  Vladimir Stasov no doubt harmed his case by overstating it. But the battle he fought is one we can recognize. “Who knows,” he asked at the end of his 1882 essay, “perhaps in a few years the ideas, taste and sympathies of the public and its spokesmen, the music critics, will also change from top to bottom itself, with a corresponding change in their attitude toward our new school, the heirs of Glinka.”24 The attitude he complained about was hostility. Today it is indifference or trivialization: the mentality of the “Russian Spectacular” or the “White Nights Prom.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Survivors

  Stasov died in 1906, eighty-two years old but still at his desk at the St. Petersburg Public Library, still fighting old battles as the clash of arms receded into the past. Russian art had long since moved into a new phase. Mir iskusstva—the World of Art magazine—had come and gone; symbolism and art for art’s sake had displaced Stasov’s beloved realism as the vehicles for innovation and the war on academicism. Though for some reason sympathetic to the heady musical vapors of Alexander Skryabin, and, more understandably, the writings and personality of the young Maxim Gorky, he loathed most of the new art. He described Diaghilev’s second World of Art exhibition in January 1898 as “utterly idiotic, outrageous, antiartistic, and repulsive.” He told the artist Yelizaveta Boehm that “I am generally very much discouraged with all our artistic affairs, with the victory of falsehood, filth and stupidity. It seems that I would be better off keeping quiet and no longer interfering with anything. What’s the point in fighting two or three mosquitoes, bedbugs, or lice—even a whole hundred—if the general dirtiness and wretchedness multiply them more and more with each passing minute!!”1 He did, nevertheless, keep writing. His final article was a defense of an old love, Schumann, against press attacks on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in July 1906. The article came out on 28 September. A fortnight later he himself was dead.

  Rimsky-Korsakov, though twenty years his junior, outlived him by less than two years. He had become disillusioned in a different way. After reading Stasov’s “Twenty-five Years of Russian Art,” he had suggested to the critic Alexander Ossovsky that he write “an article called ‘Fact and Fiction on the “New Russian School.” ’ ”2 And one day in 1904, at a dinner after a Belyayev memorial concert, he had turned to Stasov with a tragic look on his face and blurted out:

  Do you know what it is that, amid all these festivities, toasts, congratulations, and speeches, is secretly tormenting and tormenting me, deep down, relentlessly? Do you know? Today I’ll tell you. Look over there, that one sitting opposite us with his napkin tucked into his collar, and who is making all these wonderful, wise, pithy little speeches (that was Glazunov himself)—he is the last of us. With him Russian music, the whole New Russian period ends!!! It’s horrible!3

  Stasov had replied that he himself had long thought the same. But he may have overlooked—deliberately or otherwise—the implied criticism of Glazunov himself, the suggestion that the end, the failure of promise, was embodied not just in the lack of successors, but in Glazunov’s own limitations. There was, in any case, a streak of pessimism, even fatalism, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s makeup. Of all the kuchka, he—not Stasov—was the most politically minded, the most apt to feel the inertia and futility of Russian public life at the start of the new century. In 1905, at the time of the student demonstrations and the forced closure of all academic institutions in the wake of the disturbances of January and February that year, he sided openly with the students and was dismissed from his conservatory post in consequence. Three years later, mortally sick with angina pectoris, he confided to his friend and chronicler Vasily Yastrebtsev that his heart was weak and his body worn out. “As you see,” he added stoically, “everything is proceeding normally; it’s all moving toward a single end.”4 Three months later, in June 1908, he died at his dacha at Lyubensk, not living to witness the Moscow premiere in 1909 of his final opera, The Golden Cockerel, with its ludicrous Tsar Dodon and hi
s inept generals, nothing but “delirium, daydream, a pale specter, emptiness,” as the Astrologer’s epilogue informs us. Nor can he have had much presentiment of the spectacular success of his least conventional pupil, Igor Stravinsky, with his Firebird another two years in the future. But that was on another stage, and in another country.

  Balakirev also died without knowing about Stravinsky’s success with the subject he himself had for so long contemplated as an opera. He died of pleurisy in May 1910, four weeks before the Paris triumph of The Firebird. But for a long time before that he had been a marginal figure in St. Petersburg’s musical life. His seventieth birthday, in 1906, had been virtually ignored, and a concert of his music in February 1909 had been cancelled for lack of ticket sales. By 1910 only César Cui, of the original circle, survived to remind the world, in a brief obituary in the Birzheviye vedomosti, of Balakirev’s crucial role in the emergence of the kuchka half a century before.5 Talking to a reporter, he recalled their first meeting in 1855, Balakirev’s subsequent dominant position in the circle, his critical methods and curious judgments:

  God, how disrespectful we were to Mozart and Mendelssohn, how crazy about Schumann, then Liszt and Berlioz, but above all stood Chopin and Glinka. [Balakirev] nursed us like a broody hen with her chicks. All our early works passed through his strict censorship. He wouldn’t let anything be printed until he had looked it over and approved it. Soon each of us left the circle, but to his dying day Balakirev would insist that only what we had written under his wing was any good.