Musorgsky V:

The Man

Many witnesses testify to Musorgsky's charm and wit, gentleness, kindliness, and lack of malice. (At the same time, however, he was the most pugnacious of the Kuchkists in their fight against such "Germanist" musicians as Tchaikovsky and Rubenstein). Almost the only negative testimony about Musorgsky's character before his alcoholic decline comes from Nadezha Purgold (Rimsky-Korsakoff's wife), but it seems pretty clear that Musorgsky's supposed arrogance and standoffishness were simply his ways of escaping marriage to Nadezha's sister, Alexandra.

Alexandra was a wonderful person and a good match, but Musorgsky was adamantly opposed to marriage. It has been speculated that he was gay, but there are also good reasons to believe that he had been influenced by the Narodnik spokesman Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who recommended that radicals avoid the encumbrance of marriage. While Musorgsky's degree of politicization is uncertain, it seems most likely that he avoided marriage in order to dedicate himself more fully to music.

Musorgsky was of aristocratic descent, but really quite poor. He ended his military career at age 19, and when the Czar's decree freed the serfs three years later, Musorgsky's brother Filaret got almost the whole estate, which left Modest pretty much on his own. While Musorgsky was usually treated very leniently by his employers, the civil service jobs he got were not sinecures but real clerical jobs, and they paid very poorly. Musorgsky also earned very little from his music, and his marginal status among the working poor may well explain his refusal to marry (and perhaps some of his other peculiarities too). Sometimes it seems that none of Musorgsky's contemporaries, most of whom were in reasonably comfortable circumstances, really understood how poor he was, or what the consequences of his poverty were.

Musorgsky formed intense attachments both with men and with women, and several times he fell into despair when a friendship was ended by death or weakened by marriage or relocation. Music was almost always the central theme in Musorgsky's personal relationships and social involvements, and for him music was to an unusual degree a collective or collaborative activity. In St. Petersburg there was a dense network of musical amateurs meeting in salons, and at these salons Musorgsky and other composers would perform their new pieces and ask for criticisms -- Mussorgsky even would compose music during the salon itself, playing each section for the attendees as he finished it. He frequently solicited advice about his new music, and on more than one occasion was devastated when a friend failed to give him the expected support. He was aware of his dependency or vulnerability: "Moreover, I am discovering in myself something that is already obvious -- a kind of looseness, a softness; you called it doughiness, I now recall, and I was a little hurt, because dough has the quality of retaining the impression of dirty fingers as well as clean fingers...." (Leyda, p. 39) He descried his attitude both to formal teaching and to collaboration thus: "I am an 'enemy of advice' really because in my humble opinion each man is an individual .... Consequently, again in my humble opinion, conference, that is, the exchange of ideas and viewpoints, is the best soil for the free acquisition of that which is called advice." (L 146-7).

For Musorgsky, these salons served as a substitute for a conservatory. All members of the Kuchka were amateurs (except for Rimsky-Korsakoff, the youngest of them, and only after the group had effectively dissolved), and to a greater or lesser degree they deliberately rejected formal training. In turn, the school musicians (of whom only Tchaikovsky and Anton Rubenstein are remembered any more) were by and large hostile to the Kuchkists, and Musorgsky could not expect much support from the Russian musical establishment. And in fact, Musorgsky could not even rely on support from the other members of the Kuchka -- all except Borodin slighted Mussorgsky at one time or another.

What Musorgsky did was use his charm to put together a friendship-based informal support group which helped him with advice, emotional support, and (I assume) tactfully given material support. His awareness of the importance of this support group probably accounts for the oft-noted fact that he was absolutely crushed by the deaths of friends, which not only took away his friends, but also threatened his ability to continue to make music. Kompaneisky reports that at the death of Petrov (an eminent bass singer who strongly supported Musorgsky), Musorgsky cried "With grandfather's death, I've lost everything. I've lost the support of my bitter life." (O7, L 367-8). And he mourned the marriages of his friends just as much, since they took his friends away from him: "And I am left alone -- so, I'll be alone. You have to die alone anyway....." he wrote in 1875 when Golenishchev-Kutuzov's married (L 322-3).

At the end of his life Musorgsky succumbed to alcoholism, which had intermittently been a problem before then. He seems to have produced almost nothing during the last three years before his death at the age of 42, and his actual productive career -- counting from the first composition to become part of the repertoire -- the song "King Saul" of 1863 -- was 15 years or less. During that time he wrote two versions of Boris Godunov, three incomplete operas (of which Khovanshchina is a masterpiece), Pictures at an Exhibition, Night on Bald Mountain, and several dozen songs. We can only wish that he had done more, but even with this small oeuvre he surpasses and most of the non-Russian musicians of his time, and all of the Russians except Tchaikovsky. As he said, his goal was quality rather than quantity, and his works were original and influential in a way that Tchaikovsky's were not. (In his own words, speaking of a most prolific contemporary and adversary who is now almost forgotten: "What prerogatives does [Anton] Rubenstein have for such narrowness? -- glory and money, and quantity rather than quality."
 

Musorgsky VI:

the Russian Tradition
 

Musorgsky was the culmination and triumph of Russian musical nationalism, a decades-long movement begun by Glinka and continued by Dargomyzhky, Balakirev, and their disciples. Balakirev's kuchka (Cui, Musorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakoff, aided by the librettist and polemicist Stasov) supported the Russian cause against the Germans and their allies in the Russian conservatory (notably Anton Rubenstein and P.I. Tchaikovsky)..

The kuchka chronology goes something like this. By 1861 all of its members had met, and they were working together under Balakirev's leadership. The next year Balakirev started the Free Music School to compete with the Russian Music School (later to become the Conservatory). In 1866 a journalistic piece by Stasov introduced the kuchka to the world under that name. In 1867, however, the issue became confused when Balakirev was hired by the Russian Music Society upon Rubenstein's resignation. But Balakirev broke permanently with the RMS the next year, and for the next four or five years relations were hostile, with nasty lampoons exchanged in 1870 and 1871.

About this time, however, the kuchka itself began to break up -- Rimsky-Korsakoff had already felt doubts in 1868, and by 1871, according to Borodin, Balakirev had alienated almost everyone. In 1872 Balakirev's Free Music School closed down. The next year Rimsky-Korsakoff joined the Conservatory, and Balakirev left the music world a disappointed man. Cui and Borodin continued with their day jobs (respectively as an artillery and fortifications expert, and as a research chemist -- the discoverer of the Aldol reaction and the Borodin [or Hunsdiecker] reaction). Only Musorgsky remained to fight on.

In retrospect it's hard not to feel that the whole fight was pretty silly, and was primarily the product of Balakirev's difficult personality (with quite a bit of help from Stasov and Musorgsky). As late as 1867 Balakirev was still able to work with the RMS, and five years later the battle was over -- ultimately,Rimsky-Korsakoff would teach at the Conservatory, even the ever-so-cosmopolitan Tchaikovsky would write some works on Russian themes.

From the point of view of Musorgsky's reception, it's hard to decide whether the polemical environment harmed him by making him unnecessary enemies, or helped him by getting him publicity and giving him protectors and supporters. (I would guess that on the net it did him more harm than good.) However, I think that it is clear that Musorgsky's unexpected and unlikely achievement (how many other great self-taught amateur composers are there?) would not have been possible without two generations of advocacy for an authentically national Russian music, including the entire bodies of work of the dozen or so composers who tried to make that music a reality .

The pathos of history is thus made manifest. Serov, Dargomizhky, Cui,  Rubenstein and the others all hoped for musical fame, but by now they're mostly just supporting players and names on a list. Glinka, Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakoff still appear on concert programs of the older type, but they were already obsolete in my youth in the distant Fifties, when I was listening to Scheherazade and the Capriccio Espagnol out in the provinces. By now almost everything of that time has, like Rome, crumbled into ruin.  Only Musorgsky and his arch-enemy Tchaikovsky are regularly heard today.

Musorgsky VI

His Reception

At the beginning, the senior members of the kuchka (Balakirev, Cui, and Stasov, the group's spokesman) all thought that Musorgsky was an idiot, and said so. Reviews of Musorgsky's works in the musical press, except for Stasov's, were generally mixed or negative, and even after Musorgsky's death, when Rimsky-Korsakoff prepared Musorgsky's manuscripts for publication, he felt obligated to revise them heavily. Among the Germanists of the Russian Music Society, of course, the situation was worse: Tchaikovsky basically despised him, and after a certain point Rubenstein ignored him entirely because he believed that Musorgsky had insulted him. Borodin and Dargomizhky were the only composers among Musorgsky's contemporaries who are not on record denigrating his music in some way, and perhaps that just means that my research hasn't been thorough enough.

Yet almost everyone, even Tchaikovsky, granted Musorgsky's enormous talent, only regretting what they regarded as his technical incompetence. Especially in the cases of Rimsky-Korsakoff and Cui, envy cannot been ruled out as a motive: Boris Godunov came on the heels of the failure of Cui's opera Ratcliff, and it is said that in when Rimsky-Korsakoff wrote his opera Mozart and Salieri (after Pushkin), he thought of his own relationship with Musorgsky.

Musorgsky's support did not come from the official musical community, but from a large group of personal friends, amateur musicians, and singers. (Composers do not regard singers as musicians; they're just genetic freaks with beautiful voices.) The general musical audience, too, seems to have responded very well to Musorgsky's works, when they were able to hear them.

The irony, of course, is that it was Musorgsky who would be honored by the musicians of the future, and it was precisely for his "mistakes" that he would be honored. When Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky finally were to free music from the curse of the German Seriousness, their models would be two musical amateurs: Modest Musorgsky and Erik Satie. These two men gave the lie to the pedant's slogan "If you are going to break the rules, first you must learn them". Musorgsky was mostly self-taught (and his sometime teacher, Balakirev, was entirely self-taught), and the evidence is that Musorgsky never knew the rules because he'd never seen any reason to learn them. (In his middle age, after he had already had some success as a composer, Satie would to the conservatory to study counterpoint. It is uncertain to me that this was a good thing.)

Recently, as part of the deSovietification program, Musorgsky has been "demythologized". We are told that he wasn't really a Narodnik or leftist, as the Communists claimed; that he wasn't really treated badly by the Opera Society or by the Censor; and most of his problems came from his own drunkenness. All this is arguable, but the fact remains that one of the two most fruitfully original (and best) European composers of second half of the nineteenth century, lived his life in poverty and was never fully appreciated even by his fellow kuchkists. In retrospect, we can see that the most appropriate response to Musorgsky's work would have been unconditional admiration. That sounds like unreasonable demand, but in fact, many of his amateur listeners did admire his work unconditionally. It was only the people who counted, the professionals, who didn't.

Appendix II: Tchaikovsky

There was no love lost between Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky. (Musorgsky called Tchaikovsky "Sadik Pasha", after the Polish anti-Czarist renegade Czajkowski, who after his defeat converted to Islam and settled in Turkey.) Musorgsky's musical realism was diametrically opposed to Tchaikowsky's "religion of absolute beauty".

In his diaries, Tchaikovsky wrote this about Dargomizhky's Stone Guest:

Tchaikovsky's very mixed feelings about Musorgsky are revealed in a letter to his patron Madame von Meck:

Tchaikovsky starts off agreeing with the patron he's dependent upon, and later on gradually lets it slip that his feelings are not quite so entirely negative as hers. It was Musorgsky's bad luck not to have that kind of tact, and of course, he had no Mme. von Meck either.

Musorgsky VIII:
His Originality

When I try to get people to listen to Musorgsky, the main problem is that to most people his music sounds like generic XIXc romantic opera, albeit with a definite Russian flavor. Not only does this prejudgment impede their appreciation of Musorgsky's music, but it also makes it impossible for them to understand his place in music history. Why did almost all of the composers of his time feel obliged to question Musorgsky's competence as a musician, and why did composers from a later era (starting with Debussy) turn the tables and admire him as a musical revolutionary?

When I began reading about Musorgsky I already about his use of modes and of asymmetrical and irregular meters, I knew that he was a nationalist, and I knew that he had new ideas about how words should be set and about how opera should be staged. However, other composers also did most of these things, and while Musorgsky's nationalism and musical realism did raise some eyebrows, even his Russian nationalist friends had serious doubts about his work. I think that that the specific thing which no one could quite accept was Musorgsky's flouting of the rules of common-practice harmony and counterpoint, which even rebels like Balakirev considered to be the "laws of music". Musorgsky (who was almost entirely self-taught) apparently never even bothered to learned these rules, simply because he didn't see the need for them.

After the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert in 1827 and 1828, classical music was at an impasse. Beethoven had set the standard against which his successors were judged, and between 1828 and Musorgsky's time, composers tried various ways of doing something new: greater instrumental virtuosity, new orchestration techniques, free-form program music (usually based on literary models), the use of national themes, increased chromaticism, specialization on short forms for piano and voice, and above all, a move toward opera. Nonetheless, during the fifty years after Beethoven's death no composer came close to matching his achievement, except possibly Wagner -- and for French or Russian nationalist musicians, Wagner was just reaffirming the hated German domination.

Musorgsky's innovations were regarded by his fellow-composers as errors. They probably had good reason to think this way, but this just means that Musorgsky (like Satie) is a powerful counterexample to a conservatory claim that "In order to break the rules, you must first know the rules." In any case, as I understand, the crucial rules he broke were the voice-leading rules (the prohibition of parallel fifths and octaves and the proper introduction and resolution of dissonances) plus the rules forbidding abrupt modulations. The average listener does not hear these violations (except perhaps as a "sound" or "flavor"), and the evidence I've seen seems to show that his works were well-accepted by audiences, which included many talented amateur musicians as well as professional singers and instrumentalists.  Only teachers, critics and composers found Musorgsky's innovations objectionable.

By the end of the XIXc, the "laws of music" were strangling music: the well-codified rules of the the symphonic genre, the sonata form, voice-leading, and functional common-practice harmony. Musorgsky did not write symphonies or sonatas at all and ignored the rules of voice-leading, dissonance-resolution, and modulation, thus producing a textured melodic, harmonic music without internal voices. His use of the modes drew him away from functional harmony and its tendency toward vigorous movement by fifths and fourths, and his asymmetrical rhythms also tended to weaken the strong forward impulsion of classicism and romanticism. Dissonance and chromaticism were used as colors, rather than as elements in rule-governed, progressive formal structures, and a strolling or wandering movement replaced the mechanical or the robotic movement characteristic of classicism (for example, in Bach's English Suites -- or for a more contemporary example, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive). Each musical moment (rhythmically, harmonically, and tonally) was much more a particular act or event, and much less the logical culmination of what went before.

The "laws of music" honored even by Balakirev only defined a style -- they were never laws. Even the revolutionaries submitted themselves to this style, and even at the cost of stunting their own work. When Musorgsky broke away and did new and original work, not only the forces of orthodoxy, but even those of heterodoxy, were taken aback. They knew that there was something there, but they couldn't fully accept it. The classical music paradigm had been brought to such a degree of perfection that nothing could be done with it, but that was of no concern to the academic paradigm-enforcers.

Musorgsky had not been dead for long before Debussy discovered his work (and Satie's), and music was never the same again. With a little luck, Musorgsky (born in 1839) would have lived to see his triumph. But that was not to be.

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