MUSSORGSKY
MODEST MUSSORGSKY
(1839–1881)
London Philharmonic Orchestra – Prelude to ‘Khovanshchina’
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997
Mussorgsky’s genius went largely unrecognised while he was alive. Born well off, he died at the age of barely 42 from the effects of alcoholism and poverty. Famously slovenly and chaotic as both a man and an artist, he planned far more works than he ever completed and, although he was a member of the group of Russian nationalist composers known as ‘The Mighty Handful’ along with Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Cui, his music was more individual and humanistic than theirs. If it had not been for his friend Rimsky-Korsakov’s heroic feats of revision and orchestration after his death, Mussorgsky’s stature might well have remained one of the music world’s best kept secrets.
His reputation today rests on a number of key works. Apart from some accomplished songs including a setting of Goethe’s poem The Song of the Flea and the cycle The Nursery, he produced the first solo piano masterpiece by a Russian (the suite Pictures at an Exhibition) in 1874 and, two years before that, Night on Bald Mountain, his contribution to the projected opera-ballet Mlada which was planned in collaboration with other of ‘The Five’ and then abandoned. Of his operas, Boris Godunov from Pushkin’s play about the 16th-century Tsar, was the only one he was to see staged, but even then his original version of 1870 was deemed so original and daring that the Imperial Opera in St Petersburg only accepted it after Rimsky-Korsakov had produced a revised, more conventional version of the score.
The idea for the opera Khovanshchina was suggested to the composer by the historical scholar Vladimir Vassilievich Stassov, who saw in the Khovansky conspiracy the perfect vehicle for Mussorgsky’s favoured brand of “musical folk drama”. Work began in August 1873, but only desultorily, as for one thing Mussorgsky had to spend half of each day earning a pittance as a minor civil servant, and he was simultaneously sketching out another opera, Sorochintsy Fair. The full piano draft took six years to complete, but he had no time to orchestrate much more than a fragment himself, and was only ever to hear one song from it in a concert Rimsky-Korsakov conducted in the winter of 1879–80.
The story of Khovanshchina concerns the plot by the Princes Khovansky, father and son, to depose Tsar Peter before he became ‘the Great’ in the closing years of the 17th century. As the composer himself observed, the subject gave him the opportunity to musicalise the emotional reactions of the mass under the stress of social revolution – “the past in the present”, as he termed it, the clash between old and new, and the effects of Peter’s expansionist policy on a country whose traditions and social structure had remained frozen in time for thousands of years. The historical Tsar dismissed the plot with a derisory colloquialism (the title of the work), and had the pair hanged, but Mussorgsky alters this outcome for his own dénouement. The dark mysticism of the old order is contrasted throughout, both visually and aurally, with Peter’s new ‘enlightened’ view, characterised by blaring trumpets and vulgar march tempos. The overall style of the work is different to that of Boris Godunov as here the composer, working solely from his own libretto, sought to turn recitative into melody, finding appropriate tunes on which the words would sit naturally but effectively – “melody justified by meaning”, as he put it.
While the opera ends on a note of stark despair, with the Raskolniki of the old order burning in the flames of self-immolation, the Prelude which opens the first act is a rare example of landscape painting in Mussorgsky’s work He called it ‘Dawn on the Moscow River’, and its main theme is an unashamedly Russian one, given in five widely differing variations. It is nationalistic in the sense that the traditional way of singing a popular song in a Russian village was for each participant to bring to his own stanza ways of expression that best suited his voice and style. Thus the Russian landscape in the Prelude, while gloomy and monotonous, refuses to be pinned down. Its character alters by subtle degrees in changing conditions – a metaphor for the story of the opera itself. In effect, the Prelude paints a detailed pastel view of an infinite and indefinite landscape where there is nothing as such to grasp except atmosphere, space and silence.
Following the composer’s early death in 1881, Rimsky-Korsakov suspended his own work for the next two years to devote himself to the task of orchestrating Khovanshchina. He had to reduce the bulk of his old friend’s sketches to a manageable evening’s length by cutting over a thousand bars, nearly enough for a complete opera in itself. The first performance of this revised version was finally given in February 1886 by the amateur St Petersburg Musical and Dramatic Society after the Imperial Marie Theatre had turned it down on the grounds that “one radical opera [ie, Boris Godunov] was enough”. The eight performances it received went without notice. It was only revived twenty-five years later by the Imperial Theatre, belatedly recognising their obligations to one of their true home-grown musical geniuses, with Chaliapin playing Dosifei, the leader of the Old Believers. In 1913 Diaghilev commissioned a new version from Stravinsky and Ravel for a Russian season at the Paris Opéra. This sank without trace and when in 1923, the work was inducted into the repertoire of the Opéra, it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s version that was reinstated. For all its roughness and individuality, Mussorgsky’s original score still awaits its ideal arranger.
