CHAPTER 4

Who Am I? (And Who Are You?)

RULING OUT essentialist approaches to what defines Russia (the Russian, Russians) makes things harder, but only because it requires us to be realistic. Nothing exists in its own terms only; nothing, at least since the expulsion from Eden, is truly autochthonous. What may appear to be perceptions of essences are in reality perceptions of relationships. A biographer incautious enough to believe that he has seen Chaikovsky plain has only gazed credulously upon a construction of his own making, reflecting (like all “others”) the writer’s projected sense of himself.

This comes out especially clearly when David Brown identifies Chaikovsky’s “natural” limitations vis-à-vis the Western “classical” symphonic tradition. The English writer’s conceptualizations of that tradition are entirely idiolectal, based, one can only surmise, on the jargon of his own training. They include hollow catchphrases—”tonal dynamism,” for example, or “tonal growth”—that have been coined to designate (that is, create) categories to which Chaikovsky’s access is barred by “nature.”¹ What the author has done, obviously, is to accept himself as a metonymy for the West, against which he has manufactured a countermetonymy named Chaikovsky.

That countermetonymy should never have been allowed to write symphonies, Brown strongly implies. But there is an early exception: the Symphony no. 2 in C minor, Op. 17 (1872), which bears the subtitle “Little Russian” because Ukrainian folk tunes are incorporated into three of its four movements. The folkloristic element is most obvious in the finale, where (in a manner paralleling that of Balakirev’s overtures on Russian themes, described in chapter 8) the first “group” of a sonata design consists of variations à la Kamarinskaya on a dance-tune (gopak) called “The Crane” (Zhuravel) (see example 4.1a). “Here it was that Tchaikovsky aligned himself more closely than ever before with the nationalists’ ideals and practices,” Brown writes.² The resulting success should have taught him to stay put in the ghetto, where he belonged: “It is one of the greatest causes for regret in all Tchaikovsky’s work that he never again attempted something of the same sort.”³

EXAMPLE 4.1. Chaikovsky, Symphony no. 2, fourth movement

a. Beginning of variations

But there is something very peculiar about Brown’s description of the piece. He gives three examples illustrating the clever changes Chaikovsky works on the tune, and another to illustrate a whole-tone progression that brought a grudging word of praise from César Cui. These are quoted as examples of Chaikovsky at his most personal, even though all of them—especially the whole-tone scale!—are patent derivations from Brown’s approved models. Never quoted, but only described (and inaccurately), is the symphonic introduction to the variations set (example 4.1b).

Brown hears in this an anticipation by two years of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (“Promenade” and “The Great Gate of Kiev”).⁴ But that must be because of the resemblance between Chaikovsky’s brassy scoring and Ravel’s 1923 orchestration of the Musorgsky. Once the mind is rid of prejudice—once, that is, the possibility is entertained of parallels and models that lie outside the ghetto walls—it is hard to miss the resonance from another C-major finale to a C-minor symphony, the most famous symphony in the world (example 4.2a). And once resonances with Beethoven, the most inevitable of all symphonic models, are spotted, they proliferate. The introduction to Chaikovsky’s finale simultaneously glosses or parodies the introduction to another Beethoven symphonic finale in C major, the start-again-stop-again introduction to the finale of the First Symphony, in which the constituent notes of the theme are gradually accumulated (example 4.2b).

b. Introduction

These resonances are just as conspicuous as the ones with Glinka or Balakirev (to say nothing of actual peasant music). They would never be missed in a Schumann or a Bruckner. But in Chaikovsky they are occluded by the ethnic walls that have been erected by defenders of the “Western” mainstream, ideologically blind to the possibility of a valid or authentic relationship of receptivity between that mainstream and its Far Eastern tributary.⁵

EXAMPLE 4.2

a. Beethoven, Symphony no. 5, fourth movement, beginning

b. Beethoven, Symphony no. 1, fourth movement, beginning

When such resonances are noticed by those guardians of “the West” who pose as guardians of Russia, it is usually to regret them. The New Grove Dictionary, for example, complains that Glinka “could not dispense with Western compositional techniques,” and that therefore A Life for the Tsar is “basically ... a Western opera.”⁶ But this is addled. All operas that are recognizably within the historical tradition of the genre are “basically Western.” The “Western” techniques one employs to compose such a work are one’s vehicles, not one’s impediments; no composer of “art music,” regardless of nationality and however nationalistic, could ever dispense with them, for they are what define his trade.

THE PROCESS of metonymy-countermetonymy also works the other way around, of course, and that is where it becomes interesting. Russian perceptions of Russia, or Russians’ perceptions of themselves as Russians, are inevitably colored by perceptions of others to the East and to the West. In the case of classical art music, of course, it can only be the West, even (as will be argued in chapter 9) when the East is the object of ostensible imitation.

But to speak here of “the West” is very much to oversimplify. The West was never perceived, except by the most incurable bigots, as a monolith but rather as an aggregate of components—some cherished, others rejected; some held to be compatible with Russian ways, others incompatible (not only with Russia but with one another). Russia was no more a monolith than was “the West”; and differences of Russian opinion often came down to differences in perceptions as to what was to be cherished and what rejected in Russia’s most significant Other.

In music at least two “Wests” were always present to Russian consciousness, two “Wests” against which Russian musicians habitually defined and constructed their identities. Neverov’s account of A Life for the Tsar is again indicative. Immediately before the preposterous assertion that Glinka’s recitatives were life-drawings of native speech inflections comes a much more plausible characterization of them: “His recitatives resemble neither the German nor the Italian; they unite the expressivity and dramatic flexibility of the former with the melodiousness of the latter.”⁷

This is highly resonant with a great deal of Russian thinking about Russia. The way in which Glinka’s recitatives are uniquely Russian (the way, that is, in which they are unlike their Western counterparts) consists precisely in the way that they resemble their Western counterparts—or rather, the way in which they combine all that is best in them. Uniting the best of the West—or, more generally, the best of the rest—was one highly preferred way of being Russian, for it affirmed belief in the universality of Russian culture, and in its salvific mission. What Neverov modestly claimed for Glinka (and, through Glinka, for Russia) was no different from what Dostoyevsky would magnilo-quently declare of Russia by way of Pushkin:

Never has there been a poet with such a universal responsiveness as Pushkin. But it is a matter not only of susceptibility but also of its amazing depth—that reincarnation in his spirit of the spirit of foreign nations, an almost complete, and therefore miraculous, reincarnation. . . . This we find in Pushkin alone, and in this sense he is a unique and unheard-of phenomenon, and to my mind a prophetic one. . . . For what else is the strength of the Russian national spirit than the aspiration, in its ultimate goal, for universality and all embracing human-itarianism? . . . Not inimically (as it would seem it should have happened) but in a friendly manner, with full love, we admitted into our soul the genius of foreign nations, without any racial discrimination, instinctively managing—almost from the first step—to eliminate contradictions, to excuse and reconcile differences. ... To become a genuine and all-around Russian means, perhaps (and this you should remember), to become brother of all men, a universal man.⁸

For all that his conventional reputation as founder of an insular Russian school suggests otherwise, such a man was Glinka, a prodigally eclectic composer, natural heir to the full range of operatic styles and conventions practiced in his day. The elaborate first-act cavatinas in both his operas, or especially the third act of A Life for the Tsar with its multipartite ensembles and its monumental finale, show his mastery of what Julian Budden has called the “Code Rossini”⁹—the set of formal molds that governed the Italian opera of the primo ottocento—to the point where, looking back, he could poke fun at his own “creeping Italianism” (ital’yanshchina). At the same time, both Glinka’s operas conspicuously exhibit features of the French rescue genre—the genre of Grétry, Méhul, and Cherubini, not to mention Beethoven—with its ample choruses, its reminiscence themes and its “popular” tone. As Berlioz was quick to notice, moreover, Glinka’s style, especially in Ruslan and Lyudmila, was heavily tinged with “the influence of Germany” in the prominence accorded the orchestra, the spectacular instrumentation, and the “beauty of the harmonic fabric.”¹⁰

That the models for his second opera included Mozart, Die Zauberflöte in particular, can be readily seen not only from the gaudy glockenspiel and glass-harmonica colors in the magic music but also from the act 3 finale, in which the good sorcerer Finn first intervenes like a Sarastro to break the spells woven by the evil sorceress Naina (= Queen of the Night), then stands in as a tenor to complete the vocal complement for a concluding quartet (“Teper’ Lyudmila ot nas spasen’ya zhdyot,” or “Now Lyudmila awaits from us salvation”) that reflects something of the serene radiance of “Bald prangt, den Morgen zu verkünden.” This limpidly scored, loftily diatonic ensemble, too often overlooked amid the welter of blinding exotica for which Ruslan is justly famed, marks Glinka as Russia’s one-and-only “high classic.”

What must be emphasized is that, just as Neverov’s review of A Life for the Tsar implied, this eclecticism, far from effacing Glinka’s musical Russianness, in fact constituted it—emphatically in the composer’s own eyes, as well as in the eyes of his contemporaries. (Only his self-styled heirs disagreed; but as we shall see in chapter 8, Balakirev’s demonstrative folklorism was not without its ambiguities, being in fact the vehicle for the thoroughgoing Ger-manification of the “Glinka tradition.”)¹¹ And just as Dostoyevsky implied, Glinka’s programmatic eclecticism was aimed explicitly at “eliminating contradictions and reconciling differences”—specifically, the contradiction, more apparent to Russians, perhaps, than to anyone else in Europe, between the southern Catholic culture of the “Latins” and the northern Protestant culture of the “Teutons.”¹²

This dichotomy was variously, but always radically and invidiously, ratified by Russian musicians and music lovers in the early nineteenth century: by the many Russian “melomanes” who enthusiastically endorsed Italy over Germany; but also by romantic idealists like Prince Odoyevsky (see chapter 10), who cast the split in lofty, somewhat puritanical terms taken over directly from German philosophers who valorized Teutonic Geist (dukh in Russian), or “spirit,” over Latin Sinnlichkeit (in Russian, chuvstvennosf), or “sensuality.” German music was all dukh, brains without beauty; Italian music was all chuvstvennosf, beauty without brains. Glinka resolved—yes, consciously—that his music, Russian music, would uniquely have both brains and beauty.¹³

Because he grew up in a country that lacked the institutional means for training professional composers, Glinka is habitually looked (down) upon as an autodidact and a naif. This is a serious misapprehension. Despite a late start, and despite his being, as an aristocrat, an avocational musician, Glinka had a fabulously well rounded professional education in music, but it was an education acquired the old-fashioned way, by apprenticeship and practical experience.

After childhood and adolescent music instruction in piano and violin, both on his ancestral estate and (from 1818) at the Boarding School for the Nobility in St. Petersburg, and after teaching himself the rudiments of form and orchestration by rehearsing and conducting his uncle’s serf orchestra in the classical repertory, Glinka apprenticed himself in 1828 to Leopoldo Zamboni, the principal coach for an Italian opera troupe headed by Leopoldo’s father Luigi, the famous buffo (Rossini’s original Figaro), that had come to St. Petersburg at the expense of Count Matvey Wielhorski. Zamboni schooled his local apprentice in the forms and conventions of Italian opera, as well as in elementary counterpoint (“fugues in two parts without words,” as Glinka put it in his memoirs).¹⁴ Over the next two years he also attended the rehearsals and the extremely idiomatic Zamboni-led performances of over a dozen Rossini operas.

In 1830 Glinka went abroad for an extended stay. In Milan he became personally acquainted with Bellini and Donizetti and under their supervision wrote creditable imitations of their work, publishing in addition a number of instrumental tributes to the Italian opera that included (besides several sets of piano variations) a couple of ambitious concerted compositions. Thus he acquired beauty. Then he went after brains, making straight for the Teutonic source. He spent the winter of 1833-34 in Berlin, under the tutelage of Siegfried Dehn (1799-1858), the most sought-after German pedagogue “and indisputably the first musical wizard in Europe” in his pupil’s awed recollection, who through a combination of strict counterpoint and ancient lore, “not only put my knowledge in order, but also my ideas on art,” as Glinka so meaningly put it in his memoirs.¹⁵ He returned to Russia shortly before his thirtieth birthday, the possessor of a fully professional, exceptionally cosmopolitan technique. He went back to Dehn nearly a quarter of century later, at the very end of his life, for advice on how he might apply the principles of species counterpoint to Russian church chant—that is, how he might achieve a new “reconciliation of contradictions” to produce a new, distinctively Russian, style.

As the first fully equipped, native-born Russian contributor to the European fine art of music, and a nobleman with powerful court connections, Glinka worked, from every standpoint but the (in his case) irrelevant pecuniary one, under highly favorable institutional conditions, with a state-owned theater at his virtual beck and call. He could afford his accommodating, omnivorously receptive attitudes toward the musical “West.”

As chapter 10 will detail, those conditions would deteriorate radically almost immediately after the première of Glinka’s second opera (which goes a long way toward explaining why there was no third). Faced with unequal competition from a court-sponsored Italian opera troupe barred by explicit policy from performing the work of Russian composers, the generation of Russian composers who came creatively to active life in the 1840s and 1850s were forced into an alienated, antagonistic relationship to the very state Glinka had happily venerated in his first opera, to its musical establishment, and to the foreign artists it now exclusively supported.

The quintessential victim of this blatantly discriminatory phase in Russian government arts policy was Dargomïzhsky, and it is to him that we may trace a new phase in Russian musical self-definition vis-à-vis “the West,” one of jealous omnivorous rejection. Dargomïzhsky, some nine years Glinka’s junior, also took early instruction from a member of the Zamboni troupe (Franz Schoberlechner, a Viennese composer of Italian opera whose Russian-born wife was a leading soprano with the company) and received from Glinka, on the latter’s return from Berlin a few years later, the notebooks in which Dehn had set down his course of instruction in thoroughbass and counterpoint. But, frozen out by the court-backed Italians, he recoiled from the “beauteous” Western strain (on Donizetti’s latest: “There’s little to say . . . once a medal has been stamped out and described, is there any need to describe the next medal from the same die?”), and on encountering Wagner (through Serov, who lent him the score of Tannhäuser), he recoiled from the “brainy” Western strain as well: “unnatural . . . painful . . . Will und kann nicht!”¹⁶

What is left, after both brains and beauty have been renounced? Good character! Dargomïzhsky became a musical Diogenes, seeking “truth” in word (the sloganeering letters for which he is so well remembered by nationalistic historians) and in musical deed (The Stone Guest, after Pushkin, the very model of “reform” opera).¹⁷ His new, unbending stance demanding art without artifice won him a coterie of admirers in Balakirev’s young circle of musical mavericks, and at least one outright imitator in Musorgsky, whose early Marriage, after Gogol, and the first version of whose masterpiece Boris Godunov, were modeled on the precepts, and to some degree even on the music, of the man Musorgsky twice called “the great teacher of musical truth.”¹⁸

There is very little in any of these works—The Stone Guest, Marriage, even the first Boris beyond its folkish or churchly set pieces—that is indicatively Russian in style; yet they, and the stylistic trend they represent, no less than the one (or the two) represented by Glinka, were nonetheless the product of a particular, very emphatic Russian national self-definition vis-à-vis “Europe.” Thus the shared style characteristics of these odd operas amount in their way to another particular and peculiar Russian style.

How did this extremist, uniquely Russian brand of musical realism that arose out of wholesale rejection of European artifice relate to other manifestations of Russian musical nationalism? That is the crucial Musorgsky question, but it does not apply to Dargomïzhsky. The Stone Guest, based verbatim on Pushkin’s “little tragedy” of Don Juan (1830), has a Spanish setting and a certain amount of perfunctory Spanish local color. Otherwise the music is cast, with inventiveness and expressivity of a high order, in an international lyric style that is not in itself in any way innovative. Dargomïzhsky’s reform targeted institutions and genres, not style.

Musorgsky, in addition to being (after Dargomïzhsky) an institutional outsider and a rebellious rejector of European savoir-faire, was a very self-conscious stylistic innovator. His media, no less than Dargomïzhsky’s or Glinka’s, were those of the European tradition; and yet he was more thoroughly and profoundly obsessed than any other member of his musical generation by narodnosf and its full panoply of attendant historical and social issues. With him the question of the relationship between originality and tradition(s), between realism and narodnosf, becomes central, and it becomes complicated.

His obsessions and his historical group-identity as an insular nationalist notwithstanding, Musorgsky was far less squeamish than Dargomïzhsky about his “Western” counterparts and rivals. He studied both Wagner and Verdi with apparent fearlessness, and accepted a great deal from both of them in the process of learning the ropes of historical opera on the grand scale he favored.¹⁹ He often twitted his kuchkist confrères on their provincial naysaying, reminding the immature Rimsky-Korsakov that Wagner, whatever his faults, aimed high and was in this, if in nothing else, worthy of emulation: “Wagner is strong, strong because he seizes art and shakes it.”²⁰ In the thick of work on Khovanshchina, he took time out to see the first Russian production of Aida. For all the practiced ironizing (especially practiced when writing to Stasov, his stern collaborator) and strained punstering, his enthusiasm at Verdi’s “rough and gaudy theatricality” shows right through: “Now maestro-senator e Verdi on the other hand! This one does it big, he’s not afraid of anything, this originator! His whole Aida—way to go!—it’s full of everything, from everyone and even from himself. He’s got Trovatore in there, and a little ‘Mendelssohn,’ and a little ‘Wagner’—everything but Amerigo Vespucci.”²¹

Clearly, “Europe” was something Musorgsky felt he could face up to. His self-confidence—easily (and usually) dismissed as the bluster of the callow, the ignorant, the untried—has a suprapersonal, ideological edge as well. Roll callowness, ignorance and innocence together, translate it all into Russian, and the specific nature of his Russian ideology, his national self-definition, will emerge. It is the ideology of yurodstvo, Holy Foolery, a state of perfect freedom from cogitation (brains) and charm (beauty), a state of perfect authenticity.

MUSORGSKY’S songs of the late 1860s represent, with Marriage, the high-water mark of what is generally regarded as his naturalistic phase. They are a portrait gallery of life-drawn types: so, at least, the composer purported, and so they have been characterized by long-standing reputation. Among them, “Darling Savishna” (Svetik Savishna, 1866), one of the earliest, dedicated to brother-kuchkist Cui, is held to be especially emblematic. According to Vladimir Stasov, the composer’s would-be mentor and indefatigable tribune, the song was especially truthful in that it was a virtually unmediated portrayal of an actual scene the composer had witnessed on his brother Filaret’s country estate in the summer of 1865.

Standing by the window one day he was struck by the commotion taking place before his very eyes. A hapless village idiot (yurodivïy) was declaring love to a young peasant girl whom he fancied, pleading with her, and abasing himself on account of his ugliness and his miserable position. He understood better than anyone else that the joys of love were not for him. Musorgsky was deeply affected. The character and the scene were strongly imprinted on his soul. Instantly there appeared to him the peculiar forms and sounds in which to embody the images that had so shaken him.²²

A study in grotesquerie, in musical uncouthness (no brains) and calculated deformity (no beauty), the song “milked laughter” from a “tragic ferment,” as the composer explained, no longer reconciling but most discomfitingly exposing contradictions, the first and foremost being that between the genteel art song medium and the indecorous content.²³ The very complex half-comic, half-tragic ambience that arose out of what seemed the author’s unflinching precision of observation and his refusal to intrude or comment on the scene did strike a new note in Russian music, indeed (once it became known abroad) in European music tout court. This was realism at full potency. It had the ring and the force of truth. Alexander Serov pronounced the ultimate Russian accolade: “A ghastly scene. It’s Shakespeare in music.”²⁴ In the West it would win the composer a host of posthumous disciples, who worshiped him as a musical god.²⁵

But was he really trading in true facts? And what was the nature, or the butt, of his harsh humor?

Consider first what came first. Like most of the texts Musorgsky set during the period, the words of Savishna were of his own devising; that was part and parcel of life-drawing as he conceived it. Set in characteristically resolute syllabic fashion, it convinced connoisseurs (especially those familiar, from the composer’s correspondence, with his designs) that it reproduced “the inflexions of prose speech.”²⁶ The use of quintuple meter, the isochronous rhythmic beats organized by contour in inflexibly recurring measure-long units (“modules,” to use now-fashionable terminology), was also taken as naturalism, depicting, according to the song’s greatest interpreter, “the irregular walk of the limping ‘innocent’ [yurodivïy] and the hasty [i.e., breathless?] formation of his phrases.ormation of his phrases.”²⁷ Laid out phrase by hasty phrase, the text looks like this:

Svetik Sávishna, / svet Ivánovna,

Svet moy Sávishna, / sokol yásnen’kiy,

Polyubí menya / ne razúmnova,

Prigolúb’ menya / goremchnova!

Oy-li, sókol moy, / sokol yásnen’kiy,

5 Svetik Sávishna, / svet Ivánovna,

Ne pobrézgai tï / gol’yu góloyu,

Bestalánnoyu / moyey dóleyu!

Urodílsya vish’ / na smekh lyúdyam ya,

Pro zabávu da / na potékhi im!

10 Klichut: Sávishna, / skorbnïm rázumom

Velicháyut, slïsh’, / Vaney Bózhiyim,

Svetik Sávishna, / svet Ivánovna,

I dayút pin’kov / Vane Bózh’yemu,

Kormyat chéstvuyut / podzatl’nikom.

15 A pod prázdnichek / kak razryádyatsya,

Uberútsya vish’ / v lentï alïye,

Dadut khlébushka / Vane skórbnomu,

Ne zabït’ chtobï / Vanyu Bozh’yego.

Svetik Sávishna, / yasnïy sokol moy,

20 Polyubí-zh menya / neprogózheva,

Prigolúb’ menya / odinókova!

Kak lyublyú tebya, / mochi nét skazat’,

Svetik Sávishna, / ver’ mne, vér’ ne ver’,

Svet Ivánovna!. . .

Darling Savishna, bright falcon mine,

Love me, fool that I am,

Cosset me, miserable one that I am!

my falcon, bright falcon mine,

5 Darling Savishna, Dear Ivanovna,

Don’t despise the poor, the hungry,

Misfortune is my lot!

Look how I was born to be laughed at,

To provide amusement, entertainment!

10 They shout at me, O Savishna, hear?

They cry up Johnny Fool-in-God’s poor brains,

Darling Savishna, dear Ivanovna,

And they give Johnny Fool-in-God a kick,

Feed him, honor him with slaps and cuffs.

15 But on holidays when they deck themselves

With finery, you see, with ribbons red,

Then they’ll give poor Johnny a crust of bread,

Not to forget old Johnny Fool-in-God.

Darling Savishna, bright falcon mine,

20 Do love me, good-for-nothing that I am,

Cosset me, lonely one that I am!

How I love thee I just can’t begin to say,

Darling Savishna, believe me, or don’t,

Dear Ivanovna! . . .

But this is not prose at all. Nor does it transmit any sort of spontaneous utterance. A quick glance up above, at Count Lvov’s letter-in-verse in praise of Russia (quoted in chapter 1), will instantly give it away. It is an imitation folk poem in Lvov’s pesennïy razmer, which is to say (with excruciating irony) an imitation wedding song. These ironies extend beyond the generalities of form to the specifics of wedding diction as well: velichayut (“cry up”) in line 11 resonates with velichal’nïye, the mock-praises or “roasts” sung as toasts at Russian peasant wedding feasts (cf. the fourth tableau of Stravinsky’s Svadebka); lentï alïye (“ribbons red”) in line 16 recalls the plaiting songs sung at the bridal shower on the wedding eve (cf. the first tableau of Svadebka). But the irony of casting the hopeless nattering of a lovesick idiot in the strains of which he dreams, but will never hear, is only one level of the poem’s resonance.

The choice of the indicatively Russian pesennïy razmer—or what Musorgsky, who had used it more than once before (albeit by way of ready-made chanson russe verses, and in musical meters that avoided quintasyllabic iso-chrony) would have called the kol’tsovskiy stikh, “Koltsovian verses”²⁸— makes Savishna, like Lvov’s letter in verse, an ironic velichal’ naya to Russia herself. It is another instance, like Glinka’s maiden chorus in the third act of A Life for the Tsar (the first, epochal, usage in Russian art music of literal quintuple meter to reflect the pesennïy razmer), of turning a decorative cliché to expressive account through irony. (Glinka’s maidens arrive, right after Su-sanin’s abduction by the Poles, to celebrate Antonida’s bridal shower as in countless earlier Russian singspiels and are astonished to find her lamenting not pro forma but in earnest.)

Musorgsky hinted as much a year later when he singled out Savishna, among all the things he’d written, as “a rudimentally Russian production, not steeped in German profundity and routine, but poured forth on native fields and nourished on Russian bread.”²⁹ Having written the song, Musorgsky briefly took to calling himself and even signing himself “Savishna” in his correspondence with intimates like Lyudmila Shestakova (Glinka’s long-surviving sister) and Balakirev.³⁰ Was he identifying with the girl? Is this more evidence of complex sexuality?³¹ This time the answer must be no. Musorgsky identified himself not with the title character but with the song itself—or rather, with the voice within the song, the self-pitying, self-obsessed voice of the yurodivïy.

Yurodivïy. Holy Fool. The simpleton who speaks the truth. That was Musorgsky among composers, and that was Russia among nations. Thus Svetik Savishna was not just a song. It was a badge. And so, whatever its anecdotal origins and however entrenched its aesthetic reputation, it was no monument to realism. It did not fix a single, never-to-be-repeated moment in all its particularity. Rather, it created and bequeathed an archetype, one that established a creative self-image and defined a Russia.

That archetype achieved an epitomizing, immortalizing embodiment a couple of years later, in the character of the yurodivïy, the Holy Fool in Boris Godunov. Although modeled on a character in Pushkin’s drama (as Pushkin’s yurodivïy had been modeled on a story from Karamzin’s history of Russia),³² Musorgsky’s yurodivïy is the most original conception in the opera. In the version of 1869, the yurodivïy appears where he had appeared in Pushkin, in the scene at the Shrine of the Blessed Basil, where with a boldness unavailable to the common folk, the Fool confronts the “Tsar-Herod” with his crime. Pushkin, for whom the Fool was just a “funny young fellow,”³³ had given him a silly little song to sing when he receives a penny in return for his prayers:

Mesyats svetit,	The moon is shining,
Kotyonok plachet,	The kitten’s crying,
Yurodivïy, vstavai,	Get up, fool,
Bogu pomolisya!34	Pray to God!

Musorgsky’s Fool expands on the song somewhat (the additional words are the composer’s), and, by changing over to the future tense, adds a note of unmistakable if inscrutable prophecy:

Mesyats yedet,	The moon goes its way,
kotyonok plachet,	The kitten’s crying,
yurodivïy vstavai,	Get up, fool,
Bogu pomolisya,	pray to God,
Khristu poklonisya.	Bow to Christ.
Khristos, bog nash,	Christ, our God,
budet vyodro,	There will be fine weather,
budet mesyats. . .	There will be moonlight. . .

Musorgsky marks the division between Pushkin’s nonsense song and his own fool’s prophecy with a remarkable musical change (see example 4.3a). The first quatrain is set in the three-beat meter and paired couplets of the traditional Russian dance song. Here the Fool is obviously singing—performing his song—within the action of the drama: his song is “diegetic music,” as today’s film critics would say, or “phenomenal music” in the apter vocabulary of Carolyn Abbate, who has so fruitfully explored the all-important operatic code of music “heard” and “unheard.”³⁵ The Fool’s song starts out as unambiguously “heard” music, and in this it resembles all the other clearly folk-marked vocal music in the first version of the opera.

When the yurodivïy goes over from Pushkin’s original text to Musorgsky’s vaticinal extension, his music undergoes a change in meter (to four-beat measures), in tonality (down a half step), in verse structure (to a disintegrating ostinato), and in cadence placement (cadential harmonies gradually losing their stable definition and flowing into an endless mudslide of chromatic side steps). The transformation describes an entropy: song collapses into speech as the Fool becomes (according to Musorgsky’s direction) “distracted,” or vati-cally entranced. At the same time, the status of the utterance becomes ambiguous: what begins as clearly “phenomenal” shades over into “noumenal music,” the music of the general sonic ambience, no longer clearly “heard” by the onstage characters. The effect is to surround the words of the yurodivïy with a nimbus—the aura of “truth”—that disembodies them.

This remarkable musical transformation is repeated at the end of the scene, when Musorgsky’s yurodivïy (unlike Pushkin’s) reprises his song in an expanded form (example 4.3b), with new words (the composer’s), in a tonic (i.e., stress-counting) folk meter that occasionally hints at the quintasyllabic pesennïy razmer. They are explicitly and chillingly clairvoyant with respect to the outcome of the historical drama:

Léytes’ slyózï gór’kiye,

Plách’, dushá pravoslávnaya!

Skoro vrág pridyot / I nastánet t’ma,

Témen’ tyómnaya / neproglyádnaya.

Gore Rusi!

Plach’, russkiy lyud,

Golodnïy lyud! . . .

Flow, bitter tears,

Weep, Orthodox soul!

Soon the enemy will come and darkness will fall,

EXAMPLE 4.3. Musorgsky, Boris Godunov

a. Scene at St. Basil’s, first yurodivïy (Holy Fool) song

b. Second (closing) yurodivïy song

Darkest dark, impenetrable dark.

Woe to Russia!

Weep, Russian folk,

Hungry folk! . . .

In the second version of the opera (1872), the scene of the yurodivïy is plucked out of Pushkin’s scene (literally ripped by Musorgsky out of his older score) and inserted into a new final scene, the one at Kromy, that has no counterpart in Pushkin. The two songs now enclose not the confrontation between idiot soothsayer and guilty ruler but the scene of popular submission to the Pretender, thus marking the hungry, frantically gullible Russian folk, not the sinful Tsar, as the tragic protagonist of the drama. The yurodivïy’s final disembodied prophecy now closes not a single scene but the entire opera on a note of desperate, doom-laden entropy: the disintegration of its cadential structure is now the opera’s concluding harmonic gesture, casting an uncanny retrospective pall over the whole preceding action.

Whose voice is this? Who gets the last word? In Pushkin, and in Musorgsky’s earlier version based directly on Pushkin, the voice of the yurodivïy was the voice of nemesis, invoking heavenly judgment on Boris. Placed at the end, after Boris’s death and the Pretender’s triumph—that is to say, after the apparent resolution of the drama—the negating entropic voice is the voice of one who knows the unhappy future, who knows that there has been no resolution of Russia’s fate.

That description applies, superficially, to the yurodivïy, but his is not, in fact, the last “voice” that is heard. The disembodiment of his song continues after his singing stops in an orchestral postlude based on an ostinato drawn from the sighing, sixthy, semitonal “intonation” of lamentation that had accompanied the song at its beginning. The very last phrase, in the low strings, is a final, rhythmically augmented repetition of the ostinato, a double descent from the sixth to the fifth degree of the A-minor scale, that sounds after the tonic bass note has dropped out. The song, the scene, and the opera thus grind to a halt on an unaccompanied fifth degree—that is, on the dominant, the very emblem of nonresolution (example 4.4).

EXAMPLE 4.4. Musorgsky, Boris Godunov, orchestral postlude following second yurodivïy song

Whose voice is this? It is the voice of one who knows the unhappy future because for him it is the past. At one level of disembodiment beyond the visible body on the stage, it is the voice of the chronicler, the super-Pimen who has penned the opera, the composer-yurodivïy who sees and speaks the truth, and whose name is Musorgsky. At a further level of disembodiment it is the voice of the chronicle itself, the truth-bearing voice of history. At the ultimate level, it is the voice of Russia’s self-consciousness, a voice transcending persons and people, defining the mtion-yurodivïy whose mission it is, earned through suffering, to bear the truth to the world.

¹ “Such a command of tonal growth was utterly beyond Tchaikovsky” (Brown, Tchaikovsky, vol. 1: The Early Years: 1840-1874 [New York: Norton, 19781, P- 109); “being entirely devoid of the ability to devise a planned tonal growth ...” (ibid., p. 112).

² Ibid., p. 264.

³ Ibid., p. 269.

⁴ Brown, Tchaikovsky, vol. 1, p. 265.

⁵ For a discussion of Chaikovsky’s Second Symphony that avoids cliches about “high nationalism” and explores the work’s many affinities with the international symphonic literature, one must go all the way back to Hermann Laroche’s review, “Novaya russkaya simfoniya,” which first appeared in the newspaper Moskovskiye vedomosti, 1 February 1873. There is no English translation. The most recent Russian reprint is in G. A. Larosh, Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 2 (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1975), pp. 28-31. A German translation is available in Hermann Laroche, Peter Tschaikowsky: Aufsätze und Erinnerungen (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, 1993), pp. 74-79. Most sustained is a comparison between Chaikovsky’s symphony, including the finale, and Beethoven’s Eighth.

⁶ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 7, pp. 436, 442.

⁷ Quoted from Tamara Livanova and Vladimir Protopopov, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1966), part 1, p. 207.

⁸ F. M. Dostoyevsky, “Pushkin: A Sketch,” The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), pp. 978-80. A little less apocalyptically, the platform of Dostoyevsky’s short-lived literary journal Vremya had suggested in 1861 that “the Russian idea may well be a synthesis of all the ideas that have developed in Europe” (quoted in V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline [New York: Columbia University Press, 1953], vol. 1, p. 414.

⁹ Operas of Verdi, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 12ff.

¹⁰ H. Berlioz, “Michel de Glinka (La Vie pour le czar; Russlane et Ludmila),” Journal des Débats, 16 April 1845.

¹¹ This Germanification itself reflected a general cultural trend in Nikolayan and post-Nikolayan Russia; the model for Balakirev’s “New Russian school” (a.k.a. the “mighty kuchka”) was no native precedent but Schumann’s Davidsbund; by the time of César Cui’s critical debut, Balakirev’s brother-kuchkist would define Russian music by saying that its distinctiveness came by way of German music, which it had emulated and surpassed “in depth of feeling and force of passion” (César Cui, “Opernïy sezon v Peterburge,” Sankt-Peterburgskiye vedomosti, 3 September 1864; reprinted in Cui, Muzïkal’ no-kriticheskiye stat’i, vol. 1 [Petrograd, 1918], p. 109). By this time, the stranglehold of the court Italian Opera on St. Petersburg musical life (to be described in chapter 10) had made expedient a tactical alliance with the German school, lately given an official institutional presence in the Russian capital by Anton Rubinstein’s performance and pedagogical organizations.

¹² Cf. Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev’s celebrated Lettre première sur la philosophie de l’histoire (1829), trans. Valentine Snow in Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 160-73 (esp. pp. 164-65).

¹³ The Russian predilection for brains-and-beauty eclecticism is already evident in Yevstigney Fomin’s musical education: after preliminary study in St. Petersburg with the resident German, Raupach, he was packed off to Italy to finish his training with Padre Martini.

¹⁴ Glinka, “Zapiski” (Memoirs), in Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: Literaturnïye proizve-deniya i perepiska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1973), p. 235.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 262.

¹⁶ To his father, December 1844; to A. N. Serov, summer 1856; both in Nikolai Findeyzen, ed., A. S. Dargomïzhskiy (1813-1869): Avtobiografiya, pis’ma, vospominaniya sovremennikov (Peterburg: Gosudarstvennoye izdatel’stvo RSFSR, 1921), pp. 16, 43.

¹⁷ For a full account see R. Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia, 2d ed. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994), chapter 5 (““The Stone Guest and Its Progeny”).

¹⁸ The phrase appears in the dedications to Dargomïzhsky of two of Musorgsky’s naturalistic songs of the late 1860s, when relations with Dargomïzhsky were at their closest: Kolïbel’ naya Yeryomushki (“Jeremy’s Cradle Song,” 1867) and S nyaney (“With Nanny,” the first of the Nursery cycle). On Musorgsky’s relationship to and borrowings from Dargomïzhsky, see R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, chapters 2 (“Handel, Shakespeare, and Musorgsky”) and 5 (“Musorgsky vs. Musorgsky: The Versions of Boris”).

¹⁹ See R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, pp. 267-69 (including a possible quotation from Don Carlos in Boris Godunov); Roland John Wiley, “The Tribulations of Nationalist Composers: A Speculation Concerning Borrowed Music in Khovanshchina” in Musorgsky: In Memoriam (1881-1981), ed. Malcolm H. Brown and R. John Wiley (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 163-77 (on a possible quotation from Rigoletto); Borodin recalled that the teenaged Musorgsky could play excerpts from Traviata and Trovatore pretty much ad libitum (see Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson, The Musorgsky Reader [New York: Norton, 1947), p. 3; much later, a younger contemporary reported that Musorgsky could play through whole scenes from Siegfried from memory (Nikolai Kompaneysky, “K no vim beregam: M. P. Musorgskiy [1839-1881],” Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta, no. 17 [1906], col. 439; quoted in Caryl Emerson and Robert William Oldani, Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], p. 233).

²⁰ Fragment of a letter datable by its contents before 4 October 1867; Musorgsky, Literatur-noye naslediye, ed. A. A. Orlova and M. S. Pekelis, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1971), p. 95.

²¹ Letter of 23 November 1875; Musorgsky, Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 1, p. 207. The phrase translated as “way to go!”—Russian readers will smell it a mile off—is ai-da! On “rough and gaudy theatricality” (A. A. Gozenpud’s phrase) see Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, p. 267.

²² Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov, “Modest Petrovich Musorgsky” (1881), in Stasov, Izbrannïye sochineniya (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952), vol. 2, p. 184.

²³ Letter to Arseniy Golenishchev-Kutuzov, 10 November 1877; M. P. Musorgsky, Literatur-noye naslediye, vol. 1, p. 235.

²⁴ Kompaneysky, “K novïm beregam,” Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta, nos. 14-15 (1906), col. 365; according to Kompaneysky, who sang the song to Serov and recorded his remark, Serov immediately added, “Too bad, though, that he has such poor command of his pen.”

²⁵ Cf. Claude Debussy, “La Musique russe et les Compositeurs français,” Excelsior, 9 March 1911; quoted in Malcolm Brown, introduction to Musorgsky: In Memoriam (1881-1981), p. 4.

²⁶ Gerald Abraham, “Russia,” in A History of Song, ed. Denis Stevens (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 364.

²⁷ Boris Christoff, Moussorgsky: Mélodies, Enregistrement intégral (Paris: Pathé Marconi, 1958), commentary, p. 39.

²⁸ Earlier Musorgsky settings of poems cast in the kol’tsovskiy stikh include his very first song, “Where Art Thou, Little Star?” (Gde tï, zvyozdochka, 1857, rev. ca. 1863), to a text by Nikolai Grekov, and “Tell Me Why, Fair Maiden” (Otchego skazhi, dusha devitsa, 1858), to a text by Koltsov himself (see Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, pp. 56-68).

²⁹ To Vladimir Nikolsky, 12 July 1867; Musorgsky, Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 1, p. 89.

³⁰ E.g., Shestakova, 5 January 1867 (Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 1, p. 78). Having referred to himself throughout the letter as Savishna, Musorgsky signed it with an exaggeratedly wr-Slavic spelling, interpolating a superfluous “hard sign,” thus: Savisli’na, adding in a footnote, “the earthy [pochvennaya, better rendered as “Mother Earthly”] spelling of the name.”

³¹ On Musorgsky’s probable homosexual orientation see Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, p. 30; Jane Turner, “Musorgsky,” Music Review 47 (1986-87): 153-75.

³² For details see Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, p. 189.

³³ Letter to Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky, 7 November 1825; J. Thomas Shaw, ed., Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 261.

³⁴ A. S. Pushkin, Sochineniya (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1964), vol. 2, p. 328.

³⁵ See Robbert van der Lek, Diegetic Music in Opera and Film (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1991); and Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 4-10.