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Glasnost' in Russian Music: The Musorgsky Jubilee during a Time of Trouble
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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1. By the early 1990s, such rubrics as “Razmyshleniia i spory o kul'ture” (Ruminations and Arguments about Culture) and “O kul'ture—s trevogoi” (On Culture— with Alarm) were serving as forums for probing self-criticism; topical, quasi-utopian essays in the vein of “Muzyka i problemy global'noi ekologii cheloveka” (Music and the Problems of the Global Ecology of Man; Iusfin, Abram, Sovetskaia muzyka 8 [August 1990])Google Scholar had become common. More recently, music has been pulled stoutly into the Russian religious renaissance; see, as an example, Valentina Kholopova's “Nikolai Berdiaev i Sofiia Gubaidulina: v toi zhe chasti Vselennoi” (Nicolas Berdiaev and Sofia Gubaidulina: in the same part of the Universe), Sovetskaia muzyka 10 (October 1991): 11-15. Along with its sister journals, Sovetskaia muzyka has experienced a drop in subscriptions and has made awkward appeals for western sponsorship. The October 1991 issue announced a name change to Muzykal'naia akademiia.
2. Twentieth century Musorgsky studies can be divided into three phases of peak interest and reassessment, each marked by a cluster of landmark performances, new editions or jubilee publication of documentary materials: 1908-1917, 1928-1932 and the 1970-1980s. The first phase, launched by the great Diaghilev opera productions in Paris, confirmed Musorgsky as master at dramatic recitative, as victim of an exotic mix of genius and Russian vice and thus as unambiguous beneficiary of Rimsky-Korsakov's heroic reclamation efforts. The second phase was inaugurated by Pavel Lamm's pioneering editions of the de-Rimskified scores, followed by lively controversy and a flurry of enthusiasm for the “original Boris” (both 1869 and 1874 versions). In the final period, approaching the centenary jubilee, Musorgsky's “irregularities” were reassessed as forerunners of twentieth century musical culture and his effect on recent Russian music was explored. For more detail, see the editor's introductory essay, “Khudozhestvennoe nasledie Musorgskogo: Vzgliad vchera, segodnia, zavtra …” in G. L. Golovinskii, ed., M. P. Musorgskii i muzyka XX veka (Moscow: Muzyka, 1990), 3-11.
3. Viacheslav Kostikov, “Vlast’ mertvaia i vlast’ zhivaia: zametki pri chtenii otechestvennoi istorii,” Sovetskaia kul'tura, 11 August 1990; and Liubimov, Boris, “Imperatorskii teatr?”, Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 June 1990Google Scholar. For these references I am indebted to the text of Robert C. Tucker's Presidential Address to the AAASS, “What Time is it in Russia's History?” (Washington, DC, 19 October 1990).
4. For one extensive parallel between Boris Godunov and Mikhail Gorbachev, see Oleg Moroz, “Zhivaia vlast’ dlia cherni nenavistna?” (Is Living Power Hateful to the Mob?), Literaturnaia gazeta, 1 May 1991: 3. The title of the article transforms a line from Pushkin's Boris into a fateful question.
5. See D. Logbas, “God Musorgskogo prodolzhaetsia: v kontekste XX veka,” in Sovetskaia muzyka 11 (1989): 89-91. Richard Taruskin discusses this problematic Christianizing tendency in passing in his “Christian themes in Russian opera: A millennial essay” (Cambridge Opera Journal 2, no. 1 [March 1990]: 83-91) and more thoroughly in the Epilogue to his Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
6. Marina Kornakova, “Tarkovskii prodolzhaetsia,” Muzykal'naia zhizn’ (January 1991): 3-5, esp. 4. According to Musorgsky's stage directions in the Kromy scene, Varlaam and Misail enter only after the introductory musical episodes are complete, presumably as part of Dmitrii's advance guard; in this production, however, the two renegade monks are present from the beginning, maneuvering the crowd into various line-dances and coordinating the torture of the boyar and the Jesuits. Throughout, Misail brandishes a red-tipped axe. Immediately before the Pretender's entry the mob freezes in a gesture of violent defiance, axe thrust upward and forward—uncannily reminiscent, in fact, of heroic stalinist-style statuary celebrating the victorious proletariat— but this defiance is not presented as a positive, intelligent or conscious force. Such seems to be Kornakova's point.
7. See Stasov's 1881 necrologue “Modest Petrovich Musorgsky: A Biographical Sketch “: “With its fresh and still unspoiled feeling, youth understood that a great artistic force had created and entrusted to our people a new, marvelous, national work, and youth rejoiced, and was glad, and celebrated. Twenty performances were given to a full theatre; more than once a crowd of young people broke into singing “The Coronation of the Boyar by the People” and other choruses [from Kromy] throughout the night in the streets …” “Modest Petrovich Musorgskii: biograficheskii ocherk,” in Stasov, V. V., Izbrannye stat'i o M. P. Musorgskom (Moscow: GosMuzIzdat, 1952), 105–6Google Scholar. For additional references to the response of the younger generation to the premiere of Boris, see Vladimir Stasov's “Recollections of Musorgsky” in Orlova, Musorgsky Remembered, 16-17.
8. Three Jubilee productions or revivals of Boris Godunov are worth noting. The first is the 1983 joint effort of Leningrad's Kirov Theater and London's Covent Garden (its director, Andrei Tarkovsky, was then in exile), a “supersaturated” or maximally full version of the opera that was revived in 1990, several years after Tarkovsky's death. (It was brought to New York City's Metropolitan Opera in July 1992.) This Boris bears the signature of the cinematographer: replete with a recurring white-robed spectre of the murdered tsarevich, icons staged as living tableaus, a heavy clerical presence (both Catholic and Orthodox) and a blind, shrouded holy fool, it is, except for the final Kromy scene, lyrical and meditative in spirit. In a review in Sovetskaia kultura ( “Segodnia—’ Boris’ Tarkovskogo,” 27 October 1990), director Valery Gergiev reflected: “This performance came to us when we were deeply mired in a chaos of problems and sufferings. Tarkovsky had no interest in the affairs of the distant past for their own sake. Painfully contemplating Russia's fate, he sought a way out—and found it in our reawakened memory, in a troubled conscience. He sought that sense of the sacred, which should never depart from our lives.” Only with some strain can such a gentle, post-communist message be read back into the choral extravaganzas, irony-laden people's scenes, aggressive Polish coquetry and pretenders on horseback that mark the operatic Boris most of us know best. Exclusive focus on inner spiritual torment can be found only in Musorgsky's original, 1869 version of the opera (which contains no Polish act and no Kromy scene). That earlier score is in fact the base for two other major productions of Boris Godunov during the Jubilee. One is the production of the “Estonia” theater from Tallinn, in repertory throughout the 1980s. Stage sets for this production are an abstraction of stage hangings and cross-bars, reminiscent of the traps of the mind; monks with candles continually crowd into this space and the seven scenes are separated by a tolling of bells and by monastic processions. The “Estonia” production has ceased to be the dramatization of political struggle and has become a passion play with music. Another production, also based on the 1869 score, was mounted in 1989 by the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow. After many years of hearing how Musorgsky's operaticgenius had “saved” Pushkin's play by making it stageable and dramatic, this production loudly committed itself to the reverse procedure. As one review in Muzykal'naia zhizn’ put it (Sergei Korobkov, “Venchanie na tsarstvo,” 14 [1990]: 9), Russians have had enough of these palatially kitsch, “socialist-realist Bolshoi Theater” productions that do no more than “fulfill the social-political decree for opera-style emotions that are obliged to reflect the power and greatness of the Fatherland.” Opposing itself to that task with a vengeance, this Boris advertised itself as “purely poetic and purely theatrical.” Among its innovations are a young blond-haired boy with a candle (a specter, perhaps, of the murdered tsarevich or perhaps the catharsis of Boris's crime) who remains at the tsar's side throughout the opera, alternately consoling and threatening him. Of political subtlety there is none. Two posters were on display in the foyer of the Stanislavsky theater during the opera's run: one depicted the murder of Dmitrii of Uglich by Boris Godunov's minions in 1591; the other showed the Romanov heir, Tsarevich Aleksei, shot by a bolshevik firing squad in 1918.
9. For a taste of the variety, see the commemorative Musorgsky issue of Sovetskaia muzyka3 (March 1989) which includes pleas by singers and directors to perform orig inal versions, research on the composer's genealogy, speculation on the relation be tween Musorgsky and Stravinsky, contrastive studies of the composer's work in his own and in others’ settings, as well as routine defenses of Musorgsky's musical literacy.
10. The production has been recorded live on compact disc by Deutsche Grammophon, 1989 (429758-2), boxed with an introductory essay by Richard Taruskin and briefer comments by Victor Borovsky and Claudio Abbado.
11. See V. I. Antipov, et al., “Polnoe akademicheskoe,” in Sovetskaia muzyka 3 (1989): 66; updated (1992) by fliers inviting foreigners to subscribe. The project will proceed along two tracks: vols. 1-17 will contain all of Musorgsky's own surviving texts plus commentary; vols. 23-32, arrangements and completions by the hands of other masters (Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Ravel). In the words of the editors, the order of work will not be chronological but according to “cultural value “: the earliest volumes will be on the historical operas, followed by the comic operas and finally the songs, piano works and incidental orchestral pieces.
12. See Antipov, 67-68.
13. See his “Introduction: Who Speaks for Musorgsky?” in Richard Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue. A compatible but somewhat different interpretation of the composer's creative evolution can be found in Caryl Emerson and Robert William Oldani, Musorgsky and Godunov, Boris: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1993)Google Scholar.
14. Orlova, Alexandra, Musorgsky's Days and Works: A Biography in Documents, trans, and ed. Guenther, Roy J. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983 Google Scholar.
15. Some entries are inexplicably trivial, however: two sentences from the music critic Semyon Kruglikov remarking on Musorgsky's keyboard imitation of Kremlin bells and an emotional three-sentence entry on Musorgsky's aggressive piano playing by Elizaveta Dianina. These mini-entries, clearly influenced by an excerpting style appropriate to the bulky Trudy i dni genre, wear much less well in a slender volume.
16. When Kutuzov modestly remarks, for example, that Musorgsky preferred (forreasons the poet did not respect) one version of a Kutuzov couplet to another, Orlova provides a footnote: “Musorgsky, an ardent lover of the Russian past, could hardly have been ‘enthusiastic’ about Golenishchev-Kutuzov's verses in their second version, which was as pitiful as the first … “; or when Kutuzov wonders why Musorgsky chose the incomparably perfect Pushkin as base for his “realistic” opera and then mangled Pushkin's verses (a question frequently raised by aesthetic critics at the time), Orlova angrily retorts: “This entire passage is testimony to a total misunderstanding of Boris Godunov. One is absolutely at a loss to see how Golenishchev-Kutuzov could have said that the Balakirev Circle neither appreciated nor understood the great poet.” When Kutuzov makes light of the piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition” as mere illustration, Orlova testily instructs us to remember that Kartinki is “a profoundly philosophical work, a meditation on life and death, on history, on the people, and on man in general. “
17. See Gordeeva's commentary and notes to Golenishchev-Kutuzov's “Vospominaniia o M. P. Musorgskom,” M. P. Musorgskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 252-60. Although she corrects Kutuzov at several points, she does him the courtesy of drawingon his own biographer (N. Zverev) for evidence of the deep compatibility between musician and poet, of Kutuzov's musical memory that often aided Musorgsky in re cuperating his improvised compositions and for the reasons—both personal and aesthetic— why their paths eventually diverged.
18. Among the translation misjudgments we should note: in Musorgsky's song “Serenada,” Death does not strangle his consumptive victim but smothers her (dushit); the “Rasskaz o brate” written by Filaret Musorgsky is, of course, “Story about My Brother,” not “My Brother's Story “; “Dances of the Persian Slave Girls” (pliaski persidok) is not “The Persian Dance “; the title of the penultimate song in “Detskaia” is not the grotesque, Baba-Yaga-like “In Iukk', Riding on a Stick” but simply “To [the village of] Yukki on a Hobbyhorse “; Smuta is not sedition but a time of trouble; and non-Russian titles should be translated back into their original languages, not into some slapdash English (i.e., Schubert's “Lesnoi tsar'” is the famous “Erlkonig,” not “The Forest King “).