Natasha's Dance (31 page)

    - its heterophony: a melody divides into several dissonant voices, each with its own variation of the theme, which is improvised by the individual singers until the end, when the song reverts to a single line.

    - its use of parallel fifths, fourths and thirds. The effect is to give to Russian music a quality of raw sonority that is entirely missing in the polished harmonies of Western music.

    Secondly the
kuchkists
invented a series of harmonic devices to create a distinct ‘Russian’ style and colour that was different from the music of the West. This ‘exotic’ styling of ‘Russia’ was not just self-conscious but entirely invented - for none of these devices was actually employed in Russian folk or church music:

    - the whole-tone scale (C-D-E-F sharp-G sharp-A sharp-C): invented by Glinka and used for the first time in the march of Chernomor, the sorcerer in his opera
Ruslan and Liudmila
(1842), this became the ‘Russian’ sound of spookiness and evil. It was used by all the major composers from Tchaikovsky (for the apparition of the Countess’s ghost in
The Queen of Spades
in 1890) to Rimsky-Korsakov (in all his magic-story operas,
Sadko
(1897),
Kashchei the Immortal
(1902) and
Kitezh
(1907)). The scale is also heard in the music of Debussy, who took it (and much else) from Musorgsky. Later it became a standard device in horror-movie scores.

    - the octatonic scale, consisting of a whole tone followed by a semi-tone (C-D-E flat-F-G flat-A flat-B double flat-C double

    flat): used for the first time by Rimsky-Korsakov in his
Sadko
symphonic suite of 1867, it became a sort of Russian calling card, a
leitmotif
of magic and menace that was used not just by Rimsky but by all his followers, above all Stravinsky in his three great Russian ballets,
The Firebird
(1910),
Petrushka
(1911) and
The Rite of Spring
(1913). - the modular rotation in sequences of thirds: a device of Liszt’s which the Russians made their own as the basis of their loose symphonic-poem type of structure that avoids the rigid (German) laws of modulation in sonata form. Instead of the usual progression to the relative minor in the development section of the sonata form (e.g. C major to A minor), the Russians established a tonic centre in the opening section (say, C major) and then progressed through sequences of thirds (A flat major, F major, D flat major, and so on) in subsequent sections. The effect is to break away from the Western laws of development, enabling the form of a composition to be shaped entirely by the ‘content’ of the music (its programmatic statements and visual descriptions) rather than by formal laws of symmetry. This loose structure was especially important in Musorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition,
a work that probably did more than any other to define the Russian style. Musorgsky was the most original of the
kuchkist
composers. This was partly because he was the least schooled in European rules of composition. But the main reason was that he consciously rejected the European school and, more than any of the other nationalists, looked to the traditions of the Russian folk as a means of overturning it. There is a sense in which this very Russian figure (lazy, slovenly and heavy-drinking, full of swagger and explosive energy) played the Holy Fool in relation to the West. He rejected out of hand the received conventions of composition drawn up from the music of Bach, Mozart and Haydn. ‘Symphonic development, technically understood, is developed by the German, just as his philosophy is’, Musorgsky wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1868. ‘The German when he thinks first theorises at length and then proves; our Russian brother proves first and then amuses himself with theory.’
⁷²

    Musorgsky’s direct approach to life is reflected in his
Pictures.
The suite is a loosely structured series of musical portraits, a gentle amble through a picture gallery, without any sign of the formal (‘German’) rules of elaboration or development, and little evidence of the Western conventions of musical grammar. At its heart is the magic reach and power of the Russian folk imagination. The opening ‘Promenade
(in mode russico)’
is a folk-inspired tune with a metric flexibility, sudden tonal shifts, open fifths and octaves, and a choral heterophony echoing the patterns of the village song. The grotesque and tempestuous ‘Baba Yaga’ shifts violently between keys, persistently returning to the key of G in that static manner of the Russian peasant song
(nepodvizbnost’)
which, in a musical revolution yet to come, Stravinsky would deploy with such explosive force in
The Rite of Spring.
Musorgsky’s final picture, the glorious ‘Kiev Gate’, religiously uplifting, beautiful and tender, takes its cue from an ancient Russian hymn, the chant of Znamenny, originating from Byzantium and heard here, in the awesome closing moments, resounding to the clangour of the heavy bells. It is a wonderfully expressive moment, a picture of all Russia drawn in sound, and a moving tribute by Musorgsky to his friend.

    Alongside their interest in its ‘Russian style’, writers, artists and composers developed an obsession with Moscow’s history. One only has to list the great historical operas (from Glinka’s
A Life for the Tsar
to Rimsky-Korsakov’s
The Maid of Pskov
and Musorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
and
Khovanshchina),
the history plays and novels (from Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov
to Alexei Tolstoy’s trilogy beginning with
The Death of Ivan the Terrible),
the huge proliferation of poetic works on historical themes and the epic history paintings of Surikov and Repin, or Vasnetsov and Vrubel, to see the importance of Moscow’s history to the cultural quest for ‘Russia’ in the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that nearly all these works concerned the final years of Ivan the Terrible and the so-called ‘Time of Troubles’ between the reign of Boris Godunov and the foundation of the Romanov dynasty. History was regarded as a battlefield for competing views of Russia

    and its destiny, and these fifty years were seen as a crucial period in Russia’s past. They were a time when everything was up for grabs and the nation was confronted by fundamental questions of identity. Was it to be governed by elected rulers or by Tsars? Was it to be part of Europe or remain outside of it? The same questions were being asked by thinking Russians in the nineteenth century.

    Boris Godunov was a vital figure in this national debate. The histories, plays and operas that were written about him were also a discourse on Russia’s destiny. The Godunov we know from Pushkin and Musorgsky appeared first in Karamzin’s
History.
Karamzin portrayed Godunov as a tragic figure, a progressive ruler who was haunted by the past, a man of immense power and yet human frailty who was undone by the gap between political necessity and his own conscience. But in order to make the medieval Tsar the subject of a modern psychological drama, Karamzin had to invent much of his history.

    Boris, in real life, was the orphaned son of an old
boyar
family who had been raised at the Muscovite court as a ward of the Tsar, Ivan the Terrible. The Godunovs became intimate with the Royal Family at a time when noble lineage was viewed as potentially seditious by the Tsar. Engaged in a protracted struggle with noble
boyar
clans, Ivan made a point of promoting loyal servicemen from humble origins like the Godunovs. Boris’s sister, Irina Godunova, married Fedor, the Tsar’s weak and feeble-minded son. Shortly after, Ivan struck down and killed his eldest son, Ivan the Tsarevich, an episode which gripped the nineteenth-century imagination through Repin’s famous painting of the scene,
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November
1581(1885). Dmitry, Ivan’s other son, was just two years old when Ivan died in 1584, and his claim to the succession was tenuous at best. He was the child of the Tsar’s seventh marriage, but Church law permitted only three. So Fedor was crowned when Ivan died. The practical affairs of government were taken over by Boris Godunov - addressed in official documents as ‘the great sovereign’s Brother-in-Law, Ruler of the Russian lands’. Boris made a notable success of government. He secured Russia’s borders in the Baltic lands, kept in check the Tatar raids from the southern steppe, strengthened ties with Europe and, to secure a stable labour force for the gentry, he laid down the administrative framework of serfdom - a measure which was deeply unpopular with

    the peasantry. In 1598 Fedor died. Irina refused the crown and went into a convent, overcome with grief at her failure to produce an heir. At the
zemskii sobor,
or ‘Assembly of the Land’, the Moscow
boyars
voted for Boris to become Tsar - the first elected Tsar in Russian history.

    The early years of the Godunov reign were prosperous and peaceful. In many ways Boris was an enlightened monarch - a man ahead of his own time. He was interested in Western medicine, book printing and education, and he even dreamed of founding a Russian university on the European model. But in 1601-3 things went badly wrong. A series of harvest failures led to the starvation of about one-quarter of the peasantry in Muscovy, and since the crisis was made worse by the new laws of serfdom which took away the peasants’ rights of movement, the rural protests were aimed against the Tsar. The old princely clans took advantage of the famine crisis to renew their plots against the upstart elected Tsar whose power was a threat to their noble privilege. Boris stepped up his police surveillance of the noble families (especially the Romanovs) and banished many of them to Siberia or to monasteries in the Russian north on charges of treason. Then, in the middle of this political crisis, a young pretender to the Russian throne appeared with an army from Poland - a country always ready to exploit divisions within Russia for territorial gain. The pretender was Grigory Otrepev, a runaway monk who had been at one time in the service of the Romanovs, and he was probably approached by them before his escapade. He claimed to be the Tsarevich Dmitry, Ivan’s youngest son. Dmitry had been found with his throat cut in 1591; he was an epileptic and at the time it was established that he had stabbed himself in a fit. But Godunov’s opponents always claimed that he had killed the boy to clear his own passage to the Russian throne. The ‘False Dmitry’ played upon these doubts, claiming he had escaped the plot to murder him. It enabled him to rally supporters against the ‘usurper Tsar’ among disgruntled peasants and Cossacks on his march towards Moscow. Godunov died suddenly in 1605, as the pretender’s forces approached Moscow. According to Karamzin, he died of the ‘inner agitation of the soul which is inescapable for a criminal’.
⁷
’

    The evidence implicating Godunov in the murder of Dmitry had been fabricated by the Romanovs, whose own claims to the throne had rested on their election by the
boyars’
assembly to restore Russia’s

    unity, following the ‘Time of Troubles’, a period of civil wars and foreign invasion following the death of Boris Godunov. Perhaps Kar-amzin should have realized that Godunov was not a murderer. But nearly all the documents which he consulted had been doctored by official clerks or monks, and to challenge the Romanov myth would have got him into trouble with the government. In any case, the murder story was far too good for Karamzin to resist. It allowed him to explore the inner conflicts of Godunov’s mind in a way quite unsupported by the evidence. It underpinned his tragic concept of Boris Godunov - a progressive ruler who was haunted by his crime and in the end undone by his own illegitimacy as a Tsar. Karamzin’s
History
was dedicated to the Emperor Alexander - the reigning Tsar from the House of Romanov - and its vision was overtly monarchist. The moral lesson which he drew from the Godunov story - that elected rulers are never any good - was carefully attuned to the politics of Alexander’s reign. Boris was a Russian Bonaparte.

    Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov
was very closely based on Karamzin’s
History,
sometimes even lifting sections word for word. The conception of the play is firmly royalist - the people play no active part in their own history. That is the meaning of the famous stage direction ‘the people remain silent’ (
‘narod bezmolvstvuet’)
with which the drama ends. Musorgsky, too, who followed Pushkin’s text in his first version of the opera (1868-9), portrayed the Russian people as a dark and passive force, mired in the customs and beliefs of the old Russia embodied in Moscow. This conception of the Russians is epitomized in the scene outside St Basil’s on Red Square. The starving people gather there and Boris is confronted by the Holy Fool, who by implication condemns the Tsar’s crimes. But the crowd remains inert, kneeling in supplication to the Tsar, and even when the Holy Fool says he will not pray for the ‘Tsar Herod’, the people just disperse. Hence what might have been a signal for revolt is allowed to pass, and the Holy Fool appears not as the people’s leader but as a voice of conscience and Boris’s remorse.
⁷⁴
It was only with the addition of the ‘Kromy Forest Scene’, in the second version of the opera (1871-2), that Musorgsky introduced the theme of conflict between the people and the Tsar. Indeed, this conflict becomes the motive force of the whole drama, and the people the real tragic subject of the opera. In the Kromy scene the

    people are revealed in rebellion, the crowd mocks the Tsar, and folk song is deployed as the embodiment of the people’s voice. Musorgsky was first inspired to insert the scene for musical effect, having been impressed by the choral heterophony of a similar crowd scene in Rimsky-Korsakov’s
The Maid of Pskov.
The two men were sharing an apartment (and a piano) at the time and Musorgsky set to work on the Kromy scene just as Rimsky was orchestrating his opera.
⁷⁵
But the substitution of the Kromy scene for the one before St Basil’s (which is what Musorgsky clearly intended) meant a complete switch in the intellectual emphasis of the opera.*