Natasha's Dance

from the Russian soil. Gartman’s fantastic folk forms were the equivalent of Musorgsky’s explorations in music: both were attempts to break free from the formal conventions of European art. Among the pictures at the exhibition there was a design for a clock in the form of Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken’s legs.+ Images like this demanded a new mode of

    * The Musorgsky family owned 110,000 hectares - eighteen villages - with a total population of 400 serfs prior to the emancipation of 1861 (C. Emerson, The Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge, 1999), p. 37).

    + In Russian fairy rales the witch Baba Yagfl lives deep in the woods in a hut whose legs allow it to rotate to face each unfortunate new visitor.

    musical expression, one entirely free from the sonata form of European music, if they were to be redrawn in sound; and this is what Musorg-sky’s Pictures did. They created a new Russian language in music.

    ’To you, Generalissimo, sponsor of the Gartman Exhibition, in remembrance of our dear Viktor, 27 June, ‘74.’ Thus Musorgsky dedicated Pictures to Vladimir Stasov, the critic, scholar and self-appointed champion of the national school in all the Russian arts. Stasov was a huge figure, one might say a tyrant, in the mid-nineteenth- century Russian cultural milieu. He discovered a large number of its greatest talents (Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Repin, Kramskoi, Vasnetsov and Antokolsky); he inspired many of their works (Borodin’s Prince Igor, Musorgsky’s Khovansh-cbina, Balakirev’s King Lear and Rimsky’s Sadko and Scheherazade); and he fought their battles in countless thunderous articles and letters to the press. Stasov had a reputation as a brilliant dogmatist. Turgenev carried on a lifelong argument with ‘our great all-Russian critic’, whom he caricatured in the figure Skoropikhin in his 1877 novel Virgin Soil (‘He is always foaming and frothing over like a bottle of sour kvas’). He also wrote a famous ditty about him:

    Argue with someone more intelligent than you:

    He will defeat you.

    But from your defeat you will learn something useful.

    Argue with someone of equal intelligence:

    Neither will be victorious.

    And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.

    Argue with someone less intelligent:

    Not from a desire for victory

    But because you may be of use to him.

    Argue even with a fool: You will not gain glory But sometimes it is fun.

    Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.65

    Stasov wanted Russian art to liberate itself from Europe’s hold. By copying the West, the Russians could be at best second-rate; but by borrowing from their own native traditions they might create a truly national art that matched Europe’s with its high artistic standards and originality. ‘Looking at these paintings’, Stasov wrote of the Academy Exhibition of 1861, ‘it is difficult to guess without a signature or label that they have been done by Russians in Russia. All are exact copies of foreign works.’66 In his view, art should be ‘national’ in the sense that it portrayed the people’s daily lives, was meaningful to them, and taught them how to live.

    Stasov was a towering figure in Musorgsky’s life. They first met in 1857, when Stasov was the champion of the Balakirev circle in its revolt against the Petersburg Conservatory. Founded by the pianist Anton Rubinstein in 1861, the Conservatory was dominated by the German conventions of composition developed in the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Its patron was the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, a German by origin and proselytizer of her nation’s cultural cause, who secured the court’s support after Rubinstein had failed to raise public finance for the Conservatory. Rubinstein was contemptuous of the amateurism of musical life in Russia (he called Glinka a dilettante) and he set about promoting music education on Germanic lines. Russian national music, Rubinstein maintained, was of only ‘ethnographic interest’, quaint but without artistic value in itself. Balakirev and Stasov were incensed. While they recognized that a standard had been set by the German tradition, as nationalists they worshipped what they perceived as Glinka’s ‘purely Russian’ music (in fact it is steeped in Italian and German influences)67 and retaliated by accusing Rubinstein of denigrating Russia from the heights of what they called his ‘European conservatorial grandeur’.68 There was an element of xenophobia, even anti-Semitism, in their battles against Rubinstein. They called him ‘Tupinstein’ (‘dull’), ‘Dubinstein’ (‘dumbhead’) and ‘Grubinstein’ (‘crude’). But they were afraid that German principles would stifle Russian forms and their fear gave way to foreigner-baiting. In 1862 they established the Free Music School as a direct rival to the Conservatory, setting it the task of cultivating native talent. In Stasov’s phrase, it was time for the ‘hoopskirts and tailcoats’ of the Petersburg elites to make way for the ‘long Russian coats’ of the

    provinces.69 The School became the stronghold of the so-called ‘Mighty Five’, the kuchka, who pioneered the Russian musical style.

    The kuchkist composers were all young men in 1862. Balakirev was twenty-five, Cui twenty-seven, Musorgsky twenty-three, Borodin the old man at twenty- eight, and Rimsky-Korsakov the baby of them all at just eighteen. All of them were self-trained amateurs. Borodin combined composing with a career as a chemist. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer (his First Symphony was written on a ship). Musorgsky had been in the Guards and then the civil service before taking up music, and even after that, at the height of his success in the 1870s, he was forced by the expense of his drinking habit to hold down a full-time job in the State Forestry Department. In contrast, moreover, to the elite status and court connections of Conservatory composers such as Tchaikovsky, the kuchkists, by and large, were from the minor gentry of the provinces. So to some degree their esprit de corps depended on the myth, which they themselves created, of a movement that was more ‘authentically Russian’, in the sense that it was closer to the native soil, than the classical academy.70

    But there was nothing mythical about the musical language they developed, which set them poles apart from the conventions of the Conservatory. This self-conscious Russian styling was based on two elements. First they tried to incorporate in their music what they heard in village songs, in Cossack and Caucasian dances, in church chants and (cliched though it soon became) the tolling of church bells.* ‘Once again the sound of bells!’ Rimsky once exclaimed after a performance of Boris Godunov. He too had often reproduced the sound, in The Maid of Pskov (1873),the Easter Overture (1888), and his orchestra-lions of Borodin’s Prince Igor and Musorsgky’s Khovanshckina.71 Kuchkist music was filled with imitative sounds of Russian life. It tried to reproduce what Glinka had once called ‘the soul of Russian music’

    *Russian church bells have a special musicality which is unlike the sound of any other bells. The Russian technique of bell-chiming is for the ringers to strike the different bells directly with hammers, or by using short cords attached to the clappers. This encourages a form of counterpoint - albeit with the dissonances which result from the resounding echoes of the bells. The Western technique of ringing bells by swinging them with long ropes from the ground makes such synchronization all but impossible to achieve.

    - the long-drawn, lyrical and melismatic song of the Russian peasantry. Balakirev made this possible with his study of the folk songs of the Volga region in the 1860s (the heyday of populism in the arts). More than any previous anthology, his transcriptions artfully preserved the distinctive aspects of Russian folk music:

    - its ‘tonal mutability’: a tune seems to shift quite naturally from one tonic centre to another, often ending up in a different key (usually a second lower or higher) from the one in which the piece began. The effect is to produce a feeling of elusiveness, a lack of definition or of logical progression in the harmony, which even in its stylized kuchkist form makes Russian music sound very different from the tonal structures of the West.

    - 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