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.
5
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
