First, about the name. Mussorgsky (Russians pronounce it with the accent on
the first syllable) does not derive from the Russian word musor, meaning
"rubbish," as many have long wished to believe, in part because it makes such a
good story — especially considering the brilliant alcoholic Russian
composer's messy life and death. Instead, as David Brown meticulously explicates
in a lengthy footnote on the very first page of his exhaustively researched new
book on Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), the name comes from the Church
Slavonic word "musorga," meaning musician. Bestowed upon a 15th-century
ancestor in apparent recognition of his musical gifts, this nickname was
eventually adapted as the surname Mussorgsky. The rather vain composer (perceived
as a "strutting cock" by one artist acquaintance) insisted upon the "g" in the
spelling, to avoid any unpleasant associations with rubbish.
Brown informs every page with this sort of scrupulous attention to every possible detail surrounding the personal and musical life of the composer who created of the epic historical operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, the cycle of piano pieces (later orchestrated by Ravel) Pictures at an Exhibition, the spooky symphonic work Night on Bald Mountain, and dozens of unforgettably dramatic and "realistic" songs. This dense but rewarding study is indeed a welcome addition to the distinguished Master Musicians Series. At each turn, Brown, author of biographies of Glinka and Tchaikovsky, seeks to clarify the historical and musicological record, clearing away the mist of obfuscation, confusion and uncertainty that has surrounded the career of this exasperating genius, ever since his death from drink in 1881 at the inappropriate age of 42. In separating fact from speculation, Brown draws upon numerous developments in Mussorgsky scholarship of recent years. He also succeeds in proving that "the workings of Mussorgsky's musical mind were much more sophisticated, intricate and intensive than might have been expected from his perceived persona and day to day existence," although Brown admits ruefully at the outset that "Mussorgsky's working practices would always be fitful."
So fitful, in fact, that he left the door wide open for more disciplined and methodical colleagues like Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov to "clean up" what was left behind. It was, of course, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky's one-time roommate and fellow member of the group of St.Petersburg composers called "The Mighty Fistful" (moguchaya kuchka), who "edited" Mussorgsky's masterpiece Boris, accurately described by Brown as "one of the greatest tragic operas ever composed." Boris already existed in Mussorgsky's own version (actually, several versions, only adding to the confusion), but Professor Rimsky (himself a much more prolific and systematic opera composer) could not abide what he saw as his friend's technical shortcomings: "absurd, incoherent harmony, ugly part-writing, sometimes staggeringly illogical modulations, sometimes a dispiriting absence of such, inept instrumentation in the orchestral pieces, in general a certain, irreverent, self-admiring dilettantism, at times moments of technical dexterity, but more often utter technical feebleness." So in the last decades of his life, Rimsky reworked the entire score. Because of its splashy production in Paris in 1908 with Chaliapin in the lead, this considerably more conventional Boris became the preferred performing version for many years afterward. Only within the last 30 years, due to the efforts first of Soviet musicologist Pavel Lamm and later of David Lloyd-Jones, has Mussorgsky's own score for Boris pushed Rimsky's adaptation into the wings.
Brown devotes two chapters, nearly one-fifth of the book, to Boris. His discussion makes clear that Mussorgsky knew exactly what he was doing in this highly individual opera, and even anticipated the objections of critics such as Cesar Cui, who dismissed Boris as immature and the result of a "hasty compositional process." (Mussorgky's desultory working routine could have been called many things, but hasty was not one of them.) What really bothered Cui and others was that Mussorgsky treated the voice in opera (as in his songs) in an entirely new way, decreasing the role of melody and increasing the role of the text, even to the point where "the words could be all-determining, and they might be the only means of decoding the music."
To many of his contemporaries, this bare-bones, "realistic" aesthetic was too crude and unlyrical, and represented a rejection of the pretty "salon" style that had long reigned in Russian music. The much more westernized (and socially adroit) Tchaikovsky, only one year older than Mussorgsky, wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck that Mussorgsky "has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, roughness. He flaunts.his illiteracy, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent which are, moreover, not devoid of originality." In his own operas, Tchaikovsky employed a much more "westernized" style — and depicted the brutally oppressed Russian peasantry (in the opening scene of Eugene Onegin, for example) through the rose-colored glasses that Mussorgsky refused to wear.
Straightforward, sober, and devoid of chic theoretical agendas or jargon, Musorgsky: His Life and Work assumes a reader with a basic technical knowledge of music. (The text includes 78 extensive music examples, as well as a very useful Calendar, List of Works, Personalia and Select Bibliography.) There is extended discussion of fine points of harmony. Brown tends to segregate the personal from the musical, and the book reads less like a biography than a musicological study equipped with relevant biographical and historical information, much of it gleaned from letters written by his friends and colleagues and expertly translated by the author. Averse to speculation beyond the facts, Brown resists the temptation (so common among biographers) to launch into psychological conjecture. This is not the sort of volume you can read at a single sitting. Rather, it should be savored in incremental small doses, rather like a box of chocolates, only with greater nutritional content.
One of the reasons why the last significant life-and-works treatment of Mussorgsky was written nearly 50 years ago (by M.D.Calvocoressi) is because Mussorgsky (again unlike Tchaikovsky) led such a disorderly and frequently unchronicled life. When he died, he had long been homeless, and his archives were scattered about in a chaotic state. Repeatedly, Brown has to admit that there is little or no documentation of Mussorgsky's activities for a certain period, his correspondence having been lost or nonexistent. Especially towards the end of his life, when Mussorgsky's former kuchka comrades had mostly gotten married and were busy pursuing respectable lives, he became increasingly isolated. Alexander Borodin, full-time chemist and part-time composer (most notably of another opera left unfinished, Prince Igor), observed to his wife that Mussorgsky would drink "almost daily" at the Maly Yaroslav restaurant in St. Petersburg "sometimes till he's insensible," and that he would "periodically drop out of sight, then reappear uncharacteristically morose, taciturn." Rimsky was also aware of his friend's "nervous fever" that led him to "wreck himself with cognac," which (as alcoholism inevitably does) only grew worse: "From the time when Boris was mounted began the decline of its highly talented composer." In 1880, Mussorgsky, who although born into the land-owning gentry had to work his entire life to make ends meet, even lost his post in the civil service. When he was finally persuaded to enter the hospital in early 1881, homeless and distraught, Mussorgsky bribed one of the orderlies to bring him a forbidden bottle of wine or cognac, which precipitated his death on March 28, just two weeks after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It was in the hospital that Russian "realist" artist Ilya Repin painted his famous portrait, the single most enduring visual image of the composer.
Perhaps because Mussorgsky was so frequently operating with impaired facilities, he found it increasingly difficult to bring large-scale works to completion. The most obvious example is his magnificent opera Khovanshchina, set in late 17th-century Muscovy, which he labored over fitfully for eight years without completing. Nor did he have any interest in writing symphonies (unlike the conservatory-trained Tchaikovsky), as he told his sponsor and literary collaborator Vladimir Stasov: "I'm not against symphonies, but against symphonists — incorrigible conservatives."
But Mussorgsky was much more successful in a genre that required a shorter attention span: songs. For Brown, the songs "are sufficient certainly to warrant Mussorgsky a place not only among the most original of all songwriters, but among the greatest," and help to compensate for the unfortunately small body of work that the composer left us. It was, in Brown's words, an "extraordinary flair for catching in musical terms both the physical mien and emotional convolutions of a human being" that make these songs so unique and treasured. From Alexander Dargomizhsky (1813–69), Mussorgsky learned how to put the text first, and how to convey the slightest nuances in attitude by stressing the natural rhythm and movement of the words.
Perhaps the supreme masterpiece of Mussorgsky's song-writing is the cycle Songs and Dances of Death, four songs composed from 1875 through 1877, to which Brown devotes nearly an entire chapter. Set to poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, this series of bleak but compelling conversations between death and its victims — a baby, a young woman, a drunk in a snowstorm, soldiers on the battlefield — is really a mini-opera, as Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya later discovered: "I was struck by the scope of the passions and the high tragedy of the whole cycle — the tremendous possibilities for the actor's metamophosis from one role to another." The cycle emerged from Mussorgsky's own obsession with dying (remember the terrifying death scene of Tsar Boris in Boris Godunov), and seems to prefigure his own premature and sordid exit from life.
With Mussorgsky it is hard to escape the "what might have been" factor: If only he had not been bedeviled by alcohol. If only he had possessed greater self-discipline. If only he had received better musical training. And yet such regrets lead us nowhere. We must accept Mussorgsky (as David Brown does in this indispensable guide) on his own terms, and in his own time. His influence on the future — on such great composers of the twentieth century as Sergei Prokofiev, Leos Janácek and Dmitri Shostakovich — was enormous and gratefully acknowledged. But then Mussorgsky was well aware that he never belonged only to the present: "the artist believes in the future because he lives in it."
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