Mussorgsky’s Walk

Encyclopaedia Britannica places him among The Five — with Aleksandr Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui — composers bound to the idea of a nationalist school of Russian music. It names the works that still carry him: the opera Boris Godunov, final version first performed in 1874; the songs; the piano piece Pictures from an Exhibition, 1874. He was the son of a landowner with peasant blood, his father’s grandmother having been a serf. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1881, the year of his death, he said he had learned Russian fairy tales from his nurse. The sentence that follows is the career in one breath. Mother, an excellent pianist, gave him his first lessons. The nurse had already given him a country.

This early familiarity with the spirit of the people, with the way they lived, lent the first and greatest impetus to my musical improvisations.

Ilya Repin painted him in four days, 2–5 March 1881, in the Nikolaevsky Military Hospital in St Petersburg. Vladimir Stasov, who had come to the ward and later wrote the portrait up for Golos, says the painter arrived from Moscow for the Wanderers’ ninth exhibition and understood they would not meet again. A period of the illness had come when Mussorgsky seemed fresher, believed in recovery, even dreamed of new work inside the hospital walls. The room had high windows and, that week, sun. Repin had no easel. He perched at a small table. The sitter wore a dressing-gown with crimson velvet facings, head a little down, “deeply considering something.” After the fifth, the last period of the illness began. Britannica’s dates are 9 March 1839, Old Style — 21 March New Style — at Karevo, and 16 March 1881, Old Style — 28 March New Style — in St Petersburg. He died days after the sitting, not yet forty-three. The portrait is not a death mask. It is a man who still thought he might write.

This portrait was painted God knows how quickly, fiercely — everyone can see that.

Britannica’s summary of the life is unsparing and short: composition without training in his teens; first lessons from Balakirev in 1857; resignation from a military regiment to devote himself to music; government jobs; alcoholism that made him, in the end, unemployable. The personal decline, it says, was accompanied by maturity as a composer. That pairing is the difficulty and the point. Rimsky-Korsakov, after the death, edited and completed, and in doing so often smoothed what the living man had left rough. Original versions began to return to print from 1928, in Pavel Lamm’s work. The visitor who knows only the concert Night on Bald Mountain knows, in large part, Rimsky’s later recension of a piece Britannica dates to 1867. The roughness was not a mistake waiting for a friend. It was the method.

Boris Godunov is the opera the article names first. The final version’s first performance in 1874 is Britannica’s date. Mussorgsky wrote his own theatre of crowd and conscience: not a string of arias with a nation attached, but a nation that keeps interrupting the arias. Khovanshchina, Britannica notes, was left unfinished and completed by Rimsky-Korsakov. The unfinished is not a romance. It is what the hospital already knew. If you come to him through painting, Repin’s gown is the last costume. If you come through sound, Boris is the first room large enough to hold the voice he wanted: speech as music, the crowd as a character, a crowned man talking to himself as if the country could hear.

The songs are the other speech. Britannica names them with the opera and the piano pictures. The Nursery, written across the years of Boris, sets a child’s talk — a nurse, a corner, a beetle — without translating it into grown-up melody first. The autobiographical nurse is not only a legend in a sketch. She is a method: listen until speech has a rhythm, then write that. Government desks and drink did not cancel the ear. They narrowed the years in which it could still work. What got written in those years is disproportionately the work that lasts. Rimsky’s completions of Khovanshchina kept a plot on the stage. They also taught later ears to expect a smoothness the manuscripts did not always offer.

Pictures from an Exhibition was written in 1874 as a memorial to Viktor Hartmann, architect and artist, dead the year before at thirty-nine. Britannica records the piano origin and Maurice Ravel’s 1922 orchestration, the version orchestras still carry into halls that have never seen the watercolours. Stasov had organised the commemorative show. Mussorgsky walked the pictures and made a suite in which the composer himself promenades between them. Promenade is not an introduction to be skipped. It is the body of the friend moving from frame to frame. Hartmann’s designs survive in enough sheets to keep the walk honest: a clock in the shape of Baba Yaga’s hut, a gate for Kiev that was never built. The suite also walks through a ballet of unhatched chicks and through catacombs; those rooms are in the music even when the watercolours are not on this page. The music does not illustrate as a guidebook illustrates. It answers. A drawing of a hut becomes a ride. A gate that does not exist becomes a city that does.

Hartmann’s Hut on Fowl’s Legs is a clock in the Russian style, 1870: an izba on chicken legs, timekeeping as a fairy tale. Mussorgsky’s Baba-Yaga is the hut in motion. The piano original, in Bernd Krueger’s recording, still has the hammer-and-wood truth of the suite before Ravel dressed it. The first minutes are the wildest: the ride, not the souvenir. Britannica’s nurse-and-fairy-tales sentence is not a cute origin story here. It is the permission to let a witch be a structure of rhythm rather than a costume. The Five wanted a Russian school. He gave them a clock that walks.

The suite’s darker rooms turn the promenade minor, as if friendship had to learn another language in order to keep walking. The chicks are the opposite weather: a joke of shells and feet that the piano makes into pecking time. Variety, in this suite, is not Repin’s variety of genres. It is one friend’s eye, many temperatures. You do not need Ravel to hear it. Ravel is how the twentieth century learned to hear it in a crowd. The piano is how 1874 heard it in a room.

The Great Gate of Kiev is Hartmann’s unbuilt civic dream: a cupola, an arch, a city proposing itself in watercolour. Mussorgsky’s finale, in the original piano suite, is the promenade raised to a chorale, bells under the hands, a splendour that does not require the gate to have been constructed. Musopen’s public-domain recording of the movement lasts the better part of five minutes; the last of them is the part a hall waits for. Britannica’s title is Pictures from an Exhibition, not the later English “at.” The preposition is small. The claim is not. These are pictures from a show that was also a funeral. The gate is the last hospitality the dead friend could still offer: a way into a city of sound.

Pictures from an Exhibition

Night on Bald Mountain, 1867 in Britannica’s dating, is the other famous night: St John’s, witches, a gathering on the bare hill. The concert shape most listeners know is Rimsky-Korsakov’s after the composer’s death. The opening storm is the best minute of that reputation — the plunge, not the later church bells that tidy the dawn. To hear it after the Hartmann gate is to hear two kinds of Russian supernatural: a civic fantasy that wants to stand, and a folk night that wants to fly apart. He could do both without asking permission of a conservatory form. The Five’s nationalist programme, in his hands, is not a costume cupboard. It is speech, a hut, a tsar, a hill. Rimsky’s polish made him bearable to orchestras. The hospital portrait makes the polish look like what it was: a friend’s fear that the roughness would not survive.

Stasov, at the Wanderers’ show, called him one of the largest Russian musicians, a man who by right should lie near Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, close to them in force, depth, originality, and narodnost — the quality of belonging to the people. Photographic portraits existed, he said, and were nothing beside a likeness made by a painter who had loved the music for years. Tretyakov bought the canvas without seeing it; Stasov notes that the collection was already willed to the Moscow public museum, “that is, to the Russian people.” The people, in that sentence, are a destination for a picture. In Mussorgsky’s sentence they were a nurse’s voice. Between the two sentences the operas and the pictures sit, unfinished, edited, finally allowed to be rough again. He is not Tchaikovsky’s theatre. He is the speech Tchaikovsky’s theatre did not need to be. After him, a Russian crowd in an opera is never only chorus. It is a character that has learned to interrupt a tsar.

Balakirev’s lessons in 1857, Britannica says, were the first composition teaching. Resignation from a regiment followed. The Five were a circle, not a conservatory class: a common goal of a nationalist school, different gifts. Cui wrote criticism. Borodin kept a chemist’s life beside the scores. Rimsky would become the professional editor of other men’s roughness. Mussorgsky’s gift was the ear for talk. Boris is what happens when that ear is given a tsar and a crowd. Pictures is what happens when it is given a dead friend’s drawings. Night on Bald Mountain is what happens when it is given a folk night and, later, a friend’s fear that orchestras would not play the night as written.

Ravel’s 1922 orchestration is not a correction. It is a translation into the language of a later hall. Britannica records it as the fact that made the piano suite an orchestral citizen. The piano original, which Musopen’s Great Gate still represents, keeps the walk indoors: one person, one friend’s pictures, hammers rather than brass. Both versions are honest if you know which room you are in. The visitor who only knows the orchestral gate has met the civic dream in public clothes. The hut on fowl’s legs, in Krueger’s piano, still sounds like a clock that has decided to run.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s posthumous labour is the other translation, the one that still divides listeners. Britannica is plain: he edited and purged; original versions returned later. Khovanshchina on stage is often his completion. Night on Bald Mountain in the park is often his recension. Gratitude and loss sit in the same bar. Without him, much would have waited longer for a first hearing. With only him, the speech would have been remembered as a smoother dialect than the manuscripts speak. Lamm’s work from 1928 onward is the later justice. The hospital portrait is the earlier one: a face that had not yet been edited.

The portrait left the hospital for the Wanderers’ ninth exhibition, the errand that had brought Repin from Moscow. Stasov wrote it up in Golos before the month was out. Surikov’s morning of condemned streltsy was in the same rooms: another history that would not stay still. Mussorgsky’s gown is not a history painting. It is a sitting that history interrupted. Britannica names the canvas among Repin’s vigorous portraits of great contemporaries, with Tolstoy and Glinka. The count’s 1887 sitting is the other weather of that gift: a living man who had already judged his own fame. The composer in crimson facings would not sit again. The painter’s 1887 self-portrait, made in Florence, is the look that had already learned not to flinch. Three faces, one hand. The music is what the gown was for.

Britannica’s life is unsparing in another direction: composition without training in his teens; government jobs; alcoholism that made him, in the end, unemployable. The personal decline, it says, was accompanied by maturity as a composer. That pairing is easy to moralise and hard to hear. The songs, named with the opera and the piano pictures, are the proof that the ear outlasted the desk. The Nursery sets a child’s talk without translating it into grown-up melody first. The autobiographical nurse is not only a legend in a sketch. She is a method: listen until speech has a rhythm, then write that. What got written in those narrowed years is disproportionately the work that lasts.

The concert Night on Bald Mountain most listeners know is, Britannica’s dating makes plain, a later friend’s recension of a piece from 1867. The opening storm in the recording here is that reputation’s best minute: the plunge, not the dawn that tidies it. To put the storm after the Great Gate is to hear two supernatural temperatures in one afternoon. One wants to stand as a city. The other wants to fly apart as a folk night. Rimsky made the night bearable to orchestras. Lamm, from 1928, began to let the manuscripts speak in their own dialect. The visitor can be grateful for the concert and still want the speech. Both facts can sit in one ear if the ear knows which version it is hearing.

Begin with Repin’s gown if you want the face before the catalogue. Stay for Boris if you want the room in which a country talks. Pictures from an Exhibition is the walk you can take in an afternoon: hut, chicks, catacombs, gate. Night on Bald Mountain is the other night, the one the concert still uses as a storm. He wrote, Britannica says, without the training the others leaned on, and died in a hospital where a friend painted fast because there was no later. The Five wanted a school. He left a voice. The voice still sounds like someone speaking, not like someone who has agreed to be a statue of Russian music. That is why the portrait’s eyes, in Kramskoy’s mouth, are still at work. The minute has not ended. The improvisation the nurse started is still going.