Natasha's Dance

4

In 1874 the Academy of Arts organized a show in remembrance of the artist Viktor Gartman, who had died the previous year, aged thirty-nine. Today Gartman is best known as a friend of Musorgsky, the painter at the centre of his famous piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). Musorgsky was struck down by grief at Gartman's death, and the drinking bouts which led to his own death are dated from this time. He paid his own tribute to his artist friend by composing Pictures after visiting the show.⁵⁷ Gartman's 'neo-Russian' style had a huge influence on the music of Musorgsky - and indeed on all the trends of nineteenth-century art that took their inspiration from Moscow's cultural world. His architectural drawings were based on years of

11. Viktor Gartman: design for the Kiev city gate

study of medieval ornament. The most famous was his fanciful design for the Kiev city gate, shaped in the form of a warrior's helmet with a kokosbnik arch, which Musorgsky celebrated in the final picture of

the piano suite. One critic called the Gartman design 'marble towels and brick embroideries'.⁵⁸

Moscow was the centre (and the central subject) of this renewal of interest in the ancient Russian arts. The artist Fedor Solntsev played a crucial role, making detailed drawings of the weapons, saddlery, church plate and wall hangings in the Kremlin Armoury, and unearthing many other treasures in the provinces. Between 1846 and 1853 Solntsev published six large volumes of his illustrations called Antiquities of the Russian State. They provided artists and designers with a grammar of historic ornament which they could incorporate in their own work. Solntsev himself used these ancient motifs in his restoration of the Kremlin's Terem Palace - an authentic reproduction of the seventeenth-century Moscow style, complete with ceramic-tiled stoves, ornate vaulted ceilings with kokoshnik arches and red leather walls and chairs (plate 6). Solntsev's work was carried on by the Stroganov Art School, founded in Moscow in 1860, which encouraged artists to work from ancient Russian church and folk designs. Many of the leading 'Russian style' designers who took the world by storm in the 1900s - Vashkov, Ovchinnikov and the Moscow masters of the Faberge workshop - had graduated from the Stroganov School.⁵⁹ In contrast to the rigid European classicism of the St Petersburg Academy, the atmosphere in Moscow was rather more relaxed and open to the exploration of Russian themes and styles. Artists flocked to Moscow to study its icons, its lubok painting and Palekh lacquer work. Three giants of Russian painting, Repin, Polenov and Vasnetsov, all moved there as students from St Petersburg. These old crafts were still alive in Moscow and its environs, whereas they had died out in St Petersburg. There were several lubok publishers in Moscow, for example, but none in Petersburg. Icon painters flourished in the towns around Moscow, but there were none in Petersburg. Much of this was explained by the old-style merchant taste that dominated the art market in Moscow. The Moscow School of Painting was also more receptive to these native tra-ditions, and unlike the aristocratic Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, its doors were open to a wide social range of students, who brought with them the outlook of the common folk. The director of the Moscow School called on artists to use folk themes, and on the opening of the Ethnographic Exhibition, in 1867, he lectured on the need to study

old folk clothing and embroidery so as to retrieve the ancient Russian style of art that had been buried under Western tastes.⁶⁰

In Gartman's world of architectural design, the mid-century boom in the neo-Russian style was made possible by the abolition of an eighteenth-century law stipulating that buildings in the centre of Moscow should be made from stone with facades in approved European styles. The repeal of this law, in 1858, opened the way for a spate of wooden buildings in the Russian peasant style. More than ever, Moscow took on the appearance of a 'big village'. The historian and Slavophile Pogodin, himself a peasant son and a well-known collector of antique artefacts, commissioned several wooden houses in the peasant style. Wood was declared by nationalists the 'fundamental folk material' and every architect who aspired to be 'national' constructed buildings in that material.⁶¹ Gartman designed the exhibition halls with their wooden folk-style decoration for the Moscow Polytechnic Exhibition which was held in 1872 to mark the bicentenary of Peter the Great's birth. The exhibition heralded a return to the artistic principles of Muscovy. It was housed in the newly opened Russian Museum, opposite St Basil's on Red Square, which had been designed by Vladimir Shervud (an architect of English origin) in the old ecclesiastical style of Moscow. The tall church-like towers of the museum reflected the contours of the neighbouring Kremlin - a symbol of the fact, as Shervud put it, that Orthodoxy was 'the primary cultural element of [Russia's] nationhood'.⁶² The neo-Russian style entered its heyday in the 1870s, largely as a result of the growing wealth and status of the Moscow merchant patrons of the arts. Pavel Tretiakov built his famous gallery of Russian art as an annexe to his mansion in the ancient Moscow style. Sergei Shchukin's Moscow villa (which housed his huge collection of French painting) was a neo-Russian fantasy modelled on the seventeenth-century wooden architecture of Yaroslav and Kolo-menskoe. The centre of the city, between the Kremlin and Lubianka Square, was entirely reconstructed in the neo-Russian style favoured by the wealthy merchant councillors in Moscow's city hall. New trading rows (later to become the state department store GUM) were constructed on Red Square in the 1880s; followed by a city Duma (to become the Lenin Museum) in 1892. The city's business region was suddenly taken over by ancient tent roofs and kokoshnik pediments,

f z. Vladimir Shervud: Russian Museum, Red Square, Moscow (the Kremlin to the left). Early 1900s

fancy yellow brickwork and ornate folk designs. Moscow entered the twentieth century with its skyline in the form of the seventeenth.

Musorgsky fell in love with Moscow's 'Russianness'. He had spent nearly all his life in Petersburg. But as an artist he was drawn to the 'realm of fairy tales' which he discovered in the ancient capital. 'You

know', he wrote to Balakirev on his first trip to Moscow in 1859, 'I had been a cosmopolitan, but now there's been a sort of rebirth; everything Russian has become close to me and I would be offended if Russia were treated crudely, without ceremony; it's as if at the present time I've really begun to love her."³³ As a mentor to the young composer, Balakirev was not pleased. For all his pioneering of the nationalist school, Balakirev was a Westernist and a thumping patriot of Petersburg who looked down on Moscow as parochial and archaic; he called it 'Jericho'.⁶⁴ Musorgsky's love affair with Moscow, then, seemed almost a desertion from the Balakirev school. It was certainly a sign of the young artist finding his own style and theme. He began to spend his summers on the fabulous estate of the Shilovskys at Glebovo, near Moscow, renewing contact with his own gentry background in that area.* He made new friends in circles outside music where he found a stimulus to his own art: the poet Kutuzov (a descendant of the famous general), the sculptor Antokolsky, the painter Repin, as well as Gartman, who were all receptive to his unschooled style of music, and more tolerant of his alcoholic ways, than the rather staid composers of St Petersburg. Breaking free from the domination of the Balakirev school (which took Liszt and Schumann as the starting point for the development of a Russian style), Musorgsky began to explore a more native musical idiom in his 'village scene' for voice and piano, Savishna (1867), in Boris Godunov (1868-74) and then in his Pictures, which, like Gartman's drawings, reworked Russian folklore in imaginative ways. Moscow thus delivered him from the 'German' orthodoxy of the Balakirev school. It allowed Musorgsky, who had always been perceived as something of an outcast in St Petersburg, to experiment with music 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 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.