"...please
write me, I have no one but you. I don't
count Cui, he is a talent, but not a human being
in a social sense; Mussorgsky is practically an
idiot. R.-Korsakov is as yet a charming child, of
great promise, but by the time he blossoms into
full light, I will already be old and will be
useless to him. Besides you, I can find no
one whom I need..."
You'll note that Balakirev isn't
exactly condemning them all artistically, it's just
personal. So far, anyway.
They were musical outsiders, and they
all had plenty of practice taking criticism. The very
term 'Mighty Five' was meant to be a slam by their
critics, and the composers used it (when they used it
at all) defiantly back. Already there was a conflict
between the professionally educated and conservatory
minded composers and those talented amateurs who
didn't seem to fit the system. All five had day jobs.
Borodin was a chemist, Mussorgsky worked for the civil
service. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer, Cui was
an army man. Balakirev appears to be the only
professional musician among them, and he was their
leader.
There was more to it than their lack
of formal musical education. It wasn't simply a matter
of those without learning trying to belittle those who
had it. In the 19th century the conservatory system
already become an attempt to teach mainly the music of
Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart, good Germans all
(more or less). Composers in other countries in the
late 19th century had to make up their minds: did they
want to sound like Germans or did they want to create
a distinctive national sound in their work, capture
the spirit of their own people, rather than imitate
what had brought acclaim to foreigners?
The Mighty Five were dedicated to the
cause of what they considered a distinctively Russian
music. They simply weren't dedicated to unanimity with
regard to how to get there. In fact they could be
downright nasty about it. But I'm going to focus
mainly on the group's criticism of one man, Modeste
Mussorgsky. The comments about him can be found in a
book called "Mussorgsky Reader;
A Life of Modeste Petrovich Mussorgsky in Letters
and Documents," which was edited and translated by
Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson, without whom all of
the materials in quotes in this article would be in
Russian (which I don't read)! The book is mostly
concerned with all things Mussorgsky, being a
collection of letters sent to or from the composer,
but the editors have included a few letters in which
other members of the Mighty Five discussed the
composer behind his back, and this is the
interesting muck that I want to dredge up here.
Cesar Cui got to be the old man of
the group. He outlived the others, and passed on in
1918, at 83, after a life of musical invective most
famously remembered in his criticism of Rachmaninoff
on the occasion of the premiere of the young
composer's First Symphony which was so nasty it sent
him into a depression. In it Cui spoke of a 'contest
in hell for the most fiendish composition' which
Rachmaninoff would easily win. But, as you'll see Cui
spent a lifetime honing his verbal nastiness on all
sorts of musical targets, including other members of
The Five. We'll start mild and grow spicier:
"Modinka [in a language full of
pet names this is one for Modeste Mussorgsky] is at
my place weekly. [his music is]... not devoid
of good turns, harmonies, thoughts, but as a
whole--it's rather ridiculous...In his work, of
course, I don't believe."
That was from a letter to Balakirev.
In case that seemed too ambiguous he also wrote "this
insane youngster is completely lost." Now that is the
way to get ratings--telling it like it is. (Unless you
have a sense of shame, or think in terms other than
hyperbole.)
Balakirev was the leader of the
group, and you don't get to be the leader of anything
without being able to massage egos, spin your message,
tell different people different things in private and
public settings, and, well, just plain lie on
occasion. Evidently he made Mussorgsky glow with
admiration for him, apparently by being very
supportive of him and his work, at least to his face.
Here is the composer's testimony:
"I thank you friend for your
warm speech, and doubly for your support. --Yes,
this is the comradely way: to
support, when necessary; and your warm
words poured warmth over me, even though the air is
hot. Thanks!"
Unless, of course, Mussorgsky is
trying to massage Balakirev's ego, too, or get points.
He may not have been such an idiot after all.
It is not so difficult to imagine
that Balakirev did, at times, praise Mussorgsky, and
that he may have been genuine about it. And that, at
other times, he was just as effusive in his put-downs.
The stakes were high. The future of music in Russia
was up for grabs! And then, there was that G-word.
Let's call Stasov (an associate but not one of The
Five) to the witness stand. Here he writes to someone
who is also not part of the group:
"...you know that in originality
and inventiveness Musoryanin outstrips everyone and is
simply a genius. Even your
idealist Balakirev, against whose grain Musoryanin's
realistic music goes, agrees with this..."
Ahh, genius. Is genius a
synonym for impractical? Let's hear from Borodin,
about one of Mussorgsky's works: "[Mussorgsky's
piece] is an extraordinarily curious and paradoxical
thing, full of innovations and places of great
humor, but as a whole...impossible in
performance. Besides, it bears marks of too
hasty labor..."
Again praise mixed with criticism.
Well, at least these reviews are mixed. When it came
to damning the Germans, however, there were no two
ways about it. But this is a very old group dynamic.
Intramural sports must cease when confronted by the
enemy without. Until then, we sharpen our claws on
each other; then we unite and attack with full force.
When Wagner's music came to town...well, let Stasov
tell it:
"....Tonight "Lohengrin" will be
played for the first time at the Petersburg
opera. Possibly part of the audience will like
this brutal, heavy-handed music. But we all do
not believe that
Wagner is a prophet: we
hold that he marks a retrogression from the music of
Weber. We find in him a lack of taste and
measure, vulgarity, noisy scoring, no gift for the
recitative, horrible modulations..."
Adds Rimsky-Korsakov: "Lohengrin
called forth complete scorn from us, and an
inexhaustible torrent of humor, ridicule and venomous
caviling from Dargmomizhsky [a fellow Russian composer
with similar views].
At the risk of piling on, we ought to
give Mussorgsky himself a chance to show that how
could wield a poison pen: "I am very doubtful about
German vocal music in general and modern German music
in particular. --German men and women sing like
roosters, imagining that the more their mouths gape
and the longer they hold their notes...the more
feeling they show.....and for my taste the
Germans...offer nothing attractive for me....These are
a people, theoretical in music, too, who with nearly
each step fall into abstraction."
Once the Germans are gone of course,
it is ok to commence inter-group sniping. Let's let
Borodin have a word. The chemist is perhaps the
kindliest toward Mussorgsky in general, but he has an
interesting observation to make about two of the other
composers in the group. Korsinka is a diminutive
version of Rimksy-Korsakov, who became Mussorgsky's
roommate. Here is an interesting tidbit if you know
some history:
Borodin: "Modinka and Korsinka
particularly, since they began to share a room, have
both greatly developed. They are diametrically
opposed in musical qualities and methods: one seems to
compliment the other. Their influence on each
other has been extremely helpful Modeste has improved
the recitative and declamatory sides of Korsinka who
has, in his turn, wiped out Modeste's tendency towards
awkward originality, and has smoothed all his rough
harmonic edges, his pretentiousness in orchestration,
his lack of logic in the construction of musical
form--in a word, he has made Modeste's things
incomparably more musical."
This is exactly what Rimsky-Korsakov
continued to do after Mussorgsky's relatively early
death--to 'improve' Mussorgsky's music by re-writing
it and re-orchestrating it. For a while many of the
composer's most recognizable masterpieces were being
played in versions that had actually been partially
written by his friend--all in the name of getting rid
of all the musical warts--I'm sure many listeners,
given the chance, would write a lot of passages out of
Beethoven, too, that they don't like or don't
understand. But here is a professional doing the same
thing.
This brings up an interesting
question regarding our intrepid composer. He was an
outsider, not educated in a music school; lacking much
formal training, he relied mainly on himself. Many
persons so educated do not have any great love for
those educated by others. But Mussorgsky does not seem
to have simply expressed the easy disdain of the
autodidact for the scholastically-trained. He had the
guts to confront a tough question. He may have escaped
the conformist mold, and the narrow thinking of many
academically inclined composers, but was the price
lack of technical proficiency? Was he clumsy AND
original? Could he have had the best of both worlds?
Rimsky thought so, which was why he
so heavily 'edited' the composer's works after his
death (and before, apparently) to get rid of that awkward
originality Borodin deplored. And he has been
heavily criticized for it since, especially by those
who would like to make sure the composer's own voice
pokes through occasionally, even if the modulations
aren't as smooth or
typical of the period. There is plenty of typical
to go around anyway. But Let us give our defendant
Modinka a few words. In just a few lines, he will
accuse himself, and then defend himself from the
ravages of practicing excess attention to technical
matters while leaving other things at the door:
"Maybe I'm afraid of
technique because I'm poor at it?" he begins in a
letter, then decides to make technique less of an
aweful potentate: "[these composer's] brains are
limited; so what use is this sounds of worlds, or
rather world of sounds!...It isn't symphonies I
object to, but symphonists--incorrigible
conservatives. So do not tell me, dear
generalissime [Stastov], why our musicians chatter
more often about technique, than about aims and
historical tasks--because, this derives
from that."
While we are dealing with
assumptions--that technique is your friend, or your
enemy, depending on whether you are 'educated', or
that originality means your music betrays a lack of
sophistication, let's throw in another--that of the
lone genius, the man who, going his own way, mines a
rich vein of inspiration that all the small-minded
pedants could never hope to discover because they are
too busy trying to imitate one another. Perhaps Ms.
Ivanova, a patroness of the group, whose home once
served as a meeting place for the five, had this in
mind when she launched the G-bomb in Mussorgsky's
direction and caused him to do a little
self-examination:
"The other day I received a
most charming epistle from Ludmilla Ivanova, but I
must express a reservation about it. Speaking
of my talent our little dove added a word which
would lead my humble self to Olympus. --It's
no use to climb the hill--I'm lazy and I fear
fatigue. I don't understand the word genius.....I
have done my work and what happens later is in the
hands of the authorities....Once, before my
departure, the little dove threw this word in my
face (I shuddered) and now she has written it....I
am not a malicious sort, and there is no reason to
punish me....Why force a man to depend on the
garnishes of a creative full-dress uniform?"
You don't find that kind of
staggering praise from the other musicians! Usually
they play some variation on what a nice fellow he was
and then--well, you'll like how this one ends. It is
an observation by soprano Yulia Platonova, who
encountered Mussorgsky at a musical evening once:
"Mussorgsky, with whom I became
acquainted at my house...captivated all with his
extraordinary sympathy; to become acquainted with him
meant to love him--even hardened enemies of the new
Russian school, of which Mussorgsky was a
representative, were involuntarily conquered by his
charm, saying: "What a sympathetic man, it's a pity
that he has gone astray musically."
Isn't that sweet? All of those
composers and musicians putting up with his musical
deficiencies like that? And within the circle love and
support continued to thrive, particularly after it was
time to part ways and the members wanted to remember
only the happy moments and pretend the rest of that
stuff never happened. Anybody who has ever been in a
contentious artistic enterprise is familiar with how
this works: afterwards it is time to forgot how you
wanted to tear each other's throats out at the time,
bask in the warm glow of success, and long to do it
all over again. Here is Borodin, at the time that
Balakirev, the group's leader, is leaving:
"And in all the relations within
our circle there's not a shadow of envy, conceit or
selfishness;--each is made sincerely happy by the
smallest success of the other. There are the
warmest of relations..."
To which Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov can only
add their amen chorus, quoting Stasov:
"How good it all was!" (Actually, I
think this is in reference to a particular musical
evening but my notes are disorganized; it is no less
truthful that the above; let it stand).
It will be a nice thing to close with
the words of Mussorgsky himself, summing up the
experiences of The Five, and being, shall we say, far
more realistic about its proceedings:
"Little Dove of ours, Ludmilla
Ivanovna, [the lady who called him a genius] Five
years ago you realized your blessed wish to gather
together a Russian musical circle in your home. You
have been a witness of heated doings, occasional
struggles, aspirations, and again struggle, of the
circle's members and your heart always responded in a
lively way to these struggles, aspirations and heated
doings. Much good has been accomplished...."
Mussorgsky wanted to be a 'realistic'
composer, and it is refreshing to find him, at least
occasionally, a realistic man as well.
Bibliography
The Mussorgsky Reader; A Life of
Modeste Petrovich Mussorgsky in Letters and
Documents. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda and
Sergei Bertensson.