Musorgsky II:

Dark Realism
 

Musorgsky's most gorgeous music is to be found in the choruses of his operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, but in the context of the operas as a whole, the choruses always have an ironic twist. In diametrical opposition to his contemporary Tchaikovsky (who was perhaps the first pop composer), Musorgsky aspired to realism and did not trust beauty. Musorgsky was personally associated with political progressives and narodniks (populists), and the "Kuchka" school to which he belonged was slavophile (more or less) but the only label Musorgsky ever explicitly accepted was "realist".

His new, less artificial way of setting words to music, following Dargomyzhky's example  and probably inspired by the progressive pamphleteer Chernyshevsky, was most notably seen in his unrecorded experimental opera The Wedding, and this has been the most-discussed aspect of his realism. However, I think that the realism of his librettos is much more striking. While Musorgsky had collaborators, he did extensive independent research for Khovanshchina, and had the final say in both librettos. One critic, Prince Mirsky, described Musorgsky as "the greatest Russian tragic poet of the period".

Musorgsky's was a sardonic national realism like Gogol's, verging on the grotesque.  Musorgsky's nationalism, like much Russian nationalism, often had an odd flavor of hopelessness. Perhaps this is because Russia was an imperial oppressor and could not claim victimhood, so that an inward, self-flagellating turn was necessary:

 Khovanshchina concludes with the self-immolation of the saintly but doomed Old Believers, and at the end of Boris we hear  the Holy Fool:

 Musorgsky is not usually thought of as a poet of blackness, but if you pay attention to his librettos you can see that that's what he is.

Musorgsky used peasant themes more than any other Russian composer of that time, but his treatment of the common people, either as individuals or in ensemble, was neither optimistic nor edifying. In Musorgsky's two major operas, as Musorgsky's friend Stasov complained, only a handful of non-clergy commoners appear outside the choruses.  In Boris, there were the  peasant Mitiukha, the innkeeper, the two rogues Varlaam and Misail, and two policemen. In Khovanshchina, there were the drunken Kuzka, Golytsin's craven servant, and the bigoted Susannah. There is not an admirable character among them -- all are either thuggish,  vindictive, corrupt, craven, or visibly stupid.

It's in the choruses, however, that Musorgsky's dark political vision can most clearly be seen. The glorious choral songs of mourning and praise at the beginning of Boris are intensely affecting, but the action very explicitly tells us that the singers have been coerced, and that they neither know nor care what they're singing about. Much the same can be said of the folkish songs of Marina's attendants in Boris and of Khovansky's peasant girls in Khovanshchina. (Oddly, both Khovansky and Marina reject the lovely songs that they are offered. Is this to be taken as evidence of their bad character -- or was Musorgsky obliquely telling us that he had himself grown a bit tired of folkishness?) In Khovanshchina the Muscovite chorus enters singing a smutty nonsense chorus; later on they bully the clerk, cynically excusing themselves by saying

 In this opera the odious, brutal streltsy are also get long stretches of jolly music.  Finally, at the end of Boris the populace descends into confused thuggishness, bullying the Holy Fool, the boyar Khrushchev, and the Jesuit priests, while at the same time praising the usurping False Dmitri -- a Catholic pawn -- under the mistaken impression that he is a staunch defender of Orthodoxy. (It is a general rule in both operas that the crowds don't really know what's going on and are controlled by blind impulse).

For Musorgsky realism came first, and he refused to offer false hope. With the possible exception of the offstage Peter the Great in Khovanshchina,  there are no genuinely positive characters in either of his politically-themed operas. The big players are all terribly flawed: though they all purport to love Russia and perhaps really do, their acts are sly, dishonest and often vicious. The common people, meanwhile, are servile, blind, and brutish -- the sufferers and patients of history, but not in any sense the agents. As in Tolstoy, there are really no agents here: fatalism is pervasive, and both operas seem to portray a cyclic pattern or usurpation and murder (an unsuccessful one in the case of the Khovanskys). Yet the choruses, without being agents,  are protagonists in Mussorgsky's operas, and not just mouthpieces for history or for the author: they represent suffering Russia. Their ability to produce beauty from wretchedness and servility is both a triumph of the human spirit, and an example of the dilemma of the powerless, socially-aware artist, dedicated both to art and to truth, who lives under a blind, unshakable  government which will never listen.

After well over a century, Musorgsky has not yet found his audience. The generic opera audience  loves pretty music in an exotic setting, and Musorgsky gives them that. (In his defense, it should be pointed out that the audiences of his time found the music harsh). But Musorgsky's best  listeners probably have not heard him, because they despise escapism and prettiness -- just as Musorgsky did. His operas are precursors of contemporary anti-art, and Musorgsky (trapped in the "nightmare of history") was an early prophet of political despair. Like his monk Pimen, Musorgsky spoke to the future: 

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Appendix:

The Interpretation of Khovanshchina

A number of difficulties make any interpretations of Khovanshchina doubtful. First, the opera was unfinished -- its present form is due to Rimsky-Korsakoff and other editors, who had to reconstruct most of the last half of the work. Second, while the opera assumes considerable background knowledge of the events portrayed, it is not completely faithful to the historical facts. 

The opera shows the last days of the adversaries of young Peter the Great: the old-fashioned boyar Ivan Khovansky (and his streltsy),  Golitsyn the modernizer (who was Peter's enemy only because of his close association with Peter's half-sister and rival ), and Dosifei and his fundamentalist Old Believers. Peter had to be off-stage throughout because of a censor's ruling, but he is represented musically by offstage trumpet fanfares and by the overture theme, "Dawn Over Moscow". (Leaving an absolutist ruler in the background as a distant, unknown power is actually quite appropriate; absolutist rulers did not try to establish a personal bond with their subjects).

Some think that the religious groups in Musorgsky's operas are to be taken as the positive figures: Pimen, Dosifei, the minstrels and hermits in Boris, and the Old Believers in Khovanshchina. The prominent place given the Old Believers in  Khovanshchina makes it possible to believe that they are the real heroes of the piece, but I doubt this (though they do represent suffering Russia). In Khovanshchina the pious Old Believer Dosifei goes on bended knee to beg the support to the brutish conspirator Ivan Khovansky (as well as Khovansky's worthless failed-rapist son Andrei, whose father wants to make him czar). In Boris, the devious Shiusky uses the saintly Pimen is to demoralize Boris -- for the sake of a usurper whom Pimen well knows is an utter fraud. What we know about Musorgsky tells us that he was an admirer of Charles Darwin with positivist sympathies, and while it is clear that he appreciated the dramatic possibilities the Old Believers brought to his opera, it seems doubtful to me that he sympathized with their vision in any real way.

In Rimsky-Korsakov's version at least, one of the Peter themes is heard at the very end of the opera, making it possible to give the work a rather grotesquely optimistic interpretation when the fanatical Old Believers go to their fiery deaths. The last two acts put together are only a little longer than the first act standing alone, and there's no way of knowing what the lost material might have been. I suspect that in the completed opera the Old Believers would not have dominated the ending the way they do now. But we will never know. 

Sources:

I have used the libretto of the Rostropovich version of Boris Godunov, and the Khovanshchina libretto found in Jennifer Batchelor and Nicholas John's  Khovanshchina (Calder / English National Opera, 1994). I cannot read Russian and have had to rely on the translations, though occasionally deciphering the Cyrillic has allowed me to clear up a point.

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