THE TRAGIC GENIUS OF RUSSIAN MUSIC

(See my other Mussorgsky entry Khovanshchina in the Religion section, posted on my blog on January 16^th, 2011, as the final item in the mega-posting And When She Was… Good She was Horrid!)

It is not pleasant to be relentlessly attacked by your enemies, but a far greater tragedy is to be misunderstood by your closest friends. Such was the fate of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, undoubtedly, one of the greatest geniuses of music in human history, the author of two monumental historical music dramas: Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, unrivalled as such in the history of music. His greatest friend, admirer, and supporter, the otherwise great Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was, regrettably, convinced that Mussorgsky’s lack of proper music education had to be responsible for everything that he found incomprehensible in Mussorgsky’s music, and sincerely strove to correct all such mistakes. It was only much later, already well into the twentieth century, during the Soviet era, that Mussorgsky’s so-called “mistakes” were at last understood as revolutionary musical innovations, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “helpful” corrections and improvements were discarded, in favor of the author’s original drafts.

But at the time, the brutally negative opinion of Mussorgsky’s hopeless amateurism was prevalent in music circles. Even the greatest contemporary talents, such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, were merciless toward the hapless genius, who may just have been in some ways superior to them all.

This is what Rimsky-Korsakov wrote about Mussorgsky’s scores:

“They were very defective, teeming with clumsy, disconnected harmonies, shocking part-writing, amazingly illogical modulations, or intolerably long stretches without ever a modulation, and also bad scoring. What is needed is an edition for practical and artistic purposes, suitable for performances and for those who wish to admire Mussorgsky’s genius, not to study his idiosyncrasies and sins against art.”

Tchaikovsky was hardly more generous:

“Mussorgsky you very rightly call a hopeless case. In talent he is perhaps superior to all the [other members of The Five], but his nature is narrow-minded, devoid of any urge towards self-perfection, blindly believing in the ridiculous theories of his circle and in his own genius… In addition, he has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, and roughness. He flaunts his illiteracy, takes pride in his ignorance, mucks along anyhow, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent that are, moreover, not devoid of originality.”

Mussorgsky was of course no patsy, and did not accept his friends’ intrusion into his creative masterpieces with unquestioning gratitude and submission.---

“At the first showing of the 2^nd act of Sorochinskaya, I received proof of the basic lack of understanding by the musicuses of the broken [Mighty] Cluster of the very nature of [Ukrainian] humor… Such a chill was in the air from their views and demands, that the heart froze, to quote protopop Avvakum. Still I took a pause, thought about it, and not just once tested myself. It cannot be that I was wrong all round in my strivings, it cannot be. But it is so sad that with the musicuses of the broken Cluster one has to talk over the ‘turnpike,’ behind which they have been left.”

Thus, Mussorgsky’s vindication in his lifetime was only in his own eyes. It is most probable that this kind of rejection that he suffered so unjustly had pushed him into a downward spiral of alcoholism and, eventually, delirium tremens, from which he died having just reached the age of forty two (1839-1881).

Genius, like hero, lives and dies in the shadow of tragedy.

In my opinion, Mussorgsky’s genius ranks with that of Richard Wagner’s. By the age at which Mussorgsky died, Wagner had just completed his first opera of the Ring: Das Rheingold, still having a generous nearly thirty-year stretch of productive life ahead of him (which should put certain things in perspective).

Both men were radical music innovators, both were creators not just of operas but of “music dramas,” writing their own librettos to them… This is by no means comparing their music, for each of them is incomparable. But in terms of the profound originality and sheer power of their genius, they do stand together as the ultimate expression, the apotheosis of music as Schopenhauerian “pure will,” with none of those who have come after them, great geniuses included, measuring up.