Detskaya (The Nursery)

S nyaney (With Nanny)

V uglu (In the Corner)

Zhuk (The Beetle)

S kukloy (With Dolly)

Na son gryadushchiy (Going to Sleep)

Poyekhal na palochke (On the Hobby-Horse)

Kot matros (Sailor the Cat)

The first of Mussorgsky’s Nursery songs, With Nanny, is dedicated to his colleague Alexander Dargomïzhsky “the great teacher of musical truth.” Written in 1868, it was not intended at that time as part of a larger cycle. It was a one-off tribute to a composer whose last opera, The Stone Guest, was a revelation of naturalistic word-setting, of vocal lines formed only by the natural rhythms and pitch inflections of the words, with no melodic or metrical pattern imposed on the text. “That’s outdone me!” said Dargomïzhsky when he heard With Nanny. In fact, he was so impressed by the song that he urged Mussorgsky to write more, both the words and the music, in the same vein - which, after getting the first version of Boris Godunov out of the way, he did, adding In the Corner, The Beetle, With Dolly and Going to Sleep to complete a cycle of five Nursery songs in 1870.

Like Ravel - whose most inspired set of songs, Histoires naturelles, would probably not have been written had he not known the Nursery - Mussorgsky had the rare gift of being able to enter the world of children directly and intuitively, without adult condescension or sentimentality, as the children of his friends have testified. With Nanny is a particularly brilliant achievement. The piano part is so abundant in illustrative detail - the dissonant harmonies and prowling rhythms applied to the wicked wolf, the snatch of broad Russian melody arising on the mention of the Tsar and Tsarina in their palace, the clumsily stumbling Tsar, the sneezing Tsarina, the tinkling of the shattered window panes - that one could wish that it didn’t go past so quickly. But everything happens here at an appropriately prattling pace, with speech rhythms so realistically reproduced in the vocal line that the metre has to be changed bar by bar to accommodate them.

In the Corner is a dramatic dialogue, the Nanny’s outburst accompanied by a surge of quavers until her anger breaks through the bar lines, the child’s gradually more resentful reply reflected in a gradually less humble piano part. Driven at first by a breathless ostinato, The Beetle is packed with incident, heavily buzzing sonorities, frightening harmonies and, as the insect flies into the child’s face, percussive shocks. A moment of caution is followed by a renewal of the excitement. With Dolly is a lullaby so sleepy that even the wolf holds no fears and, as the most lyrical music in the cycle suggests, the child is already dreaming before dropping off at the end. If Going to Sleep seems just a little sentimental, it is perhaps only to English ears that are all too familiar with Christopher Robin and his “Now I remember: God bless me.” However that may be, this bedtime prayer embraces a precisely calculated accelerando and crescendo of aunts and uncles before it abruptly breaks off for the timely change of tone on the intervention the Nanny.

When the first edition of The Nursery was published in 1872 it comprised just those five songs. On the Hobby Horse and Sailor the Cat were written in the same year for a second set of nursery songs to be called At the Dacha which, however, was never completed. With nowhere else to go, they found a congenial home with their older siblings, which they resemble in every way except that the adult protagonist is now the child’s mother rather than a nanny. In On the Hobby Horse (which exists in two slightly different versions) she offers melodious comfort between the galloping outer sections with their perilously giddy piano part. The child gets hurt in Sailor the Cat too, this time in an effort to save a bird from a predatory cat. The story is told in much the same breathlessly excited manner as that of The Beetle while the piano part - in its evocations of a bird’s alarm calls, a cat’s claws scratching metal and a child’s finger painfully striking the bird cage - is even more colourful. The harmonically inconclusive ending was too eccentric for Rimsky-Korsakov who, in his long-circulated edition of the songs, well-meaningly but ruinously corrected it.