Songs and Dances of Death

Cradle Song

Serenade

Trepak

The Field-Marshal

“I revere Mussorgsky,” Shostakovich is quoted as saying. He is said to have felt such a “special relationship” with “one of the greatest of Russian composers” that, while respecting the enormous amount of work done by Rimsky-Korsakov on Mussorgsky’s behalf - notably in his editions of Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina - he also resented it. “I suppose the fact that I orchestrated the Songs and Dances of Death as well as Boris and Khovanshchina proves that I am jealous of Rimsky-Korsakov - that is, that I wanted to surpass him when it came to Mussorgsky.”

In fact, Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrated only two of the Songs and Dances of Death. Glazunov supplied the other two. Shostakovich was the first to publish an orchestral version of the whole set, in 1962, and Edison Denisov produced a rival version twenty years later. The inspiration for all of them must have been an ambition to realize the full potential of these so resourcefully written and so modestly titled “songs and dances.” Powerfully dramatic confrontations with the dread figure of Death, they do include songs or dances but only where the narrative situation demands them.

In the first piece, Cradle Song, there is no dance and little song. Based on a story similar to that of Schubert’s Erlkönig, in which Death wrests the ailing child from the protection of the despairing parent, it is set in a quite different way. Mussorgsky Cradle Song has no comparable melodic structure. The vocal line is inflected according to the natural rise and fall of the words - of the narrator, of Death and of the hapless Mother - and is set against an instrumental part concerned not so much with accompaniment in the conventional sense as with heightening the drama. The one melody, anticipated on Death’s first entry, is the recurring seven-note phrase “Bayushki, bayu, bayu” which is fatally augmented in rhythm in the last two bars.

Serenade also has a parallel in Schubert’s songs. But, while it is based on a scenario similar to that of Der Tod und das Mädchen, it is quite different again. The pre-impressionist scoring of the scene-setting introduction, eerily coloured in Shostakovich’s orchestration, is an extraordinary inspiration. Death’s serenade is the sinister, leering obverse of the innocent troubadour song in Il vecchio Castello in Pictures at an Exhibition.

Trepak, the earliest of the four pieces, is a remarkably flexible construction. It incorporates nature descriptions as widely contrasted as the whirling blizzard in the middle and the deceptively lyrical evocation of summer at the end. And yet it is always ready to break into the Ukranian dance through which Death allies himself with his drunken peasant victim. It is even more remarkable that much of the melodic material is developed from the four notes of the Dies Irae first postulated in the depths of the orchestra in the opening bar.

The Field-Marshal was written two years after the rest of the cycle, in 1877, and is the most vividly coloured. It is also, because of its battle-field imagery as much as because of the irresistible power of Field-Marshal Death, the most terrifying - not least in the bleak, wind-swept introduction, where Shostakovich’s orchestration so aptly complements Mussorgsky’s fearless harmonic imagination. The heroically orchestrated march theme in the second half derives from a Polish revolutionary song, Z dymen pozarow.

Four years after writing that Mussorgsky himself was dead, his Songs and Dances of Death still unpublished, like much of the rest of his music. According to Vladimir Stasov, who suggested the idea of the cycle to Mussorgsky in the first place, the composer had planned four further songs and had actually played extracts to him. If Mussorgsky’s young poet friend Arseni Golenishtchev-Kutusov, who wrote the words for the existing songs, supplied texts for the other four, nothing survives of them.

Gerald Larner©