Songs and Dances of Death

QH/ 5

Modest Mussorgksy (1835-1881)

Songs and Dances of Death

Cradle Song

Serenade

Trepak

The Field-Marshal

“Songs and dances” is a serious understatement. Each one of these confrontations with the symbolic figure of Death is a vividly dramatic scene, most of them including a song or a dance but only where the narrative situation demands it. The most extreme example is Cradle Song, the first in the order Mussorgsky preferred although not in the once all too prevalent Rimsky-Korsakov edition. 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, Cradle Song is set in a quite different way.

Erlkönig, though dramatic in its characterization, is a pure song in which the words are aligned to a melodic structure recurring from stanza to stanza. There is no comparable melodic structure in Cradle Song. There is a vocal line inflected according to the natural rise and fall of the words of the narrator, of Death and of the hapless Mother, set against a piano part concerned not so much with accompaniment in the conventional sense as with heightening the drama: it creates the night-time sick-room atmosphere, signals events like the eerie footsteps outside and the shock of the rap on the door, and contrasts the emotional state of the Mother with the chilling implacability of Death. The one “tune,” 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 similar scenario to that of Der Tod und das Mädchen, it is quite different again. The impressionistic piano scoring of the scene-setting introduction (written when Debussy was twelve and Ravel only two months old) is an extraordinary inspiration. Death’s serenade is the sinister, leering obverse of the innocent saxophone solo in Il vechhio castello in Pictures at an Exhibition.

Trepak, the earliest of the four pieces (and the opening number in Rimsky-Korsakov’s edition of the cycle) 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 a trepak, the Ukranian folk dance through which Death allies himself with his drunken peasant victim. It is even more remarkable that much of the melodic material derives from the four notes of the Dies Irae first postulated low in the pianist’s left hand 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 and the most terrifying, though as much because of its battle-field imagery as the irresistible power of Field-Marshal Death. The macabre piano writing of the introduction derives to some extent from Liszt but still more from Mussorgsky’s fearless harmonic and acoustic imagination. The massively orchestrated march theme in the second half derives from a Polish revolutionary song, Z dymen pozarow.

Four years later Mussorgsky himself was dead, his Songs and Dances of Death still unpublished like much of his music. According to Vladimir Stasov, who suggested the idea of the cycle to the composer in the first place, he 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©