Mussorgsky

When Ravel agreed to orchestrate the Pictures at en Exhibition for Serge Koussevitsky in 1922 he was not just accepting a handsome fee for a job he knew he would enjoy. He was also settling a debt owed by the more progressive French composers of his generation to a “mighty handful” of Russian composers of a previous generation. Tchaikovsky was of little interest to Ravel and his colleagues but the influence of the Russian nationalists - including Borodin, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and, above all, Mussorgsky - had made a vital contribution to the development of French music over the past thirty years or so. While it was obviously going too far, as Jean Cocteau characteristically did, to describe Debussy’s piano impressionism as “Russian music with the pedal down” there was more than a grain of truth in the statement.

It is one of the ironies of musical history that the most influential of all Russian scores arrived in Paris by way of Camille Saint-Saëns, who came back from a visit to Moscow in 1875 with a copy of Boris Godunov in his luggage. Saint-Saëns, who had as little respect for Mussorgsky’s music as Mussorgsky had for his, was dismayed by the interest shown in the work and the part it played in diverting French music from what he considered its true path. Debussy is known to have borrowed that same copy of Boris in 1889. If he didn’t fully understand the work at the time, it certainly contributed to a Mussorgsky enthusiasm which he shared with Chausson in the early 1890s, when they played though as many of the Russian composer’s score as they could find, and which culminated in his passion for the songs round the turn of the century. Again, while it was an exaggeration to claim, as one critic did after the first performance of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, that “Boris is the grandfather of Pelléas,” there is probably as much Mussorgsky in Debussy’s opera as there is Wagner.

Although Debussy and Ravel differed in many respects, they were united at least in their admiration for Mussorgsky. Ravel first encountered the headily exotic orchestral colours and modal harmonies of Russian nationalist music when Rimsky-Korsakov conducted a pair concerts at the Exposition universelle in Paris in 1889. He learned much about Mussorgsky, as did Debussy, from the dozens of song recitals given by the Russian soprano Marie Olenine and her husband Pierre d’Alheim in Paris in the 1890s and he was thrilled by the first French performance of Boris Godunov in Diaghilev’s Paris Opera season in 1908. He claimed to have followed the example of Mussorgsky’s Wedding in the naturalistic word-setting of a prose text in his comic opera L’Heure espagnole and, although Debussy thought them cheap imitations, Ravel’s magical little Histoires naturelles could not have existed without the precedent of Mussorgsky’s Nursery songs.

Whatever Ravel owed to the Mussorgsky he repaid it, first by working with Stravinsky on orchestrating those parts of Khovanshchina that the composer had left unfinished and then by completing his masterful arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition, which is not only more familiar than the original piano score but also one of the most popular works in the orchestral repertoire.

Rees 184: French critics, Bourgault-Ducoudray especially, found much to commend in Russian music and Saint-Saëns, during a visit to Moscow, obtained a copy of Boris Godunov. He did not esteem this rough-cast epic highly himself, but he lent the score to Jules de Brayer - a found and contributor to the new Revue Wagnerienne who was said to have travelled to Bayreuth from Paris on foot - and ultimately it reached the hands of Debussy, who revelled in its unconventionality.

Rees 385: He was now surprsied at the adulation which M was receiving from D and others. “Is it [BG] such a great masterpiece?” he asked Bellaigue. “I have found to my astonishment some parts very feeble. It has the advantage of coming from afar off with the prestige of another race in another language. I find a different mastery in Glinka and in Onegin of Tchaikovsky that the critical world affects to despise.”

Studd 110: [1875] …a mutual hostility between him and that wild, gruff, bibulous member of the Five, M. S-S regarded him as a madman and his music as rough and uncouth, while M dismissed him as a purveyor of bonbons, a “framer of miniatures” and was one of the first to argue that his brilliant orchestrations cloaked “tiny little thoughts.” But by bringing back with him to Paris the vocal score of BG - presumably out of perverse curiosity - S-S unintentionally advanced the cause of the music he so deplored because it was seen on a visit to his apartment by the organist Jules Brayer, a former colleague at the Ecole Niedermeyer. Brayer, at that time manager of the Lamoureux concerts, studied it and launced a small circle of enthusiasts, later to include D, through whom M’s music was to grow in influence in the West.

Riesemann 370: The first perf of K outside Russia took place in 1913 at the Opéra…included by SD in the Russian season which had been one of the standing features of Paris music since 1907.

Note Ravel’s part in preparing a new version with Stravinsky. [See AO 517]

380: a reference to R’s orch of The Marriage - spurious

385: There is no possible dooubt that the first source of M’s fame was France, and especially in Paris.

Franco-Russian Alliance 1896

386: It was the healthy musical naturalism that M displays in all his works that attracted the French.

The honour of having discovered M in France is officially due to Pierre d’Alheim, the husband of the singer Marie Olenine, the talented interpreter of M’s songs. In 1896 he wrote a fine pamphlet on the coposer and delivered a course of lectures in Paris, which soon appeared in book form. His wife supported his literary propaganda by giving between 1896 and 1900 more than sixty concerts of M’s works in France and Belgium…

387: Camille Bellaigue (1900) wrote a brilliant notice of the author of BG in his Impressions musicales et littéraires and, soon after, a more comprehensive essay in his Etudes musicales (“A great realist musician: Mussorgsky”). He was followed by Claude Debussy, with a detailed study in Revue blanche (1901) and Pierre Lalo with three long article in the Temps. Lastly in 1908 appeared the well-known book of Calvocoressi and Mussorgsky’s Legacy by Marine Olenine d’Alheim.

387: from M on S-S - “with every fibre of my brain I loathe him; with every pulse of my heart I renounce him”…The pointillistic” method of many of Ms piano accompaniments, the light and shad of his harmonies, his vivid musical declamation, and the free sweep of his rhythms were the models for D’s own musical style.

388: the Russian master’s art was a welcome set-off against the ever-encroaching influence of Wagner.

AO 35 36 99 118 126 199 200 300 301 314 315 321 340 471 505 514 517 518 541 542 543 544 581 584

35: leur spontanéité directe, leurs couleurs orchestrales, leur exoticism, leur emploi de la modalité lui parassaient une direction nouvelles qui valait d’être suivie, d’autant plus qu’elle constituait un puissant antidot à la domination wagnérienne.

118: Comme son ancêtre direct, Le Mariage de M, interprétation fidèle de la pièce de Gogol, L’Heure espagnole est une comédie musicale. Aucune modification du text e Franc-Nohain, hormis quelques coupures. Seul la quintette final pourrait rappeler, par sa coupe, par ses vocalises, ses effets de voix, les ensembles du répertoire. A part ce quintette, c’est plutôt de la déclamation familière que la mélodie. La langue française, aussi bien qu’une autre, a ses accents, ses inflexions musicales

199: Je ne puis pas oublier le jour…où avec lui [Pierre d’Alheim], vous êtes venus nous révéler l’oeuvre de Moussorgsky. [see 512]

199: La “grande porte de Kiev” est enfin terminée. J’ai commencé par la fin, parce que c’était la pièce la moins intéressante à orchestrer.”

300: …certaines oeuvres de Liszt et…celles de R-K, de Balakirev, de M et de Borodin qui ont inspiré la jeune école française

313 …les moments fiévreux, combatifs de 1908

518 R detested Tchaikovsky…

518 La musique de Bo Ba et R-K…c’était là un fait d’une grande importance dans l’histoire de la musique, après tant d’années de domination par l’art allemand.

541 R couldn’t get hold of the original version of Pictures [note his plea for restoration of original of BG - 199+]

Lesure 86 118 120 175 213 218

118 [1893] On y déchiffra aussi du M et peut-être d’autres musiques russes que Chausson avait chargé D d’apporter avec lui.

120 Jules de Brayer… En 1889 Robert Godet…porta la partition chez D, qui la lassai longtemps sur son piano, sans manifester apparament un grand intérêt, si ce n’est pour le choeur des jeunes polonaises. Pour le reste il déclarait incapable do pénétrer le sens des paroles de ce dramat, si bien que Godet restitua la partition à Brayer…la véritable “découverte” de Moussorgsky eut lieu dans ces semaines de Luzancy, en mai-juin 93. Raymond Bonheur, qui était preesent, assure que Chausson réussit à se procurer la partition de Boris, qui fut déchiffré “des soirées entières” par un Debussy “infatigable.”

213 more on Marie Olénine. Godet nous assure…que ce sont ces séances “qui valurent à l’auteur de Pelléas sa première révélation positive et décisive de M”

Dietschy 59 60-4 82 145 146 152 153

61: 1901 emotional report on The Nursery in Revue blanche

1892/3: “Chabrier, M, Palestrina, those are the ones I like”

“The real, profound and useful function of M was above all de-Wagnerisation”

62 Palestrina, Bach, Wagner in 1889

63 1889 R-K had conducted on 22 and 29 June two concerts of Russian music, which in included Bo, Gli, Ba, Glaz and M’s Night on the Bare Mountain.

152: Boris the “grand-papa of Pelléas”

“the musical genius who created Pelléas had visibly absorbed B like a sponge”

Nichols dr

107: according to Cyril Scott he thought Tchaikovsky the worst Russian and overlooked the truly admirable, R-K, Mussorgsky and others.

108 Stravinsky: “He said he had discovered M when he found some of his music lying untouched on Mme von Meck’s piano. Thought M the best of Russian song composers. He did not like Rimsky, who he called “a voluntary academic, the worst kind.”

el/hh 69-73 133 136 158 207 300 317 323 389 410-11 465 472-3 576 595 671 720-1

73 Debussy on Nursery “Personne n’a parlé à ce qu’il ya de meilleur en nous avec un accent plus tendre et plus profond”

Nicolas Rubinstein dirige quatre concerts de musique russe, comprenant des oeuvres de Dargomyjsky, Tchaïkovski et Rimsky-Korsakov à l’Exposition universelle 1878

300 Laloy on Histoires naturelles and Debussy’s reply

323 Debussy on Nursery and D always praising M

576 children’s corner

671 Nuages and Sunless

720 Nursery and Yniold

Rosenthal 12 26 48 51-2 82168

mawer 194 Cocteau on D “Russian music with the pedal down”

When Ravel agreed to orchestrate the Pictures at en Exhibition for Serge Koussevitsky in 1922 he was not just accepting a handsome fee for a job he knew he would enjoy. He was also settling a debt owed by the more progressive French composers of his generation to a “mighty handful” of Russian composers of a previous generation. Tchaikovsky was of little interest to Ravel and his colleagues but the influence of the Russian nationalists - including Borodin, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and, above all, Mussorgsky - had made a vital contribution to the development of French music over the past thirty years or so. While it was obviously going too far, as Jean Cocteau characteristically did, to describe Debussy’s piano impressionism as “Russian music with the pedal down” there was more than a grain of truth in the statement.

It is one of the ironies of musical history that the most influential of all Russian scores arrived in Paris by way of Camille Saint-Saëns, who came back from a visit to Moscow in 1875 with a copy of Boris Godunov in his luggage. Saint-Saëns, who had as little respect for Mussorgsky’s music as Mussorgsky had for his, was dismayed by the interest shown in the work and the part it played in diverting French music from what he considered its true path. Debussy is known to have borrowed that same copy of Boris in 1889 and, although he didn’t fully understand it at the time,