In Act IV. the curtain rises upon a hall in Prince Ivan Khovansky’s country house, where he is taking his ease, diverted by the songs of his serving-maids and the dances of his Persian slaves. Shaklovity appears, and summons him to attend the Tsarevna’s Council. As Khovansky in his robes of ceremony is crossing the threshold, he is stabbed, and falls with a great cry. The servants disperse in terror, but Shaklovity lingers a moment to mock the corpse of his enemy. The scene now changes to the open space in front of the fantastic church of Vassily Blajeny, and Galitsin is seen on his way to exile, escorted by a troop of cavalry. When he has gone by, Dositheus soliloquises on the state of Russia. Martha comes in and tells him that the foreign mercenaries have orders to surround the Old Believers in their place of assemblage and put them all to death. Dositheus declares that they will sooner perish in self-ignited flames, willing martyrs for their faith. He enjoins Martha to bring Prince Andrew among them. During the meeting between Martha and Andrew, the young Prince implores her to bring back Emma, and learning that the girl is safely married to her lover, he curses Martha for a witch, and summons his Streltsy to put her to death. In vain the Prince blows his horn, his only reply is the hollow knelling of the bell called “Ivan Veliky.” Presently the Streltsy enter, carrying axes and blocks for their own execution. At the last moment a herald proclaims that Peter has pardoned them, and they may return to their homes.

In the fifth and last Act the Old Believers are assembled by moonlight at their hermitage in the woods near Moscow. Dositheus encourages his followers to remain true to their vows. Martha prays that she may save Andrew’s soul by the power of her love for him. Presently she hears him singing an old love song which echoes strangely amid all this spiritual tension. By sheer force of devotion she induces him to mount the pyre which the Brethren, clothed in their white festal robes, have built up close at hand. The trumpets of the troopers are heard drawing nearer, and Martha sets a light to the pyre. The Old Believers sing a solemn chant until they are overpowered by the flames. When the soldiers appear upon the scene, they fall back in horror before this spectacle of self-immolation; while the trumpets ring out arrogantly, as though proclaiming the passing of the old faith and ideals and the dawning of a new day for Russia.

“My first introduction to the works of Moussorgsky came through Vladimir Stassov. Together we went through the earlier edition of Boris Godounov (1875), and Khovanstchina, already issued with Rimsky-Korsakov’s revisions. ‘There is more vitality in Moussorgsky than in any of our contemporary composers,’ Stassov would declare to me in my first moments of doubtful enthusiasm. ‘These operas will go further afield than the rest, and you will see their day, when I shall no longer be here to follow their fortunes in Western Europe.’ How surely his predictions regarding this, and other questions, were destined to be fulfilled is a fact borne in upon me every year that I live and work in the world of music. Later on he gave me the new edition of Boris (1896), edited by the composer’s life-long friend, who was in some degree his teacher—Rimsky-Korsakov. Theoretically, Stassov was fully opposed to these editorial proceedings; for, while admitting Moussorgsky’s technical limitations, and his tendency to be slovenly in workmanship, he thought it might be better for the world to see this original and inspired composer with all his faults ruthlessly exposed to view, than clothed and in his right mind with the assistance of Rimsky-Korsakov. Stassov’s attitude to Moussorgsky reminds me of the Russian vagabond who said to Mr. Stephen Graham: ‘Love us while we are dirty, for when we are clean all the world will love us.’ We who loved Moussorgsky’s music in spite of all its apparent dishevelment may not unnaturally resent Rimsky-Korsakov’s conscientious grooming of it. But when it actually came to the question of producing the operas, even Stassov, I am sure, realised the need for practical revisions, without which Moussorgsky’s original scores, with all their potential greatness, ran considerable risk of becoming mere archæological curiosities. In 1908 Bessel published a later edition of Boris, restoring the scenes cut out of the version of 1896. This is the edition now generally used; the first one, on which I was educated, having become somewhat of a rarity.”[41]

At the present moment it is impossible to write of Moussorgsky’s operas without touching on this vexed question of Rimsky-Korsakov’s right to improve upon the original drafts of his friend’s works, since it is daily agitating the musical press of Russia and Paris.

Throughout his whole life, it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s lot to occupy at frequent intervals the most delicate, difficult and thankless position which can well be thrust upon a man, when, time after time, he was asked to complete works left unfinished in consequence of the illness, untimely death, or incompetence of their authors. That he attacked this altruistic work in a self-sacrificing and perfectly honest spirit cannot for a moment be doubted by anyone who knew him personally. But his temperament was not pliable, and as time went on and his æsthetic theories became more set, it grew increasingly difficult for him to see a work in any light but that of his own clearly illumined orderly vision. The following conversation between himself and V. Yastrebtsiev—if it contains no note of exaggeration—shows the uncompromising view which he took of his editorial duties. In 1895 he had expressed his intention of writing a purely critical article on “the merits and demerits of Boris Godounov.” But a year later he changed his mind, because he said: “a new revised pianoforte score and a new orchestral score will be a more eloquent testimony to future generations of my views on this work, not only as a whole, but as regards the details of every bar; the more so, because in this transcription of the opera for orchestra, personality is not concerned, and I am only doing that which Moussorgsky himself ought to have done, but which he did not understand how to carry out, simply because of his lack of technique as a composer. I maintain that in my intention to reharmonise and re-orchestrate this great opera of Moussorgsky there is certainly nothing for which I can be blamed; in any case I impute no sin to myself. And now,” he concluded, “when I have finished my revisions of Boris and Sadko it will be necessary to go through the entire score of Dargomijsky’s The Stone Guest (which was orchestrated by me), and should I find anything in the instrumentation which seems to me not good (and I think I shall find much) I will correct it, in order that in the future none will be able to reproach me with carelessness as regards the works of others. Only when I have revised the whole of Moussorgsky’s works shall I begin to be at peace and feel that my conscience is clear; for then I shall have done all that can and ought to be done for his compositions and his memory.”[42]

Rimsky-Korsakov was a noble and devoted friend, but he was before all things a craftsman of the highest excellence. When it came to a question of what he believed to be an offence against art, he saved his friend’s musical soul at the expense of his individuality. We have therefore to weigh his close personal knowledge of Moussorgsky’s aims and technical incapacity against the uncompromising musical rectitude which guided his editorial pen. When the question arises whether we are to hear Moussorgsky according to Rimsky-Korsakov, or according to Diaghilev-Ravel-Stravinsky, for my own part, having grown accustomed to the versions of Rimsky-Korsakov—which still leave in the operas so much of Moussorgsky’s essential genius that they have not hitherto failed in their profound psychological impression—I feel considerable doubt as to the wisdom of flying from them to evils that we know not of. For, after all, Rimsky-Korsakov was no purblind pedant, but a gifted musician with an immense experience of what was feasible on the operatic stage and of all that could militate against the success of a work.

CHAPTER XI
BORODIN AND CUI

WITH Borodin we return to a position midway between the original type of national lyric opera which Glinka inaugurated in A Life for the Tsar and the dramatic realism of Moussorgsky.

Alexander Porphyrievich Borodin, born at St. Petersburg in 1834, was the illegitimate son of a Prince of Imeretia, one of the fairest of the Georgian provinces which the Russian General Todleben rescued from Turkish occupation in 1770. The reigning princes of Imeretia boasted that they were direct descendants of King David the Psalmist, and quartered the harp and sling in their arms. Borodin’s education was chiefly confided to his mother. As a boy, his capacities were evenly balanced between music and science, but, having to make his living, he decided in favour of the latter and became a distinguished professor of chemistry at the College of Medicine in St. Petersburg. As regards music, he remained until his twenty-eighth year merely an intelligent amateur. He played the piano, the violoncello and the flute, all with some facility; he wrote a few songs and enjoyed taking part in Mendelssohn’s chamber music. It is clear that until he met Balakirev in 1862 there was never any serious conflict between duty and inclination. Borodin was a man of sane and optimistic temperament which disposed him to be satisfied with the career he had chosen, in which he seemed destined for unusual success. Unlike Tchaikovsky, who felt himself an alien among the bureaucrats and minor officials with whom he was associated in the Ministry of Justice, Borodin was genuinely interested in his work. But no one with a spark of artistic enthusiasm could pass under Balakirev’s influence and be the same man as before. Within a short time of their first meeting, the story of Cui and Moussorgsky was repeated in Borodin. All his leisure was henceforth consecrated to the serious study of music. Harmony and musical analysis he worked up under Balakirev; and all his contemporaries agree in asserting that counterpoint came to him by intuition. His early marriage to a woman of considerable talent as a musician was an important factor in his artistic development.

Borodin’s youth had been spent chiefly in cities; consequently he did not start life with that intimate knowledge of the folk-music which Balakirev and Moussorgsky had acquired. But his perception was so quick and subtle, that no sooner had his attention been called to the national element in music than he began to use it with mastery. This is already noticeable in his first Symphony, in E flat major. This work is not free from the faults of inexperience, but it displays all the potential qualities of Borodin’s talent—poetical impulse, a fine taste, an originality which is not forced, and a degree of technical facility that is astonishing, when we realise that music was merely the occupation of his rare leisure hours.