Listening to the music of Modest Mussorgsky this week, the extraordinary portrait of the composer painted just days before his death has never been far from my mind. I decided  to look at some more of Ilya Repin’s work and discovered that this remarkable Ukrainian Realist artist, Ilya Repin (1844-1930)  was, like his friend Mussorgsky, painting a series of images about ‘Mother Russia’ in all her variety and, often, sorrow. Rightly and unsurprisingly he is honoured as one of the greatest of 19th Century ‘Russian’ artists and his work now has a permanent home in the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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My first novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, is published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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Vladimir Stasov (1824 – 1906), the music and art critic, was a friend of Leo Tolstoy, a passionate advocate of new Russian music, described by Ivan Turgenev “our great all-Russian critic.” He was Russia’s very own Music Tsar, portrayed by Ilya Repin, with the confidence of a Renaissance Pope. He may have told another friend that he considered Mussorgsky “an idiot” but he also thought him an inspired one. Stasov had suggested the plot of Prince Igor to Borodin and that of Khovanschina to Mussorgsky but his doing good was sometimes too interfering for the longterm good of the composers he befriended. Still inspired with his creation, Mussorgsky received a letter filled with “helpful” and “constructive” advice from Stasov which began a piece by piece deconstruction on what he had seen so far: “There are choruses, there are songs (for both men and women), there is excellent music, but no action or interest. there are also no connections with the rest of the opera…” (Musorgsky, His Life and Works by David Brown, Oxford University Press, 2006).

Too many sensitive artists have listened to over-confident advice from interfering experts.

Mussorgsky fell apart and started to tear his work apart too even deciding to put it aside for a while to begin a new opera  – Sorochinsky Fair, which was also left unfinished as alcohol and periods of mental collapse took their toll. The next five years of his life make depressing reading, doubly so for anyone interested in musical history. Alcohol would have got him in the end, no doubt, but Vladimir Stasov, so certain in his often unoriginal solutions, wrote the letter that blew the project. When Mussorgsky died in 1881, the score of Khovanschina was a bundle of papers left incomplete and in chaos but fastidiously gathered, ordered and re-orchestrated by another distinguished Russian composer from this period, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), brilliant orchestrator, generous friend, inspiring teacher but, yes, let’s say it, rather a dull composer. OK, don’t  shout, I know Scheherazade is a lovely piece and I too can hum the Flight of the Bumblebee but you know what I mean.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Khovanschina with a newly composed final scene at least brought the work onto the stage in 1886 but it has mostly been discredited for its musical correctness and over-flashy orchestration. Serge Diaghilev, the Russian impresario described by Vladimir Stasov as a “decadent cheerleader” asked Igor Stravinsky to re-orchestrate Rimsky’s reorchestration  with a bit of help from Maurice Ravel but the Russian bass Chaliapin refused to sing anything but the Rimsky and, tragically in my opinion,  the Stravinsky score has been lost apart from the last scene which is still sometimes performed because it’s melancholy tone fits better, I think, with Mussorgsky’s dark poetry than Shostakovich’s Soviet-inspired optimistic flavour.

In 1959, Dmitri Shostakovich was asked to make another orchestration of the opera for a new film of the work. He went back to Mussorgsky’s original score and created a new score, first for the film and then for the stage in 1960 – the version that we mostly hear today.

Khovanschina will always be Mussorgsky’s unfinished masterpiece. There will always be sadness and frustration that his original mind couldn’t have forged the entire work but, thanks to Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, we have a great piece of opera theatre, a thrilling hybrid (written between 1875 and 1960) that might have simply disappeared down some Russian back alley when poor Modest Petrovetch Mussorgsky disappeared on one of his many unchronicled drunken expeditions into Russian low life.

To hear how we really now have an interesting mix of late 19th Century and mid-20th Century opera, take a look at this short clip from a Bavarian State Opera production conducted by Kent Nagano.

http://www.everydaypoets.com/?s=Colin+Bell

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