Scene II shows him a fugitive defying ecclesiastical authority. He
has renounced the cloister and has taken his first step towards the throne. He is resting at an inn situated on the Lithuanian frontier. At the moment of his betrayal by two bibulous monks, he escapes through the window and continues his journey towards Poland.
The royal palace is the scene of the second act, which is the joint work of Pushkin and Moussorgsky. The presence of the Tsar’s son Feodor and his daughter Xenia is made a vehicle for the interpolation of appropriate material of an episodic kind. The actual drama is carried a step further by the Tsar’s reference to a map of Russia, which is being examined by his heir. “All this territory,” explains Boris to his son, “will one day be yours.” The atmosphere of domesticity is dispelled by the entrance of the boyard Shouisky, who brings news of serious trouble on the Polish frontier. It has been declared that the corpse found at Ouglich was not that of Dmitri Ivanovich; and that he, on the contrary, is a living and energetic claimant of the crown. Boris, uneasy, orders an immediate inquiry into the conduct of the assassination. Shouisky, as though to reassure him, describes the appearance of the child’s corpse, which he claims to have seen. On his withdrawal Boris is seized with terror. The rack upon which his mind has for years been tortured has been given a sharp turn by Shouisky’s recital, and the strain produces a nerve-crisis. Boris, through a hallucination, has a vision of the blood-stained corpse. An awful terror seizes him.
X.
The next act is one which might well have been omitted from the scheme, and in performance often is. It was inserted, it will be remembered, to make good the deficiency of feminine interest. Dramatically it has a sort of relation to the whole, since it is complementary to the information brought by Shouisky and shows what is happening in Poland. Musically it is not uninteresting, but, considered as a part of the whole music-drama, it is as much a blemish as is Glinka’s Polish Act in “A Life for the Tsar.” Glinka’s weakness of invention is shared by Moussorgsky. Both of them failed in the musical portrayal of Poland, because neither was able to describe the Polish character in musical terms other than those of the popular national rhythms.
The act has as definite a foundation in history as any other section of the drama, but it is negligible to the working out of this particular plot. Otrepief has arrived in Poland and has found a supporter. He has also found a maiden whose attachment to him is not altogether dictated by her heart. Her aim is to share the throne of Russia, and she is striving to strengthen his ambitious hopes, knowing that upon them depends her chance of realizing her own. Both Marina Mnichek and her religious director, Rangoni, the Jesuit, are well known to history. As witnesses of their scheming, we feel that this act is at least a little helpful to our understanding of the drama. But the music, in its attempts to procure local colour, is far from convincing.
The fourth act is in two scenes. In the first the arrival of the Pretender at the forest of Kromy, _en route_ for Moscow, is the only feature of dramatic value. But Moussorgsky’s musical treatment of the behaviour of the utterly irresponsible crowd of peasants, who welcome the Pretender’s passage rather as a pretext for revolt than as any real blessing, is a page which in itself creates an epoch in the history of Opera. The “pure fool” left behind on the stage to wring his hands in anguish at the darkness that is falling upon Russia is the creation of Pushkin. It is a national type which lives again in Dostoievsky’s “Idiot.”
The final scene is apparently a continuation of that in which we left Boris vainly trying to shut out the awful vision of the murdered Prince. The Tsar’s Council, confident that the revolt of which Shouisky has apprised them will be quickly suppressed, are discussing the form of punishment to be meted out to the Pretender. Suddenly the terror-stricken figure of the Tsar bursts into the hall. With difficulty they calm him. Shouisky enters, and announces that he has found one who can give a faithful account of the Ouglich crime, and thus dispose of the Pretender’s claim. Pimen is ushered in. He tells of an old shepherd, blind from birth, who heard in a dream a command that he should pray at the tomb of Dmitri, now an angel, and whose faith was duly rewarded with the gift of sight. Boris hearing that his guilt is established, falls into a worse frenzy. He feels that his end is near. Young Feodor is sent for, and with his last breath the Tsar proclaims him his heir and successor.
XI.
The choice of “Boris Godounof” as subject would appear, as has been observed, to have been directly inspired by Glinka’s use of historical material in “A Life for the Tsar.” The music, however, is that of a composer who, after earnestly conferring with Dargomijsky, found little difficulty in seeing eye to eye with him in regard to the main principles of the “New Russian School.”
The setting of “Boris Godounof,” considered in comparison with all other operatic music, stands right apart from it. It is the artistic product of a great national crisis. One can easily imagine that a man so passionately in earnest as Moussorgsky would be immensely inspired by the so-called “nihilist” movement, and that nothing would please him more than to write an opera that would reflect the spirit of that movement.
It was the endeavour of the young intellectual of that time to be natural. There was a crusade against “pose,” and not merely deliberate but unconscious pose. One could dismiss the score of “Boris” with a compliment well worth the paying by declaring it an opera in which every bar of music is natural. Listening to the work, one could imagine Moussorgsky never to have heard an opera, to be entirely ignorant of the traditions of this form of art. With the exception of the Polish Act, in which he seems to betray that for him, as for Glinka, the vocabulary of musical terms in which the Polish character could be rendered stopped short at the Polacca and Mazurka rhythms, the composer has given us music that is appropriate, sincere, and dignified, never departing from beauty and never approaching anything in the nature of conventional pattern.
When it has been said that the music is consistently natural, it seems hardly necessary to mention that there are none of the traditional operatic subdivisions or self-contained numbers, that there are no formal overtures or _entr’actes_. The Prelude is of sufficient length to establish the requisite atmosphere. That done, the curtain rises. When it falls, the music, being there for a purely dramatic purpose, ceases. When, as in the case of Grigory’s escape from the Inn, there is a likelihood that the scene will continue in the imagination of the spectator for a moment or two after the action is shut out from view, the music comes to his assistance, but it has a curtain of its own, and this too is quickly drawn.
XII.
By Moussorgsky the leading-motive device is very happily used. His leading-motives are flashes of thought, mere reminiscences. There are the usual labels for characters and sentiments, but they are used in moderation. There is nothing resembling the Wagnerian philosophical disquisitions upon the attributes of a character on its every appearance, or upon the ethics of an emotion whenever suggested. Moussorgsky’s themes are used chiefly as links connecting the series of tableaux of which the drama is made up, and not as labels inseparable from the persons to whom they have been attached. The most prominent motive--that associated with the idea of the royal succession, heard in the dialogue between Pimen and Grigory when the latter asks what age the murdered Prince would have been; in the Introduction to the Inn scene heralding the presence of the novice-Pretender; in Shouisky’s account of the Ouglich crime and other places--does not at all times accompany reference to the subject it represents. Although it appears occasionally in the Polish scenes, there are places in which it might have been used quite effectively but in which it is neglected. Other themes recurring with more or less frequency and subtlety are the People’s motive, which is heard in an altered shape in the Forest scene when the crowd is baiting a captured noble; the short phrase which seems to refer to Russia’s past and which appears at intervals during the scene in the old monk’s cell, returning with Pimen’s narrative in the last act; and those which apparently represent the sentiments and attributes of the Tsar, his paternal solicitude and his insatiable ambition. That the full power of the leading-motive device was recognized by the composer is plain from the use of one of the Polish themes, when in the Forest scene the Pretender speaks of his destination. Here the main motive occurring under the words: “To our holy land of Russia ... let us seek the Kremlin” is heard in conjunction with a fragment of the Polacca. These two are heard together also in the Polish act.
The avoidance of formalism that characterizes the use of the leading-motive is in accord with the note of the whole work, simplicity. The moments of mental stress, the dramatic crises, are not with Moussorgsky the signal for a marshalling of “every modern luxury,” as Glinka styled the instrumental array. In this respect we find economy where extravagance usually prevails. Even in the scene of the hallucination, the composer depends mainly upon his “strings” for the description of Boris’s anguish. With him the repeated reference to an emotion does not involve an ever-increasing volume of tone for the description of the growing complexity in the psychological situation. Thus Boris’s final fit of terror is accompanied by music infinitely simpler than that heard when first allusion is made to the murdered heir.
The vocal line of the opera partakes for the most part of the nature of melodic recitative, but its purely lyrical moments are by no means sparse. As they occur in places where reference to folk-lore and song is made, they constitute no exception to the general appropriateness. There are times when Moussorgsky feels called upon to bring the sound into very close accord with the general sense; it is then that the composer resorts, as in the story of the parakeet, told by the excited young Tsarevich Feodor, to a method used in some of his songs. This consists of a faithful yet musical reflection of the rise and fall of the speaking voice. Set up as an ideal by Dargomijsky, it was attained by his disciple.
Moussorgsky was not deliberately unconventional as an operatic composer. National music-drama, if it is to exert the powerful influence without which it is not national, must be natural. Moussorgsky adopted the means best suited for the maintenance of that naturalness which alone could achieve what he has achieved. The music follows the drift of the text, serving it faithfully and never seeking to assert its claim to beauty as music. The sound, as M. Marnold so happily expresses it, is never allowed to become egotistical.[11] But, in accordance with the canons of the “New Russian School” it never ceases to be music.
“KHOVANSHCHINA”
XIII.
It was a Russian who said that religion was given by Providence as a stick which, in default of intellectual qualities, might be used as a moral support, and that with this stick Russians had chosen to belabour each other. The human interference which brought about the misuse of the stick was that of Nikon the Patriarch, who in 1655 undertook a revision of the Bible. Some of the corrections gave offence to the people, who preferred to adhere to traditional methods of worship. In consequence of this the nation was split into two main religious bodies: the Old Believers and the Orthodox, or followers of the authoritative dispensation. The dissenting body subsequently became subdivided into a great number of “jarring sects.”
It is with this schism that Moussorgsky’s second historical opera concerns itself. The figure-heads of the opposing factions, for the purposes of the opera, are Prince Ivan Khovansky, an adherent of the old régime, and Prince Galitsin, whose sympathies and interests are served by the introduction of Western enlightenment. It is understood that Dositheus, who in the opera is the spiritual leader of the Old Believers, is a portrait of another Prince. Stassof, who was responsible for the suggestion that this “antagonism between old and young Russia” would be good material for an opera, may well have feared, as in a letter to Moussorgsky he confesses he did, that instead of being a “People’s Music-Drama” it would be a Princes’.
The love-interest in “Khovanshchina” was not, as it had been in “Boris Godounof,” an afterthought. There are three prominent feminine characters: the Old Believer, Martha, described by Stassof as in some ways resembling Potiphar’s wife; Susan, a rigid fanatic, priding herself overmuch on her virtue; and Emma, a young Lutheran by whom Khovansky’s son Andrew has been attracted. In the original plan there were to have been included the figure of the Empress-Regent Sophia, of whom Galitsin is supposed to have been the lover, together with her young charge, afterwards to become Peter the Great. Owing to Moussorgsky’s decline in health, and the consequent fear that his opera might never be finished, he was obliged to reduce its scheme, and the royal personages disappeared.
The historical events underlying the dramatic material of “Khovanshchina” are as follows: Feodor Alexeyevich, eldest grandson of the first Romanof, had died without issue and was succeeded by Peter, the third brother, Ivan, being of weak intellect. As Peter was only ten years old Sophia, their half-sister, was appointed Regent. Anticipating the unwelcome reforms for which Peter afterwards became famous, Sophia did her best to place Ivan on the throne, and to this end instigated a revolt of the Streltsy--a regiment of Guards most of whom were Old Believers. Their leader, Prince Khovansky, and his son Andrew were the moving spirits in the rebellion, and Peter, who subsequently succeeded in quelling it, gave to the series of risings the appellation of “Khovanshchina.” The culminating event was the collective suicide of a large body of Old Believers who refused to submit to the heretical innovations of one whom they believed to be anti-Christ.
XIV.
Moussorgsky’s libretto is a fairly faithful rendering of the historical records, but its hurried abridgement naturally caused a sacrifice of many interesting details. The opera, in its published form, begins with a scene in the Red Square at Moscow. It is early morning. A public letter-writer enters the Square and sets up his booth, and a number of Streltsy who have been bivouacking in the Square after a riot on the previous evening betake themselves to their duties. Presently the boyard Shaklovity enters, and calls upon the scrivener to write down an impeachment of the Khovanskys, father and son. Immediately on his departure the pompous Prince Khovansky arrives with his following of Streltsy and Old Believers. Making the most of his position as head of the Streltsy, he encourages the people to rise against the authority of Peter. The crowd, impressed by his arrogance, sing a hymn in his honour. As the procession is moving off a young woman rushes upon the scene, closely followed by Khovansky’s son. It is Emma the Lutheran, who is being importuned, to her evident distress, by Prince Andrew. The altercation is interrupted by the arrival of Martha, whom Andrew has discarded. Andrew, furious at her intervention, attempts to stab her, but the Old Believer, gaining possession of his knife, delivers a mystical oration in which she foretells the young Prince’s approaching doom. The elder Khovansky now returns and, perceiving that the object of his son’s attentions is a young woman whom he himself admires, gives orders for her arrest. Andrew vows that she shall not be taken alive. She is saved by the timely entrance of the venerable Dositheus. He upbraids Andrew, orders Martha to protect Emma under her own roof, and kneels in prayer. The crowd proceeds to the Kremlin for worship, and the curtain falls on the solitary figure of Dositheus.
The second act takes place in the palace of the Galitsins. The rising curtain discloses the Prince disdainfully perusing a love-letter from the Empress-Regent. To him enters Martha, whom he has summoned, believing in her powers of clairvoyance, to read his future. She calls for a basin of water, cloaks herself in a long black garment, and proceeds to divine his early ruin. Beside himself with rage, Galitsin calls for his servants and orders them to waylay the woman on her way home, and to drown her in the marshes.
Galitsin, pondering over Martha’s terrifying prediction, is now visited by his enemy Khovansky. Between them there are personal and political recriminations, which terminate on the entrance of Dositheus, who pacifies them. The calm is but temporary. Martha returns to announce that an attempt has been made on her life, and is followed by Shaklovity, who presents himself as the envoy of the Regent and warns Khovansky that the Tsar has discovered his plot.
The Streltsian quarter of Moscow is the scene of the third act. Martha, withdrawing herself from a procession of Old Believers, seats herself on a mound near the Khovansky palace, and sings reminiscently of the days when young Andrew’s heart was hers. She refers once more to the mysterious fate awaiting him.
Susan now discloses herself. She is scandalized by the passionate references to Andrew she has overheard, and reviles Martha for her shamelessness. Dositheus enters and brings peace once more on the scene. He rebukes the old fanatic for her harshness, and comforts Martha. Night falls, and Shaklovity arrives and puts up a prayer for his harassed country.
There follows a sudden rush of Streltsy, followed by their plainly discontented wives. During the turmoil the letter-writer enters breathless, bringing news of the defeat of a Streltsian force at the hands of Peter’s men. A call is made for their leader, and Prince Khovansky counsels them from the steps of his palace to submit for the nonce to Peter’s rule.
The fourth act has two scenes. The first shows the interior of Khovansky’s country mansion. The old Prince is seeking distraction in the songs of his attendant maidens. A messenger from Galitsin, conveying news of a plot against Khovansky’s life, is scornfully dismissed, and the master of the house calls for his Persian dancers. At the conclusion of the entertainment Shaklovity brings a command that Khovansky shall appear at the Regent’s council. Imagining this to be a sign of returning favour, the Prince makes ready for the journey, but as he approaches the door he is stabbed. His terrified servants flee from the sight of their prostrate master, and Shaklovity, surveying the corpse, breaks out into derisive laughter.