800 Words: A New Tonality - A Playlist - Part 2

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881, Russian)

(God, this scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid…)

Mussorgsky occupies the same place in music history that Henri Rousseau does in art history. On the one hand, he was a self-taught dilettante, a learning disabled genius with ten times as many unfinished projects as completed ones. And yet who could blame him? Was there ever a musician who had less desire to look away from adult themes and terrifying truths? Because he had to rely on himself, Mussorgsky is the true father of an entirely new musical thinking. He had virtually no concept of development, that most German of all musical concepts, and after him, no composer needed to have such a concept if he so wished. After Mussorgsky, all that remained a requirement was the ability to redefine harmony, tone color, melody, and rhythm in whatever way a composer wished to maximize the vividness of his music. Composers before Mussorgsky took us part of the way to his path - certainly the “Music of the Future” of Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, paves the way. Perhaps we even hear a move away from traditional development as early as certain passages of late Beethoven. But Mussorgsky was the moment of emancipation. Thanks to Mussorgsky, music became pure experience.

Mussorgsky Playlist:

Songs and Dances of Death (has there ever been more terrifying music?), The Nursery (One is about death, including the death of children, the other is about a child awakening to life and beginning its understand what it means to live), 
The Puppet Show (somewhat self explanatory...), 
Sunless (Mussorgsky takes on the dread subject of depression), 
Song of the Flea (probably his most famous, look at the text underneath the video, he could have been executed for it. There are many, many other wonderful songs he wrote, which are still nowhere near as known as they should be.), 
Pictures at an Exhibition for piano (If you know the Ravel orchestration, try to get it out of your head. No French perfume here, no smoothing out of the awkward moments with artificial orchestral effects. Just pure pianistic vividness and conjuration from the same world as his unforgettable songs, done by the greatest pianist of the recorded era in his most legendary performance.), 
Boris Godunov (on the other hand, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Vegasization of Boris Godunov did him an enormous service. We’ll never know what impact Chaliapin or Golovanov might have made with the original, but smoothening the rough edges allowed Mussorgsky’s acceptance to happen quickly enough for Boris to become the Great Russian Opera, and for performers to put the roughness back into the music that Mussorgsky would have loved), 
Khovanshchina (Mussorgsky’s ‘sequel’ to Boris. It might even better - greater intrigue, greater character development, still more brutal indictments of Russian politics and history.), 
Sorochinsky Fair (including the famous Night on Bald Mountain - not a great performance, but this was to be the comic antipode to Boris and Khovashchina. Some light comedy it would have been if it includes Night on Bald Mountain..., but the fragments, both complete and incomplete - the Shebalin completion is not to be found on youtube - show us the awful truth: Mussorgsky’s early death was a tragedy for opera second only to Mozart’s.) 
Night on Bald Mountain (here’s the original orchestration by Mussorgsky - a hundred times scarier and darker than Rimsky’s)

Leos Janacek (1854-1928, Moravian Czech)

The composer who as an old man picked up where Mussorgsky left off, and superseded him. Janacek is, even if I’m the only one who believes this, the greatest name on this list - the only composer but Mussorgsky to take a new concept of harmony and use it to bring music still closer to life’s experience. The greatest miracle of Janacek, among many miracles, is his ability to use further levels of musical abstraction to bring us closer to human nature. The more mannered his music became, the closer it came to reality.

Mussorgsky’s songs work on a level which no previous songwriter achieved because he based his word settings on the patterns of human speech. Janacek took Mussorgsky’s insight and systematized it - notating people’s speech patterns as they spoke to him, and in the process, mastering the art of turning natural human speech into music.

And like Mussorgsky, only far more so, Janacek’s concept of harmony was something far beyond the reaches of his contemporaries - unpredictable not only far beyond the imaginations of Dvorak and Smetana (wonderful as they are), but beyond the imaginations of Mahler and Strauss as well. In the first decade of the 20th century, both Mahler and Strauss were piling occasional dissonances that paved the ground on which Schoenberg’s atonality walked. To Mahler, folk music was a way of recalling his early memories in his music, and perhaps his early traumas as well. He seemed to have very little interest in folk music as an adult. Strauss had little to do with folk music, one might imagine that popularity meant so much to him that he would have agreed with Elgar’s famous quote “I AM folk music.” As a result, they both walked in the byways of Bach’s tonality, and only felt the need for the type of escape that blows up the old but builds the new out of the old's pieces. But while the great German composers wanted to blow up the tonal dam, Janacek worked and walked among folk musicians, and through them heard tonal byways - intervals, progressions, modulations - which no composer further northwest ever fathomed. Janacek was the only true revolutionary among these great composers.

Janacek’s career, his true career, begins in 1904, the year after the death of his beloved daughter, whose dying breath he dutifully notated as he did every other human utterance. His opera, Jenufa, or “Her Stepdaughter” when translated from Czech literally, is the truest treatment of human beings on the operatic stage since Mozart’s death over a century earlier. From then on sprang forth a twenty-five year stream of bizarre and sometimes demented sounding masterpieces interrupted only by death. After Jenufa was Sonata 1. X, 1905 - inspired by the death by bayonetting of a University student, and sounding like Chopin on Meth. Then came the Male Choruses - like Teacher Halfar, Marycka Magdonova, and my favorite The Seventy Thousand - all three of which change tempo, rhythm, and harmony so often that they sound as though a group of fifty singers are improvising on the spot. Through all this, Janacek worked on his own version of The Well-Tempered Klavier - On an Overgrown Path - in which Janacek’s increasingly strange tonalities and rhythms manifested themselves clearly and completely. Then came the ‘statement’ pieces of World War I, when Janacek dipped into Moravian folk mythology to make statements about the need for peace and Czech independence. The Eternal Gospel, in which Janacek doesn’t yet have the secure grasp of how to be quite so bizarre on such a grand scale and sounds like it could be written by Sibelius - hardly something to be ashamed of. More interesting is ‘The Fiddler’s Child’, which is Janacek’s bizarre take on the violin concerto, which is in fact a symphonic poem about the supernatural for orchestra and violin soloist. All of these statements cumulate in Taras Bulba, his orchestral rhapsody which is in fact a love-letter to pan-Slavism - declaring his belief that Russian/Easten Orthodoxy will deliver Czechs from their Austro-Hungarian/Catholic oppressors, in which he finally transfers the bizarre carnival of his more intimate compositions onto a full orchestral stage.

With Taras Bulba, Janacek reaches the cosmic proportions of his final decade. There has never been, nor will there ever be, music like Janacek’s ever again. He founded no school, and his sole truly gifted pupil, Pavel Haas (more on him later), perished in Auschwitz before he could realize the full extent of his gift.

The Diary of One Who Disappeared is a unique Song Cycle. It is about the love of a lower-class peasant for a gypsy girl, an his heartrending decision to leave home to pursue that love. It is both a celebration of love and an elegy for all the things which we must leave behind in order to follow our blis. Love is the stuff of Art Songs, and occasionally a song-cycle appears as this one does that documents love from the point of view of both people - but how many love songs or song cycles have three offstage altos singing with them? If you do not gasp when you hear their first appearance, you do not hear music.

Janacek’s final flowering was based on his love for a comely but ordinary middle class young woman named Kamilla Stasslova. Nobody knew exactly what Janacek saw in her, as she was hardly his intellectual equal, but she was his muse, and Janacek saw her as both the daughter he lost, and the wife he wished he had. His lifelong marriage was mostly a lifelong disaster, and his first string quartet called “The Kreutzer Sonata” tells their story. When Jenufa premiered, he nearly drove his wife nearly to suicide by having an affair with the lead Mezzo. The Kreutzer Sonata is not based on the Beethoven work, but on the Tolstoy story named after the Beethoven work in which a well-intentioned husband ends up demoralizing, abusing, and finally murdering his wife.

Five years later, in the last year of his life, came the companion quartet - ‘Intimate Letters’, in which Janacek put his last measure of devotion to Kamilla. There are 600 letters from Janacek to Kamilla, full of the most ardent (and dirty) love declarations. Even so, there is no definitive evidence that their affair was ever consummated, or even two-sided. In the same year, Janacek went out to retrieve her young son, lost in the woods, and contracted the cold which killed him.

In those intervening ten years, Janacek wrote his greatest orchestral work, the Sinfonietta, and his supreme choral work, the Glagolitic Mass - both inspired by the intense Czech nationalism, optimism, and pride of the Masaryk years - both of them major Beethoven-worthy statements of universal brotherhood and liberty.

But it is as an opera composer upon which his laurels must always rest. And in the 1920’s, Janacek wrote 5 extraordinary operas which are perhaps the only 5 that can compare with the finest five by Mozart.

Seemingly half of the world’s great operas take place in legend and fantasy, but The Excursions of Mr. Broucek is one of a handful of operas (let alone great ones) which deal in science fiction. Mr. Broucek journeys to the moon and time travels to the 15th century. Like most good Science Fiction, it is meant not as an alternative world, but a parallel world which can tell truths about our world in allegory which you can’t do in reality. No opera composer since Mozart, and no opera composer since, has ever done things this outrageous - and yet, like Mozart, even the most outrageous things are done with an astonishingly light touch, full of waltzes and parody songs which give the finger to the audience which expects a diversion.

The most beautiful, and in some ways the most heartbreaking, of the final great five, is Kata Kabanova. It’s a tale of a doomed, forbidden affair between a rich but absued young man and a married woman in a suffocatingly provincial small town. Kata is dedicated to Kamilla, and is clearly supposed to be Kamilla as Janacek saw her, the young angel of his desires, whose fragile beauty is doomed to be crushed by a cruel world. Janacek pictures himself as the figure of Boris, once again a young, vigorous man, able to consummate his desires and briefly tempt Kamilla away from her husband, but helpless against the suffocating claustrophobia of small town life.

But greatest of all is the third - The Cunning Little Vixen - in which the entire life cycle of nature - youth, old age, prosperity, poverty, love, hate, nature, nature’s destruction, eros, thanatos, birth, death, and rebirth, and all this is done in an opera populated by farm and forest animals, which itself is based on a newspaper comic strip. There are moments, not often but moments nevertheless, when I rate this opera above any by Mozart, and therefore as the greatest of all operas. Whether created by animals or humans, there is nothing about the experience of being alive that is missing from this opera about a fox. It’s an anthropomorphic animal fantasy, it’s a commentary and satire on human behavior, it’s a requiem for the passing of time, and a celebration of all the things that are still to come. Find a performance of this still much too unknown opera, if you have a soul, your life will never be the same.

Which is not to devalue his final two operas. The Makropoulos Case, in which Janacek merges Kamilla and himself into the personage of a brilliant 338 year old opera singer, assertive and volatile, ‘a passionate woman with flexible morals,’ but with a vulnerable core beneath her bluster. At one point in the opera, a long sought-after love affair is finally consummated, with disappointing results. It’s enough to make one wonder if the period in which he wrote this opera was the period in which Janacek finally bedded Kamilla, and wished he hadn’t. The Makropoulos Case is a bit like a detective novel, in which the enigma of Elena Makropoulos is gradually revealed in its full strangeness, both the plot and the musif growing ever more bizarre as it develops.

His final opera, From the House of the Dead, based on Dostoevsky’s novella about his prison experience, is no longer Kamilla or soprano obsessed. Instead, it returns to Janacek’s former political obsessions, about a Siberian prison and how the prisoners try to retain their dignity under inhuman circumstances. The foreshadowing of Eastern Europe in the 20th century should be obvious to anyone. To Milan Kundera, this opera, along with Berg’s Wozzeck, is the heart of the 20th century. According to many, Janacek was heartsick from Kamilla’s rejection, and planned for From the House of the Dead to be his last opera - perhaps he even  wrote From the House of the Dead as his own requiem. We will never know the true nature of their relationship, nor will we know precisely what Janacek saw in her. But like so many artists, love, and the possibility of it, was what inflamed him to levels of creativity which others can never see. When the possibility of love dies, the desire for life often dies with it.

All of this strangeness in Janacek is not possible without strange music. Between the very straightforward emotions of most great operas and art-songs, and the music of alienation which atonality brings is a chasm-wide gulf of ambiguity in which the real quirks of human behavior reside. What Janacek and Mussorgsky were able to do past virtually any composer of whom I can think is to plumb the deep ambiguities of human emotion, behavior, and condition. The questions they ask are eternal, but they are of a very different eternity than either the Church-bound masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque, or the State-bound masterpieces of the Classicism and Romanticism. This is music for the age of Democracy, for the age of Literature, music that not only demands freedom after the manners of Beethoven and Wagner, but asks us what that freedom is. We still don’t know, but at least we now know to ask these questions, and who knows if we would have without these two geniuses?

800 Words: In Search of Boris Godunov - Before the Prologue

Overture (technically there is none):

Late January, 2005. I’m a college senior. In August of the year before, I spent an absolute fortune (sixty-five dollars!) to see the Mariinsky Opera perform Boris Godunov on tour at the Kennedy Center in a production conducted by Valery Gergiev. I have been looking forward to this all year – even if I knew it would be a cold day in hell before I could get anyone to go with me. Getting anyone to come with me to the Kennedy Center is enough of a pill, but for sixty five dollars, I might as well tell them their money would be siphoned to Jack Abramoff (remember him?).

A week beforehand, I get a surprise IM from Il Giovine. He is about to leave for eight months in Australia, but before he leaves, he wants to come down to DC with some friends of his from New Jersey, and our pledge to enable our corner apartment in Connecticut Heights to put on one last legendary party before he leaves. Against some resistance, I insist the party has to be Friday night so that I can go to the opera Saturday. I’ve looked forward to that night for too long to have any conflicting plans.

Il Giovine comes down Thursday night with a number of friends who have since become my friends, and the plans are firmly in place. The party is, true to form, as legendary as any college party thrown by cripplingly awkward nerds can be. Fifty-odd guests crammed into our tiny corner apartment, no noise complaints, and some hilariously wrong hookup stories. Three hours after the last guests leave, two hours after Der Schreiber and our houseguests have fallen asleep, Il Giovine and I are still drinking Sambuca at ten in the morning.

I awaken at three-thirty in a sweaty frenzy and make a beeline for the toilet. The results are precisely the color of that Sambuca, and even afterward I feel like microwaved death. I have four hours to get to the opera, and am in no humor to either walk to the Van Ness metro station or to the Kennedy Center from the Foggy Bottom station. I have no appetite for food and I make a plea to Il Giovine to drive me to the Kennedy Center, but he’s as hung over as I and has dinner plans. “Come to dinner!” he says, “You know I can’t.” I reply. I call Le Malon to ask him for a ride to the Kennedy Center, but he too has other plans. He, Il DeAngelo, and The Kanneth, having recouperated the night before at Le Malon’s apartment, are about to leave for a spontaneous roadtrip to Leesburg, Virginia. “Come with us!”, they entreat. “I wish I could,” I reply. “Can you wait an hour and take me to the Kennedy Center?” They oblige me, and when I suggest they see about getting tickets, they even oblige that, only to find that all the remaining seats are over $250.

At seven-twenty, I am in my seat, breathlessly waiting for the beginning of this performance I’ve anticipated so devotionally. The man in the seat next to me starts to talk to me, he’s an operaphile too who is quite happy to make the acquaintance of a fellow Mussorgsky-lover. “You realize it’s the 1869 Boris Godunov, right?....”

“Oh shit…” I think to myself.

“…So there’s no intermission.”

“No, I hadn’t realized that.”

The lights grow dim, and the tonsured visage of Gergiev can be seen, already mounted on the pit’s rostrum. The plaintive C-Sharp Minor bassoon solo is the last thing I remember…

140 minutes later, I awaken to a tumultuous, deafening ovation. The man next to me turns and exclaims…

“Wasn’t that the most incredible performance you’ve ever seen?”

“Absolutely.”

The Performer:

The Golovanov Boris Godunov is a travesty of a travesty. Nikolai Golovanov inserts hundreds of unwritten changes in dynamics, tempo, and instrumentation into what already is a bastardization of Mussorgsky’s original opera – in which Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov changes the orchestration, rearranges the harmonies, and sometimes rewrites whole scenes. This recording has all sorts of playing and singing that is shaky, shrill, imprecise, and out of tune. Yet this 1947 recording is one of the absolute cultural glories of the 20^th century – the only recorded performance that does Mussorgsky’s vision true justice and coming as close as any document ever has to explaining the Russian Soul to those of us fortunate enough not to understand it.

It was 1947, 27 million Russians had died in The Great Patriotic War (World War II) in addition to the 10-20 million Stalin had already killed without Hitler’s help. By the end of the year, Stalin would begin his purges anew, and still more millions would be fed to Stalin’s meat grinder. And if that weren’t enough, the Soviet people already lived every day under the threat of nuclear attacks from America, a future only made more likely by Stalin’s announcement in that year that the Soviets too had built an atomic bomb.

By the early 1940’s, all the great Soviet writers and painters were either dead, imprisoned, or in internal exile. All that was left to Russia was its music, and through the work of composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev spoke all the sentiments which no person in the regime dare say out loud. The freedom of musicians was limited, but compared to the scores of other artists killed for speaking their minds, their freedom was limitless. No Soviet bureaucrat could accuse a piece of music of being about Soviet oppression simply because it’s written in a minor key, or sounds angry. The Soviet authorities used to append meanings to the music of their greatest composers that were commensurate with what they wanted to hear. But the Russian people got very different messages.

If you ask most culturally aware Americans to name the great Russian performing organizations, they’ll know only one answer: The Bolshoi. That answer is over twenty years dated, and they probably think it’s only a ballet company, and not a 236 year old theater company with a 180 year old theater that produces ballet and opera. They won’t know that the Bolshoi is a mere nub of its Soviet self, while its historic rival, the Kirov/Mariinsky, has been fully restored to its pre-Soviet glory. They might have heard of one or two of their dancers: Barishnikov and Nuryev of course – but the names of singers like Chaliapin, Vishnevskaya, Reizen, Kozlovsky, would draw complete blanks. If they’re classical music lovers, they may have heard of the Mariinsky’s current, and perhaps greatest, director, Valery Gergiev. But they won’t know the name of the Bolshoi’s greatest modern director, Nikolai Golovanov.

It’s an unfortunate fact of classical music that even the very greatest musicians are only at their very greatest in a small sliver of their repertoire. Just as the greatest theater actors have roles they do less well, no musician, however extraordinary, can be so authoritative that (s)he can have equal ability in their entire repertoire. Pavarotti could do extraordinary things in Italian roles for lyric tenors, but was rather incompetent outside his specialty. Vladimir Horowitz was a super-virtuoso who made audiences believe that Liszt, Rachmaninov, and Scriabin wrote their piano music specially for him, yet in more self-effacing composers like Beethoven and Brahms, all his hair-raising effects sounded hopelessly narcissistic – though he was trying to put the focus back on himself.

Even to fanatical classical music lovers, Nikolai Golovanov is a conductor not much known today – it’s a shame, since even when his recordings suck, they are fascinating. Most recreative musicians are complacent and simply produce a rough approximation of what the composer writes on the page, and they disguise their intellectual laziness with technique good enough to cover up their flaws. They give little thought to why they do what they do, and they’re not artists, they’re merely artisans. But a greater class of musician knows better than to stop at the water’s edge. When a talented artist gives a unique performance,  many have negative reactions to them, some even feel threatened – as though their precious preconceptions will be shattered forever and no one can put them back together. But no one can possibly find such artists bland. Nikolai Golovanov is this higher class of artist to the n’th degree.

I can think of at least three times as many performances conducted by Golovanov that are weird beyond description than I can of his performances that I treasure. Few conductors would have the nerve (let alone the stupidity) to conduct a Mozart Requiem in which some movements (though not all) are in the wrong key, and the tempos usually change from bar to bar. Yet from a musician that unique, there is always something to be learned – even if it’s something we don’t want to.

If an artist as challenging as Golovanov were in any line of work but music, he’d have wilted. But Golovanov was the most original conductor in a time and place in which music was virtually the soul’s only outlet, and he was feted accordingly – four-time recipient of the Stalin Prize, director of Orchestral and Operatic activities at the Moscow Conservatory for 23 years, 8 years as conductor of the Bolshoi Theater’s radio orchestra, 16 years as conductor of the USSR’s state-sponsored radio orchestra. And finally in 1948, at the age of 57, he reached  the very top of his profession - he became music director of the Bolshoi.

Golovanov made this recording in the year before he became the Bolshoi’s director, but the problems which proved his undoing are already there in this album. This recorded performance has two editions, one starring the bass, Alexander Pirogov, in the titular role of Boris Godunov – the third Czar of All Russia. The other starred Mark Reizen in the same role. Golovanov preferred Reizen as Boris, but Reizen was Jewish, and Stalin preferred Pirogov.

One would think that the Generalissimus of the Soviet Union would have better things with which to concern himself. But according to the autobiography of one famous singer, the battle of the Borises was waged all throughout Golovanov’s five-year tenure. Every time Boris Godunov was performed, there was a tense question as to whom would assume the title role. Eventually, the Kremlin tired of this contest of wills, and in 1952, Golovanov was barred from the very premises of the Bolshoi. By the next year, he was dead, and according to the same autobiography, he simply died of humiliation.

Had he lived just six months longer, Golovanov would have outlived Stalin and would likely have been completely rehabilitated. But like Boris Godunov, like Mussorgsky, perhaps like Russia itself, Golovanov was the victim of terrible luck – and we can only speculate as to the glories that might have been had history taken a completely different turn. 

St John's Night on Bare Mountain

In whatever form, it is such an utterly brilliant fragment: scary, cinematic, evil-sounding. I don't understand how the Rimsky arrangement, fine as it is, continues to eclipse either Mussorgsky arrangement in popularity. Rimsky made a cute tone poem.

Song of the Flea

A king there was once reigning,

Who had a goodly flea,

Him loved he without feigning,

As his own son were he!



His tailor then he summon’d,

The tailor to him goes;

Now measure me the youngster

For jerkin and for hose!



In satin and in velvet

Behold the younker dressed;

Bedizen’d o’er with ribbons,

A cross upon his breast.



Prime minister they made him,

He wore a star of state;

And all his poor relations

Were courtiers, rich and great.



The gentlemen and ladies

At court were sore distressed;

The queen and all her maidens

Were bitten by the pest,



And yet they dared not scratch them,

Or chase the fleas away.

If we are bit, we catch them

And crack them without delay.


...How the hell was Mussorgsky not thrown in jail for this?