Modest Musorgsky (may 1, 1839 – feb 1, 1881)

Description:

History, language, and melody made Russian opera the best genre for impressive nationalist statements. Among Russian operas, Musorgsky's Boris Godunov was the most celebrated achievement of the second half of the century, as Glinka's A Life for the Tsar had been for the first. It made Musorgsky the best-known of the MIghty Five composers. He was, like Smetana, one of the most innovative composers of the nineteenth century, although his reputation in the West focuses on his identity as a RUssian more than as a progressive. His nationalism--combined with the fact that he was trained for a military career, not for a musical one--led him to adopt an extreme outsider's attitude toward the existing European musical traditions and institutions. He rejected the models that had served Glinka so well: both the standard curriculum of the German conservatory (counterpoint, mastery of form, systematic theory, any manifestation of "braininess" and the aesthetic of Italian opera (bel canto, ornate melody, all conventional canons of "beauty").

What is left after renouncing both brains and beauty? Good character, obviously. That is where Musorgsky's high moral commitment to "Truth"was born, a commitment he viewed as being particularly Russian.

In his commitment to realism, with its rejection of fine manners and convention, he found a mentor in composer Alexadner Dargomizhsky. Like him, Dargomizshky was an aristocratic dilettante frozen out by the professional establishment. Dargomizhsky's unfinished opera (The Stone Guest) served as a model for Musorgsky. The literary source for the work was a dramatic poem by Pushkin inspired by the statue from Hell in Don Giovanni. Dargomizhsky had attempted to solve the problem of operatic form by dispensing with the libretto altogether, basing his work directly on Pushkin's text, which made him for Musorgsky "the great teacher of musical truth."

Musorgsky decided he could go even further. Rather than use verse, he believed that composers should set librettos in conversational prose, with the music faithfully mirroring the tempo and contour of actual conversational speech. Such "imitation of nature," based on the idea that art derives its power from the mirroring of reality, had inspired the invention of opera in Florence's humanist academis almost three centuries earlier. Never before, however, had a composer recommended abandoning verse as the basis of musical setting.

Musorgsky's extraordinarily radical postrue turned all of his liabilities into advantages. Far from being handicapped by a lack of formal musical training, he was privileged by his mvarecik, self-taught status to think the unthinkable. His conservatory would be the conservatory of life. He wrote in the summer of 1868, when he was making his first attempt to realize these ideas in practice, that "whatever speech I hear, whoever is speaking (or, the main thing, no matter what he is saying), my brain is already churning out the musical embodiment of such speech." In his writing of naturalistic prose recitative, Musorgsky had an advantage over composers working in other languages: the pattern of spoken Russian imposes a sort of beat on most utterances that can be represented fairly accurately in regular musical notaiton. Indeed, Musorgsky developed an acute ear for the tempo of Russian speech.

Added to timeline:

Date: