SONG MASTERPIECES

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 61, 12 March 1936, Page 5

SONG MASTERPIECES

WORKS OF MOUSSORGSKY

REALISM AND SENTIMENT

The visitor to Moscow, doing the sights, is shown round the Tretiakov Gallery—an inferior Tate Gallery, rich in examples of the Muscovite equivalents of our Luke Fildes, B. W. Leader, and R. Caton Woodville. There was a Victorian age in Russia, too, writes Richard Capell in the "Daily Telegraph, ' . Better pictures are to be seen elsewhere in Moscow. But there is one thing in the Tretiakov rooms which no musical visitor can forget. Surely Repin was a very fine portrait painter. Anyhow, the example to which I refer makes an arresting effect. It depicts with cruel brilliancy the wreck of a man. The musician has no need to spell out the legend on the frame to know that it is Moussorgsky, here painted not long before he drank himself to death. '' '. It is like seeing him—the composer of "Boris Goudounov" and the "Nursery Songs"—and seeing him repellent and pitiable. Bloated and with bloodshot eyes, he tells you he has made a mess of life and were best out of it. And out of it he has been, now for more than fifty years. Out of it: and yet, in a way he may have hoped for but .could not expect, remaining' in it. There is something symbolic in the fact that on the Tretiakov walls his portrait lives, a square foot or two of vitality in a cemetery of bad paintings. So has the disreputable Moussorgsky outlived.most-of his respectable contemporaries. A LONDON CULT. He could hardly have expected that in-London, half a century and more on, there would be a Moussorgsky cult; a cult so pious that out at Islington they give "Boris" without some of the best things simply because these were afterthoughts—much as collectors prize first editions above .second, in which the misprints are corrected. And only the other day an -enthusiastic voice declared: "Moussorgsky's songs are equal to any in the world.-". The occasion of this was the appearance of an album of gramophone records of, Moussorgsky's songs, sung by Vladimir Rosing, which is published by the Parlophone company. As-the field of the Puccini operas becomes exhausted, gramophone... records , tend to cover more and more unhackneyed ground. The Moussorgsky album, if not universal in.appeal, will assuredly interest-a considerable public, while to those fortunate enough '„to know Russian it will be.a veritable treasure. That anyone would ever listen to his songs without knowing Russian cannst have entered Moussorgsky's head.. As Richard Holt—the critic we-have just quoted—says in a pamphlet that accompanies the gramophone records: "His fidelity to the-word dominates the musical form of his songs"; and again: '"Moussorgsky sought to infuse into music even the intonations of speech. ". .'".Never does he allow any musical consideration, to influence the text, always the reverse." , . Moussorgsky's aesthetic in his own words is to be found translated in.one "of Mr. Calvocoressi's invaluable contributions' to Moussorgskian literature. The composer wrote:,' V "If 1- have'managed to"-render the straightforward expression of thoughts and feelings.as it takes place in ordinary speech, and' if my rendering .is artistic and musicianly, then the deed is done"; and again: "What I want to do is to make my characters speak on the stage as-they would in real life, and yet.write music that will ,be . thoroughly artistic!" Finally: "The quest for artistic beauty for its own sake is sheer puerility—is art in its nonage." One-more quotation, again from Mr. Holt's pamphlet: "His songs fall into several categories, but no matter which they belong to, they exhibit this passion for truth and reality as opposed to fantasy and abstraction." GERMAN INFLUENCE. This dictum is not quite borne out] by the selection of fourteen songs which Mr. Rosing has. recorded. The two cycles, "The Nursery" and "Sun:, less," are not' included,- but we are given all the "Songs and, Dances of Death," and if the impersonation of

Death to be found there is not "fantasy and abstraction,"' what is the meaning of those words? ■ In the first of these songs Death dances a trepak with a drunken peasant who. has'lost his way in the storm; in the second, he wrests a sick child from its mother's arms; in the third, he is Don Juan, seducing . with his' serenade a. consumptive girl; in the fourth, "FieldMarshal Death," he is the victor.of a battlefield, reviewing , -the troops of the slain, The themes, it: will be- seen, are striking, but facile. . They, are: "period"; they belong to the era of "The Better Land" and "The May Queen," . They represent the backwash in remote Russia of the "Tod and das Madchen" lyricism of long-ago Germany, with' its penchant for graveyards and skeletons. They are excellent songs :df a cheap order. The rhythm of the trepak lends character to the first and best-of the . set. We may resent, as, unfair and ail too facile, the harrowing motive, of. the "Cradle Song," but there is a beautiful phrase to Death's words, "Bayousliki, bayou." . What, however, can be said for the commonplaces of the I'Serenade," with its diminished sevenths coming at the beginning of the second stanza as glibly as to any little conservatory pupil of the time? As for "Field-Marshal Death," it is effective ranting. , The Tretiakov Gallery is full of paintings equivalent to these "Songs arid Dances of .Death." '~'..■ *"•" ' WHERE IS HE? "Where, then, is the uncouth, original : Moussorgsky, the man' of '' genius? Where "the straightforward expression of thoughts and feelings , as... it take* place in ordinary speech"? 'The' answer, so far as the songs go,- is -above all in the admirable little, non-senti-mental pieces of "The Nursery,"-but the original Moussorgsky- is also .to be found in the racy peasant songs, comprised in Mr. Rosirig's : collection, such as the lively "GOpak',' and'"Gathering Mushrooms," In, their way-.these are capital pages, like the .inserted numbers of the palace scene in "Bpris." But Mr. Bosing.. was no-doubt well advised in including the more conventional and substantial "Songs -. and Dances of Death," for,, especially to an audience ignorant of Russian, they essential Moussorgsky pieces are bound to seem musically slight in. the: extreme when- deprived of .the interpreter's presence and facial expression. "The Nursery" songs would ,be, but the ghost of themselves on the gramophone, for like the rest of Moussorgsky's realistic pieces—those' in which he is the honoured and unique artist —they are "not songs of-the kind, that stand on a solid musical basis, but are rather song-recitations or rriusical , sketches of character, and. situation, and they call for an actor-singer's in- , terpretation, an interpretation V that . must be seen as well as heard. . i The exactitude, of Moussorgsky's musical inflections of his text charms ; Russian scholars like Mr. Calvo'coressi : and Mr. Holt to the point, it.seems, of , "compensatiing in their view for the thinness of the sheer music. Obviously it is a style' of vocal writingl that more than any other defies the.translator of the text. Edward Agate'has englished "The Nursery*" but, .the , naturalness required is lost by his formal inversions (e.g., "who beside the sea dwelt in a lovely palace"). A song-writer on Moussorgsky's lines , who desires universal appreciation as one of the song-writers of the. world ought to compose different versions of his vocal line: to conforrii with .translations of the text into the languages , of'the world. NEED OF LANGUAGE. A greater Moussorgsky would,'com- - pel musical people to learn Russian, ■ as many have . tackled German for : Schubert's and Wagner's*sake, -fortunately for the' lazy, Moussorgsky's , substantial masterpiece ; is an; opera,and there scene and gesture sufficiently help out our ignorance. How essentially he was an opera composer Mr. Rosing's album' tells "us. All the characteristic • pieces—"Savishna,;'-: "The Orphan," "Mushrooms," and the fine but fragmentary-seeming pieces •of minstrelsy, like "The .Star" and "To the Dnieper"—suggest that their true and most telling ■ position would be as numbers in an opera. "The Orphan," though so vivid, is-yet a tiresome piece as a-concert-song,, but how effective it might be in the.right dramatic setting".the Idiot's, song: in "Boris", can suggest. "Mushrooms," I too, is something that only a master'hand could have written. But can-it be called a great song? No; but an, admirable scrap from "some unwritten lyric drama of which ', it should have ' been" one of the clous. ;