Downhill to Fame

Hollywood, ransacking the lives of composers for plot material, has never got around to Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky. The composer of Boris Godunov suffered no searing romances, died a quaking alcoholic at 42; during most of his life he was regarded, with loving condescension, as little more than a talented idiot, even by the other four of the Russian Five.*

But the story of the aristocrat who wrote music full of crude peasant power, and his downhill rush from dandy to drunk, is as dramatic as any in music. Many of the facts, but few of the explanations, can be found in a newly published compilation of letters by & about him, called The Musorgsky Reader (edited & translated by Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson; Norton; $6).

Musorgsky learned early to drink like a gentleman; later he just drank. At 13, already a talented pianist, he entered the School of Guards Ensigns in St. Petersburg, where according to one account, "all free time after drilling was dedicated by the cadets to dancing, amours, and drink. General Sutgof was . . . proud when a cadet came back from leave drunk with champagne, sprawled in an open carriage drawn by his own trotters."

Foppish & Fussed-Over. Musorgsky was, wrote Composer Alexander Borodin on first meeting him, "quite boyish, very elegant, the very picture of an officer: brand-new, close-fitting uniform . . . sleek pomaded hair, nails as if carved . . . refined, aristocratic manners, conversation . . . sprinkled with French phrases, rath er affected . . . some traces of foppishness. . . . The ladies made a fuss over him. He sat at the piano and, coquettishly throwing up his hands, played . . . very sweetly and gracefully, while the circle around him buzzed . . . 'charmant, delicieux!' "

Before long, young Modeste was buzzing noisily in another circle: the fiercely nationalistic circle of the Russian Five. In their letters, they viciously attacked the prevailing Germanism of the Imperial Russian Music Society, which Musorgsky called "the musical slum." Wrote Musorgsky: "Force a Russian peasant to love any of the Volkslieder of the rotten Germans --he will not love them!" Almost as fast as he poured in vodka, he poured out characteristically Russian songs which caught the inflections and rhythms of Russian speech.

He was "boiling," he wrote, with ideas for Boris, and the pages were beginning to fill. His friends hovered over him like mother hens, pecking, suggesting, soothing. When Boris was finally produced (it was turned down at first because originally it had no female roles), the audience in the Marinsky Theater received it with enthusiastic astonishment. Said one spectator: "What sort of opera is this? There's no music in it; but I must confess I never took my eyes from the stage." Russian critics and musicians regarded it with horror. Screamed one: "This is a disgrace to all Russia! . . ."

Coarse & Crude. No composer's work suffers more than Musorgsky's from the conviction of his contemporaries that they could write his music better. Only in recent years have U.S. conductors stripped away the lacy ornamentation that Rimsky-Korsakov wrapped around some of his music.* Boris has never been produced at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera the way Musorgsky wrote it; the piano pieces, Pictures at an Exhibition, are usually heard only in latter-day orchestrations by Ravel, Stokowski and others.

Wrote Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky: "Musorgsky you are quite right in characterizing as hopeless, [but] his talent is perhaps the most remarkable of all [the Five]. . . . He has some sort of low nature which loves all that is coarse, crude and rough . . . coquets with his illiteracy and takes pride in his ignorance, rolling along, blindly believing in the infallibility of his own genius. But he has a real, and even original, talent which flashes out now and then. . . . Musorgsky, for all his ugliness, speaks a new language. Beautiful it may not be, but it is fresh."

After Boris, his supreme triumph, only a few years were left to Musorgsky. Sinking toward dissolution, he still continued to .create music--the unfinished opera Khovanshchina, many songs, e.g., The Song of the Flea, Songs and Dances of Death. Then, after a last desperate effort to make money by touring Russia as accompanist for a singer, he collapsed. Finally put in a hospital early in 1881, he lived only long enough for Artist Ilya Repin to finish his famous drunkard's-nose portrait.

Readers of The Musorgsky Reader will find him no idiot, but a man with the soul of a child. His friends patronized him, but he became the greatest of them all.

*Balkirev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korasav. *Musorgsky's letters do much to clear Rimsky-Korsakov, whom Musorgsky often asked for help, while they were rooming together.

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