After each new presentation, Dargomyzhsky usually mused that, if he died without finishing The Stone Guest, he wanted Cui to finish writing it and Korsakov to orchestrate it. And that’s what happened. On January 17, 1869, Dargomyzhsky was found dead in his bed, the manuscript of The Stone Guest open on his lap. Only the last few pages of the piano score were left unfinished. Completed and arranged lovingly by his young friends in 1870, the opera was staged at the Maryinsky Theater two years later.
There was a reason for the delay. Nicholas I’s decree of 1827, which had remained in force even after the emperor’s death, stated that a Russian composer could receive no more than 1,143 rubles for an opera, while Dargomyzhsky’s executor demanded a fee of 3,000 silver rubles. The court minister who supervised the Maryinsky Theater refused to pay that sum. (For the sake of comparison, Verdi’s honorarium for an opera specially commissioned by Alexander II, La Forza del Destino, which the composer premiered in Petersburg in 1862, came to 22,000 rubles.) At Stasov’s urging, the needed sum was collected—not by musicians but by Petersburg artists, who then offered the rights to Dargomyzhsky’s opera “to the Russian theater and the Russian people” for free.
Presented to the Petersburg audience, The Stone Guest was met by the predictable raptures from Stasov and confusion, even hostility, among the uninitiated, who charged that Dargomyzhsky in his last years had fallen “completely under the sway of our home-grown musicoclasts.”34
But this wonderfully “musicoclastic” opera, inspired and completely original, gave a powerful impulse to the radical strivings of the Petersburg group of composers. This group, whose members are listed here in birth order (Borodin, 1833; Cui, 1835; Balakirev, 1836; Mussorgsky, 1839; and Rimsky-Korsakov, 1844), entered music history under the “tactless” (according to Rimsky-Korsakov) name Moguchaya Kuchka (Mighty Handful), in the West, the Mighty Five, invented by the group’s ideologue, Stasov.
The Mighty Five may be the most outstanding artistic group that ever existed in Petersburg or elsewhere in Russia. It assured the domination of Russian artistic development for years to come by a similar kind of friendly alliance: both the realistic painters known as Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) and later the members of the modernist Mir iskusstva started out as participants in circles that were connected not only by aesthetics but also by close personal ties. The members of the Mighty Five, musical amateurs who basically taught one another under the stern leadership and supervision of Balakirev, decisively changed the style and substance of Russian music and, in the person of their most famous representative, Mussorgsky, noticeably influenced Western culture as well.
The connection between Dargomyzhsky and Mussorgsky is unquestionable. Mussorgsky dedicated the first song of his cycle, The Nursery, to Dargomyzhsky, “the great teacher of musical truth.” Under the influence of The Stone Guest and the (at first) joking suggestion of Dargomyzhsky, Mussorgsky began composing an opera to the unchanged prose text of Gogol’s play The Marriage, that satirical, “completely unbelievable event in two acts” from the life of a bachelor Petersburg clerk. Mussorgsky explained, “This is what I would like. For my characters to speak on stage the way living people speak … in The Marriage I am crossing the Rubicon.”35 It sounded like a manifesto of musical realism, but the result was just as “unbelievable” as Gogol’s Petersburgian grotesque play.
Mussorgsky’s Marriage today is perceived as a prescient forerunner of expressionism; in its day even Dargomyzhsky, the young innovator’s mentor, thought that Mussorgsky “had gone a little too far.” The other circle members, delighted by early fragments of the opera, viewed The Marriage, presented to them in the form of the completed first act, as just a curiosity.
Mussorgsky himself was almost frightened by the audacity of his experiment and announced, “The Marriage is a cage in which I am kept until I become tame and then I can come out.”36 He broke off the composition and left the opera unfinished. Appreciation of The Marriage’s real value came only a half-century later.
Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest and Mussorgsky’s Marriage speeded the future development of Russian opera, setting off a chain reaction of experimental works created by Petersburg musicians. They are Rimsky-Korsakov’s chamber opera Mozart and Salieri (1897, after Pushkin); Prokofiev’s The Gambler (1916), based on the Dostoyevsky novel; and Shostakovich’s The Nose (1928) and The Gamblers (1942), after Gogol.
