St Petersburg полностью

Of the Russian composers, Tchaikovsky had long been a favorite of Alexander III. Knowing that, we can understand more easily why the emperor was rather hostile toward the music of the Mighty Five, a seemingly inconsistent position for a Russian nationalist. Alexander personally crossed out Boris Godunov from the proposed repertoire for the 1888-1889 season of the Maryinsky Theater, replacing it with an opera by Massenet. In his prejudice against Mussorgsky and his comrades, the tsar was not alone, and his allies in this matter were not all conservatives. Among the most famous opponents of the Mighty Five were the liberal novelist Ivan Turgenev and the radical satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.

The denunciations of the Mighty Five are among the more curious episodes in the history of Petersburg culture. They prove that purely aesthetic prejudices often make as strange bedfellows as politics. The artist Repin recalled how the staunch foe of the monarchy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, published a satirical attack on Mussorgsky and his mentor, Stasov: “All of Petersburg read that lampoon of a young talent, dying of laughter; it was a funny tale of a noisy aesthete presenting a homegrown talent to a jury of connoisseurs and how the hung-over talent grunted his new aria on a civic theme: about a coachman who had lost his whip.”53

Mocking the “realism” in music proclaimed by Mussorgsky and supported by Stasov, Shchedrin had Stasov deliver the following absurd tirade in his article: “We must depict in sound combinations not only thoughts and sensations, but the very milieu in which they take place, not leaving out the color and shape of the uniforms.”

Turgenev, who couldn’t stand the music of Balakirev or Mussorgsky, scolded Stasov for supporting them: “Of all the ‘young’ Russian musicians there are only two with positive talent: Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The rest—not as people, of course (as people they are charming) but as artists—the rest should be put in a sack and thrown in the water! The Egyptian king Ramses XXIX is not as forgotten today as they will be forgotten in 15 or 20 years.”54 Fortunately, this prophecy did not come to pass.

The relations between Tchaikovsky and the Mighty Five were extremely complex and confused. They began fatefully on that March day in 1866 when Tchaikovsky, then twenty-six, sitting in a Petersburg café, opened the influential newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti to read the first-ever review of his graduation composition. A member of the Mighty Five, Cui had an extremely negative reaction to Tchaikovsky’s cantata performed at his examination: “The conservatory composer Mr. Tchaikovsky is totally without merit.”

That “terrible verdict,” in Tchaikovsky’s words, shook the beginning composer. He saw black, his head spun, he threw down the newspaper, and “like a madman” (as he later described it) ran out of the café to wander around the city all day, repeating over and over, “I’m nothing, a mediocrity, I’ll never be anything, I am talentless.”55

Trying to overcome his hurt, Tchaikovsky one day attended a party at Balakirev’s. The attitude of the Mighty Five toward Tchaikovsky becomes clear from the memoirs of Rimsky-Korsakov, who described their meeting this way: “He turned out to be a pleasant conversationalist and a nice man, who knew how to behave simply and to speak seemingly sincerely and frankly.”56 Note the sarcastic and suspicious “seemingly.”

Still, Tchaikovsky persisted in befriending Balakirev; he dedicated one of his works to him and at Balakirev’s suggestion wrote one of his masterpieces, the symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet. But in the long run, Tchaikovsky did not turn Balakirev’s circle into the Mighty Six, as the eternal enthusiast Stasov had first predicted: the tastes, views, ties, preferences, goals, and finally characters of the “Mighties” and of Tchaikovsky were too different. This inevitably led to conflicts—often veiled, sometimes open.

The most hostile, almost morbid relations were between Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. How fine it would have been had the two greatest Russian composers of their time liked, or at least understood and respected, each other! Alas, the reality was different, and no attempts by later biographers to smooth over the situation succeeded. The temperamental Mussorgsky, sensing an enemy in Tchaikovsky, mocked him at every opportunity, never calling him anything but by his derisive nickname Sadyk-pasha. In his turn, the usually quite generous Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother after having “thoroughly studied Boris Godunov,” “I send Mussorgsky’s music to hell with all my heart; it is the tritest and basest parody of music.”57