Finally, on the part of Mussorgsky, there was the wish to preserve what a comrade in art had created. Such a brotherly impulse not to leave the work of your friends unfinished or destroyed was typical also for the other members of the Mighty Five; it became a Petersburg tradition. And so Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest, several operas of Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor were completed posthumously by the friends of the original creators.
This Petersburg ritual of preserving any creative spark dear to the heart was important for Shostakovich, too, who completed and orchestrated the opera Rothschild’s Violin, by his student Veniamin Fleishman, fallen in the battle for Leningrad in 1941.
Composed to a specially written text by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, the author of the poems for Mussorgsky’s song cycle Sunless, in the spirit of Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky’s “Forgotten” is striking in its lapidary expressiveness. Depicting in a mere twenty-seven measures not only a soldier’s death in battle, his body devoured by vultures, but also the sorrowful lullaby that appears and vanishes unexpectedly—the song of the peasant woman who waits in vain for her husband—Mussorgsky’s small masterpiece of the ballad far surpasses Vereshchagin’s obvious and rhetorical painting, which we know from reproductions. As in the case of Pictures at an Exhibition, the composer’s tribute to an artist brought the work that served as his creative impulse real fame and the recognition of posterity.
Mussorgsky’s “Forgotten” was immediately banned by the Petersburg censors. This rare instance of a nervous reaction from the authorities to a musical ballad’s political message only confirmed Mussorgsky’s ambitions regarding the civic potential of his beloved art. So he continued to express his antiwar feelings in music by writing, three years later, “The Field Marshal,” a part of his Songs and Dances of Death, with words by Golenishchev-Kutuzov once again. Here Death appears as a military leader riding in the quiet of the night through the field after battle. Victory was Death’s and not the soldiers’, and he sings a wild, triumphant song to the majestic and grim melody of a Polish anthem from the period of the anti-Russian uprising of 1862. (Its choice must have been dictated by Mussorgsky’s anti-Polish feelings.) The musical picture of Death on horseback, delivering a mocking, cynical, howling monologue, is part of a European tradition; Albrecht Dürer’s cycle of engravings or Liszt’s Totentanz, which appeared two decades before Mussorgsky’s song, come to mind. But Mussorgsky’s song is filled with a purely Russian broad emotionalism and theatricality.
The piano accompaniment to “The Field Marshal” and the other songs of that cycle achieves orchestral effects in its intensity and drama, so it was natural for Shostakovich to orchestrate Songs and Dances of Death in 1962. Seven years later, noting that he wanted to continue Mussorgsky’s “too short” cycle on death (only four pieces), Shostakovich wrote his Fourteenth Symphony for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, in which he obsessively added to the musical gallery of death’s appearances.
Mussorgsky is an interesting example of the Petersburg artist: His vivid, nationalistic music not only lacks strong imperial traits, but, because of its antimilitaristic tendencies, it was perceived by the authorities as being directed against the pillars of the state. For this reason Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, then the vice president of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, stopped his son from applauding at the premiere of Boris Godunov and then shouted (according to eyewitnesses), “This is a shame for all of Russia, not an opera!”65
Along with Mussorgsky, the other members of the Mighty Five, even those much more conservative in their political views, were “under suspicion.” From the aesthetic point of view, they were all dangerous extremists as far as the emperor and his court were concerned. In addition, they all behaved independently, constantly coming into conflict with the official system of cultural administration. In disciplined Petersburg, and especially in the strictly regimented sphere of the imperial theaters, this was considered intolerable and could help explain why Alexander III, in reviewing the proposed repertoire for the imperial opera in 1888, not only crossed out Boris Godunov but put a question mark next to the planned premiere of Prince Igor, a most patriotic and perfectly “imperial” opera by Borodin.
