The Icon and the Axe

If the defenders of Old Russia are corrupt, the advocates of innovation are also: the venal Prince Golitsyn and the self-satisfied Emma from the German suburb.

Meanwhile, with increasing frequency, the dark figures of Old Believers move in and out, singing choruses and muttering semi-intelligible prayers. Hovering over all this strange, disconnected activity like a druid priest watching the senseless struggles of animals in the forest stands Dosifei, the leader of the Old Believers. At the end he beckons his followers to join him in mounting the great funeral pyre which will return them to the elements through fire. The contrast between the long and beautiful aria with which he bids farewell to earth and the shrill, banal chords used to announce the approach of Peter the Great's army suggests that the bleak world of the elements brings man closer to truth than the dazzling world of artificial invention.

The real conflict in Khovanshchina is between these two primal forces: the real world of nature and the artificial world of human striving. Both old and new Russia have succumbed to the latter, Musorgsky seems to be saying through the figure of Marfa, the leader of the sisterhood of feminine Old Believers. Marfa seeks to expiate her sin of having loved Andrew Khovansky, the symbol of Old Russia, and is thus led to join Dosifei in the final scene of immolation. The venal Khovansky does not understand her and elopes with the German girl, Emma; and the streltsy are spared at the last minute. Thus physical life survives while spiritual life seeks release in death. Both Old and New Russia tried to kill Marfa: Golitsyn by drowning her, Khovansky by seducing her. But Marfa survives so that she may voluntarily free herself of the world and its chains; and music from the divination scene returns in reprise in a particularly beautiful fashion as Golitsyn sets off for exile.

In the course of successive drafts of Khovanshchina, Marfa became the main character. She was, together with the great contralto Daria Leonova -for whom Musorgsky was a touring accompanist in his last years-the

"missing madonna" of his lonely life, the "damp mother earth" of his naturalistic cosmology. He gave to Marfa-and to Leonova who sang the part-his most beautiful love music and his most haunting music of foreboding and prophecy. One evening shortly before he died-apparently from epileptic alcoholism-he was accompanying Leonova on the piano as she was singing selections from the still-incomplete Khovanshchina for a small group of friends. When she came to the line "Glory and honor to the white swan," Musorgsky suddenly stopped at the piano. A strange shudder ran through the whole group, and neither Leonova nor Musorgsky could go on. It was the moment of truth-or perhaps a decisive instant in his own final turn to insanity. A shudder was the last stage direction he had written in for the fool after his last lament in Boris Godunov, and now the full impact of the shudder had come back to him.

Wagner alone in the nineteenth century had a conception as vast as that of Musorgsky. He too sought to transcend the conventions of the operatic stage with a new type of music drama to be constructed out of a new musical idiom and rediscovered pagan folklore. It was largely fear of succumbing to the influence of Wagner (who had come to St. Petersburg in 1862-3) that the "mighty handful" came together in the sixties. If Musorg-sky's rival musical culture was less successful in terms of formal perfection and subsequent influence than that of Wagner, the difference between their two independent and simultaneous careers tells us something about the inner aspirations of the Germanic and Slavic worlds respectively in an age of awakening nationaj self-consciousness. Unlike Wagner, for whom the Downfall of the Gods was seen as the prelude to a new heroic age, there is no hint of redemption as Musorgsky's Brunnehilde mounts her final funeral pyre. Whereas Wagner had sought to uncover the music of the future, Musorgsky had sought to recapture the music of the past-actually writing some of Khovanshchina in the hook note style of the Old Believers. There is no Siegfried in Musorgsky's "popular music drama"; no prize songs in his sunless song cycles; no tinsel of religion or nationalism. Instead, there is a kind of Eastern resignation of willful striving, a strange mixture of clairvoyant insight and realism with no way out.