A Voice Unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky's "Sunless" Author(s): Simon Perry Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer, 2004), pp. 15-49 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1555167 Accessed: 02/06/2009 21:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. 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University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th- Century Music. http://www.jstor.org A Voice Unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky's Sunless SIMON PERRY The only element I have here is feeling, and the result isn't half bad. -Mussorgsky I Sunless (Bez solntsa), the cycle of six short far from unusual for Mussorgsky to put some- songs set in 1874 to poems of Count Arseny thing of himself into his songs and other works, Arkad'evich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1848- his common practice was to mediate and "ob- 1913), is unique in Mussorgsky's slim output. jectify" such personal injections by the adop- Composed between 7 May and 25 August 1874,1 tion of an alternative persona, as that, for ex- it is perhaps his single most intimate and di- ample, of the young "village idiot" in the early rectly personal artistic utterance. While it was song "Darling Savishna" (Svetik Savishna). In Sunless Mussorgsky adopted a far more un- 1Alldates are given in Old Style. The exact chronology of masked, "subjective" approach; in crude terms its composition, according to the completion dates on the the cycle represents a turn from realism to autographscore, is as follows: 7 May, no. 1, "Within Four Romanticism. This fundamental change in aes- Walls" (V chetyrekh stenakh); 19 May, no. 2, "You Did Not Know Me in the Crowd"(Ty menia v tolpe ne uznala); thetic orientation has spawned much specula- 19-20 May (i.e., ovemight), no. 3, "The Idle, Noisy Day is tion on its motivation. A common explanation Over" (Okonchen prazdnyi, shumnyi den'); 2 June, no. 4, is that Sunless represents Mussorgsky's reac- "Ennui"(Skuchai); 19 August, no. 5, "Elegy"(Elegiia); and 25 August, no. 6, "On the River" (Nad rekoi). Mussorgsky tion to a number of problems in his life and did not work solely on Sunless during these months. Be- tween nos. 1 and 2, he completed the ballad "Forgotten" (Zabytyi), also to a text by Golenishchev-Kutuzov, writ- ten after Vasily Vereshchagin's famously censored, anti- completed Pictures at an Exhibition (dated 22 June) and war painting.According to Orlova,Mussorgsky at one point began work on a satirical vocal work to be called "The seriously considered including this song in the Sunless Hill of Nettles" (Krapivnaiagora), but never completed it. cycle, but later changed his mind. See Alexandra Orlova, The epigraphabove is attributedto Mussorgsky,in Arsenii Musorgsky'sDays and Works:A Biographyin Documents, [Arkad'evich]Golenishchev-Kutuzov, "Reminiscences of ed. and trans. Roy J. Guenther, Russian Music Studies 4, Musorgsky," in Musorgsky Remembered, ed. Alexandra ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor:UMI Research Orlova, trans. Veronique Zaytzeff and FrederickMorrison Press, 1983), p. 16. Between nos. 4 and 5, Mussorgsky (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 96. 19th-CenturyMusic, XXVllI/1, pp. 15-49. ISSN:0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606.? 2004 by the Regentsof the University 15 of California.All rightsreserved. Please direct all requestsfor permission to photocopyor reproducearticle content throughthe Universityof CaliforniaPress's Rights and Permissionswebsite, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 19TH career in the period leading up to its composi- served, in fact, as an explanation for what CENTURY MUSIC tion.2 Pavel Lamm, for example, suggested that Keldysh saw, or had to see, as a general decline Sunless was an "answer" to the vicissitudes in Mussorgsky'swork afterBoris Godunov. This Mussorgsky had met in early 1874 in relation line was continued by V. A. Vasina-Grossman to the staging of Boris Godunov, its subsequent in the immediate post-Stalin period. She found harsh critical appraisal(by friend and foe alike), in Sunless the first open expression of the and, ultimately, the break-upof the moguchaia composer's personal feelings, for which, again, kuchka itself.3More recently, AlexandraOrlova the "darkand mean" 1870s were to blame.6 has cited personal difficulties, including the Although orthodox Soviet views like those deaths of his friends Viktor Gartmann, on 23 of Keldysh and Grossman now seem overly July 1873, and Nadezhda Opochinina, on 30 tendentious, it is certainly possible to give more June 1874, as backgroundfactors to the notably than a little credence to those of Lamm and gloomy disposition of the cycle.4 Between Orlova. These, however, largely, or indeed com- Lamm and Orlova,Soviet writers of the Stalinist pletely, ignore the author of the cycle's texts. and immediate post-Stalinist period were re- Golenishchev-Kutuzovremains today not much quired to search for a greater-than-personal more than a footnote to the history of Russian motivation to justify the Sunless cycle's de- letters, and it is difficult to assess precisely scent into pessimism. Thus, lury Keldysh sub- what sort of aesthetic influence he may have mitted that the cycle reflects the malaise of the had over Mussorgsky. Richard Taruskin notes liberal, mixed-class intelligentsia, the so-called that Golenishchev-Kutuzov's aristocratic "aes- raznochintsy, in the depressing social condi- theticism" was strongly at odds with the popu- tions of the 1870s.5This supposed class malady list and realist strains in art that, as espoused by polemicists like Stasov, temporarily held sway in the 1860s and 1870s. It was Mussorgsky, 2Foran overview of the reception of Sunless in Russia in the of course, that Stasov held to be the prime nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see James Walker, "Mussorgsky'sSunless Cycle in Russian Music Criticism: exemplar of these strains in music. Thus, in Focusfor Controversy, " Musical Quarterly67 (1981),382-91. stark contrast to the commonly received artist- 3PavelLamm, preface [Ot redaktoral, Bez solntsa: Al'bom image of Mussorgsky, sponsored M. of-the-people stikhotvorenii A. A. Golenishcheva-Kutuzova, by Golenishchev-Kutuzovwas Musorgskii, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, no. 7 primarilyby Stasov, (Moscow: Muzgiz; Vienna: Universal [1928-39], rpt. New far, aesthetically, from being a man of his times York:Kalmus [19691,vol. 8), p. iii. (although he would come into his own much 4Orlova,Musorgsky's Days, pp. 23-24. Death can certainly be interpretedas a theme in Sunless, but it is hard to see later in his career, during the so-called Silver the cycle as a specific response to the death of individuals. Age).7Late in the 1880s Golenishchev-Kutuzov In the case of Gartmann's death, this had already been completed a memoir of Mussorgsky, which was memorialized,in a style very differentfrom that of Sunless, in Pictures at an Exhibition. In the case of Opochinina, not published until after the poet's death.8His Mussorgsky had already completed the first four numbers intention in it, quite explicitly stated, was to of Sunless before her death. Orlova notes that Mussorgsky attempted to memorialize Opochinina in a work titled "The Epitaph" (Nadgrabnoe pis'mo) but was unable to complete it, and that he eventually "returnedto Sunless, 6V. A. Vasina-Grossman,Russkii klassicheskii romans XIX the completion of which was a more natural response to veka (The Russian Classical Romance of the 19th Cen- the loss of his dear friend" (Musorgsky'sDays, p. 24). The tury) (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1956), pp. title of the fifth number, "Elegy," does loosely suggest 199-200, cited in Walker, "Mussorgsky'sSunless Cycle," that the song may have a memorializing intent, but it is p. 389. difficult to draw a specific conclusion concerning this. 7SeeTaruskin, Musorgsky,pp. 15-17. 5Iurii Keldysh, Romansovaia lirika Musorgskogo 8"Vospominaniiao M. P. Musorgskom"(Reminiscences of (Musorgsky'sLyric Romances) (Moscow: Gos. muzykal'noe M. P. Mussorgsky), in Muzykal'noe nasledstvo. Sbornik izd-vo, 1933), p. 7, cited in Walker, "Mussorgsky'sSunless materialov po istorii muzykal'noi kul'tury v Rossii (Musi- Cycle," p. 387. After the decade of the "Great Reforms," cal Heritage:A Collection of Materials on the History of the 1870s were a period tinged with mixed progress of Musical Culture in Russia), ed. Mikhail Vladimirovich continuing reform and increasing reaction. Views such as Ivanov-Boretskii,vol. I (Moscow: Ogiz/Muzgiz, 1935). The Keldysh's should be compared with the position of Rich- memoir was first translatedinto English in 1991, in Orlova, ard Taruskin, who argues that Mussorgsky never fully, if, Musorgsky Remembered,pp. 81-99. This is the source re- indeed, at all, identified as a raznochinets.