Photograph of Dargomyzhsky
Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (1813-69)

Musorgsky saw in Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (1813-69) his "great teacher in musical truth"[1], and in his own vocal works he sought to convey through music the inflections of ordinary speech, very much as the elder composer had. Nowadays, however, Dargomyzhsky's two principal operas—Rusalka (1865) and The Stone Guest (first staged posthumously in 1872),  both based on plays by Pushkin—are rarely seen on the stage, even in Russia. Some of his songs, on the other hand—including the melancholic Old Corporal and The Titular Councillor (1859), so close in spirit to Gogol and the "natural school" that dominated Russian literature in the 1840s—are still frequently performed by Russian singers at concerts. On the whole, though, the considerable fame which Dargomyzhsky attained in his own lifetime—not only in Russia, where Vladimir Stasov and some members of the "Mighty Handful" proclaimed his "genius" and "courageous" innovativeness from the house-tops, but also abroad (in Brussels, for instance, a concert performance of his symphonic fantasy Kazachok in 1865 delighted both the audience and the critics)—has faded considerably with time.

Turgenev was no admirer of Dargomyzhsky, and after attending a performance of Rusalka at the Saint Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre in February 1880, he wrote to Pauline Viardot: "the impression I had was very poor. This music is devoid of originality altogether. It is a blend of Glinka, Weber, Donizetti, and even Auber" [2]. His most extensive criticisms, however, were reserved for The Stone Guest, an experimental opera which Dargomyzhsky composed when he was already severely ill, having entrusted the young Rimsky-Korsakov with the task of orchestrating the score after his death. Turgenev's disapproval of the "new Russian school of music" at the time clearly reveals itself in his attitude to this opera.

At first glance it might seem paradoxical that an opera which was based entirely on verses by Turgenev's "idol and teacher" Pushkin could awaken such violent repulsion in him. For 'repulsion' is indeed the most appropriate word to describe Turgenev's reaction to the opera when its piano-vocal score, ordered from Russia, was played through at the Viardots' house in Paris! Thus, to his trusted friend and literary adviser Pavel Annenkov he wrote on 23 February 1872:

"We received the [piano score of] Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest, opened it with great eagerness—and were left completely nonplussed! It seemed like some hoax! What? These limp, colourless, and wishy-washy recitatives are supposed to be a work of genius, compared to which Mozart's Don Giovanni is worth nothing?!! I simply cannot understand what this is all about, and if this Guest is ever staged and the whole audience doesn't start howling out of boredom, I swear that I will never again venture to make a judgement in matters of music" [3]

Turgenev was not wrong in his prediction, for at the première of The Stone Guest, which was soon to take place in Saint Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre, the audience responded coldly, and most critics rubbished it, accusing Dargomyzhsky of "musical vandalism". Now, the composer had set himself the very ambitious task of writing a completely new kind of opera in which the music would fuse as one with the text, and, dispensing with standard themes and melodies, would instead try to convey the smallest nuance of every word in the text. When listening to The Stone Guest, it becomes clear that the opera is made up of a continuous and rather monotonous recitative, as in the final part of the first scene (when Don Juan asks the monk: "So the Commendatore was buried here?") Listen to an extract from «The Stone Guest»!. True, the orchestra sometimes plays various expressive motifs, such as the one associated with the false piety of the Commendatore's widow, Doña Anna (a majestic theme which also appears in the Prelude Listen to the Prelude to «The Stone Guest»!), but these cannot really make up for the absence of proper arias and ensembles. Still, this was precisely what Dargomyzhsky had intended in the first place. He once described the idea for his new opera as follows:

"I've come up with something unthinkable! I'm going to write an opera without arias, without duets and without choruses! Of course, the audience won't like it, but I'm not actually writing it for them, since it's very unlikely that it will ever be staged! No, I'm going to write this because I can't do otherwise: I must write this and only in the way I've just mentioned!" [4]
Osip Petrov as Leporello, and Fyodor Komissarzhevsky as Don Juan at the première of «The Stone Guest»
Osip Petrov (right) as Leporello
and the tenor Komissarzhevsky as
Don Juan at the première of
The Stone Guest in 1872

Despite the composer's misgivings, his opera was eventually staged in 1872, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Stasov and César Cui: its failure in no way shook their faith in what they considered to be a truly revolutionary and outstanding work. Dargomyzhsky's famous motto (which he used as the epigraph for The Stone Guest): "I want the sounds to express the words directly. I want truth!", which Musorgsky so readily subscribed to, was certainly in keeping with Russian art's striving for realism at this stage of the nineteenth century. For Turgenev, however, even though he generally sympathised with these tendencies, the most important criterium in assessing a work of art was always whether it possessed "immediate beauty". It was precisely such beauty which, in his view, seemed to be so conspicuously absent in The Stone Guest. He also didn't like the way Dargomyzhsky had made use of a text by no less a poet than Pushkin for his 'experiment':

"I honestly cannot think of a greater act of sacrilege than this encroachment by an incompetent little musician on one of the greatest works of poetry! What need did Pushkin's verses have of this banal 'jingle-jangle'?!" [5]

—he wrote in another letter to Annenkov. However, he seems to have been even more aghast at the way in which, after Dargomyzhsky's death, the champions of the "new Russian school" started to proclaim the ground-breaking significance of The Stone Guest. Thus, Cui, for example, wrote in his review of the première that after this performance there could no longer be any doubts as to the genius of Dargomyzhsky, and that The Stone Guest and Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila were the two greatest operas in the world![6] Similarly, writing to his brother from Germany in 1873, Stasov compared The Stone Guest with Mozart's Don Giovanni, very much to the disadvantage of the latter:


The famous unfinished portrait of Mozart in 1782-83, by Joseph Lange
Mozart in the unfinished portrait
by Joseph Lange, 1782-83
"I was forced to go and see a performance of Don Giovanni. The singers and the staging as a whole were wonderful; I was even amazed by some things. But what comparison can there be between this and [Dargomyzhsky's] The Stone Guest!!! [Mozart's opera] is just a ridiculous and amusing childish prattle (and, besides, one that is also unbelievably boring in most parts of the work) compared to Dargomyzhsky's work of genius. This ancient Italianate stuff, which has played out and faded entirely (just like a grandmother's old cotton bonnet)—how unbearable it seems now! Even the Commendatore's appearance is insipid and monotonous" [7]

If Stasov also expressed this opinion in one of his conversations with Turgenev—which would be quite like him, as he was never afraid of entering into an argument—then it can only have prompted Turgenev to loathe Dargomyzhsky's opera even more, given that the music of Mozart was sacred for him. Here it is also worth bearing in mind that Pauline Viardot was the owner of the original score of Don Giovanni in Mozart's own hand (a priceless manuscript which Tchaikovsky, who always had the greatest veneration for Mozart, was allowed to study when he visited Mme Viardot in Paris, a few years after Turgenev's death). So, obviously, the assertion by some of his compatriots that the composer of The Stone Guest was superior to Mozart cannot have inspired Turgenev with much sympathy for the work of Dargomyzhsky! Accordingly, on 27 March 1872 he wrote to Stasov, who had recently criticised him for letting Potugin, in the novel Smoke (1867), speak slightlingly of Glinka:

"You are wrong to imagine that I am "not overfond" of Glinka: he was a very significant and original figure, but, as for the other gentlemen—well, that is another matter, especially in the case of Dargomyzhsky with his Stone Guest. It will always remain a mystery to me how such intelligent people as you, for example, and Cui could see in these limp, colourless, and feeble recitatives, in which here and there are interspersed various passages of excruciating howling for the sake of adding a touch of colour and of the fantastic, how you could see, I repeat, in this insignificant squeaking not just music (?!) but even new, 'epoch-making' music of genius!!?!! Surely this must be subconscious patriotism? Apart from a sacrilegious encroachment on one of Pushkin's most beautiful creations, I really haven't been able to find anything in this Stone Guest" [8]

Nevertheless, such an unconditional rejection of The Stone Guest carries the risk of overlooking some parts of this strange opera which are in their way quite striking: for instance, the already-mentioned motif of religious piety which accompanies the monk and Doña Anna. Similarly, in the second scene there is a song performed by the courtesan Laura for her guests, for which Dargomyzhsky used one of Pushkin's 'Spanish' poems: "I am here, Inesilla!" Listen to Laura's song!. Here the composer broke his own rule of seeking to express the unembellished 'truth' and created a memorable number which is not that far from a traditional aria. In the accompaniment of this song Dargomyzhsky cites the vivid "Jota aragonesa", that is the Aragonese folk melody which Glinka had noted down during his stay in Spain (1845-47) and later turned into his famous Spanish overture.


Notes:

  1. From Musorgsky's dedication of his song cycle The Nursery (1868) to Dargomyzhsky. Quoted in: L. M. Tarasov, Dargomyzhskii v Peterburge (Leningrad, 1988), p. 209 [back]

  2. Letter to Pauline Viardot, 2/14 February 1880. See: H. Granjard and A. Zviguilsky (eds), Lettres inédites de Tourguénev à Pauline Viardot et à sa famille (Lausanne, 1972), p. 215. In the original French: "L'impression a été très faible, cette musique manque absolument d'originalité; c'est un mélange de Glinka, Weber, Donizetti et même Auber" [back]

  3. Letter to Pavel Annenkov, 11/23 February 1872. See: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols (Leningrad, 1961-68), Pis'ma, ix, p. 226-27 [back]

  4. From a letter to the soprano Yuliya Platonova, quoted in: L. M. Tarasov, Dargomyzhskii v Peterburge (Leningrad, 1988), p. 212 [back]

  5. Letter to Pavel Annenkov, 2/14 March 1872. See: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols (Leningrad, 1961-68), Pis'ma, ix, p. 235 [back]

  6. See Cui's review in: Stuart Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian music, 1830-1880 (Cambridge 1994), p. 174-75 [back]

  7. Letter from Vladimir Stasov to his brother Dmitry, 23 August/4 September 1873. Quoted in: A. Gozenpud, I. S. Turgenev. Issledovanie (Saint Petersburg, 1994), p. 83 [back]

  8. Letter to Vladimir Stasov, 15/27 March 1872. See: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols (Leningrad, 1961-68), Pis'ma, ix, p. 245 [back]