Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure - Hardcover

Walsh, Stephen

3.79

19 ratings by Goodreads

9780307272447: Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307272443 ISBN 13: 9780307272447

Publisher: Knopf, 2013

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The emergence of Russian classical music in the nineteenth century in the wake of Mikhail Glinka comprises one of the most remarkable and fascinating stories in all musical history. The five men who came together in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in the 1860s, all composers of talent, some of genius, would be—in spite of a virtual lack of technical training—responsible for some of the greatest and best-loved music ever written. How this happened is the subject of Stephen Walsh's brilliant composite portrait of the group known in the West as the Five, and in Russia as moguchaya kuchka—the Mighty Little Heap. Friends, competitors, and creative intellectuals whose ambitions and ideas reflect the ferment of their times, Mily Balakirev, C�sar Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and—most important of all—Modest Musorgsky, come wonderfully to life in this extended account.

The detail is engrossing. We see Borodin composing music while conducting research in chemistry (“he would jump up and run back to the laboratory to make sure nothing had burnt out or boiled over there, meanwhile filling the corridor with improbable sequences of ninths or sevenths”); Balakirev tutoring Musorgsky (“Balakirev could not remedy the defects in his pupil’s character, but he could confront him with works of genius”); Cui doggedly producing operas during breaks from his career as a military fortifications instructor. Musorgsky asserts his independence, moving from writing songs and the showpiece Night on Bald Mountain to the magnificent Boris Godunov, meanwhile struggling against poverty and depression. In the background such important figures as Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chern�shevsky shape the cultural milieu, while the godfather of the kuchka, critic and scholar Vladimir Stasov, is seen offering sometimes combative support.

As an experienced and widely skilled musical scholar and biographer (his two-volume life of Stravinsky has been called “one of the best books ever written about a musician”), Stephen Walsh is exceptionally wellplaced to tell this story. He does so with deep understanding and panache, making Musorgksy and His Circle both important and a delight to read.

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About the Author:

Stephen Walsh is a professor of music at Cardiff University and the author of a number of books on musical subjects. He was deputy music critic of The Observer for nearly twenty years. He now broadcasts frequently on BBC Radio 3 and writes reviews for a variety of publications. His two-volume Stravinsky is regarded as the standard biography of that composer. The first volume won the Royal Philharmonic Society prize in 2000, and the second was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by The Washington Post.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Few influential artistic friendships have had more participants, lasted longer, or been more consequential than that of five Russians who stormed the heights of Western music in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Though Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, C�sar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov did have predecessors—principally Mikhail Glinka—in building a truly Russian art music, they put it on its feet despite lack of musical education beyond piano tutoring anywhere in Russia (only Rimsky-Korsakov had academic training), of career paths for musicians in Russia, and of encouragement by Russian elites. As the title of Walsh’s brilliant volume signals, the greatest of these composers is now considered to be Mussorgsky, whose work was so structurally unusual for its time that most of it wasn’t performed as he wrote it until the later twentieth century. In absorbing dicusssion of virtually every bit of his production, Walsh argues that Mussorgsky invariably chose emotional expression and the rhythms of Russian speech rather than the rules of classical form to shape his music, outstandingly in his 60 songs and transcendent opera, Boris Godunov. Walsh discusses the most ambitious works of the other four musical friends with similar penetration as he unfolds the life and career trajectories of all five, constantly bedeviled by lack of time to compose and shortage of venues for performance. A masterpiece of Russian cultural history. --Ray Olson

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