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С куклой (S kukloy)

music and words by Modest Musorgsky

WHEN THE COMPOSER OLIVER KNUSSEN wrote to the author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, hoping to turn his children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are into an opera, the author rang him up.

‘What is the best children’s opera?’ Sendak asked down the phone. The obvious options included Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges and Britten’s Noye’s Fludde.

‘The second act of Boris Godunov,’ Knussen replied.

‘Right answer!’ said Sendak, their collaboration off to a good start.

Musorgsky’s grand opera about the troubled reign of the Russian tsar at the turn of the seventeenth century veers from the clanging pomp and ceremony of Boris’s coronation (quoted, in fact, by Knussen in Wild Things) to the oppressive darkness of his growing paranoia. But Act II is set in Boris’s children’s nursery. It’s a dramatic masterstroke, offering light relief while simultaneously throwing the main events into a new perspective. We come to worry about the children, exposed to their father’s mental deterioration and its potentially violent outcome, but equally we witness their childishness through Boris’s eyes and ears, and it begins to seem like a symptom of his decline.

Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881) gained a reputation, even in his lifetime, for being a bit of an amateur. Good ideas, yes, but if only he had enough technique to realise them fully; if only his music were more polished. The drunken and dissolute lifestyle of the composer’s later years probably added to this impression. After his death, his fellow composers, doubtless well-intentioned, set about correcting his errors of judgement and making his music more suited to the world of professional performance. Accordingly, there are many versions of Musorgsky’s best-known works, edited by Rimsky-Korsakov, Anatoly Lyadov and others.

These days, we tend to feel differently about the composer. What struck Rimsky-Korsakov and his colleagues as clumsy and oafish now seems vital and compelling. Debussy always knew this. He was greatly influenced by Boris Godunov in writing his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, and once observed to a friend who was attending a performance of the former, ‘You will find all of Pelléas there’.

Musorgsky’s influence on Debussy is most clearly detectable in the Frenchman’s word-setting, where lyricism is sacrificed to the rhythms and contours of normal speech. In the case of Yniold, the boy in Debussy’s opera, Boris’s children are role models, but so are the children of Musorgsky’s group of songs called Detskaya – literally, ‘The Children’s Room’, though in English the songs are usually called The Nursery.

Musorgsky wrote five songs between 1868 and 1870, then two years later, as the first set was being published, began composing five more. Just two of these later songs survive and perhaps only two were ever completed.

With a single exception, the songs in The Nursery are sung from the point of view of the child, with a child’s diction and tone. As often as not, the melodic contour is rather narrow, the line rising and falling as the child’s actual speech might. In the first song, ‘S nyaney’ (‘With Nanny’), we encounter childish prattle. The child wants a story, the scary story about the horrible bogeyman who took children into the forest and ate their white bones … Or maybe not – maybe the story about the Tsar and Tsaritsa might be better, about how the Tsar had a limp and when he fell down a mushroom grew, and the Tsaritsa had a cold and when she sneezed she cracked the windows. Yes, that would be better.

It is rare in song to find such accurate representation of a child’s characteristic speech patterns, now obsessed, now distracted. Oscar Brown Jr’s lyrics for Bobby Timmins’ ‘Dat Dere’ certainly achieves it – ‘Hey what dey doing dere? / And where dey goin’ dere? And, Daddy, can I have dat big elephant over dere?’ – but he doesn’t keep it going, interrupting the persistent questioning to comment, paternally, on the child’s inquisitiveness. Musorgsky, however, sustains the tone to the end of each song. More importantly, in ‘Dat Dere’ we are meant to laugh, but Musorgsky takes his children as seriously as they take themselves.

In ‘S kukloy’ (‘With the doll’), the child sings her doll a lullaby.

Tyapa, bay, bay.

Tyapa, spi, usni,

Ugomon tedya vozmi!

Tyapa! Spat’ nado!

‘Dolly, bye, bye. Dolly go to sleep, so lie down quietly! Dolly, it’s time to sleep!’

This is an action song. As the child sings her made-up song – and it sounds as if she’s making it up – she falls asleep herself. The words of the song don’t tell us this: we hear it happening; we hear the child occasionally lose focus, then continue; we hear pauses (for yawns?), before she ploughs on with her song, repeating the same phrase, willing herself to stay awake even as the doll goes to sleep. And in the end, the child is asleep, too.

Anyone who has ever overheard a child singing herself to sleep will recognise how accurately Musorgsky has captured this. Debussy certainly did, writing in La Revue blanche in 1901: “The Doll’s Lullaby” seems to have been taken down word for word, thanks to enormous powers of assimilation and an ability to inhabit those magic landscapes so special to a child’s mind. The end of this lullaby is so beautifully restful that even the little girl who is telling the story falls gently to sleep at the sound of her own voice.’

In his article, Debussy recognises and praises the extreme simplicity of the music. But he comments that while, for Musorgsky, one chord was often enough, ‘Monsieur So-and-so’ would doubtless object to such parsimony; and when Musorgsky surprises us with an unlikely modulation, ‘Monsieur What’s-his-name’ will complain that he can’t find it in any textbook. Debussy adds that these two grumpy gentlemen are, of course, ‘the same person’. He doesn’t mention Rimsky-Korsakov by name.