Icon and Axe by James Billington

Author:James Billington [Billington, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76528-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

The domain of history held out the promise of prophetic insight. Moscow, the great repository of Russian tradition, was specially revered by Musorgsky’s circle, who gave it the name of Jericho, the city which had brought the Jews into the promised land of Canaan. The heartland of Russia was the new Canaan for the restless artists of the populist age. They wandered through it like holy fools of old, and turned to the ever-expanding volume of writing about its history rather in the way monastic artists had previously studied sacred chronicles in search both of worthy subject matter and of personal reassurance and inspiration. Their attention gravitated toward the late Muscovite period: a time similar to their own in spiritual crisis and social upheaval. The same fascination that produced Repin’s image of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son and Surikov’s picture of Morozova dragged into exile (as well as some of the most popular plays of Ostrovsky and A. K. Tolstoy) also led Musorgsky to devote most of his last thirteen years to two great historical operas dealing with the late Muscovite period.

The first of these operas, Boris Godunov, deals with the beginnings of the century of schism; the second, Khovanshchina, with the end. Taken together, they begin on the eve of the Time of Troubles and end with the self-immolation of the Old Believers and the coming of Peter the Great. They are permeated with the desire for artistic fidelity to the musical laws of speech and emotion; historical fidelity to the known desires and habits of the leading characters; and theatrical fidelity to such traditions as there were in Russian opera since Glinka. But the real triumph of these operas—that which gives them a unique place even in this century of rich operatic accomplishment—is that they tell with artistic integrity much about the aspirations of the populist age itself. A key to understanding his music—and perhaps the populist movement itself—lies in the confession that he made to Balakirev just a year after resigning his army commission:

I was oppressed by a terrible disease which came on very badly while I was in the country. It was mysticism, mixed up with cynical thoughts about God. It developed terribly when I returned to Petersburg. I succeeded in concealing it from you, but you must have noticed traces of it in my music.…10

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