Musorgsky as Modernist: The Phantasmic Episode in 'Boris Godunov'

Abstract

These exuberant words, inscribed some eighteen months before the composer's death, reveal his deep interest in artistic innovation and offer an appropriate perspective for the analytic study presented here, which, it is hoped, will provide useful material for the further study of Musorgsky's music in general and of Boris Godunov in particular. Had the composer lived longer, I have no doubt that the history of tonality in the late nineteenth century and the transition to atonality in the early twentieth would have assumed an entirely different chronological profile. As it is, one can only guess that Musorgsky would have provided even more explicitly than is already the case the crucial link between the most radical of the earlier nineteenth-century experimentalists, Franz Liszt, and that incredibly innovative composer Claude Debussy, whose genius linked the tonal tradition of the nineteenth century with the non-tonal developments of the early twentieth, notably in the works of Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky.2 In fact, without Boris Godunov, I doubt that Wozzeck would exist in the form that we know today. And, as will become evident in the analytic part of this essay, Stravinsky's Firebird is but the best known of his early Russian works that bear the stamp of Musorgsky's influence.3 There is little point in bemoaning the fact that Musorgsky's 'experimental' music and I speak now specifically of the many unusual passages in his masterpiece, Boris Godunov has been misunderstood, for, indeed, there have been hardly any serious efforts to arrive at an understanding of