Filippov was a music lover, with a pleasant tenor, who enjoyed singing folk songs and organized a pretty good choir at the Comptroller’s Office. He became a leading expert on Russian antiquity, studying old manuscripts, icon painting, and church music. This led to a close friendship with the composer Balakirev, the guru of the Mighty Bunch, who introduced Filippov to Mussorgsky.
Mussorgsky was undoubtedly the most talented member of the Mighty Bunch, but no one in the group understood it. They treated him the way a family might a gifted but wayward child, despairing of his eccentric behavior, intemperate drinking, excessive (in the opinion of others) self-regard, and inability to work in an organized and concentrated manner (attention-deficit disorder, perhaps). In their correspondence and conversations about Mussorgsky, words like “complete idiot,” “almost an idiot,” and “clouded brain” came up frequently.
When Mussorgsky was composing, people tugged at him from all sides with endless advice and criticism, friendly and otherwise. The press hated him. When his opera Boris Godunov (based on Pushkin) was shown for the first time in 1874 at the Maryinsky Theater, the critics were like attack dogs: “ugly monotony,” “cacophony in five acts and seven scenes,” and “stinking object.” They were particularly exercised over the “blasphemous” tampering with the text of Pushkin’s tragedy.
Even Cui, a fellow member of the Mighty Bunch, smacked Mussorgsky in print: “There are two main flaws in ‘Boris’: chopped-up recitative and scattered musical thoughts, making the opera potpourri-like in places.” These flaws, in Cui’s opinion, were the result of “careless, self-satisfied, and hasty composing.”13
His friend’s hostile attitude bewildered Mussorgsky. “Behind this mad attack, this flagrant lie, I see nothing, as if soapy water had spread in the air.”14
Not surprisingly, Mussorgsky started his next opera, Khovanshchina (or “Khovansky Affair”), about the war the young Peter the Great and his cohort fought against the rebel streltsy (musketeers) and Old Believers, in 1682, feeling totally isolated. One of the few who came to his aid then was Filippov.
First Filippov created a sinecure for him in the State Comptroller’s Office, and when the composer turned out to be incapable of performing even nominal office duties and fled his job, Filippov (with a few friends) took on paying Mussorgsky a private pension so that he could concentrate on Khovanshchina.
Filippov was eager for Mussorgsky to complete the opera also because he was particularly interested in the schism, considering it the epochal event in Russian life. Pobedonostsev viewed the Old Believers as enemies undermining Russian Orthodoxy. His deputy commented, “No one has caused as much harm to the Church in her struggle with the schism as Filippov.”15
Filippov and Mussorgsky had lively discussions about the schism. The state comptroller provided Mussorgsky with books on its history, including his own writings. The composer read them avidly and used them to write his own original libretto for Khovanshchina, but he did not complete the opera, dying in 1881 at the age of forty-two. The funeral took place at the prestigious cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, arranged by Filippov and Pobedonostsev working together for once. Rimsky-Korsakov completed and orchestrated Khovanshchina.
Khovanshchina is perhaps the greatest political opera of all time. It does have a love subplot, but it is clearly secondary. The main thing is the clash of different political forces, expressed in music of such power and passion that the opera comes across as an expressionist thriller.
Mussorgsky conjured up idealists, opportunists, traitors, political pragmatists, and religious martyrs, who lived on the stage like real people. The self-immolation of the schismatics in the finale invariably moves one to tears. This opera will always be timely for Russia, since it probes the secrets of the Russian soul perhaps even more deeply than Mussorgsky’s more famous work, Boris Godunov.
A comparison of Khovanshchina with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, composed in 1834–1836, seems inevitable. Both operas deal with the Romanov struggle for power, but the approach of the two composers is strikingly different. Glinka portrayed the unity of monarch and people; his opera, created under the aegis and with the direct involvement of Nicholas I, instantly became the musical emblem of Russian autocracy. Khovanshchina was largely ignored by the Romanovs.
Glinka’s enemies of the Russian monarch are foreigners—the Poles; the center of Mussorgsky’s opera is the civil war inside Russia. For Glinka, the divine prerogatives of Mikhail Romanov were a given. Mussorgsky’s sympathies are with the rebels, even though intellectually he understands the inevitability of Peter’s victory.
Glinka’s opera is heroic and static, while Mussorgsky’s opera is fluid, contradictory, and profoundly tragic. The composer of Khovanshchina feels deeply for Russia and mourns its fate. Filippov may have had an idea of how to use it for patriotic propaganda, but it remained a puzzle for Alexander III.
When the Wanderer artist Surikov tackled the schism theme powerfully in his 1887 painting Lady Morozova, depicting an Old Believer being driven off into exile while the crowd of onlookers cheer and jeer her, the emperor and his entourage were also ambivalent. Surikov described Alexander’s visit to the show. “He came up to the painting. ‘Ah, that’s the yurodivy [holy fool]!’ he said. He figured out all the faces. My throat dried up from nervousness: I couldn’t talk. The rest, they were like gundogs all over the place.”16
Most of the Mighty Bunch, unlike many of the Wanderers, came from quite respectable families. But their aesthetic was revolutionary, in the artistic, not political, sense. The Wanderers, as they moved on, became singers of the new, bourgeois Russia. Alexander III is sometimes called the first bourgeois ruler of Russia. And in fact, in cultural issues, the emperor had very bourgeois tastes—and uncountable riches.
Under Alexander’s patronage Carl Fabergé flourished; in his St. Petersburg workshops the jeweler set up production of all kinds of expensive trinkets in a gaudy à la Russe style—from tableware to cigarette and cardholders, excessively ornamented in gold, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.
The peak of this style, which subsequently became so aesthetically attractive to the nouveau riche, were the Easter eggs commissioned by Alexander III (and, after him, by Nicholas II)—essentially tricky jewelry toys with simple but effective “secrets,” the better to demonstrate the wealth of royal clients.
The design of the eggs bordered on kitsch. A toy like that—be it a tiny gold chick hidden in a gold egg or a miniature copy of the equestrian statue of Peter I in St. Petersburg, also enclosed in a gold egg encrusted with precious stones—cost between 15,000 and 30,000 rubles (ten of Tchaikovsky’s annual pensions).
Fabergé eggs gave Alexander III enormous pleasure, while the music of the Mighty Bunch gave him indigestion. Therefore when the emperor canceled the production of Boris Godunov in 1888 at the Maryinsky (Khovanshchina had been rejected by the imperial theater administration five years earlier), he also put a question mark next to the planned production of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor.
Alexander knew absolutely nothing about Borodin’s music, but since it came from the camp of the Bunch he considered it suspect. (The opera, unfinished before Borodin’s death, was completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov and his student Alexander Glazunov.)