All national schools must to some extent emerge from nothing. The nothing from which the Russian musical tradition sprang, however, was profound. No orchestras, no concerts, no great composers or teachers: this was the bleak 19th-century world into which the composers nicknamed the Moguchaya Kuchka, or Mighty Handful, were born. All they had was the example of the dilettante Mikhail Glinka, a composer of a handful of notable pieces, who, however, wrote without passion and retired to an easier life early.
With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the five composers who tried to magic up a national school during the 1860s and 1870s were such a screwed-up bunch. Laziness and ineptitude were the only qualities that united them. Yet, their “comprehensive evasion of good practice” was precisely what made them so good. That’s the argument of Stephen Walsh’s fascinating history of the group.
The risibly amateurish, fiercely anti-academic behaviour of Russia’s five part-time musical founding fathers – made up of a full-time chemist (Alexander Borodin), a fortifications professor (César Cui), a civil servant (Modest Musorgsky), a naval officer (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) and a railway clerk (Mily Balakirev) – was exactly what led them to stumble upon some of the most original musical ideas of their age. Ideas that were to have significant repercussions for the 20th century as the likes of Debussy and Stravinsky ran with them.
The most musically illiterate of the five, Modest Musorgsky, was the greatest. Suspicious of beauty in melody or correctness in harmony, Musorgsky went through the 1860s without completing a single substantial work. Borodin was the same. Struggling to keep up with the demands of his lab work, he left behind a trail of fragments.
The group’s leader, Balakirev, was a bully who loved to fiddle with everyone else’s compositions and neglected his own (it took him 15 years to finish one 20-minute piece). Rimsky-Korsakov alone broke the mould, motivating himself to compose regularly and to become professor of music at the St Petersburg conservatoire (not that it made him any better a composer, says Walsh).
When they got their act together, the five could be formidable. Musorgsky’s untutored (and often inebriated) mind was responsible for some of the freshest music of the romantic era. Obsessed by the detail of everyday life, he modelled his songs on the contours of ordinary speech, and led “along a path no one before had travelled”. His opera Boris Godunov became one of the pinnacles of the repertoire.
Borodin produced two string quartets and an opera, Prince Igor, that Walsh believes would have become one of the greatest ever written, had it been finished. Rimsky-Korsakov’s inspiration resulted in a set of ravishing tone poems. Balakirev produced the firecracker Islamey. Only Cui left nothing for posterity.
For all five, though, the creative process was tortuous. Meeting up regularly at the house of Lyudmila Shestakova (the sister of Glinka), where they argued, improvised, and ran down opponents, the group grew to resemble a dysfunctional family.
Stephen Walsh is as good a guide as you could want through all this disorganised creativity, his writing sound, sharp-witted and musically insightful. Never afraid to call them out on their arrogance or indolence, he tries not to be too headmasterly in his frustrations with their woeful end-of-year report cards.
And though he very convincingly demolishes the idea pushed by Soviet historians that politics drove their musical visions, Russian society still proved important in shaping the music of the five. The way that Musorgsky and Borodin deployed crowds in operas – allowing them to intrude upon and drive the drama – surely reflects the anxieties of their time.
As with all rebels, old age and death eventually tamed the Mighty Handful. The academic traitor, Rimsky-Korsakov, was producing acolytes by the dozen by the turn of the century. One of his less domesticated pupils was Igor Stravinsky, who ensured the raw musical energy of the original quintet persisted.
Concert halls and Classic FM have tamed their legacy even further. Few today realise from what shabby beginnings they sprang. This book is a brilliant corrective to this. For the way the Mighty Handful fashioned their musical riches, not from earnest study, but by indulging their talent for incompetence, is a powerful lesson for us today.
Faber, 496pp, Telegraph offer price: £26 plus £1.35 p&p (RRP £30). Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk