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Korsakov (then twenty-seven) in St Petersburg. Stasov would arrive early in the morning, help the men get out of bed and wash, fetch their clothes, prepare tea and sandwiches for them, and then, as he put it, when 'we [got] down to our business [my emphasis - O. F.]', he would listen to the music they had just composed or give them new historical materials and ideas for their works.³³ The Populist conception of Boris Godunov (in its revised version with the Kromy scene) is certainly in line with Stasov's influence. In a general sense all Musorgsky's operas are 'about the people' - if one understands that as the nation as a whole. Even Kbovanshchina - which drove Stasov mad with all its 'princely spawn'³⁴ - carried the subtitle 'A national [people's] music history' ('narodnaya muzikal'naya drama'). Musorgsky explained his Populist approach in a letter to Repin, written in August 1873, congratulating him on his Barge Haulers:

It is the people I want to depict: when I sleep I see them, when I eat I think of them, when I drink I can see them rise before me in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, and without tinsel trappings! And what an awful (in the true sense of that word) richness there is for the composer in the people's speech -as long as there's a corner of our land that hasn't been ripped open by the railway.³⁵

And yet there were tensions between Musorgsky and the Populist agenda set out for him by Stasov - tensions which have been lost in the cultural politics that have always been attached to the composer's name.³⁶ Stasov was crucially important in Musorgsky's life: he dis-

covered him; he gave him the material for much of his greatest work; and he championed his music, which had been unknown in Europe in his lifetime and would surely have been forgotten after his death, had

it not been for Stasov. But the critic's politics were not entirely shared by the composer, whose feeling for 'the people', as he had explained to Repin, was primarily a musical response. Musorgsky's populism

was not political or philosophical - it was artistic. He loved folk songs

and incorporated many of them in his works. The distinctive aspects

of the Russian peasant song - its choral heterophony, its tonal shifts,

drawn out melismatic passages which make it sound like a chant

or a lament - became part of his own musical language. Above all, the

folk song was the model for a new technique of choral writing which Musorgsky first developed in Boris Godunov. building up the different voices one by one, or in discordant groups, to create the sort of choral heterophony which he achieved, with such brilliant success, in the Kromy scene.

Musorgsky was obsessed with the craft of rendering human speech in musical sound. That is what he meant when he said that music should be a way of 'talking with the people' - it was not a declaration of political intent.* Following the mimetic theories of the German literary historian Georg Gervinus, Musorgsky believed that human speech was governed by musical laws - that a speaker conveys emotions and meaning by musical components such as rhythm, cadence, intonation, timbre, volume, tone, etc. 'The aim of musical art', he wrote in 1880, 'is the reproduction in social sounds not only of modes of feeling but of modes of human speech.'³⁷ Many of his most important compositions, such as the song cycle Savishna or the unfinished opera based on Gogol's 'Sorochintsy Fair', represent an attempt to transpose into sound the distinctive qualities of Russian peasant speech. Listen to the music in Gogol's tale:

I expect you will have heard at some time the noise of a distant waterfall, when the agitated environs are filled with tumult and a chaotic whirl of weird, indistinct sounds swirls before you. Do you not agree that the very same effect is produced the instant you enter the whirlpool of a village fair? All the assembled populace merges into a single monstrous creature, whose massive body stirs about the market-place and snakes down the narrow side-streets, shrieking, bellowing, blaring. The clamour, the cursing, mooing, bleating, roaring - all this blends into a single cacophonous din. Oxen, sacks, hay, gypsies, pots, wives, gingerbread, caps - everything is ablaze with clashing colours, and dances before your eyes. The voices drown one another and it is impossible to distinguish one word, to rescue any meaning from this babble; not a single exclamation can be understood with any clarity. The ears are