Indeed, most of
us first come to Pictures in Ravel’s orchestration of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version
of Musorgsky’s text. There is no other instrumental work like this one with
its social messages from nineteenth-century Russia, its saturation in folk music
and culture, and its innovative harmonic language all wrapped up in an
alluringly colourful exterior. No other work has attracted so many orchestrators
of such high calibre and yet left us with the feeling that the ‘perfect’
orchestration is beyond the grasp of any of them; no other nineteenth-century
work raises so acutely the issue of authenticity and the question of what it is
morally acceptable to do to another man’s composition.
Students of this work will have noticed that its Russian title ‘Kartinki s
vystavki’ is either translated as ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ or as ‘Pictures from
an Exhibition’. The latter title is a more exact translation of the Russian, but
since the former is more often found we retain it here, usually abbreviated to
Pictures.
Why do the degenerate boy
in Perov’s ‘Birdcatcher’ and the first couple in his ‘The Hunters’ and also ... “The
Village Religious Procession’ live? And they live in a way that makes you feel, once you
are acquainted with them, that ‘you are exactly the one I wanted to see’. Why is it that
everything that has been done in the most recent music, despite its excellent qualities,
does not live in this way? ... Explain this to me, only leave the boundaries of art aside
—I believe in them only relatively because the boundaries of art in the religion of an artist
mean stagnation (letter to Stasov 13/25 July 1872).
Social comment is difficult to incorporate in architecture or design, but even
Hartman’s sketches and watercolours seem substantially unaffected by the
Populist and realist movements. It would have been convenient for Soviet
musicologists had Victor Hartman been one of the Russian realist artists or
‘Peredvizniki’. This movement was ‘born of protest in 1863 and died of
senility in 1923”; only ten years later it was resurrected for political reasons
as ‘the basis for Socialist Realism. And until recently this style flourished in
the Soviet Union’."* But Hartman’s name does not crop up amongst those of
painters Ivan Kramskoy (1837-87), Vasili Perov (1833-82), Ilya Repin, and
sculptor Mark Antokolsky (1842-1902). Hartman was a man of the sixties only
in so far as he was part of the Slavonic renaissance in architecture, which
sought inspiration in folk materials. Musorgsky’s social concerns and realism
place him a long way from Hartman’s ephemeral sketches, and his musical
style, stripped of all ornament, contrasts with Hartman’s fussiness. But as well
as their interest in things Russian and in scenes from life there is a deeper link
in that both men’s work often suggests realisation in other media and may give
an impression of incompleteness. Both seem to be working in media only
partly able to cope with what they wish to express. Furthermore, with both
we must tolerate a certain slightness in the individual items and only come
to a judgement in the context of the whole musical suite or exhibition.
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