A Graphic Analysis of Musorgsky’s ’Catacombs? Derrick Puffett Music Analysis, Vol. 9, No. 1, A Musorgsky Symposium, (Mar., 1990), pp. 67-77. Stable URL http: flinks.jstor-org/sici%sici=0262-5245% 28199003% 299%3A 1% 3C67%3A AGAOM%27%312.0.CO%3B2-9 Music Analysis is currently published by Blackwell Publishing, Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at bhupulwww.jstororg/about/terms.hunl. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of « journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial us. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. 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For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org, hupulwwwjstororg/ Wed Nov § 16:33:50 2006DERRICK PUFFETT A GRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MUSORGSKY’S “CATACOMBS? ‘Musoryanin has finally finished and written the last bit of his piece on Harman, You don’t know the second part at all, and T feel that all the best things are there. {There follow brief descriptions of ‘Limoges: le marche’, “The Hut on Fow’s Legs’ and “The Great Gate at Kiev] In this same second part, there are some unusually poetic moments. ‘These appear in the music for Hartman's painting “The Catacombs of Paris,” which consist of nothing but skulls. At first Musoryanin has a depiction of a gloomy cavern (with purely orchestral chords held out Jong with a big -). Then, above a tremolo in minor, comes the first promenade theme; ths is the glimmering of little lights in the skulls; here, suddenly, Hartman's enchanting, poetic appeal to Musorgsky rings out. (tasov to Rimsky-Korsakov, 1 July 1874) ‘Catacombs’, the eighth of the Pictures from an Exhibition, is also the strangest.* At a mere thirty bars, it is shorter than any of the other num- bered pieces in the suite (the unnumbered ‘Promenades’, which serve as links between one ‘picture’ and another, are shorter). It is unique among Musorgsky’s non-vocal works in being athematic: a chant-like inner part (bs 4-11), its notes stemmed upwards in the composer's characteristically scrupulous fashion, seems to promise thematic development, but nothing. comes of it, and the burgeoning melodic interest in bs 17-22 peters out at the cadence. Its phrase structure is flexible and prose-like: the harmonic thythm of bs 15-22 hints at a more balanced relationship between the phrases, but again this comes to nothing. The harmony is unpredictable, even non-functional (bs 23-4), its oddity emphasised by the sudden dynamic contrasts’ and unusual, Stravinsky-like spacings.’ The tonality is, at the very least, uncertain, Even the title displays ambiguity: it is not abso- lutely clear whether ‘Catacombae’ (to use Musorgsky’s Latin) refers only "Tom ete to Michael Rass an Crag Ayrey fr thr omments on a exter vrion of his anc Music ANALYsIs 9:1, 1990 67DERRICK PUFFETT Ex. 1 @ ® ®©®@ @ Occurrences of octave tive to the piece immediately following, which is subtitled ‘Sepulchrum Romanum’, or whether it is also meant to cover the next piece in the suite, which has its own subtitle, ‘Con mortuis in lingua mortua’,' and which is the only ‘Promenade’ both to do so and to act as conclusion to the previ- ous, numbered piece (all the others act as introductions or transitions). Stasov certainly saw the two as a unity.’ And this interdependence helps to explain some of the strangeness of ‘Catacombs’. Example 1 is a fore- ground graph of the piece, but one does not need a graph to hear that it is incomplete, that it depends upon ‘Con mortuis’ to resolve the tonal and harmonic tensions that have been set up. In fact ‘Catacombs’ is doubly incomplete: it does not even reach the dominant chord that would give its ending the quality of an imperfect cadence. The bass moves from B to Fs but the final chord, above the dominant pedal, is a diminished seventh, 68 Music ANaLysts 9:1, 1990Ex. | cont. implying an Fy major resolution which does not take place (and has to be indicated in parentheses on the graph). This ‘incompletion’ reflects a larger incompletion, that of the Fundamental Line. In bs 1-4 the upper voice moves from b to ff by way of the upper neighbour note g'. The rest of the piece takes the fy’ up to the g’ in b. 23, which remains the highest note in the piece and does not resolve to Fy (either f or fy’) within ‘Catacombs’ itself. For that it has to wait until the start of ‘Con mortuis’. Here ff appears as part of an octave tremolo ~ the tremolo mentioned by Stasov ~ and persists as cover note to the end of the piece while at the same time launching the descent of the Fundamental Line (this is shown in Ex. 2) ‘Con mortuis’ also resolves the harmony at the end of ‘Catacombs’, first locally (with the diminished seventh closing on the Fj major chord implied by the tremolo and made explicit in b. 2) and then on the large scale (with Music ANALYSIS 9:1, 1990 9© ©©® © ©O®@ &O® ‘Catacombs! “Con mortais! V falling to 1). ‘The tidiness of this reading should not blind us to the very real ambigui ties of the two pieces. ‘Catacombs’, as well as ending on the dominant, begins in a way which recalls many nineteenth-century off-key openings, the octave B immediately undermined by the low G and the spacing of the chord in b. 4 (this chord is especially ambiguous, containing all three notes. of the B minor triad but interspersing them with a g — and in such a way as to suggest a i). One’s aural impression of this passage is quite complex. ‘The bass line arpeggiates a G major triad (again, in $ position), giving the piece a G major quality which the chord in b. 4 does not contradict: at this, point the ff’ at the top sounds like a neighbour note, against a g pedal in the middle, and it is only as the piece progresses that one realises that ff is the pedal and g the neighbour note, itself resolving to fy in b. 9. I have tried to convey this ambiguity in the graph by interpreting the bass D in b. 4 as the fifth of G rather than as the third of B minor. The latter reading would improve the graph as an interpretation of a piece ‘in B minor’, but the exclusivity of such an interpretation is something I should like to avoid (For the purposes of graphing one has, of course, to decide on a particular pitch class as being the tonics this is implicit in any monotonal approach." However, one can still try to convey the ambiguity of the piece in all its richness.) Indeed, when one hears ‘Catacombs’ in the context of the whole 70 MUSIC ANALYSIS 9:1, 1990A GRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MUSORGSKY'S ‘CATACOMBS" suite, it is hard to experience it as being in B minor at all. ‘Limoges’, its predecessor, ends with an explosion of E major; this means that the first pitch class of ‘Catacombs’, written B, sounds like Cj» with the result that the entire opening phrase (until the crashing chord in b. 4) could be said to prolong the augmented triad E/-C;G. And although ‘Catacombs’ grad- ually reveals itself to be ‘in’ B minor, it contains no} B minor triad (and no key signature) From b.12 there is a strong move towards D major; but there is no cadence in that key, or even a} chord. The pedal A in the bass from b.15, introduced as a dominant (the 443 suspension in bs 15-16 must be a delib- erate archaism), is deceptive, resolving down to G in b.22: this is one of the most astonishing effects in the piece, with a dominant turning into a dominant-of-the-dominant before the bass finally moves by step (two crotchets after the rest of the harmony!) to the new ‘tonic’. The G in turn moves to F} in b.25, preparing for a cadence in B minor that never comes and, more to the point, for a new kind of ambiguity in ‘Con mortuis’. Here Fy is prolonged with such insistence that, to my ears at least, the final B major triad sounds inconclusive, more like a subdominant than a tonic. (The decisive point in this process is surely bs 16-17, a move from I to V which sounds more like a plagal cadence: it is part of Musorgsky’s genius that he can establish such an equilibrium between two apparently contra- dictory progressions.) The actual graphing technique used in Exs 1 and 2 is Salzerian rather than Schenkerian, as the music would seem to demand:’ in particular, ‘Musorgsky’s extensive reliance on neighbour-note figures - notably the G- Fy figure which pervades so much of ‘Catacombs’ — suggests a type of analysis close to Salzer’s analyses of Debussy." There is a historical point here, of course,’ but what interests me more is the unusual background structure that results from such an analysis. (One can hardly speak of a middleground, since there is no tonicisation other than the cadence in G minor, a cadence much weakened by the preceding A pedal and the absence of any fifth-progression in the bass. This is why my graph consists of only two levels.) For the entire piece the outer voices move in octaves, with the neighbour-note motion G-F}G-(F}) in the upper voice being shadowed by a similar (but completed) motion in the bass. The voices do not move together, of course — the opening is the only example of this ~ but in a kind of heterophony (seen most clearly in Ex. 2). In addition, from b.4 onwards the bass is doubled two octaves higher by an inner part (this can only be seen in Ex. 1), which means that at times there are three voices moving in parallel. This three-octave doubling gives the texture a unique resonance. It also helps to articulate the form. The piece is in two parts, with the first ending on the F} chord (actually a bare fifth, though the third is implied by the voice leading, as the figured bass notation in Ex. 1 makes plain) in b.11. The second part repeats and elaborates the events of the Music ANALYsis 9:1, 1990 aDERRICK PUFFETT first — except, of course, for the final Ff chord (which is also, as we have seen; implied). First, in this second part, we have the B-G third of bs 1-2, now expressed as a vertical; then rising octaves, now on G and Bb (as a means of approaching A) instead of G; and then the semitone D-Cj, which began the chromatic bass descent in bs 4ff. but now returns as a suspen- sion (the ‘archaic’ 443 mentioned earlier). The D-Cj semitone is exploited further in bs 17-20, But the most important parallel between the two parts is the use of the semitone G-Fy. I have already discussed the g' in b.3. The g in b.23 is probably the most striking single event in the piece. It is strengthened in various ways: most obviously by the octave leap that immediately precedes it (two octaves instead of one, in contrast to the single-octave leaps in bs 2-3 and 13-14); more subtly by the octaves, produced by reaching-over motions, in the inner parts from b.15 onwards, which set up a chain of ascending fourths/descending fifths (see the upper- most stave in Ex. 1); and not least by the amazing double Neapolitan in bs 23-4 (B, major harmony in relation to the D that has been so strongly suggested in bs 12ff. and never quite overshadowed by the intervening G minor, C major in relation to the impending B minor — the two bridged only by the common note G and the voice-leading connection d'-ct'-e; Alll this melodic and harmonic activity is supported, as has already been noted, by a large-scale bass motion from F} to G and back again. (It is this bass motion, of course, that constitutes the most radical departure from the first part of the piece: even though the ‘events’ of the second part seem. to reproduce those of the first, their function is different because the second part prolongs the dominant.) The D-C4 semitone simply duplicates the G-Fy semitone a fifth higher. This is particularly noticeable in bs 9-11, where the parallels become explicit (see Ex. 2). It is less noticeable at the end, because here, of course, D does not fall to Cj: it has to wait until ‘Con mortuis’ to do that (see Ex. 1). The D-C semitone returns in bs 12-14 of the new piece, now assimilated into the Fundamental Line and supported by the warmest harmony we have had so far (this is presumably the moment when the skulls begin to glow). ‘What is going on here? Alll is explained when we remember that ‘Con mortuis’ is a minor-key variant of the opening ‘Promenade’. The ‘Promenade’ theme, which is in B, major, plays with the motives G-F and C-D (see Ex. 3: the theme has an almost palindromic structure). In the pieces that follow, the G-F motive is transformed into a generalised 6-5 shape which is heard in several keys, sometimes in major, sometimes in minor. Example 4 charts its main appearances. After various tonal adven- tures the fifth ‘Promenade’ (between Nos 6 and 7) restores it to its original pitch, Then ‘Catacombs’ (No. 8) gives it an unexpected twist: G-F becomes G-F}. The motive is further developed in ‘Con mortuis’ (see Ex, 2) and in the following piece, ‘The Hut on Fowl’s Legs’, where G-F4 becomes FG in a C major context (the motive is also present in its original form, muzatis muzandis, ie. as ArG). ‘Catacombs’ and ‘Con 72 MUSIC ANALYSIS 21, 1990A GRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MUSORGSKY'S ‘CATACOMRS' Ex.3 mortuis’, which in this respect are pivotal pieces in the cycle, similarly transform the C-D motive, 2-3, into CD. It is left to the last piece of all, “The Great Gate at Kiev’, to achieve a kind of synthesis by transforming G-F} back into G-F, while at the same time transforming 6-5 into 3-2: since these pitches occur in an E, context rather than a B, one, they have a different meaning. The process is spelt out for us halfway through the piece (bs 97ff.), when ‘Promenade’ is recapitulated in Bx: G and F, which were formerly the first two notes of the theme, now become the fourth and sixth (see Ex. 5). The final statement of the ‘Kiev’ theme then absorbs these pitches into the piece’s Fundamental Line — which by a further leap of the imagination can also be taken as the Fundamental Line of the whole cycle, with the ten numbered pieces forming a closed tonal structure in Ep Gee Ex. 4 again). The motivic transformation of G-F ~ whereby the pitches formerly identified with the sixth and fifth degrees of the scale become the third and second degrees — acquires a deeper significance by being brought into the tonal organisation of the cycle as a whole. Schenkerian methods of analysis have often been criticised for minimis- ing the salient features of a piece."® This means that, when applied to music like Musorgsky’s, they would tend to minimise its strangeness, making it look like the music of any other composer. My own belief is that they show exactly in what ways Musorgsky’s music is strange: the graphs I have pro- duced, with their parallel octaves and fifths, would be considered most eccentric from an orthodox Schenkerian point of view (though not from a Salzerian one). To that extent they make a historical point, by showing ‘Musorgsky’s oblique relation to nineteenth-century tonal practice. I sus- pect that if we were to analyse Rimsky-Korsakov’s amendments to Boris Godunov, making Schenkerian graphs" and comparing them with graphs of ‘Musorgsky’s originals, we would find a far more conventional approach to tonal structure. The degree to which Schenker’s methods can be applied to ‘Musorgshy is in fact a precise measure of his originality. Music ANaLysts 9:1, 1990 3DERRICK PUFFETT Ex.4 (N08) prom 74 Music aNaLysis 9:1, 1990A GRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MUSORGSKY'S ‘CATACOMBS! Ex. 4 cont 6 7 8 9 10 Prom, (Ccomis) Prom, ‘tconmartis) v I wr OT MUSIC ANALYSIS 9:1, 1990 15DERRICK PUFFETT Ex. 5 —— jee ttal gr = - NOTES 1, Quoted in Alexandra Orlova, Musorgsky’s Days and Works: A Biography in Documents, trans. and ed. Roy J. Guenther (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), pp. 419-20. 2. Some of these are downgraded in most editions: Musorgsky’s manuscript has ‘ff sf’ markings in bs 25 and 29 in addition to those found elsewhere. See Musorgsky, Pictures from an Exhibition: Facsimile, (ed. Emilia Fried?] (Moscow: State Publishers Music, 1982). On the various editions of Pictures see Edward R. Reilly, “The Music of Musorgsky’, The Musical Newsleter (New York, 1980), pp. 32-3 3. The chords in bs 12-14, in particular, look forward to many passages in the later composer. On ‘the metamorphosis of Misha’, the bear whose ‘clumsy feet trample over so much Russian ... music’, see Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schinberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 225: ‘How ponderous and sluggish you sound always thick, low chords, always octaves with thirds.” 4. A note in Musorgsky's manuscript reads: ‘A Latin text: with the dead in a dead language. ... The creative spirit of the departed Hartmann leads me toward the skulls and invokes them — the skulls begin to glow faintly.” Quoted in The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson (New York: Norton, 1947), p.273. 5. M.D, Galvocoressi, too, refers to ‘Con mortuis’ as the ‘second part of No. 8°. 76 Music ANaLysis 9:1, 1990Mussorgsky (London: Dent, 1974), p.173 6. Commenting on an earlier version of this article, Michael Russ has written: Ambiguity is obviously at the heart of Musorgsky’s tonal/harmonic language, but Schenkerian approaches always make us decide one way or the other; they have a kind of reasoning that goes: ‘We thought it was this and/or that, but now we see it must be ...’ For this reason a Schenker graph takes away more from Musorgsky than it does from less ambiguous, cighteenth-century German music: it leaves us with a severe sense of loss, even though we might be able to use it to show Musorgsky is closer to the German tradition than we ‘may have thought. ‘To give an example, for me G major and B minor are in a state of equilibrium in ‘Catacombs’. Yet Schenker’s theory forces us to regard all the G elements as subsidiary, as prolongational; G becomes N while Ff becomes 8/1. ‘Con mortuis’, in a way, obliges us to re-hear ‘Catacombs’ as being in B minor if we are to accept the Schenkerian approach. I'm not sure we hear Musorgsky in this inte- grated kind of way. Letter to the author, 20 October 1988. See also Russ’s article ‘The ‘Mysterious Thread in Musorgsky’s Nursery’, printed above. 7. Even so, my graphs are orthodox by Salzerian standards, requiring no special symbols and invoking no special techniques of prolongation. 8, See in particular his analysis of Broyeres in Structural Hearing (New York: Dover, 1962), Ex. 478. T have used this as a model for other, unpublished analyses of Musorgsky (the first two songs of Sunless) 9, Musorgsky’s influence on Debussy is widely acknowledged. See, for example, Allen Forte, ‘Musorgsky as Modemist: The Phantasmic Episode in Boris Godunov’, printed above, p3. 10, See, for example, Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), pp.82f. 11. Boris’s monologue in Act II, ‘I have attained supreme power’, would be a ‘200d place to start. Music ANALYSIS 9:1, 1990 17