Debussy: La Boite à Joujoux - Mussorgsky: The Nursery

It's already a while ago that I listened to Debussy's La Boîte à Joujoux, a ballet score he wrote in 1913 and can hence count amongst his late works. I got to know this via Michael Tilson Thomas' recording on Sony, which has always charmed me. It's a very subdued score steeped in half-light in which the composer immersed himself in the mysterious and haunting fantasies so characteristic for childhood. As Debussy wrily remarked in a letter: "The soul of a doll is more mysterious than even Maeterlinck supposes; it does not readily put up with the claptrap that so many human souls tolerate." Martinon's recording with the French ORTF orchestra is really excellent and even more characterful than MTT's. It also helps that it comes on pristine vinyl.

In the booklet that accompanies the Sony recording there is a reference to Mussorgsky's song cycle The Nursery, for which Debussy reputedly had much admiration (the Debussy-Mussorgsky connection is not clear to me and I'd like to read a bit more about this). I happened to have a recording of this work on a Hyperion CD which also includes some his other, better known, cycles. It features Nikolai Demidenko at the piano and the bass Anatoli Safiulin as the vocal soloist. The latter's discography is very slim and there is very little info on him around. Anyway, I find his rendering of this cycle top drawer. These are not children's songs but psychologically sophisticated tableaux about childhood. The words are all Mussorgsky's. Safiulin engages in really very funny tantrums and histrionics as he recounts the story of the small boy that is punished because he upset Nanuchka's needle work (but he didn't do it, of course, it was the cat), or of the lad who wanted to keep his cat Sailor from devouring the canary and hurt himself in the process. The wittiest is the song about the boy who was playing in the garden when he was 'attacked' by a big beetle who subsequently dropped down for dead. Was the beetle dead or just feigning? That is the existential question with which the kid breathlessly accosts his nanny. Both texts and music come across as very sophisticated. There is certainly none of the coarseness of which Mussorgsky has been accused time and again. The cycle dates from 1870, just when the composer started to be drawn into his confrontation with Boris Godunov. I think at one point I will certainly spend much more time with this composer.