The Gallery of Burns’s title is the Galleria Umberto Primo, the vast late C19 glass-domed shopping arcade directly opposite the Teatro di San Carlo. In 1944 it was "the unofficial heart of Naples. It was a living and sub-dividing cell of vermouth, Allied soldiery, and the Italian people."
Here "you could walk from portrait to portrait, thinking to yourself during your promenade…" The wording points unmistakably to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which The Gallery echoes at several levels. Burns, like Mussorgsky, has a groundplan of alternating promenades and portraits. Burns uses his promenades as near-autobiography, to record his personal war, and places them as regular separators; Mussorgsky’s lightly varied statements of one theme, initially regular and separate, are later elided or combined with the substance of the portraits. And in place of Mussorgsky’s triumphantly conclusive Great Gate of Kiev, in which portrait and promenade unite, Burns prefers a brief, wearily ambiguous transformation of his opening: "dots in the circle which never stops".These differences suggest that the similarity between novel and concert work could be no more than coincidental. Certainly Burns does not try to match moods with Mussorgsky portrait by portrait. I think there is a closer, though not consistent, connection. Burns seems to be matching not the music itself, but the standard programme note about it.
The description of the movements of Pictures at an Exhibition, written by Vladimir Stassov, the work’s dedicatee, prefaces the score and is inseparable from performances. (Burns, a Bostonian, might have had it ingrained by the Koussevitsky’s pioneering Children’s Concerts; and been reminded of it (if any reminder were needed) by the San Carlo’s concert series in 1944.)
Burns’s first portrait, The Trenchfoot of Michael Patrick, opens with the words "He limped hurriedly…" and this explicitly echoes Gnomus "clumsily running with crooked legs". In the next portrait, Louella, a match with Il vecchio castello is achieved in the final section: Louella "old and mellow" (with drink) is serenaded (with Stardust): "a medieval castle before which a troubadour sings", says Stassov.
Hal has only tenuous links with Tuileries: disput d’enfants apres jeu: broadly, Hal quarrels with everyone and nurses pick up the pieces.
Mussorgsky’s lumbering Bydlo "with huge wheels" comes next – and "heavy turning wheels " mash the life out of the two clerics in Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom.
In Momma, the club hostess presides over her "pretty chicks", her brood including the twittering gay British sergeants. Mussorgsky’s No.5 is the Ballet of chickens in their shells.
The Leaf presents at length Major Motes’ doomed relationships with his subordinates; the standard note on the next portrait speculates about the power relationship between Goldberg and Schmule.
One thread in Guilia is "women’s quarrels in the marketplace", as in Limoges: Le marche.
No.8, Queen Penicillin, catches the "con mortua" of Catacombs: "He soon got used to the simplicity of life in a syphilis ward."
In No.9, Moe, the Podere di Anacleto Spodini, where Moe is killed, should offer fireworks equivalent to The hut on chicken legs; but the writing is restrained to the point of chilliness, and it is difficult to identify the blind old lady who sews with Babi-Yar. Rather, she is Atropos, fulfilling the prophecy of Moe’s last letter. And yet, as ever, the Mussorgsky is in Burns’s mind: "but the family didn’t take to the hills like sensible Ginsoes – they just moved into the chicken house".
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