One need not be a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of the Russian for his country is a passion. And from lips parched by the desire of liberty—though persecuted, exiled, imprisoned—this passion is still voiced with unabated intensity. What eloquent apostrophes have been addressed Russia by her great writers! How Turgenieff praised her noble tongue! The youngest among the European nations, herself a nation with genius, must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. Russia right or wrong! seems to be the slogan, even of those whom injustice and cruelty have driven to desperation. It is the land of neuroses, and the form that patriotism assumes there may be one other specimen. Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a willing dweller in the depths of German thought. The most artistic of Russia\'s novelists, Turgenieff, was cosmopolitan; and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was too European, not sufficiently [Pg 191] national. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. It was altogether different in the case of Modeste Moussorgsky.

To enter into sympathy with Russian music we must remember one thing: that the national spirit pervades its masterpieces. Even the so-called "cosmopolitanism" of Peter Ilitch Tschaikovsky is superficial. To be sure, he leaned on Liszt and the French, but booming melancholy and orgiastic frenzy may be found in some of his symphonies. According to the judgment of the Rubinsteins he was too much the Kalmuck; Nicolas Rubinstein severely criticised him for this trait. But of all the little group that gathered about Mila Balakirev fifty years ago there was no one so Russian as a certain young officer named Modeste Petrovitch Moussorgsky (born 1839, died 1881). Not Rimsky-Korsakof, Borodine, Cesar Cui were so deeply saturated with love of the Russian soil and folk-lore as this pleasant young man. He played the piano skilfully, but as amateur, not virtuoso. He came of good family, "little nobles," and received an excellent but conventional education. A bit of a dandy, he was the last person from whom to expect a revolution, but in Russia anything may happen. Moussorgsky was like other well-nurtured youths who went to Siberia for a mere gesture of dissent. With Emerson he might [Pg 192] have agreed that "whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." With him rebellion against law and order revealed itself in an abhorrence of text-books, harmony, and scholastic training. He wished to achieve originality without the monotonous climb to the peak of Parnassus, and this was his misfortune. Two anarchs of music, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, reached their goals after marching successfully through the established forms: and the prose versicles of Walt Whitman were achieved only after he had practised the ordinary rules of prosody. Not so with Moussorgsky, and while few youthful composers have been so carefully counselled, he either could not, or would not, take the trouble of mastering the rudiments of his art.

The result almost outweighs the evil—his opera, Boris Godounow. The rest of his music, with a few notable exceptions, is not worth the trouble of resuscitating. I say this although I disagree with the enthusiastic Pierre d\'Alheim—whose book first made me acquainted with the Russian\'s art—and disagree, too, with Colvocoressi, whose study is likely to remain the definitive one. I\'ve played the piano music and found it banal in form and idea, far less individual than the piano pieces of Cui, Liadow, Stcherbatchef, Arensky, or Rachmaninof. The keyboard did not make special appeal to Moussorgsky. With his songs it is another matter. His lyrics are charming and characteristic. Liszt warmly [Pg 193] praised La Chambre des Enfants, one of his most popular compositions. Moussorgsky would not study the elements of orchestration, and one of the penalties he paid was that his friend, Rimsky-Korsakof "edited" Boris Godounow (in 1896 a new edition appeared with changes, purely practical, as Colvocoressi notes, but the orchestration, clumsy as it is, largely remains the work of the composer) and La Khovanchtchina was scored by Rimsky-Korsakof, and no doubt "edited," that is, revised, what picture experts call "restored." So the musical baggage which is carried by Moussorgsky down the corridor of time is not large. But it is significant.

He was much influenced by Dargomyjski, particularly in the matter of realism. "I insist that the tone will directly translate the word," was an axiom of this musician. His friend and follower often carries this precept to the point of caricature. There are numerous songs which end in mere mimicry, parody, a pantomime of tone. The realism so much emphasised by the critic Stassow and others is really an enormous sincerity, and the reduction to an almost bare simplicity of the musical idea. His vigorous rhythmic sense enabled Moussorgsky to express bizarre motions and unusual situations that are at first blush extramusical. Many of his "reforms" are not reforms at all, rather the outcome of his passion for simplification. The framework of his opera—Boris Godounow—is rather commonplace, a plethora [Pg 194] of choral numbers the most marked feature. In the original draught there was an absence of the feminine element, but after much pressure the composer was persuaded to weave several scenes into the general texture, and let it be said that these are the weakest in the work. The primal power of the composition carries us away, not its form, which, to tell the truth, is rather old-fashioned.

His stubbornness is both a failure and a virtue. His sincerity covers a multitude of ineptitudes, but it is a splendid sincerity. His preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris Godounow has much influenced French music,—as I have pointed out earlier in this volume—a source at which Claude Debussy drank—not to mention Dukas, Ravel, and others—whose more sophisticated scores prove this. Of Moussorgsky, Debussy has remarked that he reminded him of a curious savage who at every step traced by his emotions discovers music. And Boris Godounow is virgin soil. That is why I have called its creator a Primitive. He has achieved the na?ve attitude toward music which in the plastic arts is the very essence of the Flemish Primitives. Nature made him deaf to other men\'s music. In his savage craving for absolute originality—the most impossible of all "absolutes"—he sought to abstract from the art its chief components. He would have it in its naked innocence: rhythmic, [Pg 195] undefiled by customary treatment, and never swerving from the "truth" of the poem. His devotion to the verbal text and dramatic action out-Wagners Wagner. Moussorgsky did not approve of Wagner\'s gigantic orchestral apparatus; he wished to avoid all that would distract the spectator from the stage—for him Wagner was too much "symphonist," not enough dramatist. Action, above all, no thematic development in the academic sense, were the Russian\'s watchwords. Paul Cézanne is a Primitive among modern painters, inasmuch as he discards the flamboyant rhetoric and familiar points d\'appui of the schools and achieves a certain na?veté. The efforts of Moussorgsky were analogous. He employed leading motives charily, and as he disliked intricate polyphony, his music moves in massive blocks, following the semi-detached tableaux of the opera.

But a man is never entirely the master of his genius, and while Moussorgsky fought the stars in their courses, he nevertheless poured out upon paper the richest colours and images, created human characters and glorified the "people." He "went to the people," to the folk-melody, and in Pushkin he found the historical story of Czar Boris, neuropathic, criminal, and half crazy, which he manipulated to serve his purpose. The chorus is the protagonist, despite the stirring dramatic scenes allotted to Boris. After all, the "people," that mystic quantity in Russian art, must have a [Pg 196] spokesman. Notwithstanding this every tune to be found in Pratsch\'s Russian anthology, and utilised by the new men, was composed by an individual man. Art is never democratic, but it is all the stronger when it incarnates the woes and joys of the people—not quite the same thing as being composed by the "people." The tree is rooted in the soil, but the tree stands alone in the forest. The moujik dominates the stage, even after the generous lopping from the partition of some of the choruses.

The feeling for comedy which is to be found in many of the songs is not missing in the stage work. Moussorgsky loved Gogol, set his Le Mariage to music (only one act) and savour............