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One of his first original compositions, written while he was yet a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human in their activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hysterical weeping of the fiery fountains, the proud exhibitions and sudden collapses of the pin-wheels.
His most original passages resemble nothing so much as the rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia. Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before the music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived.
Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteen operas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its mass, the living virtue that informs a single page of "Boris Godounow," the virtue of a thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race release and formulation of its speech.
And as such it is distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It has none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none of Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness.
It is indeed curious, and not a little pathetic, to observe how keen Rimsky-Korsakoff's intelligence ever was. The satirization of the demoniacal women of "Parsifal" and "Salome" in the figure and motifs of the Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light and witty. Indeed, not only "Le Coq d'or," but most of his work reveals his dry, real sense of humor.
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