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In mockery of one of its turns comes an enchanting bit of tune, as naïve an utterance as any, much like a children's dancing song. And it returns later with still new enchantment of rhythm. But the whole is too full of folk-melody to trace out, yet is, in its very fibre, true to the idea of an epic of the people.
But one important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its original.
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 spokesman.
It is high time for a return to the simplicity of Mozart, of Handel, of our own Purcell; to dare, as Wagner dared, to write folk-melody, and to put it on the trombones at the risk of being called vulgar and rowdy by persons who do not know great art when it is original, but only when it resembles some great art of the past which they have learnt to know.
Again, on a series of flights the main theme is reached and leaps once more to impassioned height. Follows a final tempest and climax of the phrase of second theme. The movement thus ends, not in joyous exultation, but in a fierce triumph of sombre minor. The Andante is purest folk-melody, and it is strange how we know this, though we do not know the special theme.
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