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Indeed, it had to await the coming of "Pelléas et Mélisande" in order to take its rightful place. For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it was Debussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization of Moussorgsky's.
A song of Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelléas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally at hand.
Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" maintain themselves upon the stage.
So much other music seems indirect, hesitating, timorous, beside these little forms of granite. And then, Moussorgsky's operas, "Boris" in particular, are dramatically swifter than most of Wagner's. He never made the mistake the master of Bayreuth so frequently made, of subordinating the drama to the music, and arresting the action for the sake of a "Waldweben" or a "Charfreitagszauber."
"And those over there?" asked the inspector, indicating a group at the conductor's right. "The second violins," was the reply. "What!" yelled the official. "Second violins in a Soviet state orchestra? Clear them out!" Mr. Koussevitzky went to Paris, where he conducted a series of orchestral concerts and performances of Moussorgsky's "Boris Godounoff" and Tschaikowsky's "Pique Dame" at the Opera.
Dostoïevsky was an epileptic, and the nature of Moussorgsky's "mysterious nervous ailment" is unknown to me; possibly it was a mild or masked epilepsy. Moussorgsky was said to have been a heavy drinker his biographer speaks of him as being "ravaged by alcohol" a failing not rare in Russia.
For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classical and voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness of which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress as opposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readily comprehensible of the two. But, once "Pélleas" produced, the assumption of "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived.
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 Russia speaking without the use of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Rivière, "it speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms."
After some time she said, "Gusterson, do you remember the Doré illustrations to the Inferno? Can you visualize the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch with the hordes of proto-Freudian devils tormenting people all over the farmyard and city square? Did you ever see the Disney animations of Moussorgsky's witches' sabbath music?
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