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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Khovanchtchina" is never so much the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded and cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar, and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could write.
Why do certain composers, such as Raff and Mendelssohn, hailed as geniuses while they were yet alive, soon sink into semi-obscurity, while others, such as Robert Franz and Moussorgsky, almost unrecognized by their contemporaries, grow in popularity?
And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. They have each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis et Chloé" showing the influence of Borodin, "Pelléas et Mélisande" that of Moussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony. Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them. Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by the bright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-act opera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection "Miroirs" entitled "Alborada del Graciozo," Debussy in "Ibéria" and in some of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their respective works. Debussy writes "Homage
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.
Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church, had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down chords, melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world rise up to damn him.
They are finely various and depart almost entirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin.
How quickly the aërial tapestry woven by the orchestra of "Le Coq d'or" wears thin! How quickly the subtle browns and saffrons and vermilions fade! How pretty and tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the "Persian Dances" of Moussorgsky, beside that of Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalism appears! None of his music communicates an experience really high, really poetic.
And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know. But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially religious act.
The songs of Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of their moments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not a bar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly and powerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free and strange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze and iron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth.
For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace and exile await thee.
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