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Better even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky might have said: "Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"
Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfully with each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life, while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense of the orchestra, wrote treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music.
Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a contemporary of Debussy, and an equally gifted musician, Martin Loeffler, was experimenting before Debussy himself in a dark but delectable harmonic region.
I do but we've still time for a little Moussorgsky' or whatever wild names they call themselves 'if you'll make those people outside hold their tongues. Our captain looked at her again, laughed, gave an order that sent the lieutenant right about, and sat down beside her at the piano.
Curiously enough, the Russian Moussorgsky, whose work was neglected during his lifetime, has proved to be a precursor to latter-day music. He was not affected in his development by Franz Liszt, whose influence on Tschaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakof, Glazounof he less than the others was considerable.
He absorbed Moussorgsky, and built upon him, and he had Wagner at his finger-ends; like Charpentier he cannot keep Wagner out of his scores; the Bayreuth composer is the King Charles's head in his manuscript. Tristan und Isolde in particular must have haunted the composers of Louise, and Pelléas et Mélisande.
More sheerly than any other moment, more even than the infinitely stern and simple prelude that ushers in the last scene of "Boris" and seems to come out of a great distance and sum up all the sadness and darkness and pitifulness of human existence, that scene brings into view the great bleak monolith that the work of Moussorgsky really is, the great consciousness it rears silently, accusingly against the sky.
Dostoïevsky said: "The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian soul is a dark place...." The obsession of the abnormal is marked in novelist and composer. They are revolutionists, but in the heaven of the insurgent there are many mansions. Dostoïevsky always repented in haste only to sin again at leisure; with Moussorgsky it was the same. Both men suffered from some sort of moral lesion.
Perhaps only Bach and Moussorgsky have as invariably found phrases as pithy and inclusive and final as those with which "Pelléas" is strewn, phrases that with a few simple notes epitomize profound and exquisite emotions, and are indeed the word. There are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens a prospect.
The keyboard did not make special appeal to Moussorgsky. With his songs it is another matter. His lyrics are charming and characteristic. Liszt warmly praised La Chambre des Enfants, one of his most popular compositions. So the musical baggage which is carried by Moussorgsky down the corridor of time is not large. But it is significant.
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