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Updated: May 9, 2025
Not so with Moussorgsky, and while few youthful composers have been so carefully counselled, he either could not, or would not, take the trouble of mastering the rudiments of his art. The result almost outweighs the evil his opera, Boris Godounow. The rest of his music, with a few notable exceptions, is not worth the trouble of resuscitating.
Like Dostoïevsky, Moussorgsky is ur-Russian, not a polished production of Western culture, as are Turgenieff, Tschaikovsky, Tolstoy, or Rubinstein. He is not a romantic, this Russian bear; the entire modern school is at one in their rejection of romantic moods and attitudes. Now, music is pre-eminently a romantic art.
There has been no composer, not Brahms in his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and odors of his native land more persistently.
But he wielded a brush of incomparable richness, he spun the most evanescent and iridescent web, previous to the arrival of Debussy: he is the Berlioz of Russia, as Moussorgsky is its greatest nationalist in tone. I make this discursion because, for a period, the paths of the two composers were parallel.
In a comparatively long life, long at least by the side of that of a Mozart or a Moussorgsky, he succeeded in producing only a single opera, "Prince Igor," two symphonies and the torso of a third, a symphonic sketch, "On the Steppes," two string quartets, and a score of songs. And many of these works are incomplete.
And certainly none of the other members of the nationalist group associated with Rimsky-Korsakoff not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity; nor Borodin, for all his sumptuous imagination had so firm an intellectual grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to solve it.
He came of good family, "little nobles," and received an excellent but conventional education. A bit of a dandy, he was the last person from whom to expect a revolution, but in Russia anything may happen. Moussorgsky was like other well-nurtured youths who went to Siberia for a mere gesture of dissent. With Emerson he might have agreed that "whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist."
Hearing it after Tschaikovsky's charming, but weak, setting of Eugen Onegin, the forthright and characteristic qualities of Moussorgsky are set in higher relief. All the old rhetoric goes by the board, and sentiment, in our sense of the word, is not drawn upon too heavily. Stravinsky is a new man not to be slighted, nor are Kodaly and Bartok.
The gaunt gray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of Moussorgsky, are more virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky.
The men who felt as he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style, his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceive in the music of the dead man its symbol. But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that has advanced him to his present position. It is the marvelous originality of his art.
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