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Updated: May 9, 2025
There is scarcely an operatic scene more magnificent than the scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, with its massive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and the caroling of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris himself, Moussorgsky sweeps through in stiff, blazoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic tiara.
But a man is never entirely the master of his genius, and while Moussorgsky fought the stars in their courses, he nevertheless poured out upon paper the richest colours and images, created human characters and glorified the "people."
It was performed the following year. In 1871 he became professor of composition and orchestration at the Petrograd Conservatory. In 1872 his opera "The Maid of Pskof" was produced. Rimsky married, on June 30th of that year, Nadejeda Pourgold. Moussorgsky was best man at the ceremony. In 1873 he became Inspector of Naval Bands. In 1874 he toured the Crimea.
The most artistic of Russia's novelists, Turgenieff, was cosmopolitan; and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was too European, not sufficiently national. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. It was altogether different in the case of Modeste Moussorgsky.
Of Moussorgsky, Debussy has remarked that he reminded him of a curious savage who at every step traced by his emotions discovers music. And Boris Godounow is virgin soil. That is why I have called its creator a Primitive. He has achieved the naïve attitude toward music which in the plastic arts is the very essence of the Flemish Primitives. Nature made him deaf to other men's music.
He is one of the most completely and nobly original among composers, one of the great inventors of form. The music of Moussorgsky is almost completely treasure-trove. It is not the development of any one thing, the continuation of a line, the logical outcome of the labors of others, as the works of so many even of the greatest musicians are.
The uttermost simplicity obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful. Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, to have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre d'Enfants."
Here, before Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern music dwindles. It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire.
He not only orchestrated the last opera of his friend Moussorgsky, but also Dargomyjski's The Stone Guest, and with the assistance of his pupil, Glazounow, completed the score of Prince Igor, by Borodine. He was an indefatigable workman, and his fame will endure because of "handling" of gorgeous orchestral tints.
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.
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