United States or Sierra Leone ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To us, who once thought to see in him the man of the new time, he seems only the brave, sonorous trumpet-call that heralded a king who never put in his appearance, the glare that in the East lights the sky for an instant and seems to promise a new day, but extinguishes again. He is indeed the false dawn of modern music. Moussorgsky
For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of the life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's rich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky of wanting "nerve and passionate impulse." He was, after all, temperamentally chilly.
To a large degree, it is the change of times that has advanced and appreciated the art of Moussorgsky. Although "Boris" saw the light at the same time as "Die Götterdämmerung," and although Moussorgsky lies chronologically very near the former age, he is far closer to us in feeling than is Wagner.
At the very moment of Wagner's triumph and of the full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Moussorgsky composed as though he had been born into a world in which there was no musical tradition, a world where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a few folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scales existed. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completely indifferent.
Word Of The Day