One need not be a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of the Russian for his country is a passion. And from lips parched by the desire of liberty—though persecuted, exiled, imprisoned—this passion is still voiced with unabated intensity. What eloquent apostrophes have been addressed Russia by her great writers! How Turgenieff praised her noble tongue! The youngest among the European nations, herself a nation with genius, must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. Russia right or wrong! seems to be the slogan, even of those whom injustice and cruelty have driven to desperation. It is the land of neuroses, and the form that patriotism assumes there may be one other specimen. Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a willing dweller in the depths of German thought. 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.

To enter into sympathy with Russian music we must remember one thing: that the national spirit pervades its masterpieces. Even the so-called "cosmopolitanism" of Peter Ilitch Tschaikovsky is superficial. To be sure, he leaned on Liszt and the French, but booming melancholy and orgiastic frenzy may be found in some of his symphonies. According to the judgment of the Rubinsteins he was too much the Kalmuck; Nicolas Rubinstein severely criticised him for this trait. But of all the little group that gathered about Mila Balakirev fifty years ago there was no one so Russian as a certain young officer named Modeste Petrovitch Moussorgsky (born 1839, died 1881). Not Rimsky-Korsakof, Borodine, Cesar Cui were so deeply saturated with love of the Russian soil and folk-lore as this pleasant young man. He played the piano skilfully, but as amateur, not virtuoso. 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." With him rebellion against law and order revealed itself in an abhorrence of text-books, harmony, and scholastic training. He wished to achieve originality without the monotonous climb to the peak of Parnassus, and this was his misfortune. Two anarchs of music, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, reached their goals after marching successfully through the established forms: and the prose versicles of Walt Whitman were achieved only after he had practised the ordinary rules of prosody. 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. I say this although I disagree with the enthusiastic Pierre d'Alheim—whose book first made me acquainted with the Russian's art—and disagree, too, with Colvocoressi, whose study is likely to remain the definitive one. I've played the piano music and found it banal in form and idea, far less individual than the piano pieces of Cui, Liadow, Stcherbatchef, Arensky, or Rachmaninof. 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. Moussorgsky would not study the elements of orchestration, and one of the penalties he paid was that his friend, Rimsky-Korsakof "edited" Boris Godounow (in 1896 a new edition appeared with changes, purely practical, as Colvocoressi notes, but the orchestration, clumsy as it is, largely remains the work of the composer) and La Khovanchtchina was scored by Rimsky-Korsakof, and no doubt "edited," that is, revised, what picture experts call "restored." So the musical baggage which is carried by Moussorgsky down the corridor of time is not large. But it is significant.

He was much influenced by Dargomyjski, particularly in the matter of realism. "I insist that the tone will directly translate the word," was an axiom of this musician. His friend and follower often carries this precept to the point of caricature. There are numerous songs which end in mere mimicry, parody, a pantomime of tone. The realism so much emphasised by the critic Stassow and others is really an enormous sincerity, and the reduction to an almost bare simplicity of the musical idea. His vigorous rhythmic sense enabled Moussorgsky to express bizarre motions and unusual situations that are at first blush extramusical. Many of his "reforms" are not reforms at all, rather the outcome of his passion for simplification. The framework of his opera—Boris Godounow—is rather commonplace, a plethora of choral numbers the most marked feature. In the original draught there was an absence of the feminine element, but after much pressure the composer was persuaded to weave several scenes into the general texture, and let it be said that these are the weakest in the work. The primal power of the composition carries us away, not its form, which, to tell the truth, is rather old-fashioned.

His stubbornness is both a failure and a virtue. His sincerity covers a multitude of ineptitudes, but it is a splendid sincerity. His preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris Godounow has much influenced French music,—as I have pointed out earlier in this volume—a source at which Claude Debussy drank—not to mention Dukas, Ravel, and others—whose more sophisticated scores prove this. 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. In his savage craving for absolute originality—the most impossible of all "absolutes"—he sought to abstract from the art its chief components. He would have it in its naked innocence: rhythmic, undefiled by customary treatment, and never swerving from the "truth" of the poem. His devotion to the verbal text and dramatic action out-Wagners Wagner. 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. Paul CÉzanne is a Primitive among modern painters, inasmuch as he discards the flamboyant rhetoric and familiar points d'appui of the schools and achieves a certain naÏvetÉ. The efforts of Moussorgsky were analogous. He employed leading motives charily, and as he disliked intricate polyphony, his music moves in massive blocks, following the semi-detached tableaux of the opera.

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." He "went to the people," to the folk-melody, and in Pushkin he found the historical story of Czar Boris, neuropathic, criminal, and half crazy, which he manipulated to serve his purpose. The chorus is the protagonist, despite the stirring dramatic scenes allotted to Boris. After all, the "people," that mystic quantity in Russian art, must have a spokesman. Notwithstanding this every tune to be found in Pratsch's Russian anthology, and utilised by the new men, was composed by an individual man. Art is never democratic, but it is all the stronger when it incarnates the woes and joys of the people—not quite the same thing as being composed by the "people." The tree is rooted in the soil, but the tree stands alone in the forest. The moujik dominates the stage, even after the generous lopping from the partition of some of the choruses.

The feeling for comedy which is to be found in many of the songs is not missing in the stage work. Moussorgsky loved Gogol, set his Le Mariage to music (only one act) and savoured the salty humour of the great writer. But the composer has his tragic side, and therein he reminds me of DostoÏevsky—both men died during the same year—who but DostoÏevsky, if he had been a composer, could have written the malediction scene in Boris? As a matter of fact he did write a play on the same historical subject, but it has disappeared. There are many other contacts with DostoÏevsky—intense Slavophilism, adoration of Russia; its very soil is sacred; carelessness as to the externals of their art—a Chinese asymmetry is present in their architectonic; they both excel in portraying humour, broad, vulgar, uproarious, outrageous, reckless humour; and also in exposing the profundities of the Russian soul, especially the soul racked by evil and morbid thoughts. 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. (Beethoven—a letter to Zmeskell—wrote: "Might is the morality of men who distinguish themselves above others. It is my morality, anyhow.") DostoÏevsky and Moussorgsky were not unlike temperamentally. 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. 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. The "inspissated gloom" of his work, its tenebrous gulfs and musical vertigoes are true indices of his morbid pathology. He was of a pious nature, as was DostoÏevsky; but he might have subscribed to the truth of Remy de Gourmont's epigram: "Religion est l'hÔpital de l'amour." Love, however, does not play a major rÔle in his life or art, yet it permeates both, in a sultry, sensual manner.

Boris Godounow was successfully produced January 24, 1874, at the St. Petersburg Opera with a satisfactory cast. At once its native power was felt and its appalling longueurs, technical crudities and minor shortcomings were recognised as the inevitable slag in the profusion of rich ore. A Russian opera, more Russian than Glinka! It was the "high noon," as Nietzsche would say, of the composer—the latter part of whose career was clouded by a morose pessimism and disease. There is much ugly music, but it is always characteristic. Despite the ecclesiastical modes and rare harmonic progressions the score is Muscovite, not Oriental—the latter element is a stumbling-block in the development of so many Russian composers. The melancholy is Russian, the tunes are Russian, and the inn-scene, apart from the difference of historical periods, is as Russian as Gogol. No opera ever penned is less "literary," less "operatic," or more national than this one.

Rimsky-Korsakof, who died only a few years ago, was the junior of Moussorgsky (born 1844), and proved during the latter's lifetime, and after his death, an unshaken friendship. The pair dwelt together for some time and criticised each other's work. If Balakirev laid the foundation of Moussorgsky's musical education (in composition, not piano-playing) Rimsky-Korsakof completed it; as far as he could. The musical gift of the latter was more lyrical than any of his fellow students' at Balakirev's. Without having a novel "message," he developed as a master-painter in orchestration. He belongs in the category of composers who are more prolific in the coining of images than the creation of ideas. He "played the sedulous ape" to Berlioz and it was natural, with his fanciful imagination and full-blooded temperament, that his themes are clothed in shining orchestration, that his formal sense would work to happier ends within the elastic form of the Liszt symphonic poem. He wrote symphonies and a "symphoniette" on Russian themes, but his genius is best displayed in freer forms. His third symphony, redolent of Haydn, with a delightful scherzo, his fugues, quartet, ballets, operas—he composed fifteen, some of which are still popular in Russia—prove him a past master in his technical medium; but the real engaging and fantastic personality of the man evaporates in his academic work. He is at his top notch in Sadko, with its depiction of both a calm and stormy sea; in Antar, with its evocation of vast, immemorial deserts; in Scheherazade, and its background of Bagdad and the fascinating atmosphere of the Arabian Nights.

The initial Sunday in December, 1878, at Paris, was a memorable afternoon for me. (I was then writing "special" stories to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and the rereading of my article in print has refreshed my memory.) I heard for the first time the music of Rimsky-Korsakof, also the name of Modeste Moussorgsky. The symphonic poem, Sadko, was hissed and applauded at a Pasdeloup concert in the Cirque d'Hiver, for the new music created, on the whole, a disturbing impression. To quiet the rioting in the audience—it came to shouts and fisticuffs—the conductor, Jacques Pasdeloup (whose real name was Jacob Wolfgang) played Weber's Invitation to the Valse, arranged by Berlioz, which tribute to a national composer—neglected when alive, glorified after death—put the huge gathering of musical "chauvinistes" into better humour. Sitting next to me and rather amused, I fancy, because of my enthusiasm for Sadko, was a young Russian, a student at the Sorbonne. He liked Rimsky-Korsakof and understood the new music better than I, and explained to me that Sadko was too French, too much Berlioz, not enough Tartar. I didn't, at the time, take all this in, nor did I place much credence in his declaration that Russia had a young man living in St. Petersburg, its greatest composer, a truly national one, as national as Taras Boulba, or Dead Souls. Moussorgsky was his name, and despite his impoverished circumstances, or probably because of them, he was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. He had finished his masterpieces before 1878. I was not particularly impressed and I never saw the Russian student again though I often went to the Sorbonne. I was therefore interested in 1896 when Pierre d'Alheim's monograph appeared and I recalled the name of Moussorgsky, but it was only several seasons ago and at Paris I heard for the first time both his operas. In 1889 Rimsky-Korsakof directed two concerts of Russian music at the Trocadero and Paris fell in love with his compositions. 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. He is an impressionist, a stylist, the reverse of Moussorgsky, and he has the "conscience of the ear" which his friend lacked. Praised by Liszt, admired by Von BÜlow, he revealed the influence of the Hungarian. Profound psychologist he was not; an innovator, like Moussorgsky he never would have been; the tragic eloquence vouchsafed Tschaikovsky was denied him. 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. Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus—in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture—I found more "operatic" than Boris Godounow. The Old Believers become as much of a bore as the Anabaptists in Meyerbeer; the intrigue of the second plan not very vital; but as a composition it is more finished than its predecessor. The women are more attractive, the lyric elements better developed, but the sense of barbaric grandeur of Boris is not evoked; nor is its dark stream of cruelty present. Doubtless the belief that Modeste Moussorgsky is a precursor of much modern music is founded on truth, and while his musical genius is not to be challenged, yet do I believe that he has been given too lofty a position in art. At the best his work is unachieved, truncated, a torso of what might have been a noble statue. But it will endure. It is difficult to conceive a time when, for Russia, Boris Godounow will cease to thrill.