Moussorgsky

The music of Moussorgsky comes up out of a dense and livid ground. It

comes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and

that is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomless

abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downward

through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to

the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh of

the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughout

its course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been.

It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in all

flesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its root

in every being who has been without sun, in every being who has suffered

cold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and touches every

voiceless woe, every defeat that man has ever known. And out of that sea

of mutilated flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting and

inarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling accent, no

eloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its poor and quavering tones, and

the splendor of the world is blotted out, and the great, glowing

firmament is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant, we have

knowledge of the stern and holy truth, know the terrible floor upon

which we tread, know what man has ever suffered, and what our own

existences can only prove to be.

For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his

being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the

great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for

gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all

his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells:

"Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will be torn

from thee. Neither thy past glory nor thy wisdom can save thee. Thou

wilt know what it is to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears of

the hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this world." It is as

though he had heard that cry incessantly from a million throats, as

though it had tolled in his ears like a bourdon until it informed him

quite, and suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is as

though his being had been opened entirely in orientation upon the vast,

sunless stretches of the world, and distended in the agony of taking up

into himself the knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is the

countless defeated millions that live again in his art. It is they who

speak with his voice. 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"--

It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, had

relinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, his

joy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession might

reach the ears of the living.

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life.

Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled,

whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for an

instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned and

went away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that

kneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of this

world, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares and

hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the

kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even

life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the

plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of

inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten

individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient

world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out

of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is

the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his

stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring

songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his

declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who

weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before

spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one

with them.

But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music is

they, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its style

and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as

some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of

scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The

unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence

are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats.

No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them

from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are

visible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs like

barbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little

old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the

boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins

and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and

suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and

wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom

expression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving.

It has in it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting in

inns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices; voices of children and

serving-maids and soldiers; a thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharp

speakers. The plaint of Xenia in "Boris Godounow" is scarcely more than

the underlining of the words, the accentuation of the voice of some

simple girl uttering her grief for some one recently and cruelly dead.

There are moments when the whole of "Boris Godounow," machinery of opera

and all, seems no more elegant, more artful and refined than one of the

simpler tunes cherished by common folk through centuries, passed from

generation to generation and assumed by each because in moments of grief

and joy and longing and ease it brought comfort and solace and relief.

This music is common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking without the

use of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and

values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to

the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can

be. In the phrase of Jacques Rivière, "it speaks in words ending in

_ia_ and _schka_, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms."

Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are

Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even

to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably

castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina"

maintain themselves upon the stage. This iron, this granite and

adamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fit

into the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musical

realism," "naturalism," seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this great

quivering mass of life.

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray. Just as, in

the midst of "Boris," there occurs the gentle scene between the Czar and

his children, so scattered through this stern body of music there are

light and gay colors, brilliant and joyous compositions. Homely and

popular and naïve his melodies and rhythms always are, little

peasant-girls with dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, colored

balls that are thrown about, singing games that are played to the

regular accompaniment of clapping palms, songs about ducks and

parrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of

the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naïve

and simple and unpretentious. Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness

of Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes,

the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chants

and brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black

and gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked

walls, the minarets of the Kremlin. 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. And yet through all these bright colors, as

through the darker, sadder tones of the greater part of his work, there

comes to us that one anguished, overwhelming sense of life, that single

great consciousness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensify

the great somber mass. Their simplicity, their childlikeness, their

innocence, are qualities that are perceived only after suffering. The

sunlight in them is the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls only

between nights of pain. The bright and chivalric passages of "Boris,"

the music called forth by the memories of feudal Russia, and the glory

of the Czars, give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to the

great gray pile of which they are a part. "Khovanchtchina" is never so

much the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded and

cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince

Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar,

and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned

by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could

write. And out of that hymn to the glory of the perishing house there

seems to come to us all the pathos of eternally passing things, all the

wistfulness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a vanished

happiness. 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. As collieries rear themselves, grim and sinister, above mining

towns, so this music rears itself in its Russian snows, and stands,

awful and beautiful.

And, of late, the single shaft has out-topped the glamorous Wagnerian

halls. The operas of Moussorgsky have begun to achieve the eminence that

Wagner's once possessed. 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. The other generation,

with its pride of material power, its sense of well-being, its surge

toward mastery of the terrestrial forces, its need of luxury, was unable

to comprehend one who felt life a grim, sorrowful thing, who felt

himself a child, a crone, a pauper, helpless in the terrible cold. For

that was required a less naïve and confident generation, a day more

sophisticated and disabused and chastened. And so Moussorgsky's music,

with its poor and uncouth and humble tone, its revulsion from pride and

material grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleakness,

lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed, it had to await the

coming of "Pelléas et Mélisande" in order to take its rightful place.

For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it was

Debussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization of

Moussorgsky's. For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classical

and voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness of

which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress as

opposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readily

comprehensible of the two. But, once "Pélleas" produced, the assumption

of "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. 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. 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.

It is a thing that seems to have fallen to earth out of the arcana of

forms like some meteorite. 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. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means

of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and

actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And

what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with a

newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in his

operas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songs

of Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of their

moments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not a

bar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly and

powerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free and

strange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze and

iron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth. 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." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of

life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes,

characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughout

them the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses his

wonder and trouble directly from his heart with all the sharpness of

necessary speech. So much other music seems indirect, hesitating,

timorous, beside these little forms of granite.

And then, Moussorgsky's operas, "Boris" in particular, are dramatically

swifter than most of Wagner's. He never made the mistake the master of

Bayreuth so frequently made, of subordinating the drama to the music,

and arresting the action for the sake of a "Waldweben" or a

"Charfreitagszauber." The little scenes of Pushkin's play spin

themselves off quickly through the music; the action is reinforced by a

skeleton-like form of music, by swift vivid tonal etchings, by the

simplest, directest picturings. Musical characterization is of the

sharpest; original ideas pile upon each other and succeed each other

without ado. The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of

inventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater.

Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less

pretentious. And "Khovanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost

no less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments, melodies,

choruses, dances are each of them real inventions, wonderful pieces

caught up in nets, the rarest sort of beauties. A deep, rich glow plays

over these melodies. Their simplicity is the simplicity of perfectly

felicitous inventions, of things sprung from the earth without effort.

They are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were not

produced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations of

Russians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first scene, might

stand as a sort of national anthem for Russia. Others, like the

instrumental accompaniment to the first entrance of Prince Ivan

Khovansky, are some of those bits that represent a whole culture, a

whole tradition and race.

These pieces are the children of an infinitely noble mind. There is

something in those gorgeous melodies, those magnificent cries, those

proud and solemn themes of which both "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" are

full, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois. Peasant-like though

the music is, reeking of the soil, rude and powerful, it still seems to

refer to a mind of a prouder, finer sort than that of the other man. The

reticence, the directness, the innocence of any theatricality, the

avoidance of all that is purely effective, the dignity of expression,

the salt and irony, the round, full ring of every detail are good and

fortifying after the scoriac inundations of Wagner's genius. 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. And as

the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more

prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of

modern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far the

impulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world,

from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified by

him. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting

power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of

bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest

Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know.

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially

religious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritual

knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the

Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that

great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish

guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il

Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound

sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life

is after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suffering

inherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color,

its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm,

animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the very

breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was from

his race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his music

flows. He himself confessed that it was the sense of another's

inarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boy

stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred the poet within

him and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry of

the world's pain, sound out of his music because the Russian folk has

always known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, has

known that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and pain

and misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can

hallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph and

well-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes to

appear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the

Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his

humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter

uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness

and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to

its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer.

Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the

other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad

forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose

and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its

late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and

called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in

accordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the new

gigantic body he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, to

pacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil the Old Testamentary

prophets. The evangel of Tolstoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the music

of Moussorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music has given the

new world its priest.