Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of her
past. "I live," the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend one
summer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by the
Volga. And for thirty _versts_ I can follow the windings of the river
through the blue of the immeasurable distance." And his music, at least
those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that
summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he
had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of
centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as
though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages,
villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had
mounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of the progress of a thing
round which sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It is as
though he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone for
thirty, but for thirty hundred _versts_ through plains reverberant with
the age-long combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav and
Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with her
caravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fifes, comes out of endless
wastes. And it is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the
eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, a
single nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe;
had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, spawning,
pushing ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly,
patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into
possession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until it
had joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic
empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turned
in prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells and
sound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor,
since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For through the
savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through the
cymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are
his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, that
fortifying asseveration.
It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation of
past times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad and
exuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed days
inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out of
which there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbô" of Flaubert,
for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh
and joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of
"Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its
shouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flashing
Slavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh,
its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude,
chivalric lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlike
laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan
joy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies and jousts and
feasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli and
bamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this
magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and massive forms, lifted
its wassail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of such
works, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful
warrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed, the reliques, the
trappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and gold
ornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and the
buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chiefly
because they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present.
He was one of the famous "five" who in the decade after 1870 found
Russia her modern musical speech. The group, which comprised
Moussorgsky, Balakirew, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unified
by an impulse common to all the members. All were in revolt against the
grammar of classical music. All felt the tradition of western European
music to be inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensibility,
and for the first time opposed to the musical West the musical East. For
these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the
rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and
science that had been established in Europe by the practice of
generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music,
particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply
itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as
artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of
the Petrograd _salons_. It was their firm conviction that for the
Russian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russian
folk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical
equivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found
the musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythms
and colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and to
the liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But it
was not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of their
own selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige of
the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform,
and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention.
Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore and
legends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs of
the Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries for
the missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, deciphered
epics and ballads and chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantations
of the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected the melodies
of European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan.
And he and his companions were right. Their instincts had not misled
them. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that new
musical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.
It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For what
they inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch,
that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wrought
that armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was in
the grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before
he was born. His most original passages resemble nothing so much as the
rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia.
Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in
generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on
a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before the
music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the
temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch
these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.
It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps
even the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past that
liberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of
modern music. In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia.
His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and the
savage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of the
conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of
court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of
pure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian
maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the
imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently
the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and
color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar
fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the
savage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is
distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has
none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep
humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It
has none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none of
Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness. It
is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous
blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a
singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of
the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and
hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there is
any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is
assuredly Borodin's second, the great one in B-minor. And in "Prince
Igor" and the symphonic poem "On the Steppes," for the first time,
continental Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its oceanic
wastes of grass, its strong Kurdish beverages and jerked steaks, comes
into modern music.
And was not this restatement of the national character Borodin's great
contribution to his age's life? For has not the most recent time of all
beheld a resurgence of the Russian spirit in the political field, an
attempted reconstitution of society in the light of the just and
fraternal and religious spirit with which this folk has ever been
endowed, and of which, in all its misery, it has ever been aware? If
there is any teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian affairs
to-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tolstoy learn more than from
that conserver of the pristine and dominating Russian traits, the
moujik? And so men like Borodin who sought out the racial character and
reflected it in their music seem to us almost like outriders, like the
tribesmen who are sent on ahead of wandering folks to spy out the land,
to find the passes, and guide their fellows on. Their art is a summons
to individual life. Borodin in particular came upon the Russian people
at a moment when, like a tribe that has quit its fields in search of
better pasturage, and has wandered far and found itself in barren and
difficult and almost impassable ground, it was bewildered and
despondent, and felt itself lost and like to perish in the wilderness.
And while his folk lay prone, he had arisen and mounted the encircling
ridge. And with a joyous cry, and the flaunting of a banner, he called
them to the way they had to traverse, and told them the road was found.
His work is not large in bulk. 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.
"Prince Igor" is a fragmentary composition, a series of not quite
satisfactorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from which whole
groups of enameled bits are missing. Indeed, Borodin had not even
notated the overture when he died, and we know it thanks only to a
pupil who had heard him play it on the piano and recollected it well
enough to reconstruct it. Other of his works that are complete are
spotty, commingled dross and gold. He was a curiously uneven workman.
There appear to have been whole regions of his personality that remained
unsensitized. Part of him seems to have gone out toward a new free
Russian music; part of him seems to have been satisfied with the style
of the Italian operas in vogue in Russia during his youth. He who in the
dances from "Prince Igor" wrote some of the most pungent, supple, wild
of music could also write airs sweetly Italian and conventional. The
most free and ruddy and brave of his pages are juxtaposed with some of
the most soft and timid. In his opera a recitative of clear, passionate
accent serves to introduce a pretty cavatina; "Prince Igor's"
magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followed
by a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky opera. The adagio of the
B-minor Symphony, lovely as it is, has not quite the solidity and weight
of the other movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly original
themes and ideas of the first quartet are organized with a distinct
unskilfulness, while the artistic value of the second is seriously
damaged by the cheapness of its cavatina. His workmanship continually
reminds one that Borodin was unable to devote himself entirely to
composition; that he could come to his writing table only at intervals,
only in hours of recreation; and that the government of the Tsar left
him to support himself by instructing in chemistry in the College of
Medicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always something of an
amateur. Borodin the composer is after all only the composer of a few
fragments.
But sometimes, amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of
porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and
perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such
is the music of Borodin.