The music of Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the books, full of gay
pictures, which are given to children. It is perhaps the most brilliant
of them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyous
colors--bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows--and
executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Oriental
legends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certain
humor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events.
The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and shimmering
costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings and
queens, are set in the midst of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wear
crowns incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing the
illustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden cocks and
wondrous springtime birds, fashioned boisterously and humorously in the
manner of Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed so
charmingly that the parents find it as amusing as do the children.
More than the loveliest, the gleefullest, of picture-books the music is
not. One must not go to Rimsky-Korsakoff for works of another character.
For, at heart, he ignored the larger sort of speech, and was content to
have his music picturesque and colorful. The childish, absurd Tsar in
"Le Coq d'or," who desires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food,
and listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, something of
a portrait of the composer. For all its gay and opulent exterior, its
pricking orchestral timbres, his work is curiously objective and
crystallized, as though the need that brought it forth had been small
and readily satisfied. None of Rimsky's scores is really lyrical, deeply
moving. The music of "Tsar Saltan," for instance, for all its evocations
of magical cities and wonder-towers and faëry splendor, impresses one as
little more than theatrical scenery of a high decorativeness. It sets us
lolling in a sort of orchestra-stall, wakes in us the mood in which we
applaud amiably the dexterity of the stage-decorator. How quickly the
aërial tapestry woven by the orchestra of "Le Coq d'or" wears thin! How
quickly the subtle browns and saffrons and vermilions fade! How pretty
and tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the "Persian Dances" of
Moussorgsky, beside that of Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalism
appears! None of his music communicates an experience really high,
really poetic. There is no page of his that reveals him straining to
formulate such a one.
His composition is never more than a graceful arrangement of surfaces,
the cunning and pleasing presentation of matter chosen for its exotic
rhythms and shapes, its Oriental and peasant tang, its pungency. The
form is ever a thing of two dimensions. The musical ideas are passed
through the dye-vats of various timbres and tonalities, made to undergo
a series of interesting deformations, are contrasted, superficially,
with other ideas after the possibilities of technical variations have
been exhausted. There is no actual development in the sense of volumnear
increase. In "Scheherazade," for instance, the climaxes are purely
voluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thickening and
distention of certain ideas. And it is only the spiciness of the
thematic material, the nimbleness and suavity of the composition, and,
chiefly, the piquancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music of
Rimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives it a certain limited
beauty.
It is just this essential superficiality which makes the place of the
music in the history of Russian art so ambiguous. Intentionally, and to
a certain extent, Rimsky's work is autochthonous. He was one of those
composers who, in the middle of the last century, felt descend upon them
the need of speaking their own tongue and gave themselves heartily to
the labor of discovering a music entirely Russian. His material, at its
best, approximates the idiom of the Russian folk-song, or communicates
certain qualities--an Oriental sweetness, a barbaric lassitude and
abandon--admittedly racial. His music is full of elements--wild and
headlong rhythms, exotic modes--abstracted from the popular and
liturgical chants or deftly molded upon them. For there was always
within him the idea of creating an art, particularly an operatic art,
that would be as Russian as Wagner's, for instance, is German. The texts
of his operas are adopted from Russian history and folklore, and he
continually attempted to find a musical idiom with the accent of the old
Slavonic chronicles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, particularly
"Le Coq d'or," are deliberately an imitation of the childish and
fabulous inventions of the peasant artists. And certainly none of the
other members of the nationalist group associated with
Rimsky-Korsakoff--not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity; nor
Borodin, for all his sumptuous imagination--had so firm an intellectual
grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to
solve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with
the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff was
something of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoples
of the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fund
for his work. Nor did any of the others possess his technical facility.
Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfully
with each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life,
while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense of the orchestra, wrote
treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of
harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, when
finally there devolved upon him, as general legatee of the nationalist
school, the task of correcting and editing the works of Borodin and
Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness that
bordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his learning only musical. He
had a great knowledge of the art and customs that had existed in Russia
before the influences of western Europe repressed them, of the dances
and rites and sun worship that survived, despite Christianity, as
popular and rustic games. And he could press them into service in his
search for a national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonic
poem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs for
their words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another."
Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteen
operas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its mass, the living
virtue that informs a single page of "Boris Godounow," the virtue of a
thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race release
and formulation of its speech. There is no score of his, for all the
tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of
bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep,
glowing color of certain passages of Borodin's work, with their magical
evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their
"Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevrèries
Et vieil or des vieilles nations."
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. "The people are the creators," Glinka had told
the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was
precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative
work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men
like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the
conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced his
intellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary,
for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally
incapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and of
discovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows.
Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the
unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations,
which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason that
they have so gigantic and unshakable a confidence in all purely
conscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of _a
priori_ theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his work
a vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is always
attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from
classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an
intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically
servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky
composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter
"worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks
and all the signs of a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was
pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession with
intellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening the
dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life.
If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because his
intellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant. Though he
remained ever a stranger to Russia and his fellows, as he did to
himself, he became the most observant of travelers. Though as the
foreigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements of
the life of the land--its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring--and found
his happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and a
Night," he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an almost
virtuosic sense of his material. If he could not paint the spring in
music, he could at least embroider the score of "Sniegourochka"
delightfully with birdcalls and all manner of vernal fancies. If he
could not recreate the spirit of peasant art, he could at least, as in
"Le Coq d'or," imitate it so tastefully that, listening to the music, we
seem to have before us one of the pictures beloved by the Russian
folk--a picture with bright and joyous dabs of color, with clumsy but
gleeful depictions of battles and cavalcades and festivities and
banqueting tables loaded with fruits, meats and flagons. It is indeed
curious, and not a little pathetic, to observe how keen
Rimsky-Korsakoff's intelligence ever was. The satirization of the
demoniacal women of "Parsifal" and "Salome" in the figure and motifs of
the Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light and witty. Indeed, not
only "Le Coq d'or," but most of his work reveals his dry, real sense of
humor. And how often does he not point the direction in which Russian
music has subsequently advanced! His latter style, with its mottled
chromatic and Oriental modes, its curious and bewildering intervals, is
the veritable link between the music of the older Russian group to which
he, roughly, belongs and that of the younger, newer men, of Strawinsky
in particular. Indeed, the works of Strawinsky reveal incessantly how
much the master taught the pupil.
But if they reveal Rimsky's keenness, they reveal his limitations as
well. They bring into sharpest relief the difference between poetic and
superficial expressiveness. For Strawinsky has in many instances
successfully handled materials which Rimsky not quite satisfactorily
employed. The former's early works, in particular "L'Oiseau de feu," and
the first act of the opera "Le Rossignol," related to Rimsky's in style
as they are, have yet a faëry and wonder and flittergold that the master
never succeeded in attaining. The music of "L'Oiseau de feu" is really a
fantastic dream-bird. "Petrouchka" has a brilliance and vivacity and
madness that makes Rimsky's scenes from popular life, his utilizations
of vulgar tunes and dances scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any of
Rimsky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites, neither in
"Mlada" nor in "Sniegourochka," is there anything at all comparable to
the naked power manifest in "Le Sacre du printemps." But it is
particularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of the
instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose
his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his
teacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkable
sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to develop
further the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from
minting a really new significant orchestral speech through the poverty
of his invention. His orchestration is full of tricks and mannerisms
that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets
of "Scheherazade" in "Mlada," in "Sadko," in a half-dozen works. The
orchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously like
that which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan." The
famous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Oriental
evocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he
lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the
pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his
life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the
chinks of the door.