One of the works most frequently performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York during the last three seasons has been the “Boris Godounov” of Modeste Petrovich Moussorgsky. It is concerned with one of the most tragic incidents in the history of Russia. Boris Godounov usurps the imperial crown after assassinating the Czar’s younger brother, Dimitri. After he has ruled some years, he is driven to insanity by the appearance of a young monk who pretends to be Dimitri, rescued at the last moment and brought up in a monastery. In setting this plot to music Moussorgsky adopted the principles of musical “nihilism,” which consisted in deliberately disregarding the established operatic order of things. The musical interest centers chiefly in the choruses, leaving little for the soloists, apart from dramatic action. Moussorgsky not only liked what was “coarse, unpolished and ugly,” as Tchaikovsky put it, but he refused to submit to the necessary discipline of musical training, the result being that not only “Boris Godounov,” but his next opera, “Kovanstchina,” could not be staged successfully until Rimsky-Korsakov had thoroughly revised them, especially in regard to harmonic treatment and orchestration. The charm of “Boris” lies in the pictures it presents of Russian life, and its echoes of folk music.
PEASANTS IN MOSCOW
Listening to public band concert
Of the songs by its composer few have become known outside of Russia. Some are satirical—he has been called the “Juvenal of musicians”—and it has been said of his lyrics in general that “had the realistic schools of painting and fiction never come into being we might still construct from Moussorgsky’s songs the whole psychology of Russian life.”
Rimsky-Korsakov and the Nationalists
Moussorgsky and the man who helped to make his inspired but ungrammatical works presentable to the world—Nicholas Andreievich Rimsky-Korsakov—belonged to a coterie of composers known as the nationalists. The other three were Balakiref, whose output as a composer was small, but whose two collections of Russian folk tunes are considered the best in existence; Borodin, who is best known in this country through an orchestral piece called “In the Steppes of Central Asia” and his “Prince Igor,” which has been produced at the Metropolitan Opera House, and César Cui, who is more interesting as a writer than as a composer. He has well set forth the tenets of the “nationalists,” chief of which is that a composer cannot be a truly patriotic Russian master unless he uses folk tunes as the bricks for building up his works.
MILI BALAKIREF
