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.
Liszt
Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbé Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusion of traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say which was the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For in your work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it is the actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who struts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, in all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dust reveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliant of bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the façades of the palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are executed in stucco and other cheap materials.
And yet, the many works in which you do not show yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius. The very cleverness of the imitation of the precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beauty of the real gem you had, how expert you were in the trade of diamond cutter. Into the shaping of your bad works of art there went a temperament, a playfulness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius that many better artists have not possessed.
You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as some cradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything in your personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were born musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, titular sovereign of vast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. No composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand. Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the "Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightly put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy, and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your "Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walküre"; Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he introduced them into his "Bühnenweihfestspiel."
You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time. For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than it was for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how to listen for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of its proper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely without preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory its actual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort. For few works better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument, better contrast different volumes of piano-sound. The sonata actually lies on different planes, proceeds from various directions, delimits a solid form, makes even Beethoven's seem flat and two-dimensional by contrast. Here, almost for the first time, is a sonata that is distinctly music of the pianoforte. And the modern achievements in pianoforte composition do not by any means lessen the wonder of your comprehension of the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine and the composers of the modern French school, may have penetrated more deeply than it was in your power to do, may have achieved where you failed. Nevertheless, they could not have progressed had it not been for your way-finding. They are immeasurably indebted to you.
Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece makes you the link between classic and modern musical art. The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were not sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The impressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Les jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to anticipate their style. And although you were not responsible for the music of the nationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you nevertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made you write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleased them so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while you were the very prince of musicians.