t outweighs the evil--his opera, Boris Godounow. The
rest of his music, with a few notable exceptions, is not worth the
trouble of resuscitating. I say this although I disagree with the
enthusiastic Pierre d'Alheim--whose book first made me acquainted with
the Russian's art--and disagree, too, with Colvocoressi, whose study
is likely to remain the definitive one. I've played the piano music
and found it banal in form and idea, far less individual than the
piano pieces of Cui, Liadow, Stcherbatchef, Arensky, or Rachmaninof.
The keyboard did not make special appeal to Moussorgsky. With his
songs it is another matter. His lyrics are charming and
characteristic. Liszt warmly praised La Chambre des Enfants, one of
his most popular compositions. Moussorgsky would not study the
elements of orchestration, and one of the penalties he paid was that
his friend, Rimsky-Korsakof "edited" Boris Godounow (in 1896 a new
edition appeared with changes, purely practical, as Colvocoressi
notes, but the orchestration, clumsy as it is, largely remains the
work of the composer) and La Khovanchtchina was scored by
Rimsky-Korsakof, and no doubt "edited," that is, revised, what picture
experts call "restored." So the musical baggage which is carried by
Moussorgsky down the corridor of time is not large. But it is
significant.

He was much influenced by Dargomyjski, particularly in the matter of
realism. "I insist that the tone will directly translate the word,"
was an axiom of this musician. His friend and follower often carries
this precept to the point of caricature. There are numerous songs
which end in mere mimicry, parody, a pantomime of tone. The realism so
much emphasised by the critic Stassow and others is really an enormous
sincerity, and the reduction to an almost bare simplicity of the
musical idea. His vigorous rhythmic sense enabled Moussorgsky to
express bizarre motions and unusual situations that are at first blush
extramusical. Many of his "reforms" are not reforms at all, rather the
outcome of his passion for simplification. The framework of his
opera--Boris Godounow--is rather commonplace, a plethora of choral
numbers the most marked feature. In the original draught there was an
absence of the feminine element, but after much pressure the composer
was persuaded to weave several scenes into the general texture, and
let it be said that these are the weakest in the work. The primal
power of the composition carries us away, not it