s form, which, to tell
the truth, is rather old-fashioned.

His stubbornness is both a failure and a virtue. His sincerity covers
a multitude of ineptitudes, but it is a splendid sincerity. His
preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the
dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris
Godounow has much influenced French music,--as I have pointed out
earlier in this volume--a source at which Claude Debussy drank--not to
mention Dukas, Ravel, and others--whose more sophisticated scores
prove this. Of Moussorgsky, Debussy has remarked that he reminded him
of a curious savage who at every step traced by his emotions discovers
music. And Boris Godounow is virgin soil. That is why I have called
its creator a Primitive. He has achieved the naive attitude toward
music which in the plastic arts is the very essence of the Flemish
Primitives. Nature made him deaf to other men's music. In his savage
craving for absolute originality--the most impossible of all
"absolutes"--he sought to abstract from the art its chief components.
He would have it in its naked innocence: rhythmic, undefiled by
customary treatment, and never swerving from the "truth" of the poem.
His devotion to the verbal text and dramatic action out-Wagners
Wagner. Moussorgsky did not approve of Wagner's gigantic orchestral
apparatus; he wished to avoid all that would distract the spectator
from the stage--for him Wagner was too much "symphonist," not enough
dramatist. Action, above all, no thematic development in the academic
sense, were the Russian's watchwords. Paul Cezanne is a Primitive
among modern painters, inasmuch as he discards the flamboyant rhetoric
and familiar points d'appui of the schools and achieves a certain
naivete. The efforts of Moussorgsky were analogous. He employed
leading motives charily, and as he disliked intricate polyphony, his
music moves in massive blocks, following the semi-detached tableaux of
the opera.

But a man is never entirely the master of his genius, and while
Moussorgsky fought the stars in their courses, he nevertheless poured
out upon paper the richest colours and images, created human
characters and glorified the "people." He "went to the people," to the
folk-melody, and in Pushkin he found the historical story of Czar
Boris, neuropathic, criminal, and half crazy, which he manipulated
to serve his purpose. The chorus is the protagonist, despite the
stirring dramatic scenes allotted t