men of the
opposing faction, the men who accepted only the Russian folk-song as
their touchstone, and sought in their work to find a modern equivalent
for it, the music of this school was alien and sophisticated, as
sophisticated as the pseudo-French culture of the Petrograd
drawing-rooms. For them, the music of Tchaikowsky, even, was the result
of the manipulation of themes of Slavic color according to formulas
abstracted from classical music. Without regard, however, for any
question of musical theory; apart from all question of the value for us
of the science of the classical masters, one finds oneself of this
opinion. For the music brought forward by the visit of the composer who
is at present in this country as envoy of his school, convinces us that
the work of the men of his party, elegant and brilliant as it often is,
is the work of men essentially unresponsive to the appeal of their
compatriots. For them, as it is for every Russian musician, Russia was
without their windows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild,
ungoverned energy, its misery, its rich and childish laughter, its deep,
great Christianity. It wanted a music that would have the accents of its
rude, large-hearted speech, and that would, like its speech, express
its essential reactions, its consciousness. And some men there were,
Moussorgsky and Borodin, who were quick enough of imagination to become
the instruments of their folk and respond to its need. And so, when we
would hear Russian speech, we go to them as we go to Dostoievsky and to
Tolstoy. It is in "Boris" and "Prince Igor" as richly as it is in any
work. But the men of the other school did not hear the appeal. They sat
in their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed windows.

Scriabine

There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine.
And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their
hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and
significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to
some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony,
for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried,"
although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and
rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme de
l'extase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is a
sort of Tannhaeuser "Bacchanale" modernized, enlarged, and int