generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"--

It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, had
relinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, his
joy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession might
reach the ears of the living.

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life.
Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled,
whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for an
instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned and
went away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that
kneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of this
world, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares and
hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the
kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even
life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the
plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of
inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten
individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient
world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out
of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is
the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his
stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring
songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his
declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who
weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before
spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one
with them.

But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music is
they, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its style
and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as
some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of
scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The
unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence
are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats.
No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them