from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are
visible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs like
barbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little
old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the
boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins
and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and
suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and
wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom
expression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving.
It has in it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting in
inns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices; voices of children and
serving-maids and soldiers; a thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharp
speakers. The plaint of Xenia in "Boris Godounow" is scarcely more than
the underlining of the words, the accentuation of the voice of some
simple girl uttering her grief for some one recently and cruelly dead.
There are moments when the whole of "Boris Godounow," machinery of opera
and all, seems no more elegant, more artful and refined than one of the
simpler tunes cherished by common folk through centuries, passed from
generation to generation and assumed by each because in moments of grief
and joy and longing and ease it brought comfort and solace and relief.
This music is common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking without the
use of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and
values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to
the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can
be. In the phrase of Jacques Riviere, "it speaks in words ending in
_ia_ and _schka_, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms."
Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are
Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even
to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably
castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina"
maintain themselves upon the stage. This iron, this granite and
adamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fit
into the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musical
realism," "naturalism," seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this great
quivering mass of life.

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray.