Musical Portraits Part 4

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Most often it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for these men to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artistically upright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in their consciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, of delicacy, of precision. Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this character appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in her letters and other arts, from the time of the Pleiade, to that of Charles Louis Philippe and Andre Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and not to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to Gallo-Roman times.

But it is not only the spirit of French cla.s.sicism that Ravel and Debussy inherit. In one respect their art is the continuation of the music that came to a climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is subtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the great creative role a.s.signed to him by so much of the music before Beethoven. The music of Haydn and Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to enlist his activity. It relies for its significance largely upon his contribution. The music itself carries only a portion of the composer's intention. It carries only enough to ignite and set functioning the auditor's imagination. To that person is reserved the pleasure of fathoming the intention, of completing the idea adumbrated by the composer. For Haydn and Mozart did not desire that the listener a.s.sume a completely pa.s.sive att.i.tude. They had too great a love and respect of their fellows. They were eager to secure their collaboration, had confidence that they could comprehend all that the music intimated, regarded them as equals in the business of creation. But the music written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more pa.s.sive role. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the intellectual game of the _leit-motif_ system was subst.i.tuted for the creative exercise. The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlier strategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creative imagination, that force which William Blake identified with the Saviour Himself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energetic partic.i.p.ation. And because Ravel and Debussy have this incitement steadily in view, their music is a music of few strokes, comparable indeed to the pictural art of j.a.pan which it so often recalls. It is the music of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and lines, small forms. It never insists. It only p.r.i.c.ks. It instigates, begins, leaves off, and then continues, rousing to action the hearer's innate need of an aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, its brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like the thrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, the opening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon obscured memories and buried emotions. They are like the unsealing of springs long sealed, suffering them to flow again in the night. And for a glowing instant, they transform the auditor from a pa.s.sive receiver into an artist.

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. They have each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis et Chloe" showing the influence of Borodin, "Pelleas et Melisande" that of Moussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony.

Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them.

Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by the bright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-act opera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection "Miroirs" ent.i.tled "Alborada del Graciozo," Debussy in "Iberia" and in some of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their respective works. Debussy writes "Homage a Rameau"; Ravel "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Debussy writes "Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien"; Ravel projects an oratorio, "Saint-Francois d'a.s.sise." Ravel writes the "Ondine" of the collection ent.i.tled "Gaspard de la nuit"; Debussy follows it with the "Ondine" of his second volume of preludes. Both, during the same year, conceive and execute the idea of setting to music the lyrics of Mallarme ent.i.tled "Soupir" and "Placet futile."

Nevertheless, this fact const.i.tutes Ravel in no wise the imitator of Debussy. His work is by no means, as some of our critics have made haste to insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the music of Ravel not demonstrate that he possesses a sensibility quite distinct from Debussy's, in some respects less fine, delicious, lucent, in others perhaps even more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinct development from Debussy's art in a direction quite its own, one might with justice speak of a disciples.h.i.+p. But in the light of Ravel's actual accomplishment, of his large and original and attractive gift, of the magistral craftsmans.h.i.+p that has shown itself in so many musical forms, from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral poem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year to year, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches has driven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by the spiritual kins.h.i.+p of the men, and by their contemporaneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as the fact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what is peculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon the other man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than has his master, Gabriel Faure. He is too st.u.r.dily set in his own direction. From the very commencement of his career, from the time when he wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal "Pavane pour une Infante defunte," he has maintained himself proudly against his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself against what is false and epicene in the artistic example of Faure. Within their common limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy has done. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the cla.s.sical French tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in a different direction, and form the greater contrast to each other because of all they have in common.

The intelligence that fas.h.i.+oned the music of Debussy was one completely aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with precision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations that flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as that of the middle section of "Iberia," in which the very silence of the night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh.

Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out of the flying chaos beneath him by a G.o.d. We are given to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw reflected its visage, in "water stilled at even," in the angry gleam of sunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire, s.h.i.+mmering stuffs and flas.h.i.+ng spray, in the garish lights and odors of the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in the melancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church, the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by the delicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and sh.e.l.ls and colors.

For Debussy has set these adventures before us in their fullness. Before he spoke, he had dwelt with his experiences till he had plumbed them fully, till he had seen into and around and behind them clearly. And so we perceive them in their essences, in their eternal aspects. The designs are the very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited.

The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other out of the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matter never known before, that can never live again. Every moment in a representative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Few artists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say.

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clear self-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has not the absolute completeness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not a marvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium. It is that Ravel dares, and dares continually; seeks pa.s.sionately to bring his entire body into play; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and rigidity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the center. But compare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "Iberia" to perceive how direct he is. Debussy gives the circ.u.mambient atmosphere, Ravel the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, pa.s.sionate, and instinctive.

For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mere l'Oye," but also things as quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as "Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the pa.s.sacaglia of the Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloe," has a pureness of feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, pa.s.sionate tone, this directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness, a pa.s.sionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to "Pelleas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz--zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has pa.s.sed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne of life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering, germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul.

There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem, dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff to shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his horns a-breathing, or Brahms trans.m.u.ted the witchery of the German forest into tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traume!

Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"

Like the pa.s.sage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his great ballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and show us the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more.

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composer than Debussy. One feels the past most strongly in him. Debussy, with his thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt there is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel's music which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet, for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, dainty structures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin,"

Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that he is a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance of the power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make them more intensely her own than some of her proper offspring. In no other instance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has the transfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous to himself. There must be something in the character of the French nation that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the happiest and most faithful of stepchildren.

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel, so, too, one finds him in certain respects even more revolutionary than Debussy. For while the power of the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDowellesque preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts as "Gigues" and "Jeux"

and "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared to "Petruchka" for its picture of ma.s.s-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloe,"

with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and all the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. The humor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel, on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, the artist "a qui l'absence de sensibilite fait encore une personalite," as one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality.

Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a very unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort of corrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. And so we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and "Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol"; setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard for chant, writing in "Valses n.o.bles et sentimentales" a slightly ironical and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to the season of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote.

Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de Regnier: "Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la maniere de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the three norns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt his career, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems surely bound for splendid sh.o.r.es. He is only in the forty-fifth year of his life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in the Quartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in power during the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical means has given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him.

The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. The instruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile and even magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately as ever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one of the most delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourished by the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will refer to him in even more enthusiastic tone.

Borodin

Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of her past. "I live," the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend one summer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by the Volga. And for thirty _versts_ I can follow the windings of the river through the blue of the immeasurable distance." And his music, at least those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages, villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had mounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of the progress of a thing round which sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It is as though he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone for thirty, but for thirty hundred _versts_ through plains reverberant with the age-long combat and clas.h.i.+ng, the bleeding and fusing of Slav and Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with her caravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fifes, comes out of endless wastes. And it is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, a single nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe; had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, sp.a.w.ning, pus.h.i.+ng ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly, patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into possession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until it had joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turned in prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells and sound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor, since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were a.s.sured. For through the savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through the cymbal-cras.h.i.+ng Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, that fortifying a.s.severation.

It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation of past times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad and exuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed days inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out of which there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbo" of Flaubert, for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh and joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of "Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its shouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flas.h.i.+ng Slavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh, its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude, chivalric l.u.s.tiness, a great barbaric zest and appet.i.te, a childlike laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan joy and vigor that had once informed the a.s.semblies and jousts and feasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli and bamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and ma.s.sive forms, lifted its wa.s.sail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of such works, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful warrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed, the reliques, the trappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and gold ornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and the buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chiefly because they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present.

He was one of the famous "five" who in the decade after 1870 found Russia her modern musical speech. The group, which comprised Moussorgsky, Balakirew, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unified by an impulse common to all the members. All were in revolt against the grammar of cla.s.sical music. All felt the tradition of western European music to be inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensibility, and for the first time opposed to the musical West the musical East. For these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and science that had been established in Europe by the practice of generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of the Petrograd _salons_. It was their firm conviction that for the Russian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russian folk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical equivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythms and colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and to the liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But it was not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of their own selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige of the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform, and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention.

Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore and legends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs of the Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries for the missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, deciphered epics and ballads and chronicles, a.s.similated the songs and incantations of the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected the melodies of European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan.

And he and his companions were right. Their instincts had not misled them. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that new musical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.

It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For what they inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch, that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wrought that armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was in the grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before he was born. His most original pa.s.sages resemble nothing so much as the rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia.

Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before the music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps even the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past that liberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of modern music. In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia.

His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and the savage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of the conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of pure Circa.s.sian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and color, needed the brandis.h.i.+ng of blades and the shrilling of Tartar fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the savage life that had sp.a.w.ned upon the steppes. And as such it is distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It has none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none of Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness. It is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous blows and l.u.s.ty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there is any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is a.s.suredly Borodin's second, the great one in B-minor. And in "Prince Igor" and the symphonic poem "On the Steppes," for the first time, continental Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its oceanic wastes of gra.s.s, its strong Kurdish beverages and jerked steaks, comes into modern music.

And was not this restatement of the national character Borodin's great contribution to his age's life? For has not the most recent time of all beheld a resurgence of the Russian spirit in the political field, an attempted reconst.i.tution of society in the light of the just and fraternal and religious spirit with which this folk has ever been endowed, and of which, in all its misery, it has ever been aware? If there is any teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian affairs to-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tolstoy learn more than from that conserver of the pristine and dominating Russian traits, the moujik? And so men like Borodin who sought out the racial character and reflected it in their music seem to us almost like outriders, like the tribesmen who are sent on ahead of wandering folks to spy out the land, to find the pa.s.ses, and guide their fellows on. Their art is a summons to individual life. Borodin in particular came upon the Russian people at a moment when, like a tribe that has quit its fields in search of better pasturage, and has wandered far and found itself in barren and difficult and almost impa.s.sable ground, it was bewildered and despondent, and felt itself lost and like to perish in the wilderness.

And while his folk lay p.r.o.ne, he had arisen and mounted the encircling ridge. And with a joyous cry, and the flaunting of a banner, he called them to the way they had to traverse, and told them the road was found.

His work is not large in bulk. In a comparatively long life, long at least by the side of that of a Mozart or a Moussorgsky, he succeeded in producing only a single opera, "Prince Igor," two symphonies and the torso of a third, a symphonic sketch, "On the Steppes," two string quartets, and a score of songs. And many of these works are incomplete.

"Prince Igor" is a fragmentary composition, a series of not quite satisfactorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from which whole groups of enameled bits are missing. Indeed, Borodin had not even notated the overture when he died, and we know it thanks only to a pupil who had heard him play it on the piano and recollected it well enough to reconstruct it. Other of his works that are complete are spotty, commingled dross and gold. He was a curiously uneven workman.

There appear to have been whole regions of his personality that remained unsensitized. Part of him seems to have gone out toward a new free Russian music; part of him seems to have been satisfied with the style of the Italian operas in vogue in Russia during his youth. He who in the dances from "Prince Igor" wrote some of the most pungent, supple, wild of music could also write airs sweetly Italian and conventional. The most free and ruddy and brave of his pages are juxtaposed with some of the most soft and timid. In his opera a recitative of clear, pa.s.sionate accent serves to introduce a pretty cavatina; "Prince Igor's"

magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followed by a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky opera. The adagio of the B-minor Symphony, lovely as it is, has not quite the solidity and weight of the other movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly original themes and ideas of the first quartet are organized with a distinct unskilfulness, while the artistic value of the second is seriously damaged by the cheapness of its cavatina. His workmans.h.i.+p continually reminds one that Borodin was unable to devote himself entirely to composition; that he could come to his writing table only at intervals, only in hours of recreation; and that the government of the Tsar left him to support himself by instructing in chemistry in the College of Medicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always something of an amateur. Borodin the composer is after all only the composer of a few fragments.

But sometimes, amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such is the music of Borodin.

Rimsky-Korsakoff

The music of Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the books, full of gay pictures, which are given to children. It is perhaps the most brilliant of them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyous colors--bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows--and executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Oriental legends and fairy tales are ill.u.s.trated astonis.h.i.+ngly, with a certain humor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events.

The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and s.h.i.+mmering costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings and queens, are set in the midst of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wear crowns incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing the ill.u.s.trations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden c.o.c.ks and wondrous springtime birds, fas.h.i.+oned boisterously and humorously in the manner of Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed so charmingly that the parents find it as amusing as do the children.

More than the loveliest, the gleefullest, of picture-books the music is not. One must not go to Rimsky-Korsakoff for works of another character.

For, at heart, he ignored the larger sort of speech, and was content to have his music picturesque and colorful. The childish, absurd Tsar in "Le Coq d'or," who desires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food, and listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, something of a portrait of the composer. For all its gay and opulent exterior, its p.r.i.c.king orchestral timbres, his work is curiously objective and crystallized, as though the need that brought it forth had been small and readily satisfied. None of Rimsky's scores is really lyrical, deeply moving. The music of "Tsar Saltan," for instance, for all its evocations of magical cities and wonder-towers and faery splendor, impresses one as little more than theatrical scenery of a high decorativeness. It sets us lolling in a sort of orchestra-stall, wakes in us the mood in which we applaud amiably the dexterity of the stage-decorator. How quickly the aerial tapestry woven by the orchestra of "Le Coq d'or" wears thin! How quickly the subtle browns and saffrons and vermilions fade! How pretty and tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the "Persian Dances" of Moussorgsky, beside that of Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalism appears! None of his music communicates an experience really high, really poetic. There is no page of his that reveals him straining to formulate such a one.

His composition is never more than a graceful arrangement of surfaces, the cunning and pleasing presentation of matter chosen for its exotic rhythms and shapes, its Oriental and peasant tang, its pungency. The form is ever a thing of two dimensions. The musical ideas are pa.s.sed through the dye-vats of various timbres and tonalities, made to undergo a series of interesting deformations, are contrasted, superficially, with other ideas after the possibilities of technical variations have been exhausted. There is no actual development in the sense of volumnear increase. In "Scheherazade," for instance, the climaxes are purely voluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thickening and distention of certain ideas. And it is only the spiciness of the thematic material, the nimbleness and suavity of the composition, and, chiefly, the piquancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives it a certain limited beauty.

It is just this essential superficiality which makes the place of the music in the history of Russian art so ambiguous. Intentionally, and to a certain extent, Rimsky's work is autochthonous. He was one of those composers who, in the middle of the last century, felt descend upon them the need of speaking their own tongue and gave themselves heartily to the labor of discovering a music entirely Russian. His material, at its best, approximates the idiom of the Russian folk-song, or communicates certain qualities--an Oriental sweetness, a barbaric la.s.situde and abandon--admittedly racial. His music is full of elements--wild and headlong rhythms, exotic modes--abstracted from the popular and liturgical chants or deftly molded upon them. For there was always within him the idea of creating an art, particularly an operatic art, that would be as Russian as Wagner's, for instance, is German. The texts of his operas are adopted from Russian history and folklore, and he continually attempted to find a musical idiom with the accent of the old Slavonic chronicles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, particularly "Le Coq d'or," are deliberately an imitation of the childish and fabulous inventions of the peasant artists. And certainly none of the other members of the nationalist group a.s.sociated with Rimsky-Korsakoff--not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity; nor Borodin, for all his sumptuous imagination--had so firm an intellectual grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to solve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff was something of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoples of the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fund for his work. Nor did any of the others possess his technical facility.

Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfully with each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life, while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense of the orchestra, wrote treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, when finally there devolved upon him, as general legatee of the nationalist school, the task of correcting and editing the works of Borodin and Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness that bordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his learning only musical. He had a great knowledge of the art and customs that had existed in Russia before the influences of western Europe repressed them, of the dances and rites and sun wors.h.i.+p that survived, despite Christianity, as popular and rustic games. And he could press them into service in his search for a national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonic poem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs for their words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another."

Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteen operas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its ma.s.s, the living virtue that informs a single page of "Boris G.o.dounow," the virtue of a thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race release and formulation of its speech. There is no score of his, for all the tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep, glowing color of certain pa.s.sages of Borodin's work, with their magical evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their

"Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevreries Et vieil or des vieilles nations."

For he was in no sense as n.o.bly human of stature, as deeply aware of the life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's rich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky of wanting "nerve and pa.s.sionate impulse." He was, after all, temperamentally chilly. "The people are the creators," Glinka had told the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced his intellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary, for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally incapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and of discovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows.

Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations, which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason that they have so gigantic and unshakable a confidence in all purely conscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of _a priori_ theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his work a vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is always attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from cla.s.sical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "wors.h.i.+ped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession with intellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening the dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life.