For
that was required a less naive and confident generation, a day more
sophisticated and disabused and chastened. And so Moussorgsky's music,
with its poor and uncouth and humble tone, its revulsion from pride and
material grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleakness,
lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed, it had to await the
coming of "Pelleas et Melisande" in order to take its rightful place.
For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it was
Debussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization of
Moussorgsky's. For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classical
and voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness of
which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress as
opposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readily
comprehensible of the two. But, once "Pelleas" produced, the assumption
of "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. The men
who felt as he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style,
his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceive
in the music of the dead man its symbol.
But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that has
advanced him to his present position.
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