" The little scenes of Pushkin's play spin
themselves off quickly through the music; the action is reinforced by a
skeleton-like form of music, by swift vivid tonal etchings, by the
simplest, directest picturings. Musical characterization is of the
sharpest; original ideas pile upon each other and succeed each other
without ado. The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of
inventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater.
Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less
pretentious. And "Khovanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost
no less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments, melodies,
choruses, dances are each of them real inventions, wonderful pieces
caught up in nets, the rarest sort of beauties. A deep, rich glow plays
over these melodies. Their simplicity is the simplicity of perfectly
felicitous inventions, of things sprung from the earth without effort.
They are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were not
produced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations of
Russians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first scene, might
stand as a sort of national anthem for Russia. Others, like the
instrumental accompaniment to the first entrance of Prince Ivan
Khovansky, are some of those bits that represent a whole culture, a
whole tradition and race.
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