The whole living musical world,
from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified by
him. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting
power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of
bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest
Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know.
But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially
religious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritual
knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the
Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that
great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish
guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il
Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound
sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life
is after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suffering
inherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color,
its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm,
animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the very
breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was from
his race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his music
flows.
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