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 flashing
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 lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlike
laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan
joy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies 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 massive forms, lifted
its wassail 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.
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