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 classical 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_.
Pages:
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158