Their instincts had not misled
them. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that new
musical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.
It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For what
they inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch,
that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wrought
that armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was in
the grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before
he was born. His most original passages resemble nothing so much as the
rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia.
Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in
generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on
a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before the
music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the
temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch
these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.
It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps
even the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past that
liberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of
modern music.
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