His material, at its
best, approximates the idiom of the Russian folk-song, or communicates
certain qualities--an Oriental sweetness, a barbaric lassitude and
abandon--admittedly racial. His music is full of elements--wild and
headlong rhythms, exotic modes--abstracted from the popular and
liturgical chants or deftly molded upon them. For there was always
within him the idea of creating an art, particularly an operatic art,
that would be as Russian as Wagner's, for instance, is German. The texts
of his operas are adopted from Russian history and folklore, and he
continually attempted to find a musical idiom with the accent of the old
Slavonic chronicles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, particularly
"Le Coq d'or," are deliberately an imitation of the childish and
fabulous inventions of the peasant artists. And certainly none of the
other members of the nationalist group associated with
Rimsky-Korsakoff--not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity; nor
Borodin, for all his sumptuous imagination--had so firm an intellectual
grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to
solve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with
the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff was
something of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoples
of the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fund
for his work.
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