There is no score of his, for all the
tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of
bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep,
glowing color of certain passages of Borodin's work, with their magical
evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their
"Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevreries
Et vieil or des vieilles nations."
For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of the
life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's
rich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky
of wanting "nerve and passionate impulse." He was, after all,
temperamentally chilly. "The people are the creators," Glinka had told
the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was
precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative
work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men
like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the
conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced his
intellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary,
for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally
incapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and of
discovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows.
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