Nowhere in any of
Rimsky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites, neither in
"Mlada" nor in "Sniegourochka," is there anything at all comparable to
the naked power manifest in "Le Sacre du printemps." But it is
particularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of the
instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose
his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his
teacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkable
sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to develop
further the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from
minting a really new significant orchestral speech through the poverty
of his invention. His orchestration is full of tricks and mannerisms
that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets
of "Scheherazade" in "Mlada," in "Sadko," in a half-dozen works. The
orchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously like
that which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan." The
famous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Oriental
evocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he
lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the
pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his
life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the
chinks of the door.
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