Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the books, full of gay
pictures, which are given to children. It is perhaps the most brilliant
of them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyous
colors--bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows--and
executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Oriental
legends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certain
humor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events.
The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and shimmering
costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings and
queens, are set in the midst of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wear
crowns incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing the
illustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden cocks and
wondrous springtime birds, fashioned boisterously and humorously in the
manner of Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed so
charmingly that the parents find it as amusing as do the children.

More than the loveliest, the gleefullest, of picture-books the music is
not. One must not go to Rimsky-Korsakoff for works of another character.
For, at heart, he ignored the larger sort of speech, and was content to
have his music picturesque and colorful. The childish, absurd Tsar in
"Le Coq d'or," who desires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food,
and listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, something of
a portrait of the composer. For all its gay and opulent exterior, its
pricking orchestral timbres, his work is curiously objective and
crystallized, as though the need that brought it forth had been small
and readily satisfied. None of Rimsky's scores is really lyrical, deeply
moving. The music of "Tsar Saltan," for instance, for all its evocations
of magical cities and wonder-towers and faery splendor, impresses one as
little more than theatrical scenery of a high decorativeness. It sets us
lolling in a sort of orchestra-stall, wakes in us the mood in which we
applaud amiably the dexterity of the stage-decorator. How quickly the
aerial tapestry woven by the orchestra of "Le Coq d'or" wears thin! How
quickly the subtle browns and saffrons and vermilions fade! How pretty
and tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the "Persian Dances" of
Moussorgsky, beside that of Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalism
appears! None of his music communicates an experience really high,
really poetic. There is no page of his that