reveals him straining to
formulate such a one.

His composition is never more than a graceful arrangement of surfaces,
the cunning and pleasing presentation of matter chosen for its exotic
rhythms and shapes, its Oriental and peasant tang, its pungency. The
form is ever a thing of two dimensions. The musical ideas are passed
through the dye-vats of various timbres and tonalities, made to undergo
a series of interesting deformations, are contrasted, superficially,
with other ideas after the possibilities of technical variations have
been exhausted. There is no actual development in the sense of volumnear
increase. In "Scheherazade," for instance, the climaxes are purely
voluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thickening and
distention of certain ideas. And it is only the spiciness of the
thematic material, the nimbleness and suavity of the composition, and,
chiefly, the piquancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music of
Rimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives it a certain limited
beauty.

It is just this essential superficiality which makes the place of the
music in the history of Russian art so ambiguous. Intentionally, and to
a certain extent, Rimsky's work is autochthonous. He was one of those
composers who, in the middle of the last century, felt descend upon them
the need of speaking their own tongue and gave themselves heartily to
the labor of discovering a music entirely Russian. 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