Just as, in
the midst of "Boris," there occurs the gentle scene between the Czar and
his children, so scattered through this stern body of music there are
light and gay colors, brilliant and joyous compositions. Homely and
popular and naive his melodies and rhythms always are, little
peasant-girls with dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, colored
balls that are thrown about, singing games that are played to the
regular accompaniment of clapping palms, songs about ducks and
parrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of
the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naive
and simple and unpretentious. Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness
of Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes,
the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chants
and brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black
and gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked
walls, the minarets of the Kremlin. There is scarcely an operatic scene
more magnificent than the scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, with
its massive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and the
caroling of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris himself, Moussorgsky
sweeps through in stiff, blazoned robes, crowned with the domed,
flashing Slavic tiara. And yet through all these bright colors, as
through the darker, sadder tones of the greater part of his work, there
comes to us that one anguished, overwhelming sense of life, that single
great consciousness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensify
the great somber mass. Their simplicity, their childlikeness, their
innocence, are qualities that are perceived only after suffering. The
sunlight in them is the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls only
between nights of pain. The bright and chivalric passages of "Boris,"
the music called forth by the memories of feudal Russia, and the glory
of the Czars, give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to the
great gray pile of which they are a part. "Khovanchtchina" is never so
much the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded and
cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince
Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar,
and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned
by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could
write. And