, and the broom-makers. The rest of
the characters have been taken from Wagner's "Meistersinger" picture
book; the citizens of Hellabrunn are Nuremberg's burghers, the city's'
councillors, the old master singers. The musical idiom is
Humperdinck's, though its method of employment is Wagner's. But here
lies its charm: Though the composer hews to a theoretical line, he does
it freely, naturally, easily, and always with the principle of musical
beauty as well as that of dramatic truthfulness and propriety in view.
His people's voices float on a symphonic stream, but the voices of the
instruments, while they sing on in endless melody, use the idiom which
nature gave them. There is admirable characterization in the orchestral
music, but it is music for all that; it never descends to mere noise,
designed to keep up an irritation of the nerves.

CHAPTER XV

"BORIS GODOUNOFF"

From whatever point of view it may be considered Mossourgsky's opera
"Boris Godounoff" is an extraordinary work. It was brought to the
notice of the people of the United States by a first performance at the
Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, on March 19, 1913, but
intelligence concerning its character had come to observers of musical
doings abroad by reports touching performances in Paris and London. It
is possible, even likely, that at all the performances of the work
outside of Russia those who listened to it with the least amount of
intellectual sophistication derived the greatest pleasure from it,
though to them its artistic deficiencies must also have been most
obvious. Against these deficiencies, however, it presented itself,
first of all, as a historical play shot through and through with a
large theme, which, since it belongs to tragedy, is universal and
unhampered by time or place or people. To them it had something of the
sweep, dignity, and solemnity and also something of the dramatic
incongruity and lack of cohesion of a Shakespearian drama as
contradistinguished from the coherence of purpose and manner of a
modern drama.

To them also it had much strangeness of style, a style which was not
easily reconciled to anything with which the modern stage had made them
familiar. They saw and heard the chorus enter into the action, not for
the purpose of spectacular pageantry, nor as hymners of the
achievements of the principal actors in the story, but as participants.
They heard unwonted accents from these actors and saw them behave i