he great English tragedians of the past. But we
cannot speak of the psychology of the musical setting of his words
because we have been warned that it roots deeply in the accents and
inflections of a language with which we are unfamiliar and which was
not used in the performance. But the music of the choral masses, the
songs sung in the intimacy of the Czar Boris's household, the chants of
the monks, needed not to be strange to any student of folk-song, nor
could their puissance be lost upon the musically unlettered. In the old
Kolyada Song "Slava" [Footnote: Lovers of chamber music know this
melody from its use in the allegretto in Beethoven's E minor Quartet
dedicated to Count Rasoumowski, where it appears thus:--] with which
Boris is greeted by the populace, as well as in the wild shoutings of
the Polish vagrom men and women in the scene before the last, it is
impossible not to hear an out-pouring of that spirit of which Tolstoi
wrote: "In it is yearning without end, without hope; also power
invincible, the fateful stamp of destiny, iron preordination, one of
the fundamental principles of our nationality with which it is possible
to explain much that in Russian life seems incomprehensible."

No other people have such a treasure of folk-song to draw on as that
thus characterized, and it is not likely that any other people will
develop a national school of opera on the lines which lie open to the
Russian composer, and which the Russian composer has been encouraged to
exploit by his government for the last twenty years or more.

It is possible that some critics, actuated by political rather than
artistic considerations, will find reasons

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

for the present condition of Moussorgsky's score in the attitude of the
Russian government. It is said that court intrigues had much to do with
the many changes which the score had to undergo before it became
entirely acceptable to the powers that be in the Czar's empire.
Possibly. But every change which has come under the notice of this
reviewer has been to its betterment and made for its practical
presentation. It is said that the popular scenes were curtailed because
they represented the voice of the democracy. But there is still so much
choral work in the opera that the judgment of the operatic audiences of
to-day is likely to pronounce against it measurably on that account.
For, splendid as the choral element in the work is, a chorus is not
l