His stubbornness is both a failure and a virtue. His sincerity covers a multitude of ineptitudes, but it is a splendid sincerity. His preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris Godounow has much influenced French music,--as I have pointed out earlier in this volume--a source at which Claude Debussy drank--not to mention Dukas, Ravel, and others--whose more sophisticated scores prove this. Of Moussorgsky, Debussy has remarked that he reminded him of a curious savage who at every step traced by his emotions discovers music. And Boris Godounow is virgin soil. That is why I have called its creator a Primitive. He has achieved the naive attitude toward music which in the plastic arts is the very essence of the Flemish Primitives. Nature made him deaf to other men's music. In his savage craving for absolute originality--the most impossible of all "absolutes"--he sought to abstract from the art its chief components. He would have it in its naked innocence: rhythmic, undefiled by customary treatment, and never swerving from the "truth" of the poem. His devotion to the verbal text and dramatic action out-Wagners Wagner. Moussorgsky did not approve of Wagner's gigantic orchestral apparatus; he wished to avoid all that would distract the spectator from the stage--for him Wagner was too much "symphonist," not enough dramatist. Action, above all, no thematic development in the academic sense, were the Russian's watchwords. Paul Cezanne is a Primitive among modern painters, inasmuch as he discards the flamboyant rhetoric and familiar points d'appui of the schools and achieves a certain naivete. The efforts of Moussorgsky were analogous. He employed leading motives charily, and as he disliked intricate polyphony, his music moves in massive blocks, following the semi-detached tableaux of the opera. But a man is never entirely the master of his genius, and while Moussorgsky fought the stars in their courses, he nevertheless poured out upon paper the richest colours and images, created human characters and glorified the "people." He "went to the people," to the folk-melody, and in Pushkin he found the historical story of Czar Boris, neuropathic, criminal, and half crazy, which he manipulated to serve his purpose. The chorus is the protagonist, despite the stirring dramatic scenes allotted to Boris. After all, the "people," that mystic quantity in Russian art, must have a spokesman. Notwithstanding this every tune to be found in Pratsch's Russian anthology, and utilised by the new men, was composed by an individual man. Art is never democratic, but it is all the stronger when it incarnates the woes and joys of the people--not quite the same thing as being composed by the "people." The tree is rooted in the soil, but the tree stands alone in the forest. The moujik dominates the stage, even after the generous lopping from the partition of some of the choruses.