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 so firm an intellectual grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to solve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff was something of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoples of the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fund for his work. Nor did any of the others possess his technical facility. Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfully with each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life, while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense of the orchestra, wrote treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, when finally there devolved upon him, as general legatee of the nationalist school, the task of correcting and editing the works of Borodin and Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness that bordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his learning only musical. He had a great knowledge of the art and customs that had existed in Russia before the influences of western Europe repressed them, of the dances and rites and sun worship that survived, despite Christianity, as popular and rustic games. And he could press them into service in his search for a national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonic poem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs for their words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another."