Rimsky-Korsakov was a noble and devoted friend, but he was before all things a craftsman of the highest excellence. When it came to a question of what he believed to be an offence against art, he saved his friend's musical soul at the expense of his individuality. We have therefore to weigh his close personal knowledge of Moussorgsky's aims and technical incapacity against the uncompromising musical rectitude which guided his editorial pen. When the question arises whether we are to hear Moussorgsky according to Rimsky-Korsakov, or according to Diaghilev-Ravel-Stravinsky, for my own part, having grown accustomed to the versions of Rimsky-Korsakov--which still leave in the operas so much of Moussorgsky's essential genius that they have not hitherto failed in their profound psychological impression--I feel considerable doubt as to the wisdom of flying from them to evils that we know not of. For, after all, Rimsky-Korsakov was no purblind pedant, but a gifted musician with an immense experience of what was feasible on the operatic stage and of all that could militate against the success of a work. CHAPTER XI BORODIN AND CUI With Borodin we return to a position midway between the original type of national lyric opera which Glinka inaugurated in _A Life for the Tsar_ and the dramatic realism of Moussorgsky. Alexander Porphyrievich Borodin, born at St. Petersburg in 1834, was the illegitimate son of a Prince of Imeretia, one of the fairest of the Georgian provinces which the Russian General Todleben rescued from Turkish occupation in 1770. The reigning princes of Imeretia boasted that they were direct descendants of King David the Psalmist, and quartered the harp and sling in their arms. Borodin's education was chiefly confided to his mother. As a boy, his capacities were evenly balanced between music and science, but, having to make his living, he decided in favour of the latter and became a distinguished professor of chemistry at the College of Medicine in St. Petersburg. As regards music, he remained until his twenty-eighth year merely an intelligent amateur. He played the piano, the violoncello and the flute, all with some facility; he wrote a few songs and enjoyed taking part in Mendelssohn's chamber music. It is clear that until he met Balakirev in 1862 there was never any serious conflict between duty and inclination. Borodin was a man of sane and optimistic temperament which disposed him to be satisfied with the career he had chosen, in which he seemed destined for unusual success. Unlike Tchaikovsky, who felt himself an alien among the bureaucrats and minor officials with whom he was associated in the Ministry of Justice, Borodin was genuinely interested in his work. But no one with a spark of artistic enthusiasm could pass under Balakirev's influence and be the same man as before. Within a short time of their first meeting, the story of Cui and Moussorgsky was repeated in Borodin. All his leisure was henceforth consecrated to the