The music of _A Life for the Tsar_ was an immense advance on anything that had been previously attempted by a Russian composer. Already the overture--though not one of Glinka's best symphonic efforts--shows many novel orchestral effects, which grew out of the fundamental material of his music, the folk-songs of Great Russia. Generally speaking, his tendency is to keep his orchestra within modest limits. Although he knew something of the orchestration of Berlioz, it is Beethoven rather than the French musician that Glinka takes as his model. "I do not care," he says, "to make use of every luxury." Under this category he places trombones, double bassoons, bass drum, English horn, piccolo and even the harp. To the wind instruments he applies the term "orchestral colour," while he speaks of the strings as "orchestral motion." With regard to the strings, he thought that "the more these instruments interlace their parts, the nearer they approach to their natural character and the better they fulfil their part in the orchestra." It is remarkable that Glinka usually gives free play to the various individual groups of instruments, and that his orchestration is far less conventional and limited than that of most operatic composers of his time. The thematic material of _A Life for the Tsar_ is partly drawn from national sources, not so much directly, as modelled on the folk-song pattern. The crude folk-stuff is treated in a very different way to that which prevailed in the early national operas. Glinka does not interpolate a whole popular song--often harmonised in a very ordinary manner--into his opera, in the naïve style of Fomin in his _Aniouta_ or _The Miller_. With Glinka the material passes through the melting pot of his genius, and flows out again in the form of a plastic national idiom with which, as he himself expresses it, "his fellow-countrymen could not fail to feel completely at home." Here are one or two instances in which the folk-song element is recognisable in _A Life for the Tsar_. In the first act, where Sousanin in his recitative says it is no time to be dreaming of marriage feasts, occurs a phrase which Glinka overheard sung by a cab-driver[14]; the familiar folk-song "Down by Mother Volga," disguised in binary rhythm, serves as accompaniment to Sousanin's words in the forest scene "I give ye answer," and "Thither have I led ye," where its gloomy character is in keeping with the situation; the recitative sung by Sobinin in the first act, "Greeting, Mother Moscow," is also based upon a folk-tune. But Glinka has also melodies of his own invention which are profoundly national in character. As Alfred Bruneau remarks: "By means of a harmony or a simple orchestral touch he can give to an air which is apparently as Italian as possible a penetrating perfume of Russian nationality." An example of this is to be found in Antonida's aria "I gaze upon the empty fields" (Act I). The treatment of his themes is also in accordance with