Title | Russia's gift to the world |
Creator (LCNAF) |
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Publisher | Hodder and Stoughton |
Place of Creation (TGN) |
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Date | 1915 |
Subject.Geographic (TGN) |
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Genre (AAT) |
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Language | English |
Type (DCMI) |
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Original Item Extent | 48 pages; 22 cm. |
Original Item Location | DK32.7.M3 1915 |
Original Item URL | http://library.uh.edu/record=b8304497~S11 |
Original Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
Digital Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
Digital Collection URL | http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/scpamp |
Repository | Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries |
Repository URL | http://libraries.uh.edu/branches/special-collections |
Use and Reproduction | This item is in the public domain and may be used freely. |
File Name | index.cpd |
Title | Image 21 |
Format (IMT) |
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File Name | uhlib_1315132_020.jpg |
Transcript | Russia's Gift to the World 19 word." Glinka and Dargomyzhsky gave between them the lyrical idealism and the dramatic truth which are the scope and aim of music. In the next generation their work bore fruit in the group of great Russian composers who are now recognised as amongst the most important in the history of the modern art. They made Russian music at once national and universal. It is only in recent years that their achievement has been fully realised. The two Russian musicians whose work is even now best known in England, Rubinstein and Chaikovsky (his name is generally spelled Tschaikowsky on our musical programmes and in Western editions of his compositions) are the least distinctively Russian. Rubinstein won his fame throughout Europe less as a musician than as a brilliant pianist. Chaikovsky's emotional and subjective art is essentially Western, or rather cosmopolitan, and this is so even when, as in his opera of Evgeny Onegin, he takes his sources from Russian literature and uses national Russian musical motifs. But we have lately come to know the splendid and intimately Russian music of Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. It came as a revelation, and made us realise that here we have a new birth which has enriched the art, has given it deeper truth and fresh beauty. Their motto was to make art the handmaid of humanity, to " go to the people, seek truth, and the true purpose of life." " To feed upon humanity," Mussorgsky wrote, " is the whole problem of art." In his two greatest works, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, he realised his ideal. Alongside of him, and working in the same spirit, came the two others. Borodin, the author of Prince Igor, was a musician with less of tragic intensity but more of serene beauty. Rimsky-Korsakov was the most accomplished musician of the three, and had a special genius for the expression of strong colour |