Mussorgsky's Youth and Early Development

Extract

The history of musical England's attitude to Mussorgsky's music can be summed up simply by mentioning two landmarks. In 1905 appeared the sixth volume of the Oxford History of Music, devoted to the Romantic period, by Dannreuther, who dismissed Mussorgsky's music with these words, “wilfully eccentric and barbarously ugly,” without a word of qualification. In 1928, when the genuine full text of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunof was published for the first time, the musical critic of The Times devoted the major portion of a very long article to showing how very uncalled for, and indeed how wrong, was the alteration by Rimsky-Korsakof of one single note at a certain spot in a scene in the opera Boris Godunof.