The hero of the opera is in dramatic stature (or at least in emotional content) a Macbeth or a Richard III; his utterances are frequently poignant and heart searching in the extreme; his dramatic portrayal by M.Chaliapine in Europe and Mr.Didur in America is so gripping as to call up memories of some of the great English tragedians of the past.

But we cannot speak of the psychology of the musical setting of his words because we have been warned that it roots deeply in the accents and inflections of a language with which we are unfamiliar and which was not used in the performance.

But the music of the choral masses, the songs sung in the intimacy of the Czar Boris's household, the chants of the monks, needed not to be strange to any student of folk-song, nor could their puissance be lost upon the musically unlettered.

In the old Kolyada Song "Slava" [Footnote: Lovers of chamber music know this melody from its use in the allegretto in Beethoven's E minor Quartet dedicated to Count Rasoumowski, where it appears thus:--] with which Boris is greeted by the populace, as well as in the wild shoutings of the Polish vagrom men and women in the scene before the last, it is impossible not to hear an out-pouring of that spirit of which Tolstoi wrote: "In it is yearning without end, without hope; also power invincible, the fateful stamp of destiny, iron preordination, one of the fundamental principles of our nationality with which it is possible to explain much that in Russian life seems incomprehensible." No other people have such a treasure of folk-song to draw on as that thus characterized, and it is not likely that any other people will develop a national school of opera on the lines which lie open to the Russian composer, and which the Russian composer has been encouraged to exploit by his government for the last twenty years or more.
It is possible that some critics, actuated by political rather than artistic considerations, will find reasons [figure: a musical score excerpt] for the present condition of Moussorgsky's score in the attitude of the Russian government.

It is said that court intrigues had much to do with the many changes which the score had to undergo before it became entirely acceptable to the powers that be in the Czar's empire.
Possibly.