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practical end, which is to facilitate the execution; others are only motivated by the desire to take away from the isolated aspect of the work, to render it less disconcerting to the public." Jean Marnold,/r//In Musique d'autrefois et d'aujourd'hui./r// on the other hand, screams with rage: "He (Rimsky-Korsakoff) changes the order of the last two tableaux, thus denaturing at its conclusion the expressly popular essence and the psychology of the drama. The scene of Boris with his children is especially mutilated. Rimsky-Korsakoff cuts, at his happiness, one, two, or three measures, as serenely as he cuts fifteen or twenty. At will he transposes a tone, a half-tone, makes sharps or flats natural, alters modulations. He even corrects the harmony. During the tableau in the cell of Pimen the liturgical Dorian mode is adulterated by a banal D minor. The interval of the augmented fifth (a favourite device of Musorgsky) is frequently the object of this equilateral ostracism. He has no more respect for traditional harmony. Nearly every instant Rimsky-Korsakoff changes something for the unique reason that it is his pleasure to do so. From one end of the work to the other he planes, files, polishes, pulls together, retouches, embellishes, makes insipid, or corrupts. In comparing the two scores one can hardly believe one's eyes. In the two hundred and fifty-eight pages of that