Word: crude
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...Communist-dominated Poland, defendants in the nearly continuous political trials usually "confess" and "repent" before the ax falls. But last week, from a crude, unpainted witness box in the center of a Warsaw courtroom, a courageous Pole on trial for his life departed from the Moscow purge trial tradition and spoke his unrepentant mind. Poles considered his behavior sensational...
...story of the aristocrat who wrote music full of crude peasant power, and his downhill rush from dandy to drunk, is as dramatic as any in music. Many of the facts, but few of the explanations, can be found in a newly published compilation of letters by & about him, called The Musorgsky Reader (edited & translated by Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson; Norton...
...Coarse & Crude. No composer's work suffers more than Musorgsky's from the conviction of his contemporaries that they could write his music better. Only in recent years have U.S. conductors stripped away the lacy ornamentation that Rimsky-Korsakov wrapped around some of his music.* Boris has never been produced at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera the way Musorgsky wrote it; the piano pieces, Pictures at an Exhibition, are usually heard only in latter-day orchestrations by Ravel, Stokowski and others...
Wrote Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky: "Musorgsky you are quite right in characterizing as hopeless, [but] his talent is perhaps the most remarkable of all [the Five]. . . . He has some sort of low nature which loves all that is coarse, crude and rough . . . coquets with his illiteracy and takes pride in his ignorance, rolling along, blindly believing in the infallibility of his own genius. But he has a real, and even original, talent which flashes out now and then. . . . Musorgsky, for all his ugliness, speaks a new language. Beautiful it may not be, but it is fresh...
...from it. The reason: illness and near-blindness forced Parkman to dictate, a method which soon became as "easy as lying." The Oregon Trail was then edited by prissy Harvardman Charles Eliot Norton and "carefully bowdlerized of much anthropological data and many insights into Western life which seemed too crude to his delicate taste...