Modest Mussorgsky
The most radically original of the Russian nationalist composers, whose refusal of Western formal convention produced music of startling power and an operatic masterpiece.
Modest Mussorgsky was a part-time composer — he spent much of his adult life as a government clerk — but his output, incomplete and imperfect by the standard measures, is among the most original in Russian music. He deliberately avoided the academic training that would have smoothed his harmonic idiom and formal procedures, and the result is music that sounds like nothing else: the opera Boris Godunov, the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain all have an abrasive directness that no amount of posthumous polishing by his colleagues could entirely domesticate.
Origins and formation
Mussorgsky was born in 1839 in Karevo, in the Pskov region of Russia, the son of a landowner. As was conventional for boys of his class, he trained for military service and was commissioned in the Preobrazhensky Guard Regiment in St Petersburg in 1856. It was in St Petersburg that he met César Cui and, through him, the other members of the group that Stasov would later name Moguchaya kuchka — the Mighty Handful, or "The Five" — a circle of nationalist composers committed to developing a distinctively Russian musical identity: Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky.
He resigned his commission in 1858 to pursue music, but the emancipation of the serfs the following year ruined his family's estate income, and he was forced to return to clerical work. He composed in the margins of government employment for the rest of his life.
Boris Godunov and operatic language
His opera Boris Godunov, in its original 1869 version, is one of the most uncompromising works in the operatic repertoire. Based on Pushkin's historical drama, it centres on a Tsar tormented by guilt over a murdered child-prince. Mussorgsky's setting of Russian speech rhythms is precise to the point of idiosyncrasy — each syllable placed as it would fall in natural pronunciation, resisting the regularising pull of conventional operatic melody. The opera was initially rejected by the Imperial Theatre in 1869; Mussorgsky revised and expanded it, and it was premiered in 1874. Rimsky-Korsakov's posthumous re-orchestration, long the standard performance version, has been increasingly supplanted by Mussorgsky's own scores.
Art is a means of communicating with people, not an end in itself.
Piano music and the orchestral works
Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) was composed in memory of the architect and painter Viktor Hartmann, a close friend who had died suddenly. The ten movements are musical portraits of specific works from a Hartmann memorial exhibition, linked by the Promenade theme — the composer walking from picture to picture. The piano original's harshness and irregularity have attracted arrangers; Ravel's 1922 orchestration is the most famous, but it softens precisely what is most distinctive about Mussorgsky's writing.
Night on Bald Mountain (1867) is a tone poem for orchestra depicting a witches' sabbath on St John's Eve. Like much of his work, it was left incomplete and was revised by Rimsky-Korsakov after his death.
Legacy
Mussorgsky died at forty-two, his major works unrevised and several unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov's re-orchestrations made his music accessible but also obscured its character; the scholarly recovery of Mussorgsky's original versions from the late twentieth century has revealed a composer more radical and more consistent than Rimsky-Korsakov's versions suggest. His influence on Debussy — who knew Boris Godunov in its piano-vocal score and absorbed its approach to melodic speech-rhythm and non-functional harmony — is among the most important lines of transmission in the history of modern music.
