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Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Моде́ст Петро́вич Му́соргский) (March 9/21, 1839 – March 16/28, 1881; sometimes spelled Modeste Moussorgsky (and Russians often prefer to transliterate his name now as the phonetically correct Modest Petrovič Musorgskij), was an innovative Russian composer famed for his songs and his operas on subjects connected with mediaeval Russian history. His major works include the great national opera, Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem A Night on the Bare Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers; in most cases the original scores are now also available.

Life

Mussorgsky was born in Karevo in the province of Pskov, 400km SSE of St. Petersburg. Mussorgsky's wealthy and land-owning family reputedly descended from the first Russian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk. At the age of 6, Modest began receiving piano lessons from his mother; his progress was sufficiently rapid that he was able to perform a John Field concerto for family and friends just three years later. At 10 he and his brother were taken to St Petersburg to study at the elite Peterschule; while there, Modest studied the piano with the noted Anton Herke.

Mussorgsky's intended career was as a military officer, and at 13 he entered the Cadet School of the Guards. Music remained important to him, however: at his father's expense a short (and utterly uncharacteristic) piano piece called the Porte-enseigne Polka was published in 1852, and the following year Borodin described the 17-year-old boy as an "elegant piano-playing dilettante". In 1856 Mussorgsky – who had developed a strong interest in history and studied German philosophy – succesfully graduated from the Cadet School and received a commission with the Preobrazhensky Regiment of Guards, which was the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard.

In the next two years, Mussorgsky met several figures of importance in Russia's cultural life, Dargomïzhsky, Cui (a fellow officer), Stasov, and Balakirev among them. Having produced a few songs and piano pieces, as well as a number of compositional exercises, under Balakirev's tutelage, Mussorgsky resigned his commission in 1858 after suffering a painful crisis. This may have had a spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev the young man referred to "mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity"), but its exact nature will probably never be known. In 1859, the 20-year-old gained valuable theatrical experience when he assisted in the preparation of a production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; he also met Lyadov and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow – after which he professed a love of "everything Russian".

In spite of this epiphanic experience, Mussorksky's music still leaned more towards foreign models: with Balakirev he was mostly studying German music (includung the Beethoven symphonies), and a four-hand piano sonata which he produced in 1860 contains his only movement in sonata form. Nor is any 'nationalistic' impulse easily discernible in the operas Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the Intermezzo in modo classico for piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867). The latter was the only important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: the reasons for this probably lie in the painful re-emergence of his subjective crisis in 1860 and the purely objective difficulties which resulted from the 'Emancipation of the Serfs' the following year – as a result of which the family was deprived of half its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment.

By this time, Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influence of Balakirev and was largely teaching himself. In 1863 he began another opera – Salammbô – on which he worked between 1863 and 1866 before losing interest in the project. During this period he had returned to St. Petersburg and was supporting himself as a low-grade civil-servant while living in a 6-man 'commune'. In a heady artistic and intellectual atmosphere, he read and discussed a wide range of modern artistic and scientific ideas – including those of the provocative writer Chernyshevsky, known for the bold assertion that, in art, "form and content are opposites". Under such influences he came more and more to embrace the ideal of artistic 'realism' and all that it entailed, whether this concerned the responsibility to depict life 'as it is truly lived'; the preoccupation with the lower strata of society; or the rejection of repeating, symmetrical musical forms as insufficiently true to the unrepeating, unpredictable course of 'real life'.

'Real life' impacted particularly painfully on Mussorgsky in 1865, when his mother died; it was at this point that the composer had his first serious bout of alcoholism. The 26-year-old was, however, on the point of writing his first 'realistic' songs (including 'Hopak' and 'Darling Savishna', both of them composed in 1866 and among his first 'real' publications the following year). 1867 was also the year in which he finished the original orchestral version of his A Night on the Bare Mountain (which, however, Balakirev criticised and refused to conduct, with the result that it was never performed).

Mussorgsky's career as a civil servant was by no means stable or secure: though he was assigned to various posts and even received a promotion in these early years, in 1867 he was declared 'supernumerary' – remaining 'in service' but receiving no wages. Decisive developments were occurring in his artistic life, however. Although it was in 1867 that Stasov first referred to the 'kučka' of Russian composers loosely grouped around Balakirev, Mussorgsky was by then ceasing to seek Balakirev's approval and was moving closer to the older Dargomïzhsky. Since 1866 Dargomïzhsky had been working on his opera The Stone Guest, a version of the Don Juan story with a Pushkin text that he declared would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that abolished the 'unrealistic' division between aria and recitative in favour of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two. Under the influence of this work (and the ideas of Georg Gottfried Gervinus, according to whom "the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech"), Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of Gogol's Marriage, with his prioroty being to render into music the natural accents and patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue. This work marked an extreme position in Mussorgsky's pursuit of naturalistic word-setting: he abandoned it unorchestrated after reaching the end of his 'Act 1', and though its characteristically 'Mussorgskyian' declamation is to be heard in all his later vocal music, the naturalistic mode of vocal writing more and more became merely one expressive element among many.

A few months after abandoning Marriage, the 29-year-old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of Boris Godunov. This he did, assembling and shaping a text from Pushkin's play and Karamzin's history, completing the large-scale score the following year while living with friends and working for the Forestry Department. In 1871, however, the finished opera was rejected for theatrical performance, apparently because of its lack of any 'prima donna' role; Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged '2nd version' and, during the year that he spent sharing rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov, made changes that actually went far beyond those requested by the theatre. In this version the opera was accepted, probably in May 1872, and three excerpts were staged at the Maryinsky Theatre in 1873. (It is often asserted that in 1872 the opera was rejected a second time, but no specific evidence for this exists).

By the time of the first production of Boris Godunov in February 1874, Mussorgsky had taken part in the ill-fated Mlada project (in the course of which he had made a choral version of his A Night on the Bare Mountain) and had begun Khovanschina. Though far from being a critical success, and in spite of receiving only a dozen or performances, the popular reaction in favour of Boris made this the peak of Mussorgsky's career.

From this peak a pattern of decline becomes increasingly apparent. Already the Balakirev circle was disintegrating and Mussorgsky, drifting away from his old friends, had been seen to fall victim to 'fits of madness' that could well have been alcoholism-related. In addition, his friend Viktor Hartmann had died, and his relative and recent room-mate Count Golenishev-Kutuzov (who furnished the poems for the song-cycle Sunless and would go on to provide those for the Songs and Dances of Death) had moved away to get married. For a time, however, Mussorgsky was able to maintain his creative output: his compositions from 1874 include Sunless, the Khovanschina Prelude, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (in memory of Hartmann); he also began work on another opera based on Gogol, Sorochintsy Fair (for which he produced another choral version of A Night on Bald Mountain).

In the years that followed, Mussorgsky's decline became increasingly steep. Although now part of a new circle of eminent personages that included singers, medical men and actors, he was increasingly unable to resist drinking, and a succession of deaths among his closest associates caused him great pain. At times, however, his alcoholism would seem to be in check, and among the most powerful works composed during his last 6 years are the four Songs and Dances of Death. His civil service career was made more precarious by his frequent 'illnesses' and absences, and he was fortunate to obtain a transfer to a post (in the Office of Government Control) where his music-loving superior treated him with great leniency – in 1879 even allowing him to spend 3 months touring 12 cities as a singer's accompanist.

The decline could not be halted, however. In 1880 he was finally dismissed from government service. Aware of his destitution, one group of friends organised a stipend designed to support the completion of Khovanschina; another group organised a similar fund to pay him to complete Sorochintsy Fair. In the event, however, neither work was completed (although Khovanschina, in piano score with only two numbers uncomposed, came close to being finished). In early 1881 a desperate Mussorgsky declared to a friend that there was 'nothing left but begging', and suffered four seizures in rapid succession. Though he was found a comfortable room in a good hospital – and for several weeks even appeared to be rallying – the situation was hopeless. Repin painted the famous portrait in what were to be the last days of the composer's life: a week after his 42nd birthday, he was dead.

He was interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg.

Works

The striking novelty of Mussorgsky's original compositions had not been rediscovered until the mid-20th century, when Dmitri Shostakovich reorchestrated his two operas on Muscovite history, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina.

One of Mussorgsky's wildest and most barbaric pieces (as the contemporary critics put it) is the orchestral work St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain, which was made famous in the US by its appearance in Disney's Fantasia.

His most imaginative and frequently performed work is the cycle of piano pieces describing paintings in sound called Pictures at an Exhibition. This composition, best known through an orchestral arrangement by Maurice Ravel, was written in commemoration of his friend, the architect Viktor Hartmann.

Mussorgsky left another opera, Sorochintsy Fair, incomplete at his death. However, a famous dance movement, the Gopak, is drawn therefrom.

Among his other works are a number of songs, including three song cycles: The Nursery (1872), Sunless (1874) and Songs & Dances of Death (1877).

Appearances in film and popular culture

Mussorgsky's flair for highly direct and memorable gestures has made his music popular with film and TV producers: the following examples could be multiplied many times over.

• Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) famously incorporates A Night on the Bare Mountain (in a form that is Leopold Stokowski's heavily redacted version of Rimsky-Korsakov's revision).
• Extracts from Pictures at an Exhibition and A Night on the Bare Mountain appear in the music score for the 1972 film Asylum (where the composer credit is to Douglas Gamley).
• Extracts from Pictures at an Exhibition appear on the HIStory -- the biggest selling music boxed set/double album of all time by Michael Jackson.
• Part of 'The Hut on Fowl's Legs' from Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel's orchestration) was used for the theme music of the BBC's 1977 WWII documentary series The Secret War.
• 'The Hut on Fowl's Legs' and 'The Great Gate of Kiev' in orchestrated form were also appropriated in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.
• An adaptation of A Night on the Bare Mountain appears in Saturday Night Fever (1977).
• In 1980, Woody Allen's 'Stardust Memories' used an extract from the opening of A Night on the Bare Mountain (Rimsky-Korsakov version) for a comic sequence where a character's 'anger' has escaped and run amok.
• The UK's political satire sit-com The New Statesman (1987-92), which starred Rik Mayall, used the opening 'Promenade' from Pictures at an Exhibition as its theme-tune.
• The song-cycle Sunless lends its title to the 1982 film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker; the significance of the reference is not readily apparent, but the connection is acknowledged explicitly by Marker towards the end of the film.
• Pictures at an Exhibition was also developed by progressive rock group Emerson, Lake, and Palmer into one of the groups most recognized albums (of the same name).
• The Great Gate of Kiev has long been used by legendary professional wrestler Jerry "The King" Lawler as his entrance theme.
• German heavy metal band Mekong Delta recorded progressive thrash versions of his music. Recordings include "Pictures at an Exhibition", "Night On A Bare Mountain", "The Gnome", and "The Hut Of Baba Yaga".
• Parts of Pictures at an Exhibition (Gnomus, Tuileries, and others: Gargamel's theme variation about 1.5 minutes in and a scene segway part about 10 minutes in), are used in The Smurfs cartoon series.

References

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• 1839 births
• 1881 deaths
• Alcoholics
• Rurikids
• Russian composers
• Opera composers
• Romantic composers