1839–1881 · Russia · Romantic
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839–1881) was a Russian composer and a member of The Mighty Handful. He wrote operas, orchestral pieces, vocal and piano cycles, songs and choruses. For piano he created the cycle Pictures at an Exhibition (1874); sheet music for it is available on the site.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born on 9 (21) March 1839 in Karevo, in the Toropets district of Pskov province. His father, the collegiate secretary Pyotr Alekseyevich Mussorgsky, came from an old noble family. His mother, Yulia Ivanovna Chirikova, was the daughter of the provincial secretary Ivan Ivanovich Chirikov. Until the age of ten, Modest and his elder brother Filaret were taught at home.
In 1849 the brothers moved to Saint Petersburg and entered the Petrischule. That same year Modest began studying the piano with A. A. Gerke and became a good pianist. He also had a fine chamber baritone voice and willingly sang at private musical evenings.
In 1852 Modest left the Petrischule without finishing and entered the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns. There the religious instructor Father Kirill Krupsky helped him come to know Greek, Catholic and Protestant church music in depth. The composer's first publication also appeared in Saint Petersburg in 1852: the piano polka Podpraporshchik.
Mussorgsky finished the school in 1856. He served briefly in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment, where he met A. S. Dargomyzhsky, and then worked in the main engineering administration, in the Ministry of State Property and in the State Control.
By the time Mussorgsky joined Balakirev's musical circle he was an excellently educated officer: he read and spoke French and German fluently and could make out Latin and Greek. Under Balakirev's guidance he took up the theory and history of music in earnest, analysing harmony, counterpoint, form and orchestration in the works of established composers.
In 1858 Mussorgsky wrote two scherzos, in B-flat major and C-sharp minor. He orchestrated the B-flat major scherzo, and it was performed at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in 1860. He began work on larger forms with music for Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus but never finished it; one chorus was performed at a concert of K. N. Lyadov in 1861.
His next large plans, operas based on Flaubert's novel Salammbô (also called The Libyan) and on Gogol's The Marriage, were likewise not realised. Mussorgsky used music from these sketches in his later works.
Mussorgsky carried the opera Boris Godunov, based on Pushkin's tragedy of the same name, through to the end. In October 1870 he submitted the final materials to the directorate of the Imperial Theatres. On 10 February 1871 the repertoire committee, made up mostly of foreigners, rejected the opera without giving reasons.
The premiere took place on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg only in 1874, using the second version of the opera, in whose dramaturgy the composer had been forced to make significant changes. Even before the premiere, in January 1874, the Saint Petersburg music publisher V. V. Bessel published the opera in vocal score.
In 1872 Mussorgsky conceived the dramatic opera Khovanshchina, which he called a folk musical drama; the plan was V. V. Stasov's. At the same time he worked on a comic opera based on Gogol's The Sorochintsy Fair.
Khovanshchina was almost completely finished in vocal score but, apart from two fragments, was not orchestrated. It was neither published nor staged in the composer's lifetime. For The Sorochintsy Fair Mussorgsky composed the first two acts and several scenes of the third: the Lad's Dream, Parasya's Dumka and the Gopak. The Lad's Dream uses music from the symphonic fantasy Night on Bald Mountain, written earlier for the unrealised collective opera-ballet Mlada.
In the 1870s Mussorgsky took the gradual falling apart of The Mighty Handful very hard. It was painful that his work was not understood in the official academic world, for example at the Mariinsky Theatre. Even more painful was the rejection of his innovations by people he considered close friends: Balakirev, Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov.
His feelings of being unrecognised and misunderstood found expression in a nervous fever that grew worse in the second half of the 1870s and, as a consequence, in a dependence on alcohol. Mussorgsky did not make preliminary sketches: he thought a piece through for a long time and wrote it down at once as a clean, finished copy. Together with his nervous illness and alcoholism, this slowed the creation of music in the last years of his life.
He left the forestry department, where he had served as a junior section head since 1872. With the post went a steady, if modest, income: he lived on occasional earnings and the modest help of friends. The last bright event was a tour of southern Russia from July to September 1879, arranged by the singer D. M. Leonova, his friend. Mussorgsky was her accompanist and often played his own compositions. He gave concerts in Odessa, Sevastopol, Rostov-on-Don, Voronezh, Poltava, Yelisavetgrad, Nikolayev, Kherson and other cities, and they were received well everywhere.
One of Mussorgsky's last public appearances took place on 4 February 1881 at an evening in memory of F. M. Dostoevsky in Saint Petersburg. When a portrait of the writer in a black mourning frame was carried out before the audience, Mussorgsky sat down at the piano and improvised a funeral bell toll.
On 13 February, after an attack of delirium tremens, Mussorgsky was taken to the Nikolayevsky Military Hospital in Saint Petersburg, and he died there on 16 (28) March 1881. A few days before his death, also in the hospital, Ilya Repin painted the only portrait of the composer from his lifetime. The burial took place at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, in its Tikhvin cemetery.
Over ten years Boris Godunov was given 15 times at the Mariinsky Theatre, and in 1882, soon after the author's death, it was dropped from the repertoire. Recognition in Russia and around the world came to Mussorgsky's music only after his death. It was N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov who brought it to the big stage and the concert platform, giving several years of his life to putting the legacy of his late friend in order.
In the 19th century full-scale productions of Mussorgsky's operas were very rare. Boris Godunov was staged in 1888 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. The first performance of Khovanshchina took place in Saint Petersburg in 1886, given by the amateur Musical and Dramatic Circle, and the opera first appeared on a professional stage in 1897 at Mamontov's Russian Private Opera, with F. I. Chaliapin taking part.
Later, interest returned to the original Mussorgsky as well: editions based on study of the primary sources began to appear. One of the first to take up this work was the researcher P. A. Lamm, who in the 1930s published vocal scores of Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, as well as the composer's vocal and piano works, in the authorial versions.
The M. P. Mussorgsky Museum-Reserve was established in 1972 in the village of Naumovo in the Kunya district of Pskov region. It is located on the estate of the Chirikovs, the family from which the composer's mother came. Nearby is the village of Karevo, where the Mussorgsky estate stood, but it has not survived.
Russian national features found vivid expression in Mussorgsky's music. They show in his handling of folk song and church music, in melody, harmony, rhythm and form, and in his choice of subjects, mostly from Russian life. He paid little attention to the rules of musical grammar and almost never used imitative polyphonic development of material. His main field was vocal music: he aimed at realism and at expressive treatment of the word. His vocal works include the songs Kalistrat, Yeryomushka's Lullaby and Svetik Savishna, the cycle The Nursery and the cycle Songs and Dances of Death.
His largest achievements lie in opera. He called his operas musical dramas. Boris Godunov exists in two authorial versions, of 1869 and 1872, which differ markedly in their dramaturgy. The opera Khovanshchina deals with historical events in Russia at the end of the 17th century and was almost entirely finished in vocal score in the composer's lifetime. For orchestra Mussorgsky left only a few works; among them are the symphonic picture Night on Bald Mountain, the Scherzo in B-flat major, the Intermezzo and the march The Capture of Kars (1880).
Mussorgsky's innovative opera differed greatly from the usual Romantic idea of an operatic performance, and critics met Boris Godunov harshly: they saw faults in the libretto and many roughnesses in the music. The reaction of his friends in The Mighty Handful, all but A. P. Borodin, was especially painful for the composer. Soon after the premiere Cui published a devastating review. Later, Mussorgsky's music had a great influence on composers of later generations: in his treatment of melody and harmony, musicologists see an anticipation of some features of 20th-century music. The dramaturgy of his music-theatre works influenced L. Janáček, I. F. Stravinsky, D. D. Shostakovich, A. Berg and O. Messiaen, and his vocal-declamatory style influenced F. Poulenc.
An outstanding piano work by Mussorgsky is the cycle Pictures at an Exhibition, written in 1874 as musical illustrations to the watercolours of V. A. Hartmann. The contrasting pieces are linked by a Russian theme that opens the cycle and closes it in The Bogatyr Gates. The programmatic character and colour of the cycle inspired composers to make orchestral arrangements; the best known is by M. Ravel. The site has sheet music of Pictures at an Exhibition for solo piano, at an advanced level.