ModestMussorgsky

When Borodin met Mussorgsky at a Saint Petersburg military hospital in 1856, the seventeen-year-old officer was immaculate, with a close-fitting uniform, polished manners and well-kept hands. He played extracts from Il trovatore and La traviata at the piano while admirers gathered round. Twenty-five years later, in another hospital, Repin painted the portrait that became his most familiar likeness. It shows a man in a dressing gown, his hair in disorder and his eyes still alert.

1839–⁠63Leaving the regiment

Mussorgsky was born at Karevo, on his family’s estate. His mother taught him the piano, and his nurse’s stories prompted the improvisations he remembered from childhood. At ten he was sent to school in Saint Petersburg, where he studied piano with Anton Gerke. He entered the School of Guards Cadets in 1852 and received a commission in the Preobrazhensky Regiment in 1856. His father paid for the publication of his first piano piece, a polka.

Alexander Dargomyzhsky welcomed him into his musical evenings, where he met Balakirev and the critic Vladimir Stasov. Balakirev taught at the piano, playing symphonies as duets and explaining how they were put together. Mussorgsky resigned his commission in 1858. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 reduced the family’s income from its estate, and composition brought little money. In 1863 he took a civil-service post and shared a flat with a group of young men who read and argued about the new Russian literature.

The composers around Balakirev were later called the Five. Each had another profession. Borodin practised chemistry, Cui taught military engineering and Rimsky-⁠Korsakov served in the navy. Mussorgsky had a desk in a government office. They played and argued over one another’s scores and largely taught themselves. Balakirev’s verdict could also stop a piece. He refused to conduct Mussorgsky’s original St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain, completed in 1867, and it remained unheard in its composer’s lifetime.

1864–⁠68Kalistrat and The Marriage

In Kalistrat, a poor man recalls his mother rocking him and promising a happy, comfortable life. Her promise is heard in the lullaby, and the song sets it against his present circumstances. Mussorgsky made other songs out of a beggar’s plea, a seminarian’s complaints and a child’s talk. A singer might stay on one pitch for several syllables, then leap at the most important word. The piano could interrupt, or stop and leave the voice unaccompanied.

1868–⁠74Boris and the crowd

He began Boris in 1868, drawing on Pushkin’s play and Karamzin’s history. The first version, finished in 1869, has seven scenes and no leading female role. The Imperial Theatres rejected it. Mussorgsky added Marina and the Polish scenes, rewrote much else, and brought a riotous crowd into the Kromy forest scene. During part of the revision he shared rooms with Rimsky-⁠Korsakov. The opera reached the Mariinsky Theatre in 1874, with cuts.

In the first crowd scene the people are bullied into begging Boris to take the throne. At the coronation they sing his praise while bells clash above them. Inside the monastery the old monk Pimen writes his chronicle; in the inn Varlaam, who has been drinking, sings of the siege of Kazan. Boris is given grandeur when the scene calls for it. In his scenes alone with his guilt, his thoughts keep returning to the murdered child before he can finish them.

1874Pictures at an Exhibition

Viktor Hartmann died in 1873, aged thirty-nine. Stasov helped organise an exhibition of his drawings, designs and watercolours early in 1874. In June Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition at speed. “Sounds and ideas hung in the air,” he told Stasov that month; he could barely get them down. The recurring Promenade represents Mussorgsky himself walking through the rooms. Its first phrase takes five beats, the next six.

A troubadour sings outside an old castle, chicks dance in their shells and market women quarrel. The piano then plays the bare chords of the catacombs. The Promenade returns among the dead, with a tremolo above it. The final picture is Hartmann’s unbuilt gate for Kyiv, in enormous E♭ major chords, with a quieter chant and bells spread across the keyboard. In Ravel’s orchestration of 1922 the Promenade is given to a trumpet and the troubadour to an alto saxophone.

That same year Mussorgsky composed Sunless, six songs to poems by Arseny Golenishchev-⁠Kutuzov, in which the singer is alone in a room with his memories. In the later Songs and Dances of Death, also to poems by Golenishchev-⁠Kutuzov, Death appears as a nurse singing a lullaby, a lover singing a serenade, a partner in a dance and a commander surveying the battlefield.

1872–⁠81Last operas and death

Two operas occupied his last decade: Khovanshchina, about the political and religious struggles around Peter the Great’s rise, and Gogol’s village comedy The Fair at Sorochyntsi. The latter absorbed music from the witches’ sabbath. Khovanshchina brought the streltsy soldiers and the Old Believers into a history assembled from different years. “If only I did not have to go to work as well,” he wrote to Shestakova on 2/14 August 1876, “that’s what stands in the way.”

Rimsky-⁠Korsakov prepared the scores that brought much of his friend’s music to the public, smoothing chords and filling out the orchestra as he went. Later musicians went back to the manuscripts. Debussy admired the songs; Shostakovich orchestrated both historical operas and Songs and Dances of Death.