Pictures at an Exhibition

The trumpet begins on G, falls to F and rises to B♭. The first bar has five beats and the second has six. The brass then play the same tune in chords.

In Saint Petersburg in 1874, Vladimir Stasov gathered Hartmann’s drawings, paintings and architectural designs for a memorial exhibition. That June, Mussorgsky wrote a piano suite based on his visit. According to Stasov, the Promenade depicts Mussorgsky walking between the pictures.

The walking bass brings the Promenade back to B♭ major. The last chord leads straight into Gnomus, the first picture, which shows a wooden nutcracker.

Low strings and woodwinds play a short, irregular phrase and stop on a held note. A second phrase follows and also stops. Mussorgsky writes fermatas over both notes and rests.

Hartmann’s gnome was a wooden nutcracker made to hang on the Artists’ Club tree, and nuts went into its mouth.

Mussorgsky marks this passage Meno mosso. The wind theme is played over the strings, and the bass descends by semitones. In Lamm’s piano edition the passage covers bars 60–⁠71, with the melody in octaves.

Another fermata follows, and then the final run. Mussorgsky marks it velocissimo and con tutta forza, as fast as possible and with all possible force. The piece ends on an E♭ minor chord.

The horn plays the tune and the woodwinds reply. Mussorgsky marks this Promenade “with delicacy”. The tune keeps its alternating bars of five and six beats, now in A♭ major.

The closing bars climb into high octaves and slow down. A high B♭ sounds softly above an E♭ major chord. Mussorgsky marks attacca, so the next picture begins without a break.

The bass repeats G♯ throughout, in a rocking 6/8. Above it the bassoon opens the movement, and the alto saxophone plays the long melody, whose phrases range high above the held bass note.

Hartmann travelled in Italy and painted its buildings. Mussorgsky placed a singer, a troubadour, in front of a medieval castle, and the long melody is his song. The particular picture has not been identified.

The tune expands into octaves and chords. At bars 31 and 40 a chord of D major sounds above the G♯ bass, so that its D lies a tritone from the note below. The G♯ pedal stays unchanged under every change of harmony.

In the summer of 1922 Ravel orchestrated Pictures for Serge Koussevitzky. He gave the medieval singer’s melody to the alto saxophone. Koussevitzky conducted the first performance of the new score in Paris that October.

The opening melody returns near the end and is broken into short phrases separated by rests. G♯ continues underneath. A final upward phrase reaches the upper G♯ in bar 106, and the bass ends on G♯ in bar 107.

Trumpet and trombones bring back the Promenade, with the orchestra behind them. The Promenade is in B major and lasts eight bars. At the end the chords drop out, and a single line slows down and stops on C♯.

In Ravel’s scoring the strings play pizzicato and slow to a halt. The next picture, Tuileries, shows the Paris park, “swarming with children and their nurses”.

Two-note calls alternate with semiquaver runs. Ravel gives the calls to the winds and the semiquavers to the strings. Mussorgsky marked the movement capriccioso.

The middle tune moves in longer notes and rises by semitones through A♯, B and B♯. Beneath it, D♯ falls to D♮ while F♯ is held.

The tuba plays the melody in G♯ minor over a bass of four quavers to the bar. Mussorgsky marks the music pesante — heavy. Ravel starts it quietly.

In the middle passage the chords move higher, and the tune is harmonised with A major and D major chords. The bass climbs in steps. The quaver accompaniment continues beneath it without a break.

The title is Polish for cattle. The picture behind the music is Hartmann’s ox-drawn wagon on enormous wheels, which Mussorgsky explained privately to Stasov. The wagon does not appear in the title, which is only Bydło.

The melody breaks into fragments and the steps in the bass grow quieter. In Ravel’s orchestration only harp and plucked double bass are left at the end.

The Promenade theme passes from flutes to oboes and bassoons, marked Tranquillo, in D minor. The metre changes between bars of five, six and seven beats.

In June 1874, while composing Pictures, Mussorgsky wrote to Vladimir Stasov: “My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes.”

Grace notes fall on short chords. The marking is Vivo, leggiero (lively and light), and the harmony moves away from F major and back several times. Ravel scored the chicks for woodwinds, harps and plucked strings.

In Saint Petersburg in 1871, children danced in Petipa’s ballet Trilby, to music by Julius Gerber. Hartmann’s costume design enclosed them in eggshells, with their legs out underneath and canary heads on top like helmets.

Goldenberg’s phrase is broad and heavily accented. Low woodwinds and strings play it in unison, without a separate accompaniment. The line includes a leap from G♭ to A, an augmented second.

Schmuÿle enters on a muted trumpet, which repeats notes in quick groups. The score changes to Andantino.

Mussorgsky owned both of the Hartmann drawings behind this scene. One showed a wealthy Jewish man in a fur hat, the other a poor Jewish man from Sandomierz, the Polish town where Hartmann spent a month in 1868. Mussorgsky put the two separate portraits together in one movement.

Mussorgsky’s piano piece ends on a long final note. In Ravel’s scoring Goldenberg dismisses Schmuÿle more abruptly. A warmer idea is cut short by an emphatic ending.

The violins open with a phrase in semiquavers. Woodwinds take it up, horns add accented interjections and the celesta joins in. Mussorgsky marked the movement sempre scherzando, and accents fall throughout the semiquaver figuration.

In his 1874 manuscript Mussorgsky wrote out the market’s news in French. A man has recovered his cow, a woman has acquired porcelain teeth, and another man’s nose remains as red as a peony. He later crossed the passage out.

A fermata stops the movement. The last four bars are marked Meno mosso, with a slower pulse and shorter notes, semidemiquavers passed across the orchestra. The score accelerates at the end and continues without a break into the Catacombs.

The first notes are B, then G, each held under a fermata. Ravel scores the vault for brass, low woodwinds and double basses. Abrupt changes from fortissimo to piano make one chord sound like the echo of another.

Hartmann painted himself into this watercolour. He stands in the Paris catacombs with a friend and a guide, who carries a lamp, and a pile of skulls lies to their right. Hartmann died in 1873.

The bass holds F♯ while the chords above it change. The last chord is dissonant and does not resolve. The score continues without a break into Cum mortuis, where the Promenade returns.

The familiar tune returns in B minor, marked con lamento. Ravel sets it among quiet woodwinds and trembling strings. The melody keeps the shape of a walk.

In his 1874 manuscript Mussorgsky wrote that Hartmann’s spirit led him towards the skulls: “the skulls are illuminated gently from within”. The title means “with the dead in a dead language”.

The high F♯ tremolo holds while the lower phrases are separated by rests. The last chord, B–D♯–F♯, is in B major, where the movement began in B minor. It carries a fermata.

F♯ and low G sound together, followed by a whole bar of silence. The Gs are soon repeated in hammered strokes. The marking is feroce (ferocious), and Ravel gives a trumpet theme against this, with other brass replying.

In the Andante mosso, a flute plays above a slower line in bassoon and double bass. The middle section opens with G and E alternating. Harp, celesta and strings accompany the low melody.

Hartmann’s sketch is a design for a metal clock in the form of a little hut on chicken legs, decorated with cocks’ heads. Mussorgsky added the hut’s owner, Baba Yaga, who flies about in a mortar hunting for victims.

Mussorgsky had already written a sabbath. Balakirev refused to perform his St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain, finished on St John’s Eve 1867. Orrin Howard of the LA Phil heard in Baba Yaga’s ride Mussorgsky’s “best Bald Mountain pictorialism”.

At the Allegro molto the repeated Gs return in two-beat bars. The trumpet’s strident tune comes back, and the brass reply to it.

The closing semiquavers run up through octave after octave to G. The movement is marked attacca, and the G leads without a pause into the E♭ major opening of The Great Gate of Kyiv.

The brass open in E♭ major with the main theme. Mussorgsky’s directions are Maestoso and Con grandezza, majestic and with grandeur. Broad chords support the melody, and softer woodwinds reply between its phrases.

Hartmann’s design has tinted brick, an imperial eagle and a three-storey belfry with a cupola shaped like a Slavic helmet. The planned stone gates of Kyiv were never built. Mussorgsky’s movement includes writing for bells.

Mussorgsky finished the suite on 22 June 1874. Five days later he inscribed the title page with a tribute to Vladimir Stasov, and a month after that he added a note that he meant to publish it. The suite appeared only in 1886, five years after his death, in Rimsky-⁠Korsakov’s edition.

The gate theme returns in E♭ major, played by the brass. Strings and woodwinds play rising and falling scales around the brass melody.

In the summer of 1922 Ravel orchestrated Mussorgsky’s piano suite for Serge Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky conducted the first performance in Paris on 22 October. In 1930 he recorded it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The Promenade theme returns within the bell passage (bars 97–⁠110 in Lamm’s piano edition). In the orchestral version it was first played by a single trumpet. Quick figures above and below it continue the bell pattern.

The main theme broadens at Meno mosso, sempre maestoso (slower, still majestic). Its chords sound against minim triplets. The bass and upper parts alternate across several octaves.

Repeated chords continue in minim triplets while the bass rises from A♭ to B♭ and C♭. The triplet pulse holds through each change of harmony, and a crescendo begins.

The last statement broadens further, marked Grave, sempre allargando. Low E♭ sustains the full chords, and the closing pages span the whole range of the orchestra. The suite ends on E♭.