Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky (Mah-dest Muss-ork-ski) was born in 1839 in Karevo, Russia, about 250 miles south of St. Petersburg. His family was wealthy, owned a lot of land, and was supposedly descended from Rurik, the founder of Russia in the 9th century. At six, Mussorgsky began taking piano lessons from his mother, a classically trained pianist. Within three years he was performing works by Franz Liszt. His family moved to St. Petersburg when he was ten so that he and his brother could enroll in school. He continued to study piano and at twelve his first composition was published by his father. At thirteen, Mussorgsky began studies at the Cadet School to prepare for military service, which was a family tradition. Although he was preparing to be a soldier, Mussorgsky kept up his music lessons, continuing to study piano and entertaining his fellow students with dance music. While at school he studied history and philosophy, graduating in 1856. He was commissioned into the Preobrazhensky Regiment, one of the most distinguished units in the Russian Imperial Guard. 

In October of that year, Mussorgsky met Alexander Borodin while they were both serving at a military hospital. The two future composers quickly became friends. Perhaps more importantly, Mussorgsky also met Alexander Dargomyzhsky, one of the most famous Russian composers of the day. Mussorgsky began attending concerts and parties at Dargomyzhsky’s home and met many other figures from Russian musical life. At one party, Mussorgsky met composer Mily Balakirev, who began exposing Mussorgsky to symphonic music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Franz Schubert, greatly enhancing Mussorgsky’s musical horizons. In 1858, shortly after beginning to study with Balakirev, Mussorgsky resigned his military commission to take up music full-time. He helped stage one of Mikhail Glinka’s operas and took a trip to Moscow, after which he said he loved “everything Russian.” He started composing more, but his works were more similar to the Western traditions that Balakirev had introduced. Mussorgsky also dealt with some personal crises during these years. He struggled with questions about faith and what he believed, and his family struggled financially after the czar freed the serfs, peasants who had been forced to work the land for the wealthy nobles. 

By 1863, Mussorgsky felt he had learned what he needed from Balakirev. Largely teaching himself now, Mussorgsky began work on an opera and supported himself by working in a government office. He continued to attend parties, as well as lectures, and read a lot about art and science. He hoped to become a “realistic” artist and wanted to depict life in a more honest way. In his music he stopped using repeated or symmetrical forms to try and symbolize the unpredictable nature of life. In 1865, Mussorgsky’s mother died, sending him into a deep depression. After this period of incredible sadness, he published his first songs completed in his new style, and the orchestral piece Night on Bald Mountain. Mussorgsky kept his job working for the government, however it was not terribly stable; at times he was not even paid. Artistically, Mussorgsky began to be associated with a group of Russian composers who wrote much of their music based on folk songs, stories, and legends. This group, called the Mighty Five or Mighty Handful, was an influence on Mussorgsky, but he also remained close to Dargomyzhsky, an older, less nationalist composer. Over the next few years, Mussorgsky started two operas, Zhenitba (The Marriage) and Boris Godunov. In both works he tried to use a more realistic singing style, carefully setting the words to try and match their patterns and inflections in the music. Although he quickly wrote most of Act I of Zhenitba, he abandoned it and never finished the work. Boris Godunov was completed in 1871, however the opera company rejected it because there wasn’t a sufficient role to showcase the leading soprano. Mussorgsky, who was at the time living with composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, spent the next year reworking the opera and making significant changes to the work. Three excerpts were presented at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1873 with the full production being produced the next year. He began work on a ballet and another opera shortly thereafter. 

This period was the high point of Mussorgsky’s career. The Mighty Five, which was never really a cohesive group, began to disintegrate, much to Mussorgsky’s dismay. He also began to have health issues, mostly brought on by drinking too much alcohol. Although he continued to work, finishing a prelude, the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, and beginning another opera, his health struggles and the deaths of several close friends greatly inhibited his productivity. He often missed work, and although given an amount of leeway due to his notoriety as a composer, he was eventually fired in 1880. A group of friends stepped in to raise money to pay his bills and another group raised money to pay for him to finish his latest work, for which he completed all but two songs. In early 1881 he was admitted a local hospital where he died a week after his 42nd birthday. 

Most of Mussorgsky’s music is romantic and influenced by Russian themes. His ideas about portraying real life and the way he set vocal music was very different from his contemporaries. One of his most innovative works was Pictures at an Exhibition, a set of piano pieces written in honor of his friend Viktor Hartmann, an artist and architect. After Hartmann’s sudden and unexpected death, an exhibition of his paintings was given at the Imperial Academy of Art. After seeing the works, Mussorgsky was inspired to write music in honor of his friend, completing the composition in three weeks. The suite is a musical depiction of Mussorgsky’s tour at the museum with ten movements which illustrate musically ten of Hartmann’s art works interspersed with five Promenades as Mussorgsky walked between the paintings. Although Mussorgsky wrote the work quickly, it was not published until five years after his death. Later on, the French composer Maurice Ravel orchestrated the work and introduced the composition to a wider audience. “Ballet of Unhatched Chicks” is a short, playful movement which features a jumpy melody in the strings. The middle section is a little more lyrical before returning to the bouncy music from before, ending with an upward motion in the strings. It is easy to imagine baby birds jumping as they try to fly for the first time.