To misquote Tolstoy: happy composers are all alike; every unhappy composer is unhappy in his or her own way.
Among the latter, Tolstoy’s compatriot and contemporary Modest Mussorgsky would be a worthy subject for a great novel. Prodigiously gifted, with a style of ‘realism’ that makes a visceral impact, Mussorsgky enjoyed a brief, brilliant flowering, only to die raddled by alcoholism aged just 42.
His only solo piano masterpiece, Pictures at an Exhibition, is a cycle in which ten ‘pictures’ are linked by ‘promenades’: a walk around a gallery in which we enter into the atmosphere of each image, along with the viewer’s response to it. It embodies everything most striking about the composer’s personal voice, including the qualities for which he has been most unfairly criticised.
Mussorgsky's mother, herself a musician, gave him his first piano lessons at the family estate in the Pskov region. He was playing pieces by Liszt (some of the easier ones) by the age of seven and, aged nine, gave a private performance of a concerto by John Field.
'All the women fell in love with him'
Although he was destined to go into the military, as was the family tradition, his father did not discourage his musical bent. Aged ten, Modest was sent to school in St Petersburg, where he was able to study music with Anton Gerke, later a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory. His first piece, a polka, was published at his father’s expense. He then entered cadet school at 13.
Mussorgsky’s military training brought him into contact with some of those who most closely shaped his art. Composer Alexander Borodin left a joyous picture of him at 17, the two having met when serving in a military hospital in St Petersburg: ‘There was something absolutely boyish about him; he looked like a real second-lieutenant of the picture books … a touch of foppery, unmistakable but kept well within bounds.
'His courtesy and good breeding were exemplary. All the women fell in love with him … That same evening we were invited to dine with the head surgeon of the hospital … Mussorgsky sat down at the piano and played … very gently and graciously, with occasional affected movements of the hands, while his listeners murmured, “charming! delicious!”’
Creating a distinctively Russian music
After 1858, Mussorgsky left the military to devote himself to music. At the salon of Alexander Dargomyzhsky, he got to know more of the composers with whom in the 1860s he joined forces in ‘the Mighty Handful’. Besides Borodin, the others were César Cui; Mily Balakirev, officially their leader, with whom Mussorgsky began to take lessons; and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most influential of all (not least, he taught the great Stravinsky).
Together, ‘the Five’ sought to shake off European influences – Italian opera, German counterpoint et al – and, following in the footsteps of the founding Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, to create a distinctively Russian art music, rooted deep in the country’s folksong and the music of the Orthodox Church.
They took a very different direction from Tchaikovsky, who blended Russian influences with the impact of European composers. Their respective progress mirrored long-standing differences in Russian attitudes towards western Europe; Peter the Great had created St Petersburg in aspirational European style, while Moscow was thought more genuinely ‘Russian’. If Tchaikovsky was the musical equivalent of St Petersburg, Mussorgsky was Moscow.
He wanted to capture the hideous and the beautiful
He had indeed turned towards Russian nationalism after his first visit to Moscow in 1859, when he told Balakirev: ‘I feel a certain regeneration; everything Russian seems suddenly near to me.’ Yet it was less nationalism that inspired him than Realism. He wanted to capture life in all its aspects, the hideous besides the beautiful, the violent as well as the tender, the destruction alongside the creativity.
The closest model for Pictures at an Exhibition is Robert Schumann’s piano cycle Carnaval, highly characterised pieces forming portraits of individuals and situations. The direct inspiration, however, was much darker, haunted by Mussorgsky’s increasing preoccupation with death (which caught up with him seven years later).
Part of Mussorgsky’s problem was poverty, the last of the family fortune having evaporated after the freeing of the serfs by Alexander II in 1861. After quitting the army, he took a job as a civil servant, but still struggled with debt. Another issue was loneliness. He had lived with his mother until her death in 1865; he never got over her loss. He lived for a while with his brother, then shared lodgings with Rimsky-Korsakov until the latter’s marriage.
Death of a close friend
The young poet Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov seems to have been a crucial attachment, inspiring two song cycles, Sunless and Songs and Dances of Death, but again he lost this companion to marriage. Mussorgsky's alcohol dependence worsened, and a further blow came with the death in 1873 of another friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, aged just 39.
Early in 1874, Mussorgsky visited a retrospective exhibition of Hartmann’s works, organised by the art critic Vladimir Stasov at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, which displayed some 400 works including sketches, theatrical designs and architectural drawings. It brought him the idea of capturing the images and his response to them in music. Thus the figure in the promenades is implicitly Mussorgsky himself.
He was possibly buoyed up by his opera Boris Godunov’s successful premiere. He wrote to Stasov: ‘Hartmann is boiling as Boris boiled – sounds and ideas hung in the air, I am gulping and overeating, and can barely manage to scribble them on paper. I am writing the 4th No. – the transitions are good (on the “promenade”). I want to work more quickly and steadily. My own physiognomy can be seen in the intermezzi.’
The paintings were a launchpad for his imagination
Four of the ten Hartmann pictures featured in the work have disappeared, but six of them still exist. Hartmann’s style is late-Romantic, sympathetic, full of delicacy and detail; the burnished colours lean towards warm ochres and greys. Not that Mussorgsky’s interpretations are particularly faithful; instead, he used Hartmann’s pictures as a launchpad for his own imagination.
Unfortunately, Mussorgsky’s fate, and the particular nature of his music, have sparked some startling misconceptions, including some about Pictures. Like many misunderstood geniuses, he was often condemned for not conforming to ideologies that were irrelevant to his artistic vision. In other words, he was criticised for not doing something he had never intended to do in the first place.
Rimsky-Korsakov grumbled about Mussorgsky’s ‘absurd, disconnected harmony’ and ‘strikingly illogical modulation, sometimes a depressing lack of it’. Later, Gerald Abraham, a Mussorgsky expert, wrote: ‘As a musical translator of words and all that can be expressed in words, of psychological states, and even physical movement, he is unsurpassed; as an absolute musician he was hopelessly limited, with remarkably little ability to construct pure music or even a purely musical texture.’
The War of the Romantics
The notion of ‘pure’ music versus music inspired by something extraneous – literature, art, landscape et al – originated in the ‘War of the Romantics’, which probably began when the violinist Joseph Joachim and pianist and composer Clara Schumann (the ‘traditionalists’) fell out with Franz Liszt (the ‘progressive’) in the 1850s. By the time Mussorgsky produced Pictures, a theoretical ideology had taken hold that music that was not ‘pure’ was implicitly impure. It could not be genuine if it existed for any reason outside itself.
This was used for decades as a stick to beat everyone from Liszt to film composers. With distance, the idea of purity starts to look suspect, resembling a society that prohibits interracial marriage. This attitude sometimes informed the suspicion with which some of Mussorgsky’s works were initially received. Yet Mussorgsky had nothing to do with ‘pure’ music – it simply wasn’t his aim.
In his lifetime, Pictures at an Exhibition was neither published nor publicly performed. It only appeared in print in 1886, in an edition by Rimsky-Korsakov full of edits, amendments and unconvincing metronome markings. Ravel’s 1922 orchestration made it an audience favourite, far too late for Mussorgsky to see its success.
Pianists have messed around with Pictures
He probably played it himself to his friends; one surviving comment suggests that it left them baffled. As the music says what it means, without much subtlety, it’s hard to imagine how. But it did not take long for pianists to start mucking around with it.
Many pianists have taken the notion that Mussorgsky was not very good as an excuse to adapt the score in ways they probably would not apply to any other composer. Prokofiev recorded extracts on piano rolls, but seems never to have performed the whole cycle. Harold Bauer, a British-born virtuoso living in New York, gave the Carnegie Hall premiere in 1918, in a much-tweaked version of his own.
The legendary Vladimir Horowitz claimed: ‘I felt the Pictures had to be brought forward. They were too introverted, and this was possibly because Mussorgsky was a little bit of a dilettante, and he was not really a pianist. Ravel orchestrated the work, and I “pianostrated” it. When I change anything, it is only to make a better piano sound. And Mussorgsky did not know how.’
Most people are not really pianists compared to Horowitz, but Sviatoslav Richter was, and he turned that approach on its head. His live recording from Sofia in 1958 was faithful to the composer and no less magisterial for that. Listening to him, you might feel that, contrary to popular opinion, Mussorgsky knew exactly what he was doing.
Mussorgsky died of heart failure a week after his 42nd birthday, cut off in what should have been his prime. If he was poorly understood in his lifetime, the balance has not always been redressed. But there is no better place to start than with Pictures at an Exhibition. As we mark the 150th anniversary of both the work itself and the exhibition that inspired it, it is time to take a wander with the composer around the gallery…
Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition: a guide
Promenade 1
Taking inspiration from a cappella Russian Orthodox church music, Pictures at an Exhibition begins with a solitary line of melody, which is then harmonised. Vladimir Stasov, who wrote summaries of each episode of the work, noted that Mussorgsky depicts himself ‘roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.’ The irregular metre switches between 5/4 and 6/4 time.
Gnomus
The first of the missing Hartmann pictures which, according to Stasov, shows a gnome on crooked legs. Mussorgsky, employing strong dynamic contrasts, frequent pauses and limping rhythms, brings us a grotesque vision, which some interpretations of the composition expand into a nightmarish conception.
Promenade 2
The promenades become musical transitions, forming links that move the listener and the work itself from one state to another. The second promenade begins in the bass, acquiring something of the mystery of the next picture.
The Old Castle
Stasov describes this picture – another of those that are missing today – as ‘A medieval castle before which a troubadour sings a song.’ A heartbeat rhythm underpins Mussorgsky’s representation of it, while a mournful ballad unfolds above it. There is something bleaker in the music, however, than Stasov’s simple description of the picture suggests, and an obsessive quality to the rhythm.
Promenade 3
Eight bars of the promenade appear in a more extrovert version, before…
Tuileries
In Paris’s Tuileries garden, children supervised by an army of nannies call, scamper and chase one another, veering between amusing and plaintive. An abrupt change of mood leads directly onto…
Bydło
A hefty Polish ox-cart is grinding along over the mud, its driver singing. Again, it’s up to the interpreter to decide how monstrous or otherwise to make this. Rimsky-Korsakov’s edition of the score offered a long crescendo and diminuendo as the cart approaches, passes and trundles away. Mussorgsky’s original, however, starts fortissimo.
Promenade 4
High in the treble, ten bars of promenade journey from the heaviest picture towards the lightest…
Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
Hartmann’s sketch showed his design for costumes for a scene in a ballet by the choreographer Marius Petipa, Trilby or The Demon of the Heath, staged at the Bolshoi in 1871. The chicks are canaries; the picture shows a child dancer with torso encased by an egg.
‘Samuel’ Goldenberg and ‘Schmuÿle’
Stasov commented that these were ‘two Jews, one rich, one poor’. Mussorgsky portrays them with Hebraic melodic lines, respectively pompous and miserably quavering, and it is common to see this as anti-Semitic stereotyping; indeed, anti-Semitism was rife through Russia at the time.
Still, two separate Hartmann drawings are involved, the first a detailed, dignified portrait, the other heartbreakingly sorrowful, and Mussorgsky himself owned both. It has been suggested that another Hartmann drawing, whereabouts unknown, was called ‘Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’, with Stasov adding the title to the piece, but the composer’s ownership of the others counts for much.
Promenade 5
Absent from Ravel’s later orchestration, this is the closest yet to a reprise of the work’s first statement, though the second half is shortened.
Limoges: The Market
We have previously paid a visit to Paris in ‘Tuileries’ and will do so again in ‘Catacombs’. Here, we go further south where the eponymous town’s marketplace is bustling with commerce, arguments and bartering – Stasov referred to ‘French women quarrelling violently’. The pianist must evoke all this in rapid, light, staccato chords (very demanding to play). The pace ratchets up until reaching an abrupt stop…
Catacombs
(subtitled ‘With the Dead in a Dead Language’)
Hartmann’s picture showed three dark figures holding a lantern in Paris’s catacombs, with a pitch-black cavern before them. The first section consists of booming chords, followed by hushed ones, exploiting contrast and perhaps echoes. Later the Promenade theme turns eerie, venturing deeper into this face-to-face encounter with death: ‘The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me towards the skulls, invokes them; the skulls begin to glow softly.’
The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga)
Hartmann’s picture is a clock, 14th-century style and full of folksy, carved finesse, based on the legend of Baba Yaga’s hut. Instead, Mussorgsky brings us the inhabitant: the witch herself, in full Night on Bald Mountain mode. Baba Yaga’s flight appears in a ferocious perpetuum mobile, with a lowering middle section full of angular interjections. The movement leads us straight into…
The Great Gate of Kiev
Stasov wrote: ‘Hartmann’s sketch was his design for city gates at Kiev, in the ancient Russian massive style with a cupola shaped like a slavonic helmet.’ The gate was never built (there is another, but less impressive), but Mussorgsky brought it to life in a grandiloquent portrait of the great city, vivid with the pealing and jangling of Orthodox cathedral bells. In Kyiv, in more peaceful times, the air fills with virtually the self-same sounds.
All pics: Getty Images unless otherwise stated. Top pic: Wikimedia Commons
