Modeste Moussorgski

Modest Mussorgsky was born on 21 March 1839 at Karevo in the Pskov province of north-western Russia, into a family of wealthy landowners. He grew up in the countryside among peasants and serfs. His nurse told him Russian fairy tales and legends, which nourished all his work. His mother taught him the piano, and at nine he was already playing a John Field concerto for guests.

Destined for a military career like many young noblemen, he entered the School of Guards Cadets in St Petersburg in 1852. In 1856 he became an officer in the prestigious Preobrazhensky Regiment. There he met the young army doctor Alexander Borodin, who described him as an elegant officer with refined manners, playing extracts from Italian operas on the piano. In 1857 he met the composer Mily Balakirev, who became his teacher and brought him into the circle that would become “The Five”.

In 1858 Mussorgsky left the army to devote himself to music. But in 1861 the abolition of serfdom in Russia ruined his family, which lost much of its income. He had to work as a civil servant in various ministries to live, leaving him little time to compose. He led a difficult life, often in poverty, and already suffered from nervous crises and alcoholism, which worsened over the years.

Mussorgsky wanted truthful music that would reproduce the inflections of spoken Russian and depict the life of the people without embellishment. In 1867 he composed St John’s Night on Bald Mountain, a symphonic picture of a witches’ sabbath. His songs, such as The Nursery (1872), in which he imitates the way a small child speaks, and Songs and Dances of Death (1877), are strikingly original.

His masterpiece is the opera Boris Godunov, after Pushkin’s drama, which tells of a sixteenth-century tsar tormented by remorse for having the young heir to the throne murdered. A first version, completed in 1869, was rejected by the imperial theatre, partly because it had no major female role. Mussorgsky revised it, and the opera was successfully premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1874. The Russian people play a central role in it through great choral scenes.

That same year, 1874, the death of his friend the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann devastated him. After visiting an exhibition of his works, he composed in a few weeks Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano suite in which each piece describes a picture, linked by a “Promenade” representing the visitor walking from one work to the next: the gnome, the old castle, the chicks in their shells, Baba Yaga’s hut, the Great Gate of Kiev. In 1922 Maurice Ravel made a dazzling orchestration that made it famous all over the world.

In his last years Mussorgsky worked on two other operas, Khovanshchina and Sorochintsy Fair, which he was unable to finish. His health declined because of alcohol. In March 1881, a few days before his death, the painter Ilya Repin painted his famous portrait at the military hospital. He died in St Petersburg on 28 March 1881, aged forty-two. His friend Rimsky-Korsakov completed and revised several of his works. His bold musical language deeply influenced Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky.