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Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Модест Петрович Мусоргский) (March 21 [O.S. March 9], 1839 – March 28 [O.S. March 16], 1881), one of the Russian composers known as the Five, was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music. Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes, including the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.
For
many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or
completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions
have recently come into their own in their original forms, and some of
the original scores are now also available. Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, Russia, in the province of Pskov, 400 kilometers (249 mi) south-south-east of Saint Petersburg. His wealthy and land-owning family, the noble family of Mussorgsky, is reputedly descended from the first Ruthenian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk.
At age six Mussorgsky began receiving piano lessons from his mother,
herself a trained pianist. His progress was sufficiently rapid that
three years later he was able to perform a John Field concerto and works by Franz Liszt for family and friends. At 10, he and his brother were taken to Saint Petersburg to study at the elite Peterschule (St. Peter's School). While there, Modest studied the piano with the noted Anton Herke. In 1852, the 12 year old Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled "Porte-enseigne Polka" at his father's expense. Mussorgsky's
parents planned the move to Saint Petersburg so that both their sons
would renew the family tradition of military service. To
this end, Mussorgsky entered the Cadet School of the Guards at age 13.
Sharp controversy had arisen over the educational attitudes at the time
of both this institute and its director, a General Sutgof. All agreed the Cadet School could be a brutal place, especially for new recruits. More tellingly for Mussorgsky, it was likely where he began his eventual path to alcoholism. According
to a former student, singer and composer Nikolai Kompaneisky, Sutgof
"was proud when a cadet returned from leave drunk with champagne." Music
remained important to him, however. Sutgof's daughter was also a pupil
of Herke, and Mussorgsky was allowed to attend lessons with her. His skills as a pianist made him much in demand by fellow-cadets; for them he would play dances interspersed with his own improvisations. In
1856 Mussorgsky – who had developed a strong interest in history and
studied German philosophy – successfully graduated from the Cadet School.
Following family tradition he received a commission with the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. In October 1856 the 17-year-old Mussorgsky met the 22-year-old Alexander Borodin while both men served at a military hospital in Saint Petersburg. The two were soon on good terms. Borodin later remembered, "His
little uniform was spic and span, close-fitting, his feet turned
outwards, his hair smoothed down and greased, his nails perfectly cut,
his hands well groomed like a lord's. His manners were elegant,
aristocratic: his speech likewise, delivered through somewhat clenched
teeth, interspersed with French phrases, rather precious. There was a
touch — though very moderate — of foppishness.
His politeness and good manners were exceptional. The ladies made a
fuss of him. He sat at the piano and, throwing up his hands
coquettishly, played with extreme sweetness and grace (etc) extracts
from Trovatore, Traviata,
and so on, and around him buzzed in chorus: "Charmant,
délicieux!" and suchlike. I met Modest Petrovich three or four
times at Popov's in this way, both on duty and at the hospital." More portentous was Mussorgsky's introduction that winter to Alexander Dargomyzhsky, at that time the most important Russian composer after Mikhail Glinka.
Dargomyzhsky was impressed with Mussorgsky's pianism. As a result,
Mussorgsky became a fixture at Dargomyzhsky's soirées. There,
critic Vladimir Stasov later recalled, he began "his true musical life." Over
the next two years at Dargomyzhsky's, Mussorgsky met several figures of
importance in Russia's cultural life, among them Stasov, César Cui (a fellow officer), and Mily Balakirev.
Balakirev had an especially strong impact. Within days he took it upon
himself to help shape Mussorgsky's fate as a composer. He recalled to
Stasov, "Because I am not a theorist, I could not teach him harmony
(as, for instance Rimsky-Korsakov now teaches it) ... [but] I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both Beethoven symphonies [as piano duets] and much else (Schumann, Schubert, Glinka, and others), analyzing the form." Up
to this point Mussorgsky had known nothing but piano music; his
knowledge of more radical recent music was virtually non-existent.
Balakirev started filling these gaps in Mussorgsky's knowledge. In
1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev,
Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music. He
also suffered a painful crisis at this time. This may have had a
spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev the young man referred to
"mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity"), but its exact nature
will probably never be known. In 1859, the 20-year-old gained valuable
theatrical experience by assisting in a production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; he also met Lyadov and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow – after which he professed a love of "everything Russian". In
spite of this epiphany, Mussorgsky's music still leaned more toward
foreign models; a four-hand piano sonata which he produced in 1860
contains his only movement in sonata form. Nor is any 'nationalistic' impulse easily discernible in the incidental music for Serov's play Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the Intermezzo in modo classico for
piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867). The latter was the only
important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: the
reasons for this probably lie in the painful re-emergence of his
subjective crisis in 1860 and the purely objective difficulties which
resulted from the emancipation of the serfs the
following year – as a result of which the family was deprived of half
its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo
unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment. By
this time, Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influence of Balakirev
and was largely teaching himself. In 1863 he began an opera – Salammbô –
on which he worked between 1863 and 1866 before losing interest in the
project. During this period he had returned to Saint Petersburg and was
supporting himself as a low-grade civil servant while living in a
six man 'commune'. In a heady artistic and intellectual atmosphere, he
read and discussed a wide range of modern artistic and scientific ideas
– including those of the provocative writer Chernyshevsky,
known for the bold assertion that, in art, "form and content are
opposites". Under such influences he came more and more to embrace the
ideal of artistic 'realism' and all that it entailed, whether this
concerned the responsibility to depict life 'as it is truly lived'; the
preoccupation with the lower strata of society; or the rejection of
repeating, symmetrical musical forms as insufficiently true to the
unrepeating, unpredictable course of 'real life'. 'Real
life' affected Mussorgsky painfully in 1865, when his mother died; it
was at this point that the composer had his first serious bout of either alcoholism or dipsomania.
The 26 year old was, however, on the point of writing his first
'realistic' songs (including 'Hopak' and 'Darling Savishna', both of
them composed in 1866 and among his first 'real' publications the
following year). 1867 was also the year in which he finished the
original orchestral version of his Night on Bald Mountain (which,
however, Balakirev criticised and refused to conduct, with the result
that it was never performed during Mussorgsky's lifetime).
Mussorgsky's
career as a civil servant was by no means stable or secure: though he
was assigned to various posts and even received a promotion in these
early years, in 1867 he was declared 'supernumerary' – remaining 'in
service', but receiving no wages. Decisive developments were occurring
in his artistic life, however. Although it was in 1867 that Stasov
first referred to the 'kuchka' ('The Five') of Russian composers loosely grouped around Balakirev,
Mussorgsky was by then ceasing to seek Balakirev's approval and was
moving closer to the older Alexander Dargomyzhsky . Since 1866 Dargomïzhsky had been working on his opera The Stone Guest, a version of the Don Juan story with a Pushkin text
that he declared would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner
truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that
abolished the 'unrealistic' division between aria and recitative in favour of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two. Under the influence of this work (and the ideas of Georg Gottfried Gervinus,
according to whom "the highest natural object of musical imitation is
emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech"),
Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of Gogol's Zhenitba (The Marriage),
with his priority being to render into music the natural accents and
patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue.
This work marked an extreme position in Mussorgsky's pursuit of
naturalistic word-setting: he abandoned it unorchestrated after
reaching the end of his 'Act 1', and though its characteristically
'Mussorgskyian' declamation is to be heard in all his later vocal
music, the naturalistic mode of vocal writing more and more became
merely one expressive element among many. A few months after abandoning Zhenitba, the 29 year old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of Boris Godunov. This he did, assembling and shaping a text from Pushkin's play and Karamzin's
history. He completed the large-scale score the following year while
living with friends and working for the Forestry Department. In 1871,
however, the finished opera was rejected for theatrical performance,
apparently because of its lack of any 'prima donna'
role. Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged 'second
version'. During the next year, which he spent sharing rooms with
Rimsky-Korsakov, he made changes that went beyond those requested by
the theatre. In this version the opera was accepted, probably in May
1872, and three excerpts were staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1873. It is often asserted that in 1872 the opera was rejected a second time, but no specific evidence for this exists. By the time of the first production of Boris Godunov in February 1874, Mussorgsky had taken part in the ill-fated Mlada project (in the course of which he had made a choral version of his Night on Bald Mountain) and had begun Khovanshchina.
Though far from being a critical success - and in spite of receiving
only a dozen or so performances - the popular reaction in favour of Boris made this the peak of Mussorgsky's career. From
this peak a pattern of decline becomes increasingly apparent. Already
the Balakirev circle was disintegrating. Mussorgsky was especially
bitter about this. He wrote to Vladimir Stasov, "[T]he mighty Koocha has degenerated into soulless traitors.". In
drifting away from his old friends, Mussorgsky had been seen to fall
victim to 'fits of madness' that could well have been
alcoholism related. His friend Viktor Hartmann had died, and his relative and recent roommate Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (who furnished the poems for the song-cycle Sunless and would go on to provide those for the Songs and Dances of Death) had moved away to get married. While
alcoholism was Mussorgsky's personal weakness, it was also a behavior
pattern considered typical for those of Mussorgsky's generation who
wanted to oppose the establishment and protest through extreme forms of
behavior. One
contemporary notes, "an intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be
almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a
'pose,' for the best people of the [eighteen-]sixties." Another writes,
"Talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink." Mussorgsky
spent day and night in a Saint Petersburg tavern of low repute, the
Maly Yaroslavets, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts. He and his
fellow drinkers idealized their alcoholism, perhaps seeing it as
ethical and aesthetic opposition. This bravado, however, led to little
more than isolation and eventual self-destruction. For a time Mussorgsky was able to maintain his creative output: his compositions from 1874 include Sunless, the Khovanschina Prelude, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (in memory of Hartmann); he also began work on another opera based on Gogol, The Fair at Sorochyntsi (for which he produced another choral version of Night on Bald Mountain). In
the years that followed, Mussorgsky's decline became increasingly
steep. Although now part of a new circle of eminent personages that
included singers, medical men and actors, he was increasingly unable to
resist drinking, and a succession of deaths among his closest
associates caused him great pain. At times, however, his alcoholism
would seem to be in check, and among the most powerful works composed
during his last 6 years are the four Songs and Dances of Death.
His civil service career was made more precarious by his frequent
'illnesses' and absences, and he was fortunate to obtain a transfer to
a post (in the Office of Government Control) where his music-loving
superior treated him with great leniency – in 1879 even allowing him to
spend 3 months touring 12 cities as a singer's accompanist. The
decline could not be halted, however. In 1880 he was finally dismissed
from government service. Aware of his destitution, one group of friends
organised a stipend designed to support the completion of Khovanschina; another group organised a similar fund to pay him to complete The Fair at Sorochyntsi. However, neither work was completed (although Khovanschina, in piano score with only two numbers uncomposed, came close to being finished). In
early 1881 a desperate Mussorgsky declared to a friend that there was
'nothing left but begging', and suffered four seizures in rapid
succession. Though he found a comfortable room in a good hospital – and
for several weeks even appeared to be rallying – the situation was
hopeless. Repin painted
the famous red–nosed portrait in what were to be the last days of the
composer's life: a week after his 42nd birthday, he was dead. He was
interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Mussorgsky,
like others of 'The Five', was perceived as extremist by the Emperor
and much of his court. This may have been the reason Tsar Alexander III personally crossed off Boris Godunov from the list of proposed pieces for the Imperial Opera in 1888. |