Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky was largely self-taught, and he made a virtue of it. Born in 1839 into a landowning family and trained for the Preobrazhensky Guards, he was turned towards composition by Mily Balakirev and the circle later known as The Five, and he resisted academic polish wherever he thought it smoothed away the accents of Russian speech or the truth of a dramatic situation. Boris Godunov, after Pushkin, put public scenes, private guilt and the voices of ordinary people on stage without operatic idealisation; Khovanshchina pursued the same experiments and was left unfinished at his death in 1881. The song cycles run from the child's world of The Nursery through Sunless to the austere confrontations of Songs and Dances of Death. Pictures at an Exhibition, written for piano in memory of the architect and designer Viktor Hartmann, reached most listeners through Ravel's orchestration of 1922. Much of the music circulated for decades in versions edited and reorchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, and the twentieth century spent much of its length working back towards what Mussorgsky had actually written — a recovery that only confirmed how far ahead of his contemporaries his ear had been. Night on Bald Mountain belongs to the same body of work, and he set aside the privileges of his birth in order to compose.