Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
Pictures Of A Troubled Genius
John Schauer
Associate Director of Communications, Publications
Ravinia Festival
Born on March 21, 1839, in Karevo, Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
has become the poster-boy for the misunderstood genius whose work is derided in
his own lifetime but resurrected and appreciated by later generations.
Pictures at an Exhibition, his only large work for piano, is in some ways
typical of the bulk of his compositional output: now considered a repertoire standard,
it wasn’t published until five years after his death and was subsequently ignored
for nearly half a century, winning popularity only after it was arranged by another
composer—in this case, Maurice Ravel, who created an orchestral transcription in
1923.
[Van Cliburn Competition winner Noboyuki Tsujii will perform the piano version on
June 3 in the Martin Theatre, as will Russian keyboard wizard Vladimir Feltsman
on July 3; Ravinia Music Director James Conlon will conduct the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra in a performance of the Ravel orchestration on July 8 in the pavilion.]
Mussorgsky is also emblematic of the tragic consequences of alcoholism, which prevented
him from finishing the majority of his works and ultimately led to his premature
death at the age of 42. The most famous image of him, a portrait by I.E. Repin painted
only weeks before Mussorgsky’s death, vividly depicts the ravages of his addiction.
Today he is most highly regarded for his songs and operas, in which he developed
a new form of declamation that faithfully replicated the cadences of actual speech;
his greatest achievement is the opera Boris Godunov. Although Mussorgsky
finished not one but two different versions of this work (the only opera he actually
completed), it did not gain acceptance into the international operatic repertoire
until it was revised and re-orchestrated by his colleague Rimsky-Korsakov, another
member of the “Mighty Handful” of Russian nationalist composers.
Although the title character of Boris Godunov was a tsar of Russia, in the
opinion of many the true protagonist is the people of Russia, the common folk with
which Mussorgsky so strongly identified and so vividly depicted in his songs. According
to an autobiographical sketch that he wrote in the last months of his life, he first
developed a predilection for Russian folk-life through the fairy tales that were
told to him by his nurse. Although he was the son of a prosperous landowner, Mussorgsky
was descended from peasant stock—his paternal grandfather had been a serf—and a
burning desire to depict the reality of peasant life became a ruling priority for
the rest of his life.
Palace Square, St. Petersburg, Russia
He displayed prodigious gifts as a pianist, receiving his first lessons from his
mother and later studying privately, but he seems not to have pursued music as a
profession, instead enrolling in the Cadet School of the Guards in St. Petersburg.
Later, at age 17, he entered the Preobrajensky Guards, a prestigious regiment that
was less a military force than a congregation of hard-drinking aristocrats from
whom Mussorgsky acquired his fatal attraction to intoxication.
During his first months with the guards he made the acquaintance of Alexander Borodin,
who later recorded his first impressions of Modest: “M.P. was at that time quite
boyish, very elegant, the very picture of an officer; brand-new, close-fitting uniform,
shapely feet, sleek, pomaded hair, immaculate nails and aristocratic hands. Refined,
aristocratic manners, conversation the same, sprinkled with French phrases, rather
affected. Some traces of foppishness, but very moderate. Extraordinarily polite
and well-bred. The ladies made a fuss over him.”
Within a year he had met the composers Alexander Dargomyzhsky and César Cui, who
in turn introduced him to Mili Balakirev and Vladimir Stasov. Though not a composer
himself, Stasov was a respected critic, historian and champion of the nationalist
movement in the arts; as such he became a powerful influence on the composers who
would later form the “Mighty Handful” under the leadership of Balakirev. It was
Balakirev, however, to whom Mussorgsky turned for musical instruction, but his studies
consisted primarily of performing four-hand piano arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies,
with no formal training in harmony or counterpoint, important components of composition
that Mussorgsky never really mastered. Nonetheless, he tried his hand at composing
small pieces for piano and vocal songs.
Portrait of Composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov.
In 1858 Mussorgsky resigned from the guards to pursue music full-time, and by 1861
he was part of Balakirev’s circle along with Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov. Though all
of them were essentially amateurs, there seemed to be agreement within the circle
that, while he was a competent singer and pianist, Mussorgsky was most lacking in
compositional skill. In 1863 Stasov wrote to Balakirev, “What is there for me in
Mussorgsky? . . . I didn’t hear from him a single idea or a single word expressed
with real profundity of understanding, with the profundity of a raptured, moved
soul. Everything about him is flabby and colorless. To me he seems a perfect idiot.”
By the end of that year, financial difficulties forced Mussorgsky to take a civil
service job, toiling in the engineering department of the Ministry of Communications.
He had already joined a commune, sharing a flat with five other young intellectuals
who reinforced in each other an obsession with “artistic truth,” through which art
was to be subordinated to life. He began and abandoned work on an opera based on
Flaubert’s Salammbô but did complete several songs that bore testament to
his flair for ironic comedy and musical satire. One of them, “The Seminarist,” so
shocked the censors with its “blasphemous” depiction of the erotic musings of a
theological student, that he was denied permission to publish it. Other examples
include “You Drunken Sot!” in which a woman chastises her inebriated husband; and
“Darling Savishna,” which poignantly portrays the plight of a crippled village idiot
who attempts to express his love for a beautiful woman.
Mussorgsky once wrote, “It is the people I want to depict, sleeping or waking, eating
and drinking, I have them constantly in my mind’s eye; again and again they rise
before me in all their reality—huge, unvarnished, with no tinsel.” His drive to
reproduce naturalistic speech resulted in his using irregular and even multiple
rhythms. His lack of knowledge of the principals of tonal harmony led him to employ
disjoined blocks of harmony, unusual intervals, abrupt modulations and free dissonances
that, while they made sense to him, befuddled his own colleagues.
Mussorgsky’s emotional crisis over his mother’s death exacerbated his drinking problem,
culminating in an attack of delirium tremens and his departure from the commune,
after which he moved in with his brother. By autumn of 1866 he returned to St. Petersburg
and the group that had only recently taken up the name the “Mighty Handful”; by
1866-67 he had become more closely acquainted with Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he
would eventually share an apartment and at whose wedding he served as best man.
In his posthumously published memoir, My Musical Life, Rimsky admitted some
admiration for Mussorgsky’s songs, but added that “His ideal style lacked a suitable
crystal-like finish and graceful form. This he lacked because he had no knowledge
of harmony and counterpoint. At first Balakirev’s circle ridiculed these needless
sciences, and then declared them beyond Mussorgsky. And so he went through life
without them and consoled himself by regarding his ignorance as a virtue and the
technique of others as routine and conservatism.”
In 1868 Mussorgsky embarked upon another operatic project, a setting of Gogol’s
comedy The Marriage, but this went no further than a vocal score of the first
act. It was while he was still working on that aborted venture that he met V.V.
Nikosky, an authority on the works of Pushkin who suggested that Modest compose
on opera based on the poet’s play dealing with the life of Boris Godunov, who had
ruled Russia as tsar from 1598 to 1605. Today hailed as the pinnacle of Russian
music-drama, Mussorgsky’s opera was rejected by the Musical-Theater Committee of
the Imperial Theaters when he submitted it in 1871. By June of the following year
he had made extensive revisions and additions to the score in accordance with the
criticisms of the committee, which nonetheless also rejected the revised version.
Through private readings of the score and personal connections, Mussorgsky did see
the work finally premiered in 1874—the year he composed Pictures at an Exhibition
and the year that Rimsky-Korsakov identified as “the beginning of Mussorgsky’s decay,”
a process he describes in his memoir:
The most famous image of him, a portrait by I.E. Repin painted only weeks before
Mussorgsky’s death
“With the production of Boris the gradual decadence of its highly gifted author
had begun. Flashes of powerful creativity continued for a long time, but his mental
logic was growing dim, slowly and gradually . . . His friends and companions, Borodin,
Cui and I, still loved him as before and admired whatever was good in his compositions,
but we took critical measure of much else of his. The press . . . scolded him continually.
Under these circumstances, his craving for cognac and desire to lounge in taverns
till the small hours grew stronger day by day . . . Though still keeping up friendly
relations with Cui and Borodin as well as with me, Mussorgsky regarded me with a
certain suspicion. My studies in harmony and counterpoint, which had begun to absorb
me, did not please him at all.”
In early 1875 Mussorgsky began composing the song-cycle Songs and Dances of Death,
another of the few works he would finish (two additional operas, Khovanshchina,
begun in 1872, and Sorochintsy Fair, begun in 1874, would be left unfinished).
He made use of a three-month leave from his government post in 1879 to make a provincial
tour with contralto Darya Leonova, an old friend, performing her piano accompaniments
and playing keyboard transcriptions from his own operas. He appeared with her again
the following year, having lost his government job, and taught briefly at a music
school she started in St. Petersburg.
It was in Leonova’s house that he suffered a series of epileptic fits brought on
by his alcoholism in February 1881, after which he was taken to a military hospital.
Rimsky-Korsakov describes Mussorgsky’s last days: “On learning of the misfortune
that had befallen Mussorgsky, we—Borodin, Stasov, myself and many others—began to
visit the patient . . . He was frightfully feeble, had greatly changed, and had
turned gray. Rejoicing at our visits, he occasionally talked with us altogether
normally; yet suddenly he would pass into a mad delirium. Thus things went for some
time; at last, at night, March 28, he died, apparently from paralysis of the heart.
His powerful organism proved to have been completely undermined by alcohol.”
The unfinished autobiographical note Mussorgsky started in the last months of his
life, for a music dictionary that was under preparation, sums up his artistic accomplishments
rather accurately. Writing of himself in the third person, he candidly states, “Mussorgsky
cannot be classed with any existing group of musicians, either by the character
of his compositions or by his musical views. The formula of his artistic profession
of faith may be explained by his view, as a composer, of the task of art: art is
a means of communicating with people, not an aim in itself. This guiding principle
has defined the whole of his creative activity.”
Continue – Mussorgsky’s Music After
His Death