Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky was the most original of the Russian nationalist composers, and left most of his major works unfinished at his death from alcoholism at forty-two. Born in 1839 to a landowning family in Pskov province, he was a capable pianist as a child, entered the Cadet School of the Guards in St Petersburg, and became an officer. He met Balakirev, Cui, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov and joined the group known as The Five, who set out to create a Russian art music grounded in folk material and the inflections of Russian speech rather than in German technique. He resigned his commission in 1858 to compose. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 ruined the family estate, and from 1863 he worked as a civil servant, composing in what time he had. His masterpiece is the opera Boris Godunov, drafted in 1869 and revised in 1872 after the imperial theatres rejected the first version for lacking a leading female role. Its subject is a tsar destroyed by guilt and a people who suffer regardless of who rules, and its vocal writing follows the contours of spoken Russian with an exactness nobody had attempted. Pictures at an Exhibition, written for piano in 1874 after the death of his friend the architect Viktor Hartmann, is best known in Ravel's orchestration. Night on Bald Mountain and the songs, including the cycle Songs and Dances of Death, complete the essential works. Khovanshchina was unfinished. His drinking worsened, he lost his post, and he died in 1881, days after Repin painted him in hospital. Rimsky-Korsakov edited and smoothed much of his output, and later editors have restored the originals.

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