Modest Mussorgsky - Biography
Modest Mussorgsky was born on March 21st 1839 in Karovo Russia and died March 28th 1881 in St. Petersburg. Mussorgsky was born into a family of landed gentry who lived in an estate a few hundred miles outside of Saint Petersburg. As was the case in many well to do Russian families of the period his mother was musical and taught him the rudiments of the piano and music at an early age. Mussorgsky was sent to a military school in St. Petersburg to train to become an officer. The regimen in a Russian military academy was brutal, drinking and gambling was common place for even teenage cadets, unfortunately Mussorgsky did not grow out of these habits which eventually led to his death as a derelict at an early age. Mussorgsky during his four years at the military academy did gain greater proficiency as a pianist but he had precious little formal musical training. Upon his graduation at seventeen he was assigned to the Regiment of the Imperial Guard. Mussorgsky during this period was a dapper socially engaging young man unlike the unkempt and alienated figure he was to become in latter life. He developed a friendship with Alexander Dargomyzhsky who was with the exception of Mikhal Glinka the most distinguished Russian composer of the first half of the nineteenth century. As part of the Dargomyzhsky circle he developed a friendship with the Russian music critic Vladimir Stasov who was to have a great influence on him and most of the significant Russian composers of the last forty years of the Nineteenth Century. Two other figures a young composer Mili Balakirev four years older than Mussorgsky and a young military officer Cesar Cui who along with later members of the circle Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov would constitute the great group of Russian Nationalist composers the “Mighty Five”. Mussorgsky first compositions were small piano miniatures modeled after Schumann and far from reflecting the fervent Russophile views of art that he was developing. When he was nineteen he resigned his military commission to enter into intensive musical studies with Balakirev. Mussorgsky somewhere around 1863 broke off his studies with Balakirev and became his own teacher to his advantage and somewhat to his detriment. He worked on an opera based on Flaubert’s Solammbo often and on for three years but was only partially completed. Mussorgsky’s family due to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 lost a sizeable amount of income and he had to support himself with a low paying civil service position. Due to the sudden change in his circumstances he started to have his first serious problems with alcoholism. Ironically at the same time he had a breakthrough as an artist with the composition of the songs the Hopak and Darling Savashina along with the first version of orchestral piece Night on Bare Mountain.
Mussorgsky next operatic project The Marriage based on a Gogol play was only to be partially completed and then abandoned. The following year 1868 he was to embark on what was to be his greatest work Boris Godunov based partially on a play by Pushkin that outlines the reign of the turn of the Seventeenth century Czar. The initial version of 1869 was rejected by the Maiinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg partially because there was no female role or tenor hero. Mussorgsky greatly expanded the opera to include a third “Polish” act that revolved around two new characters the pretender to the throne Dimitri and a Polish princess Marina. This version was completed in 1874. The music and dramatic level of Boris at its finest is almost on the level of Shakespeare. There is confusion about what constitutes a definitive performing edition unequalled in a musical masterpiece. There are performances that end with the scene of Boris’s death others that conclude with the revolutionary scene, there is a tremendous scene at St. Basil’s Cathedral outside the Kremlin that Mussorgsky didn’t orchestrate and repeats material (the Holy Fool’s Lament) that is used in the Revolutionary scene. To add to the confusion the composer’s friend Rimsky Korsakov created a version fifteen years after Mussorgsky’s death that radically re-orchestrates and re- harmonizes the opera. This is the version that has been in common use for over a century. Mussorgsky’s much starker original version has been performed more often since the 1980’s.
Mussorgsky’s most popular work is the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition that was greatly popularized by the brilliant orchestration by Ravel that was done in 1922 for the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Pictures were inspired by the paintings of a friend Victor Hartmann who died at a young age. While the Ravel orchestration is a brilliant masterwork in its own right the original piano work is staggeringly original and in a great performance like the famed Bulgarian live performance by Sviatislav Richter has an overwhelming effect. Mussorgsky songs are at their best are musical equivalents of the chapters from the great Russian writers like Dostoyevsky and Gogol. Amongst the fifty or so songs are the masterful song cycles Sunless, Nursery Songs and The Songs and Dances of Death.
Mussorgsky supported himself by a clerk’s position at the Ministry of Forestry. His alcoholism was becoming more out of control and periodically he descended into bouts of delirium tremens and seizures consistent with epilepsy. His job was eventually lost, his personality became more difficult and isolated he broke with many of his musical colleagues. In the last phase of his career he worked on two operas The Fair at Sorochhynsti and the great monumental Khovanschina a work on a scale even vaster then Boris. Both works remain only partially completed at his the time of his death. The standard performing edition of Khovanschina is by Rimsky Korsakov but there is a brilliant version by Shostakovich.
Multiple seizures landed him in hospital bed that was provided by friends raising money for his support. His condition was too weakened for his health to be restored and died on March 28th 1881 a few days after his forty second birthday. There is a harrowing portrait of Mussorgsky painted by Repin of Mussorgsky in a hospital gown disheveled with his face bloated by alcohol abuse that reflects the tragedy of his life.
As this essay has shown Mussorgsky was an undisciplined artist who remained in many ways a dilettante and refused to acquire a fluent technique because he believed it would affect his originality. This lack of technique and facility caused the wasteland of uncompleted projects. Mussorgsky was often a composer who reached greatness and often juxtaposed the grotesque with the sublime which gives the works modernity and truthfulness that puts him in the league with great literary figures like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.