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RAVEL AND MUSSORGSKY

Notes on the composers and the pieces

Maurice Ravel
Alborada del gracioso

Maurice Ravel
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

Modest Mussorgsky
Pictures at an Exhibition

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Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition

Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) was born into a wealthy land-owning family in the town of Karevo 250 miles south of Saint Petersburg. At six years old he started piano lessons with his mother, a professional-level pianist. He progressed quickly and was taken to Saint Petersburg to study piano with Anton Gerke and to study German at St. Peter's School. At age 12 he published a piano piece with the odd title of Porte-enseigne Polka (Sign-holder Polka). 

Despite his musical activity, he prepared for a military career by entering the Cadet School of the Guards, only to find that the roughness of the place drove some cadets (and probably Mussorgsky) into excessive drinking. On the plus side, the daughter of the school’s director was also a Gerke student, so Mussorgsky could join her in piano lessons he might otherwise not have been able to take.

After graduating he joined the Russian Imperial Guard. While stationed at a military hospital, he befriended Russian chemist and composer Alexander Borodin, who was on the staff there. Later he met composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who was impressed with his piano playing and introduced him to composers Vladimir Stasov, César Cui, and Mily Balakirev, who introduced him to orchestral music and broadened his knowledge of music and musicians.

After resigning his military commission, the young composer concentrated on composing. Writing under the influence of Western music he wrote a four-hand piano sonata and Intermezzo in Modo Classico for piano, which he later orchestrated. He also began but did not finish incidental music for Vladislav Ozerov’s play Oedipus in Athens.

After Russia’s 1861 emancipation of the serfs cost his family half their estate, Mussorgsky retreated from composing. In 1863 he began an opera based on Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô. Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Vissarion Shebalin helped him with orchestration, but after his mother died in 1865, he lost interest, increased his drinking, and left the commune where he was living. He composed some of his better known songs and Night on Bald Mountain, but Balakirev rejected Bald Mountain, and it was not performed in the composer's lifetime. In 1876 Mussorgsky moved to St. Petersburg and worked irregularly as a civil servant. 

Many 19th Century Russian composers are thought of as groups, e.g. Mikhail Glinka and Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky; Anatoly Liadov, Sergei Taneyev, and Aleksandr Glazunov; Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov were known as The Five or The Mighty Handful, a group who worked to free Russian music from Western influence. Meanwhile, Mussorgsky read and discussed many artistic and scientific ideas including Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s claim that art was a gateway to realism, and “form and content are opposites.” Eventually he moved away from the Balakirev group and closer to composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who dismissed the “unrealistic” division between aria and recitative in favor of continuous declamation between the two.  Dargomyzhsky’s opera Stone Guest would be set “so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted.” Another influence, German philosopher Georg Gottfried Gervinus, believed that “the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech.”

As for composing, Mussorgsky set the first eleven scenes of Nikolai Gogol’s play Zhenitba (Marriage) into an opera using patterns of dialogue, but he abandoned the idea after completing the first act. Next appeared the opera Boris Godunov, where he employed text from Alexander Pushkin’s play, but it was rejected because it lacked a prima donna role. His first revision of Boris was also rejected, but the second was accepted, and three excerpts from it were staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1872.

In 1874, Mussorgsky took part in the Mlada opera-ballet project¹ (not to be confused with the Mlada written by Rimsky-Korsakov). Meanwhile, the Balakirev circle was breaking up, his friend Viktor Hartmann died, deaths among other close associates caused him great pain, and another friend moved away.

At work, a transfer to the Office of Government Control put him under a music-loving superior who treated him well and allowed him to spend three months touring. When he was sober, he managed to write Songs and Dances of Death, but his job suffered from frequent “illnesses” and absences. Friends supported his effort to complete Khovanshchina, but all he produced was a near complete piano score.

Those setbacks probably aggravated his alcoholism. He all but lived in a Saint Petersburg tavern where social dropouts saw drinking as rebelling. Even so, he began thepiano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, and completed The Fair at Sorochyntsi, the song cycle Sunless, and the prelude to the Khovanshchina. After seizures of delerium tremens and a life of begging, Modest Mussorgsky died at age 42.

In Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a visitor to Saint Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Arts views an exhibit of works by Viktor Hartmann, who was an architect, painter, and friend of Mussorgsky. Ten of its movements describe individual pictures, and four Promenade movements depict the visitor’s movement about the exhibit. Mussorgsky wrote the work for piano, but it is best known in its orchestral scoring by French composer Maurice Ravel. (Many other orchestrations have appeared, but Ravel’s is performed most frequently.)

• Promenade 1: A solo trumpet announces the visitor's presence with the noble signature theme of the work. The heavyish uneven meter portrays the visitor's somewhat awkward pacing.
• Gnomus: A design for a wooden nutcracker in the form of a gnome with huge jaws
• Promenade 2: Instead of a trumpet, this more gentle Promenade is introduced by a solo French horn.
• Old Castle: The bassoon begins a sad song that also features the alto saxophone in one of the suite's longer portraits.
• Promenade 3: A solo trumpet announces its presence; the rest of the trumpets and the trombones answer followed by the full orchestra.
• Tuileries depicts a garden created by Catherine de Medici at the Tuileries Palace in Paris. After the opening description, children play and frolic.
• Bydło (Polish for ox cart): A Polish peasant drives an ox cart that lumbers with ponderous rhythm and a tuba solo.
• Promenade 4: Light textures produced mostly by woodwinds.
• Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks: Chicks dance while wearing eggshell costumes.
• Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle: Samuel Goldenberg is a rich merchant represented by heavy strings and low brass; Schmuÿle is a beggar portrayed by nagging muted trumpets. This title is a revision of “Two Polish Jews, One Rich, the Other Poor.”
• The Market at Limoges: Peasant women bustle in the city market of Limoges.
• Catacombs: A funereal, weighty picture of the Roman Catacombs. A memory of the Promenade is recalled near the end. Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (with the dead in a dead language) depicts skulls of the Catacombs set aglow through Hartmann’s spirit.
• The Hut on Fowl’s Legs: A witch lives in a hut supported by chicken legs. In this picture she is riding on a broom like a demon. This music leads without pause to...
• The Great Gate of Kyiv: By far the most impressive, powerful, and brass-filled picture with chants, bells, and a final appearance of the Promenade theme in the trumpets.

—Roger Hecht

Roger Hecht plays trombone in the Mercury Orchestra. He is a former member of Bay Colony Brass (where he was also the Operations/Personnel Manager), the Syracuse Symphony, Lake George Opera, New Bedford Symphony, and Cape Ann Symphony, as well as trombonist and orchestra manager of Lowell House Opera, Commonwealth Opera, and MetroWest Opera. He is a regular reviewer for American Record Guide, contributed to Classical Music: Listener’s Companion, and has written articles on music for the Elgar Society Journal and Positive Feedback magazine. His fiction collection, The Audition and Other Stories, includes a novella about a trombonist preparing for and taking a major orchestra audition (English Hill Press, 2013).

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