Witching Hour Secrets of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain
The Backstory
Night on Bald Mountain
I'm Modest Mussorgsky, and I'm delighted to tell you the backstory of Night on Bald Mountain. You'll learn how a witches' tale began as an opera plan, and how the music I finished in June 1867 never reached an audience while I was alive. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces when you hear them, so come and put yourself to the test in the Trainer.
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A Witch Story Before There Was a Piece
My first idea for this music wasn't a piece for orchestra at all, but an opera. On 25 December 1858 I wrote up a plan for an opera called St. John's Night, based on a tale by Gogol called St. John's Eve. Gogol had a gift for mixing village life with the supernatural, and I couldn't resist that. So the witches were already on my desk long before anyone could hear them.A Letter and a Lost Play
In 1860 I wrote to my mentor Balakirev about an act built around the Bald Mountain theme. It was meant to come from a drama called The Witch by Baron Georgiy Mengden, which is now lost. Whether I ever wrote a single note for that project, nobody knows. It may have been only a plan, which happens to composers more often than we like to admit.Twelve Days in the Country
The idea became a real orchestral piece in 1866, when I conceived it as a tone poem, which is simply a single piece of music that tells a story. I was 28 and part of a circle of composers called The Five, all of us eager to write music that sounded properly Russian. I began orchestrating on 12 June 1867 and finished on 23 June, at a farm called Minkino in the Luga district. That was the eve of St. John's Day, so I finished the witches' night just as the real one was starting.A Title You Wouldn't Recognize
My original title was St. John's Eve on Bald Mountain, which is a bit longer than the name you know today. In Russian it's Ночь на Лысой горе, and in English you'll sometimes see it called Night on the Bare Mountain. It was one of the first Russian tone poems, and it came out in the same year as Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko. I had four parts planned, and together they were meant to follow one wild night from beginning to end.The Teacher Said No
I was proud of the score, so I showed it to Balakirev and waited for his approval. He criticised it harshly and refused to perform it, which was a real blow. I wasn't in the best shape then either, since my dependence on alcohol had been growing and was slowing my progress. In the end I set the piece aside, and for a while it simply sat there.Recycling, Mussorgsky Style
I hated to waste good music, so I gave it new lives. In 1872 I reworked it with vocal soloists and chorus for an opera-ballet called Mlada, though that score is lost today. Then I reshaped it once more as a choral scene, the "Dream Vision of the Peasant Lad", for my opera The Fair at Sorochyntsi. The piano-vocal score of that version is dated 10 May 1880.The Silent Premiere
Here comes the sad part, which is that I died in 1881. In all my life I never heard this music performed in any form, not the tone poem and not the later versions. I had written it, rewritten it and carried it around for years, and it never reached an audience while I was alive. That still seems unfair to me, even from where I'm standing.A Friend Tidies Up
Fortunately my friend Rimsky-Korsakov took up my last version, the one from The Fair at Sorochyntsi, and made a fantasy for orchestra out of it in 1886. He gave it a calm ending, using music from Gritsko's aria in the same opera, so the night closes gently and not in a blaze. It was first played in October 1886 at Kononov Hall in St. Petersburg, and it was an immediate success. It runs about 12 minutes and became a concert favourite, and Bessel published it that same year with a dedication to Vladimir Stasov.Whose Piece Is It, Anyway?
People still argue about how much of the familiar version is mine. Some scholars see it as largely a new piece by Rimsky-Korsakov, built on the last way I treated the music. My own original tone poem waited until 1968 to appear in print, edited by Georgiy Kirkor. So when you hear the popular version, you're hearing my ideas through a friend's careful hands.The Goat-Shaped Guest Star
In 1940 the piece reached a huge new audience when Leopold Stokowski arranged it for Disney's Fantasia. He kept Rimsky-Korsakov's form but chose an orchestration closer to mine, which I appreciate. At the centre of that sequence is Chernobog, the "black god", an infernal Slavic figure often shown as a goat. The film then pairs it with Schubert's Ave Maria, so the night ends in a calmer place than it began.---
I never got to hear Night on Bald Mountain played by an orchestra, not once in my lifetime, so it moves me that you've come along with it now. Looking back, that piece traveled a long road, from an opera plan to a tone poem, then to a choral scene, and finally to the concert piece that Rimsky-Korsakov shaped after I died. I hope that long road made the music feel a little more alive for you. Did you enjoy learning about the backstory of Night on Bald Mountain? There is still plenty more to discover about it. For example, you can explore how the original 1867 version differs from the one most people know, or how Leopold Stokowski gave the music a new life in Fantasia. If you'd like to keep exploring, please click on the links provided and carry on with Night on Bald Mountain. I'd be glad to have you listen again, and to hear something new each time.