Wandering the Gallery with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition
The Backstory
Pictures at an Exhibition
I'm Modest Mussorgsky, and this is the backstory of my Pictures at an Exhibition. You'll find out how the death of my friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, led me to write this whole suite for piano in a single month, June 1874. Here on this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces when they play, and you can test yourself in the Trainer .
---
A Sad Day in August
The whole suite begins with a loss, so that's where I'll start. My friend Viktor Hartmann, an artist, died on 4 August 1873 from an aneurysm, and he was only 39. Our friend Vladimir Stasov, a critic who knew us both, soon turned his grief into something practical. That practical thing is the reason this music exists.A Whole Gallery of Hartmann
In February and March 1874, Stasov organised a memorial exhibition at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. It held more than 400 of Hartmann's works, which is a lot of walking for anyone with sore feet. I lent two pictures myself and went to see the show. Moving from one picture to the next, with a pause to take each one in, became the plan for my music.Not the Easiest Year
You might expect a composer to be cheerful in early 1874, because in January my opera Boris Godunov was staged, and that was the high point of my career. Even so, I felt cut off from the Mighty Handful, the circle of composers I used to belong to, and I felt overshadowed by hostile critics. A friend named Golenishchev-Kutuzov later reported that devotees praised the suite while my fellow composers were puzzled by it. He may have been a little biased, so I'd take his account with a pinch of salt.Three Weeks and a Dedication
Once the music came, it came quickly: I wrote the whole suite in June 1874, between the 2nd and the 22nd by one reckoning. I dedicated it to Stasov, who had made the exhibition happen. Five days after I finished, I wrote him a dedicatory tribute. A month after that, I let it be known that I meant to publish the work.How to Read a Musical Gallery
A movement is simply one separate piece within a longer work, much like a room in a gallery, where you finish looking at one thing before you walk into the next. The suite opens with the Promenade, and that tune keeps returning between the pictures, while the ten numbered movements begin with Gnomus, then Il vecchio castello, then Tuileries, then Bydlo. After those come the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, then Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, and then Limoges, which is a bustling market. Catacombae comes next, joined to its second half, Cum mortuis in lingua mortua, and the suite ends with Baba Yaga and finally The Great Gate of Kiev.The Case of the Missing Pictures
Most of Hartmann's pictures have been lost, so it's often unclear which works I had in mind. In 1939 Alfred Frankenstein identified seven of them in an article in The Musical Quarterly, which was careful detective work. The sketch behind Gnomus is only thought to have been a nutcracker design. And the Unhatched Chicks were never chicks in eggs at all, because Hartmann drew costumes for canaries in the ballet Trilby.A Message in Pencil
The most mysterious spot in the suite is the second half of Catacombae, where the Promenade tune returns and becomes part of the music itself. In the manuscript I pencilled a note there that reads "Latin text: With the dead in a dead language." A second note says the spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me toward the skulls. So the walk through the exhibition turns, for a moment, into a very personal conversation with my friend.The Printer Takes Liberties
My suite was not printed until 1886, five years after my death, in an edition prepared by Rimsky-Korsakov and published by V. Bessel & Co. That edition contained errors and misreadings, and it even turned Bydlo around: I began the cart loudly and let it fade away to almost nothing, as if it were rolling off into the distance. Rimsky-Korsakov's edition reverses that, so the cart seems to approach instead. Pavel Lamm restored the text to agree with my manuscript in 1931, and the manuscript itself was published in facsimile in 1975.Ravel Gives It Colour
I wrote the suite for solo piano, but today many people know it best in an orchestral dress. Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel to orchestrate it in 1922, and he conducted the premiere in Paris on 19 October 1922. Ravel's version is the most popular in concert and on record, and it leaves out the fifth Promenade. His Il vecchio castello gives the melody to a bassoon and alto saxophone duet, which suits its sad, faraway mood.One Suite, Many Costumes
Ravel was far from the only musician tempted to rework my pictures. Tushmalov's version was first performed in 1891 and covers only seven of the pictures, Henry Wood made one in 1915, and Leo Funtek's from 1922 was the first complete orchestration. Stokowski followed in 1939, and later came a rock version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, an electronic one by Isao Tomita and a metal one by Mekong Delta. I find it touching that a walk through a friend's exhibition keeps finding new ways to be heard.---
I hope you enjoyed learning about the backstory of Pictures at an Exhibition as much as I enjoyed telling it. I wrote it in a few quick weeks in June 1874, out of grief for a friend and gratitude to the people who kept his work in front of us. Looking back, I find it a comfort that a walk through a gallery could turn into music that people still want to walk through today. The piano suite you've read about is only the beginning, because there is much more to discover in Pictures at an Exhibition. Other musicians have dressed it in new colours, from Ravel's orchestration of 1922 to rock and electronic versions, and each one lets you hear the pictures a little differently. The Hartmann works behind the movements are mostly lost, so some of the stories still leave room for your own imagination. If you're curious, please click on the links on this page and explore Pictures at an Exhibition a little further. I'd be glad to have you back in the gallery whenever you feel like another stroll.