Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
Composer

A Soldier Who Would Rather Have Been at the Piano

I was born in March 1839 in Karevo, a village in the countryside of the Russian Empire, into a landowning family that liked to say it descended from Rurik, though nobody has ever proved it. My mother gave me my first piano lessons when I was about six, and I took to the keys so quickly that music soon felt like a second language. At thirteen I was sent to the Cadet School of the Guards, because a boy from my kind of family was expected to become an officer, not a musician. I graduated in 1856, joined the Preobrazhensky Regiment, and then resigned in 1858, which was my polite way of telling the army that I had other plans.

Boris Walks Onto the Stage

Before I had much to show for myself, Mily Balakirev took me under his wing and taught me about musical form, though he admitted he couldn't teach me harmony. Around him gathered a group of young composers whom the critic Vladimir Stasov named the "Mighty Handful" in 1867, and I was proud to be counted among them. My real breakthrough was the opera Boris Godunov, which I wrote in 1868 and 1869 about a Russian tsar haunted by his conscience. The Mariinsky Theatre turned it down at first, so I revised it, and when it was finally staged in February 1874 it gave me the success I had been waiting for.

Saint Petersburg and the Desk Job

My city was Saint Petersburg, and I couldn't live on music alone, so I spent years as a low-ranking civil servant. In the 1860s I lived in a "commune" with five other young men, which sounds romantic until you picture six artists sharing the same small space. Later I worked in the Forestry Department while I finished Boris Godunov, and I shared rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov in 1871 and 1872, so I had a fellow composer on the other side of the wall. My last post was at the Office of Government Control, and in 1880 I was dismissed from it.

Two Pieces You Can Hear on This Site

I finished the orchestral version of Night on Bald Mountain in 1867, a wild picture of witches gathering on a hill, but it was never performed while I was alive. The version people usually hear today is the arrangement Rimsky-Korsakov made, so you are hearing my ideas through his hands. In 1874 I wrote Pictures at an Exhibition for solo piano, in memory of my friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, and it feels like walking slowly through a gallery, stopping at one painting after another. Many people know it in the orchestral dress that Ravel gave it in 1922, but I wrote it for one pianist and a single piano.

The Bottle and the Broken Circle

My heavy drinking began in earnest in 1865, after my mother died, and I would be lying if I said I ever got it under control. It grew worse all through the 1870s, and it slowly wore down my health, my discipline and my friendships. By 1875 I had also turned bitter about the Mighty Handful, and I wrote that it had "degenerated into soulless traitors." That is a harsh thing to say about friends, but it shows how alone I felt by then.

A Portrait Just in Time

In early 1881 I had four seizures and suffered delirium tremens, and I ended up in the Nikolaevsky Military Hospital. There, in March, Ilya Repin painted my portrait in four sittings, and I think it captures a tired man who still hasn't lost his spark. I died on 28 March 1881, only a week after my forty-second birthday, so I never saw the final sitting. I was buried at Tikhvin Cemetery in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg, and the portrait now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

My Friends Tidy Up

I left behind a lot of unfinished business, including the opera Khovanshchina, which Rimsky-Korsakov completed and which had its premiere in Saint Petersburg in 1886. That same year Pictures at an Exhibition finally appeared in print, again thanks to his editing, because it had been neither published nor performed in my lifetime. For a long time many of my works were known only in versions revised by others, and Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestrated Boris Godunov in 1896, so my own rougher originals were hidden for years. Now the Moscow State Institute for Art Studies is publishing an Academic Edition of those originals, and composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev were already listening closely to what I had done.

What I Would Like You to Take Away

I don't want you to hear polished perfection in my music, because I never cared much for that. I wanted to write music that sounds like real people, with their fears, their humor and their stubbornness, even when that made it rough around the edges. So when you listen to the witches on their mountain or stroll through the gallery, I hope you feel that someone is speaking to you honestly. If you come away with a picture in your mind, or a small shiver, then I have done what I set out to do.