Classical Net - Basic Repertoire List - Mussorgsky Modest Mussorgsky (1839 - 1881) Along with Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky , the greatest Russian composer of the Nineteenth Century, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (March 9, 1839 - March 16, 1881) was born into a wealthy rural, landowning family. He began by picking out on the piano the tunes he heard from the serfs on his family's estate. At the age of six, he began to study piano with his mother. His parents initially set him out on the career of military officer. He became a cadet and finally commissioned in an elite imperial regiment. Two years later, in 1858, he resigned his commission. During this time, he met a musically-inclined army doctor: Alexander Borodin . The two became friends. In 1861, with Russia's emancipation of the serfs, his family lost significant income, and he was forced to earn a living.

In 1863, he began a spotty career in the civil service, which dismissed him at least twice. In 1856, he met the composer Dargomïzhsky, who in turn introduced him to Cesar Cui, Mily Balakirev, and a critic named Victor Stasov. Gradually, Borodin and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakoff joined to form a loose group known as the "Moguchaya Kuchka" ("the mighty handful" or "the mighty bunch"). All but Stasov nursed ambitions to compose, and all had very definite ideas about what Russian music should be. None of them had formal training in composition. Balakirev and Mussorgsky essentially taught themselves by playing through piano-duet arrangements of orchestral scores. For Russian composers of the time, this was not unusual. Neither Mikhail Glinka , the founder of the nationalist school, nor Dargomïzhsky had formally studied. After all, the first Russian music conservatory had been founded only relatively recently. All were, to one degree or another, amateurs. Rimsky, for example, was a naval officer, Borodin a doctor and chemist.

Most writers consider Tchaikovsky the first great Russian composer to have had thorough academic training along German lines. Mussorgsky absorbed these main ideas of the Kuchka: Russian music should express the Russian soul. Russian music should be written in a Russian way. The latter idea meant mainly a rejection of German classical forms in favor of one-off, "organic" forms. Instead of a form determining the nature of the musical materials, the materials shaped the forms – bottom-up, rather than top-down. The Kuchka got these ideas from German Romantic aestheticians and revered those artists who wrote accordingly, like Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz . Mussorgsky learned composition mainly by doing. His early efforts are in the expected short forms: songs, piano morceaux, and so on. His "apprentice" instrumental works, with the exception of his remarkable Intermezzo in modo classico (1862, describing Russian peasants stepping on and sinking into snowdrifts), are things you could get from just about anybody at the time. However, most of his early songs owe little to any predecessor.

Practically from the get-go, Mussorgsky found something original, even among Russian composers, which may arise from the fact that he alone of all the Kuchka grew up in the country, away from the city. He actually heard serfs sing daily as part of his normal environment, and the "crudities" that others tended to soften attracted him in the first place. He also had larger ambitions, encouraged by Balakirev and Stasov. He began several opera projects: an Oedipus (1858-61), a Salammbô (1863-66); and most notably The Marriage (1868), based on Gogol. He completed none of them, for one reason or another, but all of them bore fruit in later works, either by providing numbers Mussorgsky re-used or, in the case of The Marriage, clarifying his ideas of word-setting. He first thought that music should set the patterns of speech "realistically," as Dargomïzhsky had first theorized. While this was fine for songs, The Marriage convinced Mussorgsky that it would not work over a longer span, and he abandoned the opera after composing one act.

Much of the rest of is career is spent finding new expressive ways to create a melody, especially for the stage. Nevertheless, The Marriage counts as the most radical experiment in musical realism among the Russian nationalists. In 1867, Mussorgsky also composed St. John's Night on Bald Mountain (usually called Night on Bald Mountain), depicting a gathering of witches and demons for a black sabbath. While one can cite predecessors like Berlioz and Liszt for such an idea, nobody had come up with such crazy sounds before – shattering dissonance and wild cries as savage as anything in Igor Stravinsky 's Rite of Spring, more than four decades in the future. Mussorgsky revised it at least twice to fit it into later, unrealized projects – Mlada (1872, a group opera by the Kuchka never completed) and the composer's own unfinished opera Sorochintsï Fair. After his abandonment of The Marriage, Mussorgsky began working on a Stasov suggestion, the opera Boris Godunov.

The composer completed a version in 1869 and submitted it to the Mariinsky Theater, who rejected it, mainly due to the fact that Mussorgsky had provided no role for a prima donna. Mussorgsky took back the score and at once began to revise it, altering the work far beyond what the theater had asked for. In general, he moved from the musical realism of the first version to a folk-based arioso, extremely subtle and flexible dramatically. He resubmitted his new version in 1872. The theater accepted it, and after some wrangling with the censor, Boris premiered in 1874. This was to provide Mussorgsky his greatest public triumph. He was considered the young man to watch. However, all did not go smoothly. In 1865, following his mother's death, Mussorgsky began to go on drinking binges. He would disappear for days, even weeks at a time and turn up on friends' doorsteps physically ill. He had to borrow money to drink. In 1880, he lost his government sinecure. Even the lax imperial bureaucracy could no longer tolerate his unreliability.

Nevertheless, he continued to compose, almost up to the end. However, he completed very little and left two operas, Khovanshchina and Sorochintsï Fair incomplete. He never was a steady worker. Throughout his career, he composed in a white-hot rush and then seemed to fall into lassitude, during which time he mainly drank. His behavior, always a bit eccentric, degenerated into the erratic. His landlord kicked him out in the street for failure to pay rent. He showed up at the door of a friend, who took him in. However, after suffering seizures, he was moved to a hospital, where he seemed to rally, but it turned out he had bribed an orderly to bring him cognac. He died after roughly a month, at the age of 42. Because he began late and died young, almost all of Mussorgsky's music can be considered early work. Yet he progressed at a frankly incredible rate, went through at least three major changes of style, and even conducted successful "one-off" experiments. His songs lie at the center of his achievement and form the basis of much of his dramatic work.

There's an astonishing variety, from "realistic" portraits, to evocation of peasant song, dramatic monologues (from a child) in The Nursery (1870), psychological expressionism and a non-Wagnerian chromaticism in Sunless (1874), and a new pre- Mahler poetry in Songs and Dances of Death (1877). Instrumental works play less of a role, although even here he wrote masterpieces: the aforementioned Night on Bald Mountain and the piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). If he had composed only the last, he would be considered an eminence in Russian music. The piece is new not only in its details (bar-by-bar meter changes, startlingly original chord progressions and piano textures) but in its form – Romantic character-pieces linked by interludes varying a basic theme, with the final variation absorbed into the last character-piece. Mussorgsky was recognized by both the Kuchka and Tchaikovsky (who came to oppose the Kuchka) as a powerful musical force. However, none of them knew quite what to make of him.

Rimsky-Korsakoff, for example, regarded some of his friend's boldest strokes as mistakes, particularly in his harmonies. As a labor of love and at considerable cost to his own career, he went about revising Mussorgsky's major works including Boris, Khovanshchina, Night on Bald Mountain, and part of Pictures. For many years, the only performances of these works were in Rimsky's editions, and to a great extent Rimsky kept Mussorgsky's name alive in the concert halls and on the opera stages. However, the myth grew of Mussorgsky the naïve genius, a pure heart who found his way to artistic truth despite his lack of skill. Scholars have pretty much shot down this myth. Mussorgsky was, if anything, too intellectual, too knowledgeable about contemporary aesthetic philosophy, too self-conscious, to the extent that his mental wrestling with himself cut down even further on his composing. However, he knew what he wanted and felt it his job to flesh out his artistic intuitions. "To new shores" became his motto. As new editions of scores have appeared, what Mussorgsky actually wrote is supplanting what his nineteenth-century editors thought he should have written.

Yet the editions by Rimsky-Korsakoff are beautiful in their own way, and I would think it a shame if they disappeared forever in an excess of scruple. After all, these versions – so "scholarly incorrect" – all by themselves exerted tremendous influence, turning Mussorgsky into an avatar of Modernism, particularly in France with Claude Debussy , Maurice Ravel , Ernest Bloch , and even Stravinsky. Mussorgsky's music challenged the hegemony of German and Italian music in the Nineteenth Century and lay outside the standard Brahms -vs.- Wagner fight. He opened up a new musical path and a new aesthetic attitude. However, it's not his innovations alone that make him so important. Boris Godunov is arguably one of the three greatest operas of its time, the work of a musical dramatist of genius. Mussorgsky's songs, so little known in the West mainly due to language difficulties, put the composer in the exalted company of Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler, and show a greater variety of expression than all three. Patronized by the Nineteenth Century, the composer became a hero to the Twentieth.

~ Steve Schwartz Recommended Recordings Modest Mussorgsky Profile March 9, 1839 - Karevo, Russia Died: March 16, 1881 - St. Petersburg, Russia Mussorgsky Quick Facts: Mussorgsky was part of a group of composers referred to as The Five . The other four members were César Cui, Aleksandr Borodin, Mily Balakirev, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Their goal was to create a national school of Russian music that existed entirely without western influences. It was to be its own style of music with its own set of rules. Towards the end of Mussorgsky's life, he became an alcoholic. Finding himself alone on too many occasions, he turned to alcohol to comfort his emotions. Unfortunately, this led to several alcoholic epilepsies and multiple trips to the hospital. Mussorgsky's Family and Childhood: Mussorgsky was born to a wealthy, land-owning family (though their wealth was barely a few generations old; his great-grandparents were serfs). Mussorgsky's mother was a skilled pianist and began teaching him when he was young.

continue reading below our video Celebrity Breakups of 2015 We Didn't See Coming By the time he was 7 years old, he became quite proficient and was performing works by Franz Liszt, albeit moderately easy ones. In 1849, his father enrolled him and his brother into St. Peter's School, where he studied piano with Anton Herke, along with his general studies. In 1852, he entered into the Imperial Guards Cadet School where his published his first piece, Porte Enseigne Polka. Mussorgsky's Teenage Years: In 1856, he joined the Preobrazhensky Regimentmost, Russia's most elite regiment. Mussorgsky met many officers who shared similar musical passions. He met Aleksandr Borodin, a future member of the The Five. Borodin, along with the other cadets, liked having Mussorgsky around as he would often play the piano at parties; the ladies would woo and sigh over him. The course of Mussorgsky's musical career changed when he was introduced to Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky, one of Russia's leading composers. Mussorgsky began developing his own Russian musical style.

In 1858, he quit the army to devote his life to music. Mussorgsky's Early Adult Life: With his father's death in 1853, the freeing of the serfs, and a career in music, Mussorgsky family wealth had essentially dried up. Mussorgsky often turned to borrowing money to make ends meet, and lived in a small "six-man commune." In 1863, he took a low-level civil servant position within the Ministry of Communications. By this time, Mussorgsky was largely teaching himself music. He worked on several operas, Salammbo and The Marriage, but failed completing them after losing interest. He later used passages from Salammbo within his more famous opera, Boris Godunov. In 1867, he completed Night on Bald Mountain . Mussorgsky's Mid-Adult Life: Mussorgsky had developed a taste for alcohol, likely picked up from cadet school. Several years prior, in 1865, his mother died. He lived briefly with his brother, before moving into a small flat with another composer. Though he was a member of The Five, his lifestyle remained quite different.

Many of his works remained unfinished. His opera, Boris Godunov was started in 1868, but it took nearly four years of off-and-on again commitment to the piece before it was finally finished and performed in 1974. It was a large success for Mussorgsky. However, it was downhill for Mussorgsky from there. Mussorgsky's Late Adult Life: When The Five began meeting less and less, Mussorgsky started feeling bitter. He would often have fits of madness, largely due to alcoholism . He had begun to fall away from his friends, a close friend of his had died, and another had moved away to get married. Mussorgsky fell deeper into depression and isolation. However, he still managed to compose several pieces of music. He even toured to multiple cities as an accompanist for an aging singer. Sadly, in 1871, he experienced three consecutive alcoholic epilepsies and was taken to the hospital. While there, he had his portrait painted. He died a month later.

Well Known Works by Modest Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain (1867) The Nursery (1868) Pictures from an Exhibition (1874) Songs and Dances of Death (1875) Name Modest - The Meaning Of The Name The Meaning Of The Name Toggle navigation Name: Modest Gender: Female Usage: Modest is not a popular first name. It is more often used as a girl (female) name. People having the name Modest are in general originating from Russia, United States of America. To test the compatibility of this name with another, enter a name and click The Growth number corresponding to this first name is 22. Interpretation: Learn more with our free Numerology Tool Popularity of the Name The name Modest is ranked on the 50,216th position of the most used names. It means that this name is rarely used. We estimate that there are at least 3100 persons in the world having this name which is around 0.001% of the population. The name Modest has six characters. It means that it is relatively medium-length, compared to the other names in our database.

We do not have enough data to display the number of people who were given the name Modest for each year. We do not have a name day for Modest.

For other names check our Name Day Calendar a number of Saints, see under Saint Modest (disambiguation) Michael Modest (born 1971), semi-retired American professional wrestler Modest (e-mail client), a free, open source, e-mail client modest (adjective) People with the given name Modest: Modest of Carinthia, Saint, 8th century Modest (bishop of Trier) (died 489), German saint Modest Altschuler (1873–1963), cellist, orchestral conductor, and composer Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1850–1916), Russian dramatist, opera librettist and translator Modest Morariu (1929–1988), poet, essayist, prose writer and translator Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), Russian composer Modest Romiszewski (1861–1930), military theorist Modest Schoepen (Bobbejaan Schoepen) (1925–2010), Belgian singer-songwriter, entertainer and founder of

 the Bobbejaanland amusement park.

Modest Urgell (1839–1919), Spanish painter, illustrator, and playwright Modesty Blaise Fictional comic book character. Russian: from the Late Latin personal name Modestus, originally a byname from a vocabulary word meaning ‘moderate, restrained, obedient, modest’ (a derivative of modus (due) measure, moderation). The name was borne by half a dozen early saints, including a child martyred at Alexandria in Egypt together with his brother Ammonius, and an 8th-century evangelist of Carinthia. Cognates: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian: Modesto. See also Szerény . Pet form: Russian: Desya. The section "History and Origin" of this page contains content from the copyrighted Wikipedia article " Modest "; that content is used under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) . You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Modest Mussorgsky and Maurice Ravel, Composers | Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Modest Mussorgsky and Maurice Ravel Composers Biography Modest Mussorgsky Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (March 21, 1839 – March 28, 1881; sometimes spelt Modeste Moussorgsky), was an innovative Russian composer famed for his colourful, exotic, and lush orchestral pieces dedicated to various subjects of medieval Russian history. His major works include the great national opera, Boris Godunov, and the piano suite called Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky's family descended from the first Russian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk. Modest was prepared by his parents for the military career, but under the influence of Mily Balakirev quit the service and joined The Five, a group of composers dedicated to promoting a distinctly Russian kind of music. His first published works were an unfinished opera Salambbo and a cycle of songs. During his lifetime, Mussorgsky was but little known, lived in dismal poverty and shared his lodging with the fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

He died from alcohol intoxication on March 28, 1881 and was interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Rimsky-Korsakov then completed and recomposed some of Mussorgsky's works, and these were made famous through the criticism of Vladimir Stasov. The striking novelty of Mussorgsky's original compositions had not been rediscovered until the mid-20th century, when Dmitri Shostakovich reorchestrated his two operas on the Muscovite history, Boris Godunov (based on Pushkin's play of the same title) and Khovanshchina. One of Mussorgsky's wildest and most barbaric pieces (as the contemporary critics put it) is the orchestral work St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain, which was made famous in the US by its appearance in Disney's Fantasia. His most imaginative and frequently performed work is the cycle of piano pieces, describing pictures in sound and called Pictures at an Exhibition. This composition, best known through an orchestral arrangement by Maurice Ravel, was written in commemoration of his friend, the architect Viktor Hartmann.

Among his other works are a number of songs, including three song cycles: The Nursery (1872), Sunless (1874) and Songs & Dances of Death (1877). Sunless lends its title to the 1982 film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. The significance of the reference is not readily apparent, but the connection is acknowledged explicitly by Marker towards the end of the film. Source: 8 Notes Maurice Ravel Ravel was born in Ciboure, France (near Biarritz, part of the French Basque region, bordering on Spain). His mother was Basque while his father was a Swiss inventor and industrialist. At seven years old, young Maurice begun piano lessons and composed pieces beginning about five or six years later. His parents encouraged his musical pursuits and sent him to the Conservatoire de Paris, first as a prepratory student and eventually as a piano major. During his schooling in Paris, Ravel joined with a number of innovative young composers who referred to themselves as the 'Apaches' because of their wild abandon. The group was well known for its drunken revelry. He studied music at the Conservatoire under Gabriel Fauré for a remarkable fourteen years.

During his years at the conservatory, Ravel tried numerous times to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, but to no avail. After a scandal involving his loss of the prize, even though he was considered the favorite to win that year, Ravel left the conservatory. The incident also lead to the resignation of the Conservatoire's director. Ravel was influenced by composer Claude Debussy; likewise, the same held true with Debussy in respect to Ravel. Ravel along with Debussy were the defining composers of the movement. Ravel was also highly influenced by music from around the world including American Jazz, Asian music, and traditional folk songs from across Europe. Ravel was not religious and was probably an atheist. He disliked the overtly religious themes of other composers, such as Richard Wagner, and instead preferred to look to classical mythology for inspiration. Ravel never married, but he did have several long-running relationships. He was also known to frequent the bordellos of Paris. During the First World War Ravel was not allowed to enlist because of his age and weak health and instead he became an ambulance driver. He had very few students which included Maurice Delage and Vaughan Williams.

In 1932 Ravel was involved in an automobile accident that severely undermined his health. His output dropped dramatically. In 1937 he had an neuro-operation that he hoped would restore much of his health, but the operation was a failure and he died soon afterwards. Ravel considered himself in many ways a classicist. He relied on traditional forms and structures as ways of presenting his new and innovative harmonies. He often masked the sections of his structure with transitions that would disguise the beginnings of the motif. This is apparent in his Valses nobles et sentimentales — inspired by Franz Schubert's collections, Valses nobles D 969 and Valses sentimentales D 779 — where the seven movements begin and end without pause, and in his chamber music with many movements are in sonata-allegro form, hiding the change from developmental sections to recapulation. On the surface, he was influenced by Debussy, but also the music of Russia, Spain and the jazz music of the United States, as reflected in the movement titled Blues from his only string Trio.

Ravel has almost always been considered one of the two great French musical Impressionists (the other being Debussy), but in reality he is much more than that. In his A la maniere de...Borodine (In the manner of...Borodine), Ravel plays with the ability to both mimic and remain original. In a more complex situation, A maniere de...Emmanuel Chabrier /Paraphrase sur un air de Gounod('Faust IIeme acte'), Ravel takes on a theme from Gounod's Faust (opera) and arranges it in the style of Emmanuel Chabrier. Even in writing in the style of others, Ravel's own voice as a composer remained distinct. Ravel wrote, in 1928, that composers should be aware of both individual and national consciousness. That year, Ravel had toured the United States and Canada by train performing piano recitals in the great concert halls of twenty-five cities. In their reluctance to take jazz and blues as a nationalistic style of music, he stated America's composers' 'greatest fear is to find themselves confronted by mysterious urges to break academic rules rather than belie individual consciousness.

Thereupon these musicians, good bourgeois as they are, compose their music according to the classical rules of the European epoch.' When American composer George Gershwin met Ravel, he mentioned that he would have liked to study with the French composer if that were possible. The Frenchman retorted, 'Why should you be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?' His two piano concertos in many ways reflect the style of Gershwin. Of the Concerto in G, Ravel said the concertos mozart and Saint-Saens served as his model. He intended to write an earlier concerto, Zazpiak Bat, but it was never finished. The Basque title for 'Seven of One' reflects his Basque heritage, and this was a motto often used in connection with the idea of a Basque nation. Surviving notes and fragments also confirm that this naturally was to be heavily influenced by Basque music. Instead, Ravel abandoned the piece using its nationalistic themes and rhythms in some of his other pieces. Ravel commented that it was André Gédalge, his professor of counterpoint, was very important in the development of his skill as a composer.

As an orchestrator, Ravel studied the ability of each instrument carefully in order to determine the possible effects. This may account for the success of his orchestral transcriptions, both his of own piano works and those of other composers. Ravel had very meticulously crafted manuscripts. Unfortunately, early printed editions of his works were prone to errors. Painstakingly, he would work with his publisher, Durand, in correcting them. In a letter, Ravel wrote that when proofing L'enfant et les sortilèges, after many other editors had proofread the opera, he could still find ten errors per page. Each piece was carefully crafted, although Ravel wished he could write the great quantity of works like the historical composers he admired. Igor Stravinsky once referred to Ravel as the 'Swiss Watchmaker', a reference to the intricacy and precision of Ravel's works. Modest Mussorgsky: History's Most Trolled Composer | Houston Press Modest Mussorgsky: History's Most Trolled Composer Remember Me Or sign in with a social account: FACEBOOK GOOGLE + TWITTER YAHOO! Don't have an account yet? Sign Up › Connect. Discover. Share.

Get the most out of your experience with a personalized all-access pass to everything local on events, music, restaurants, news and more. Enter your email or sign up with a social account to get started FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ YAHOO! Don't have an account yet? Sign Up › Modest Mussorgsky: History's Most Trolled Composer Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 8 a.m. Print Article This week would have been the 128th birthday of one of Russian's most famous composers, Modest Mussorgsky. Some of you might know him as the composer of Pictures at an Exhibition, but all of you know him for A Night on Bald Mountain (sometimes translated as A Night on the Bare Mountain). Specifically, you know him because Walt Disney used Mussorgsky's score to put together one of the greatest animated sequences of all time in Fantasia . If Mussorgsky had been a metal musician in the '80s, we'd probably never mention Dio again. This work is literally one guitar solo away from causing dragons and Valkyries to leap out of your speakers and wrestlle over your soul like it was a chew toy.

It's impossible to think that anyone could listen to that and say anything to Mussorgsky except, "In what order shall we send the groupies this evening, sir?" Impossible, but believe it or not, Mussorgsky was perhaps the most trolled composer ever. The son of a wealthy and noble family, Mussorgsky left the military in his twenties to pursue a career in music. This career was not very successful, and despite hobnobbing with some of Russia's highest social personalities he died fairly unknown, drunk, and almost broke. So what, you may say, many a genius is unappreciated in his lifetime. Upcoming Events Tickets Fri., Feb. 3, 7:30pm True, but Mussorgsky composed like a man with no legs walks up stairs. Take Bald Mountain, for instance. He started working on it in 1858 and was still not done when he died in 1881. He simply couldn't decide whether to write an opera, a tone poem, a piano concerto, or what.

The version you hear performed today is one that his friend Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov - yes, the Flight of the Bumblebee guy - arranged in 1886. The Fantasia arrangement was cobbled together by Leopold Stokowski, who conducted the orchestra in the movie and on the soundtrack. Mussorgsky never lived to hear his most famous work performed. Apparently, this tortuous path to creation was fairly typical for Mussorgsky, and many of his works were Frankensteined together into their known forms by later composers who were fans. This failing on Mussorgsky's part led to a lot of criticism. A whole lot. Having been on the rough end of a few commenters before, even Rocks Off was floored by some of the following snide remarks. Viktor Hartmann's Paris Catacombs, the basis for Movement No. 8 of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition Public Domain I have no use whatever for Mussorgsky. All in him is flabby and dull. He is, I think, a perfect idiot. Were he left to his own devices and no longer under your strict supervision, he would soon run to seed as all the others have done. There is nothing in him.

- Vladimir Stasov to Mussorgsky's teacher Mily Balakirev Yes, Mussorgsky is little short of an idiot. - Balakirev in response They were very defective, teeming with clumsy, disconnected harmonies, shocking part-writing, amazingly illogical modulations or intolerably long stretches without ever a modulation, and bad scoring... what is needed is an edition for practical and artistic purposes, suitable for performances and for those who wish to admire Mussorgsky's genius, not to study his idiosyncrasies and sins against art. - Rimsky-Korsakov on Mussorgsky's scores, which he would later edit Mussorgsky, you might very rightly say, was a hopeless case. In talent he is perhaps superior to all the other members of The BIg Five [a group of Russian composers who regularly met in St. Petersburg from 1856-70] but his nature is narrow-minded, devoid of any urge towards self-perfection, blindly believing in the ridiculous theories of his circle and in his own genius. In addition, he has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, roughness... He flaunts...

his illiteracy, takes pride in his ignorance, mucks along anyhow, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent which are, moreover, not devoid of originality. - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Mussorgsky, in his vocal efforts, appears willfully eccentric. His style impresses the Western ear as barbarously ugly. - Critic Edward Dannreuther For the millions of fans who first learned that classical music can be as badass as any Iron Maiden hit through Bald Mountain, we'd just like to tell the shade of Mussorgsky happy birthday, and never mind what some of the most celebrated Russian composers said about you. Their work ain't the background music for one of the best bosses in Kingdom Hearts. That beats Swan Lake in our book. Follow Rocks Off on Facebook and on Twitter at @HPRocksOff . Jef is a contributing writer who covers politics, pop culture, social justice, video games, and online behavior. He is often a professional annoyance to the ignorant and hurtful. Contact: MUSSORGSKY : PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION Pictures at an Exhibition 5. Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells 6.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle 7. Limoges: The Market Place 8. Catacombae -Cum mortuis in lingua mortua 9. The Hut on Fowl's legs 10. The Great Gate of Kiev Night on the Bare Mountain Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (1833 -1887) Polovtsian Dances (from Prince Igor) In the Steppes of Central Asia The later nineteenth century was the great age of nationalism in Russia, a period in which the Russian language became a fit vehicle for the work of great novelists and poets and in which music sought development through recourse to Russian traditions, sacred and secular. There was a curious ambivalence, apparent in music as elsewhere in the cultural and political life of the country. On the one hand Western Europe seemed to offer a model to follow, the course embraced by Anton Rubinstein and composers of a more cosmopolitan turn of mind: on the other hand Russia was seen as the saviour of Europe, with a messianic role opposed to the decadent West.

The Five, the group of Russian nationalist composers under the leadership of Balakirev, nick-named by the polymath librarian Stasov "the Mighty Handful", involved themselves in the creation of a truly Russian form of music. Balakirev himself deplored the foundation of what he saw as German-style conservatories, established in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 1860s by the Rubinstein brothers, but it was difficult to defend his followers against a charge of amateurism or dilettantism. While Balakirev himself had musical training and was a musician by profession, apart from a brief interruption of his career, when religious melancholia induced him to work for the state railways. Rimsky-Korsakov, who was to acquire considerable technical skill, particularly in orchestration, was at first a naval officer; Cesar Cui was a professor of military fortification; Borodin was a research chemist, and Mussorgsky, when he left the army, became a monstrously incompetent and unreliable civil servant. Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born in 1839, the son of a land-owner.

As a young officer he had musical ambitions, and without any training in composition tried his hand at an opera, as well as lesser compositions for the entertainment of his friends. It was a meeting with Cui and with the composer Dargomizhsky that led him to a more influential association with Balakirev and Stasov. After leaving the army, Mussorgsky held various positions in the civil service. At his death in 1881, the result of epilepsy induced by alcoholism, he left a great deal unfinished, including the opera Khovanshchina, later completed by Rimsky-Korsakov, who took it upon himself to serve as musical executor to both Mussorgsky and Borodin. His great Russian opera Boris Godunov was to be revised by Rimsky-Korsakov, who applied his technical abilities to smoothing out apparent crudities in this and other works.

Pictures at an Exhibition, a set of piano pieces written in 1874, is intensely original in its use of texture, and has lent itself well enough to re- arrangement for all the colour of a full orchestra, as here in the most famous orchestration of the work by Maurice Ravel The work commemorates an exhibition of the work of the artist Victor Hartmann, who had died a year before, the exhibits linked by a Promenade, with which the work opens. The first picture is a design for nut-crackers in the shape of a gnome, and the second of an old castle, before the gates of which a troubadour sings. The visitor moves on to a picture of the Tuilleries Gardens, where children quarrel and play and nursemaids gossip, and this is followed by a picture of a Polish peasant ox-cart, its heavy wooden wheels slowly turning. The Promenade leads now to a costume sketch for children, chickens in their shells, with arms and legs protruding, and to a picture of two Jews, one rich and one poor, a present from Hartmann to the composer, who invented his own names for the two represented.

In the market at Limoges old women gossip, discussing the fate of an escaped cow and more trivial nonsense, as Mussorgsky suggested. The Catacombs, subtitled Sepulchrum Romanum, are lit by a flickering lamp. The skulls stacked on each side begin to glow, lit from within, as the music sets out to suggest the eerie scene, with the dead, in the language of the dead. The macabre continues in the clock in the form of a hut on fowl's legs, the hut of the Russian witch Baba Yaga, who crunches the bones of her victims and flies through the night on a pestle. The triumphant conclusion shows a design for the Great Gate at Kiev, a monument to commemorate the escape of Tsar Alexander II from the hands of assassins in 1866. The music contrasts the solemnity of a liturgical procession with the massive domes and columns of the projected gateway. The origin of the orchestral piece Night on the Bare Mountain lies in music written for a play, The Witch, by a friend from Mussorgsky's time in the army. The composer later had the idea of writing an opera on a story by Gogol, St. John's Eve.

In 1867, dismissed for the moment from the civil service, he found the leisure to write an orchestral work based on the material he had composed to depict a witches' sabbath, held on the eve of the Feast of St. John, at mid-summer, on Bare Mountain. Mussorgsky was to make use of the same music five years later for an abortive stage-work, in which he collaborated with Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Cui. As seems usual on these occasions, the witches' celebration starts with relative decorum, before proceeding to more characteristic activities. Throughout Mussorgsky derives his inspiration from Russian folk-song, an element never far from the musical idiom he employed. Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, his name and patronymic taken, according to custom, from one of the prince's serfs. He was brought up by his mother, who later married a retired army medical officer. Borodin studied at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, where he made his subsequent career ~ a professor of chemistry, his work internationally known and respected.

He died of a heart-attack at the age of 53 during the course of a fancy-dress ball given by the professors of the Academy. Borodin's professional career left him relatively little time for music. His first symphony had occupied him intermittently between 1862 and 1867, while the second, started in 1869, reached its final form twelve years later. From 1870 on-wards he worked at his opera Prince Igor, for which Stasov had sent him a scenario, writing music and words piece-meal, but without ever providing himself with a full libretto. At his death in 1887 the opera was still unfinished and was to be filled out by Rimsky-Korsakov and his young colleague Glazunov as best they could. The Polovtsian Dances make up a sequence of choral dances in the second act of the opera, where they provide entertainment for the Tartar Khan's prisoners, Prince Igor and his son.

The opening dance was orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov and the remaining dances by the composer, all making use of rhythms of enormous vitality and melodic material that suggests vividly the scene in all its barbarous energy. In the Steppes of Central Asia, described by the composer as "a musical picture", was written in 1882. It depicts the journey of a caravan through Central Asia, with a Russian theme joining with an oriental theme, as two groups meet on their long journey. The piece, the result of a commission from several composers for music to illustrate a pageant of events in the reign of Alexander II, proved enormously popular. Borodin dedicated the work to Liszt.

Modest Mussorgsky | Russian composer | Britannica.com Modest Mussorgsky Alternative Titles: Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky, Modest Petrovich Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Modest Mussorgsky Mily Balakirev Modest Mussorgsky, in full Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Mussorgsky also spelled Musorgsky or Moussorgsky (born March 9 [March 21, New Style], 1839, Karevo, Russia—died March 16 [March 28], 1881, St. Petersburg ), Russian composer noted particularly for his opera Boris Godunov (final version first performed 1874), his songs, and his piano piece Pictures from an Exhibition (1874). Mussorgsky, along with Aleksandr Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui , was a member of The Five , a group of Russian composers bound together in the common goal of creating a nationalist school of Russian music .

Modest Mussorgsky, portrait by Ilya Repin, 1881; in the Gosudarstvennaya Tretyakovskaya Galereya, … The Bettmann Archive Life and career Mussorgsky was the son of a landowner but had peasant blood, his father’s grandmother having been a serf. According to his autobiographical sketch, written in 1881, Mussorgsky learned about Russian fairy tales from his nurse. “This early familiarity with the spirit of the people, with the way they lived, lent the first and greatest impetus to my musical improvisations.” His mother, herself an excellent pianist, gave Modest his first piano lessons, and at seven he could play some of Franz Liszt’s simpler pieces. In August 1849 his father took Modest and his other son, Filaret, to St. Petersburg, where Modest attended the Peter-Paul School in preparation for a military career. At the same time, mindful of Modest’s musical bent, their father entrusted the boys to Anton Gerke, future professor of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

In 1852 Mussorgsky entered the School for Cadets of the Guard. There, in his first year he composed his Podpraporshchik ( Porte-Enseigne Polka), published at his father’s expense. Although not the most industrious of students, he gave proof of tremendous curiosity and wide-ranging intellectual interests. In 1856, by now a lieutenant, Mussorgsky joined the Preobrazhensky Guards , one of Russia’s most aristocratic regiments, where he made the acquaintance of several music-loving officers who were habitués of the Italian theatre. During this same period he came to know Aleksandr Borodin , a fellow officer who was to become another important Russian composer. Borodin has provided a very vivid picture of the musician: There was something absolutely boyish about Mussorgsky; he looked like a real second-lieutenant of the picture books … a touch of foppery, unmistakable but kept well within bounds. His courtesy and good breeding were exemplary . All the women fell in love with him. … That same evening we were invited to dine with the head surgeon of the hospital.

… Mussorgsky sat down to the piano and played … very gently and graciously, with occasional affected movements of the hands, while his listeners murmured, “charming! delicious!” Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent During the winter of 1856 a regimental comrade introduced Mussorgsky into the home of the Russian composer Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky . At one of the musicales there, Mussorgsky discovered the music of the seminal Russian composer Mikhail Glinka , and this quickened his own Russophile inclinations. Three years later, in June 1859, he saw the Moscow Kremlin for the first time, an important experience that represented his first “physical” communion with Russian history. Through Dargomyzhsky, Mussorgsky met another composer, Mily Balakirev , who became his teacher. Since the death of their father (in 1853), the Mussorgsky brothers had seen their poorly administered patrimony decrease substantially. With the freeing of the serfs in 1861, it vanished.

Having decided to devote himself to music, Modest Mussorgsky had quit the army three years earlier and since 1863 had been working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communications. His distressing financial troubles date from that time, and he had to seek the help of moneylenders. Mussorgsky achieved artistic maturity in 1866 with a series of remarkable songs about ordinary people such as “Darling Savishna,” “Hopak,” and “The Seminarist,” and an even larger series appeared the following year. Another work dating from this time is the symphonic poem Ivanova noch na Lysoy gore (1867; Night on Bald Mountain). In 1868 he reached the height of his conceptual powers in composition with the first song of his incomparable cycle Detskaya ( The Nursery) and a setting of the first few scenes of Nikolay Gogol’s Zhenitba ( The Marriage). Music: Fact or Fiction? In 1869 he began his great work Boris Godunov to his own libretto based on the drama by Aleksandr Pushkin .

The first version, completed in December 1869, was rejected by the advisory committee of the imperial theatres because it lacked a prima donna role. In response, the composer subjected the opera to a thorough revision and in 1872 put the finishing touches to the second version, adding the roles of Marina and Rangoni as well as several new episodes. The first production of Boris took place on February 8, 1874, at St. Petersburg and was a success. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies In 1865, after the death of his mother, he lived with his brother, then shared a small flat with the Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov until 1872, when his colleague married. Left very much alone, Mussorgsky began to drink to excess, although the composition of the opera Khovanshchina perhaps offered some distraction (left unfinished at his death, this opera was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov). Mussorgsky then found a companion in the person of a distant relative, Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov.

This impoverished 25-year-old poet inspired Mussorgsky’s two cycles of melancholy melodies, Bez solntsa ( Sunless) and Pesni i plyaski smerti ( Songs and Dances of Death). At that time Mussorgsky was haunted by the spectre of death—he himself had only seven more years to live. The death of another friend, the painter Victor Hartmann, inspired Mussorgsky to write the piano suite Kartinki s vystavki ( Pictures from an Exhibition ; orchestrated in 1922 by the French composer Maurice Ravel ). The last few years of Mussorgsky’s life were dominated by his alcoholism and by a solitude made all the more painful by Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s marriage. Nonetheless, the composer began his opera Sorochinskaya yarmarka (unfinished; Sorochintsy Fair), inspired by Gogol’s tale. As the accompanist of an aging singer, Darya Leonova, Mussorgsky departed on a lengthy concert tour of southern Russia and the Crimean Peninsula . On his return he tried teaching at a small school of music in St. Petersburg.

On February 24, 1881, three successive attacks of alcoholic epilepsy laid him low. His friends took him to a hospital where for a time his health improved sufficiently for one of the leading Russian artists of the day, Ilya Repin , to paint a famous portrait of him. Mussorgsky’s health was irreparably damaged, however, and he died within a month, shortly after his 42nd birthday. Music Mussorgsky’s importance to and influence on later composers are quite out of proportion to his relatively small output. Few composers were less derivative, or evolved so original and bold a style. The 65 songs he composed, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian life with great vividness and insight and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language . Mussorgsky’s operas Boris Godunov and to a lesser extent Khovanshchina display his dramatic technique of setting sharply characterized individuals against the background of country and people. His power of musical portrayal, his strong characterizations, and the importance he assigned to the role of the chorus establish Boris Godunov as a masterpiece.

From a technical standpoint, Mussorgsky’s unorthodox use of tonality and harmony and his method of fusing arioso and recitative provide Boris Godunov with great dramatic intensity. Connect with Britannica Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839 - 1881) - Genealogy Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Share your family tree and photos with the people you know and love Build your family tree online Share photos and videos Karevo, Toropets, Pskov region, Russia Death: Mar 9 1839 - Karevo, Pskovskaya Oblast', Russia Death: Petr Alekseevich Mussorgskii, Iulia Ivanovna Mussorgskii (born Chirikova) Siblings: ...etrovich Mussorgskii, Mr. Mussorgsky, Aleksei Petrovich Mussorgskii, Modest Mussorgsky, Mussorgsky, Mussorgsky, and name of one more sib ... Boris Godunov - Coronation Scene Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky ( Моде́ст Петро́вич Мýсoргский; 21 March [O.S.

9 March] 1839 – 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1881) was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music. Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes. Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have recently come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available. Life Early years Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, Toropets, Pskov region, Imperial Russia, 400 km (250 mi) south of Saint Petersburg. His wealthy and land-owning family, the noble family of Mussorgsky, is reputedly descended from the first Ruthenian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk.

At age six Mussorgsky began receiving piano lessons from his mother, herself a trained pianist. His progress was sufficiently rapid that three years later he was able to perform a John Field concerto and works by Franz Liszt for family and friends. At 10, he and his brother were taken to Saint Petersburg to study at the elite Peterschule (St. Peter's School). While there, Modest studied the piano with the noted Anton Gerke. In 1852, the 12-year-old Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled "Porte-enseigne Polka" at his father's expense. Mussorgsky's parents planned the move to Saint Petersburg so that both their sons would renew the family tradition of military service. To this end, Mussorgsky entered the Cadet School of the Guards at age 13. Sharp controversy had arisen over the educational attitudes at the time of both this institute and its director, a General Sutgof. All agreed the Cadet School could be a brutal place, especially for new recruits. More tellingly for Mussorgsky, it was likely where he began his eventual path to alcoholism.

According to a former student, singer and composer Nikolai Kompaneisky, Sutgof "was proud when a cadet returned from leave drunk with champagne." Music remained important to him, however. Sutgof's daughter was also a pupil of Herke, and Mussorgsky was allowed to attend lessons with her. His skills as a pianist made him much in demand by fellow-cadets; for them he would play dances interspersed with his own improvisations.[5] In 1856 Mussorgsky – who had developed a strong interest in history and studied German philosophy – successfully graduated from the Cadet School. Following family tradition he received a commission with the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Maturity In October 1856 the 17-year-old Mussorgsky met the 22-year-old Alexander Borodin while both men served at a military hospital in Saint Petersburg. The two were soon on good terms. Borodin later remembered, His little uniform was spic and span, close-fitting, his feet turned outwards, his hair smoothed down and greased, his nails perfectly cut, his hands well groomed like a lord's.

His manners were elegant, aristocratic: his speech likewise, delivered through somewhat clenched teeth, interspersed with French phrases, rather precious. There was a touch—though very moderate—of foppishness. His politeness and good manners were exceptional. The ladies made a fuss of him. He sat at the piano and, throwing up his hands coquettishly, played with extreme sweetness and grace (etc) extracts from Trovatore, Traviata, and so on, and around him buzzed in chorus: "Charmant, délicieux!" and suchlike. I met Modest Petrovich three or four times at Popov's in this way, both on duty and at the hospital." More portentous was Mussorgsky's introduction that winter to Alexander Dargomyzhsky, at that time the most important Russian composer after Mikhail Glinka. Dargomyzhsky was impressed with Mussorgsky's pianism. As a result, Mussorgsky became a fixture at Dargomyzhsky's soirées.

There, critic Vladimir Stasov later recalled, he began "his true musical life." Over the next two years at Dargomyzhsky's, Mussorgsky met several figures of importance in Russia's cultural life, among them Stasov, César Cui (a fellow officer), and Mily Balakirev. Balakirev had an especially strong impact. Within days he took it upon himself to help shape Mussorgsky's fate as a composer. He recalled to Stasov, "Because I am not a theorist, I could not teach him harmony (as, for instance Rimsky-Korsakov now teaches it) ... [but] I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both Beethoven symphonies [as piano duets] and much else (Schumann, Schubert, Glinka, and others), analyzing the form." Up to this point Mussorgsky had known nothing but piano music; his knowledge of more radical recent music was virtually non-existent. Balakirev started filling these gaps in Mussorgsky's knowledge.

In 1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev, Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music. He also suffered a painful crisis at this time. This may have had a spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev the young man referred to "mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity"), but its exact nature will probably never be known. In 1859, the 20-year-old gained valuable theatrical experience by assisting in a production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; he also met Anatoly Lyadov and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow – after which he professed a love of "everything Russian". In spite of this epiphany, Mussorgsky's music still leaned more toward foreign models; a four-hand piano sonata which he produced in 1860 contains his only movement in sonata form.

Nor is any 'nationalistic' impulse easily discernible in the incidental music for Serov's play Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the Intermezzo in modo classico for piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867). The latter was the only important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: the reasons for this probably lie in the painful re-emergence of his subjective crisis in 1860 and the purely objective difficulties which resulted from the emancipation of the serfs the following year – as a result of which the family was deprived of half its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment. By this time, Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influence of Balakirev and was largely teaching himself. In 1863 he began an opera – Salammbô – on which he worked between 1863 and 1866 before losing interest in the project.

During this period he had returned to Saint Petersburg and was supporting himself as a low-grade civil-servant while living in a six-man "commune". In a heady artistic and intellectual atmosphere, he read and discussed a wide range of modern artistic and scientific ideas – including those of the provocative writer Chernyshevsky, known for the bold assertion that, in art, "form and content are opposites". Under such influences he came more and more to embrace the ideal of artistic realism and all that it entailed, whether this concerned the responsibility to depict life "as it is truly lived"; the preoccupation with the lower strata of society; or the rejection of repeating, symmetrical musical forms as insufficiently true to the unrepeating, unpredictable course of "real life". "Real life" affected Mussorgsky painfully in 1865, when his mother died; it was at this point that the composer had his first serious bout of either alcoholism or dipsomania. The 26-year-old was, however, on the point of writing his first realistic songs (including "Hopak" and "Darling Savishna", both of them composed in 1866 and among his first "real" publications the following year).

1867 was also the year in which he finished the original orchestral version of his Night on Bald Mountain (which, however, Balakirev criticised and refused to conduct, with the result that it was never performed during Mussorgsky's lifetime).

Question: What was the most used first name of the composer Mussorgsky (1839-1881).
Answer: MODEST