Modest Petrovich Musorgsky (1839–1881) was a Russian composer. From 1849 he lived permanently in St. Petersburg. He took piano lessons from Anton Avgustovich Gerke and performed in concerts as a pianist, both solo and in ensemble. In 1879 he made a tour throughout the south of Russia with singer Daria Mikhailovna Leonova, and from 1880 he worked as an accompanist in the vocal school which she founded.
A decisive impact on Mussorgsky’s artistic development was made by his acquaintance with Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (in 1856–57), Mily Balakirev (under whose tutelage he began to study composition seriously) and Vladimir Stasov. The composer’s aesthetical position is inseparably connected with the blossoming of the national self-consciousness during the period of the 1860s, with the outlooks of the Russian revolutionary democrats, and in the 1870s – with the ideas of the “narodniks” or Russian populists.
Mussorgsky became a permanent member of the “Mighty Handful” circle, which proclaimed its goal as a struggle for an original national art. As far back as in his compositions of the late 1850s and early 1860s (the choral works, orchestral works, piano pieces and songs) the features of the composer’s creative individuality had already revealed themselves. Towards the mid-1860s he composed a set of realist vocal pieces depicting life of the common people (on his own texts, as well as those by Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky and others.), which depicted inimitable characters.
The most important position in Mussorgsky’s creative search was taken up by the genre of opera. In 1863–1865 he worked on the opera “Salambo” (based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert, unfinished). A bold experiment of the composer was his opera “The Marriage” (1868, based on the unchanged text of Nikolay Gogol, unfinished). Mussorgsky’s music drama “Boris Godunov,” evoking Russian national themes, was written on The texts of Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Karamzin in 1868–69, second version – in 1872. Originally not accepted by the Directorate of the Imperial Theaters, it was staged only in 1874.
In the1870s the composer was working on the music drama, based on national themes, “Khovanshchina” on a historical plot recommended by Stasov (based on Musorgsky’s own libretto, the piano-vocal score was not orchestrated by the composer) and, simultaneously on the lyrical-comic opera “The Sorochintsï Fair” (based on Nikolay Gogol’s novelette, unfinished). At the same time the composer wrote the two vocal cycles on poems by Arseny Arkadyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov “Sunless” and “Songs and Dances of Death,” as well as “The Nursery” song cycle (text by the composer), songs on the poems of Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy and the piano cycle “Pictures from an Exhibition.”
After the composer’s death, his colleagues and followers worked on completion of his unfinished compositions and the creation of new versions of his works. His compositions include the operas “Salambo,” “The Marriage,” “Boris Godunov,” “Khovanshchina,” “The Sorochintsï Fair;” works for orchestra, including scherzos, intermezzi, “Night on Bald Mountain;” works for piano, including “Pictures from an Exhibition;” works for chorus and orchestra, works for soloists, chorus and piano, works for voice and piano, including the vocal scenes “Svetik Savishna,” “Kalistrat,” “Yeryomushka’s Lullaby” and “The Seminarist” and the vocal cycles “Sunless,” “Songs and Dances of Death” and “The Nursery.”
