About this Piece

Although anxious to pursue the study of music, Modest Mussorgsky was trained for government service, and had to forage around as best he could for a musical education. Considering his limitations—an insecure grasp of musical form, of traditional harmony, and of orchestration—it is no wonder he suffered from profound insecurity. A victim of alcoholism, he died at 46 but left a remarkably rich legacy— authentic, bold, earthy, and intensely vivid Russian music.

Pictures at an Exhibition proved to be a welcome rarity in Mussorgsky’s anguished experience—a composition born quickly and virtually painlessly. Reporting to his friend Vladimir Stasov about the progress of the original piano suite, Mussorgsky exulted: “Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord. Like roast pigeons in the story, I gorge and gorge and overeat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” The fevered inspiration was activated by a posthumous exhibit in 1874 of watercolors and drawings by the composer’s dear friend Victor Hartmann, who had died suddenly the previous year at the age of 39. Mussorgsky’s enthusiastic and reverent homage to Hartmann takes form as a series of musical depictions of 10 of the artist’s canvases, all of which hang as vividly in aural space as their visual progenitors occupied physical space.

As heard most often in present-day performances, Pictures wears the opulent apparel designed by Maurice Ravel, who was urged by conductor Serge Koussevitzky to make an orchestral transcription of the piano set, which he did in 1922. The results do honor to both composers: The elegant Frenchman did not deprive the music of its realistic muscle, bizarre imagery, or intensity, but heightened them through the use of marvelously apt instrumentation.

Pictures begins with, and several of its sections are preceded by, a striding promenade theme—Russian in its irregular rhythm and modal inflection—which portrays the composer walking, rather heavily, through the gallery.

Promenade: Trumpets alone present the theme, after which the full orchestra joins for the most extended statement of its many appearances.

Gnomus: Hartmann’s sketch portrays a wooden nutcracker in the form of a wizened gnome. The music lurches, twitches, and snaps grotesquely.

Promenade: Horn initiates the theme in a gentle mood and the wind choir follows suit.

Il vecchio castello: Bassoons evoke a lonely scene in Hartmann’s Italian castle. A troubadour (English horn) sings a sad song, at first to a lute-like accompaniment in violas and cellos.

Promenade: Trumpet and trombones are accompanied by full orchestra.

Tuileries: Taunting wind chords and sassy string figures set the scene, and then Mussorgsky’s children prank, quarrel, and frolic spiritedly in the famous Parisian gardens.

Bydło (Polish Oxcart): A Polish peasant drives an oxcart whose wheels lumber along steadily (with rhythmic regularity) and painfully (heavy-laden melody in brass).

Promenade: Winds, beginning with flutes, then in turn oboes and bassoons, do the walking, this time with tranquil steps.

Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks: Mussorgsky, with disarming ease, moves from oxcart to fowl yard, where Hartmann’s chicks are ballet dancers in eggshell costumes.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle: The names Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle were later additions to the title of this section, originally named “Two Polish Jews, One Rich, the Other Poor.” The composer satirizes the pair through haughty pronouncements from the patriarch (winds and strings) and nervous subservience from the beggar (stuttering trumpets).

The Market at Limoges: The bustle and excitement of peasant women in the French city’s market are brilliantly depicted.

Catacombs: The music trudges through the ancient catacombs on the way to a mournful, minor-key statement of the promenade theme.

Cum mortuis in lingua mortua: In this eerie iteration of the promenade theme, which translates to “with the dead in a dead language,” Mussorgsky envisioned the skulls of the catacombs set aglow through Hartmann’s creative spirit.

The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga): Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in a hut supported by chicken legs, rides through the air demonically with Mussorgsky’s best Bald Mountain pictorialism.

The Great Gate of Kyiv: Ceremonial grandeur, priestly chanting, the clanging of bells, and the promenade theme create a singularly majestic canvas that is as conspicuously Russian to the ear as Hartmann’s fanciful picture of the Gate is to the eye. —Orrin Howard