Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)

A few days before his tragically early death in 1881, Mussorgsky had his portrait painted by his friend, Ilya Repin (1844-1930). The picture shows a face ravaged by alcohol and despair. The hair and beard are tangled, the nose is the color of blood, and blue eyes are glazed and desolate. It is the portrait of a man defeated by life. Composers do not often make the best role models: their work tends to be more organized than their lives. Modest Mussorgsky created music of lyrical grace and originality. He was inventive and ingenious. His life was a chaotic wilderness of misery and hopelessness.

Mussorgsky was born in 1839 into a family with more social status than money. Descended obscurely from the first ruler of Russia, Rurik, through the princes of Smolensk, the Mussorgsky family had a modest estate in northwest Russia. Mussorgsky's mother taught him the piano, but the career chosen for him was military rather than musical, and in 1852 Mussorgsky entered the Guards' cadet school in St. Petersburg. He entered the Guards in 1856. Despite his lack of musical education, Mussorgsky attempted to write his first opera the same year. In St. Petersburg he began to associate with musicians, and took lessons from the composer Mily Balakirev (1837-1910). In 1858 he suffered a nervous (or spiritual) crisis and resigned from the army.

Mussorgsky achieved some early success as a patriotic song writer, but had to return to the family estate in 1861 to deal with the emancipation of the serfs. He attempted a symphony, and failed so utterly that Balakirev remarked that "Mussorgsky is almost an idiot." Mussorgsky began to work on an opera based on Flaubert's Salammbô, a violent, colorful story set in the Carthaginian Wars. He never completed it, but the drama and exoticism of what survives shows a rough yet very vibrant musical imagination.

Mussorgsky supported himself by working in a minor administrative post in the Ministry of Communications, but lived on a commune with a group of young idealists with advanced ideas about art, religion, philosophy, and politics. Inevitably his professional and private lives clashed. In 1865 he began to drink heavily, and in 1867 he was dismissed from government service. The same year he wrote his first important orchestral work, St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain. In 1869 he completed the first draft of his operatic masterpiece, Boris Godunov. Based on Pushkin's 1824 verse drama, this bloody saga of a Macbeth-like medieval tsar was rejected at first by the Mariinsky Theatre, but after revisions it was successfully produced in 1874.

Mussorgsky was readmitted to government service in 1869, but continued to drink. He was unable to complete his next opera, Khovanshchina, but managed a brilliant series of song cycles and piano works over the next few years. Sunless (six songs, 1874) and Songs and Dances of Death (four songs, 1875-1877) show great originality in the way the words follow the rhythms of ordinary speech in their musical settings. His Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a dazzling and bold series of musical impressions inspired by an exhibition of pictures by his Mussorgsky's friend, Victor Hartmann (1834-1873), has justly become one of the most popular pieces in the piano repertory.

Mussorgsky's final years were blighted by alcohol and nervous illness. His working methods were chaotic, and he was fired from his government post in 1880. After suffering a series of episodes, he died in 1881. During those dark final years, he had shared lodgings with the composer Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). Rimsky-Korsakov edited and rewrote much of Mussorgsky's work, as well as completed many fragments that Mussorgsky left unfinished. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) later restored and reorchestrated Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and Maurice Ravel's (1875-1937) sensitive orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition introduced the work to a new audience.

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