Mussorgski, Modest / arr. Rimsky-Korsakow

Modest Mussorgsky

Danse Persane
(The Dance of the Persian Maidens) from the opera “Khovanshchina”

(b. Karevo, 21 March 1839 – d. 28 March, 1881)

orchestrated by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Preface
Modest Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, some 250 miles south of Saint Petersburg, to a wealthy, land-owning family. He displayed musical talent in his youth but due to familial responsibilities (military service was a family tradition) he was forced into a career in the Russian Army, joining first the Cadet School in Saint Petersburg. In 1856 he received a commission from the Russian Imperial Guard where, by chance, he met Alexander Borodin. By 1857 Mussorgsky began studies with Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg and soon thereafter left the army. Balakirev was not trained in theory, but taught the young composer formal concepts in the more recent European works of Beethoven, Schubert and others. This relationship would grow and soon include other composers to form the pioneering school of Russian composition known as “The Five,” which included Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky.

Mussorgsky debuted as a composer in 1860 when Anton Rubinstein premiered his single-movement orchestral Scherzo at the Russian Music Society. It was during this time that his tendency to ignore traditional compositional techniques emerged, garnering him either praise for innovation or criticism for grammatical errors from the press. In 1861 serfdom was abolished in Russia which decimated his family fortune and placed him on a path towards poverty. He found occasional employment to make ends meet, but during this period he also began habitually drinking, the habit that would eventually lead to his death. At this point his tendency to ignore German traditions and conventions become entrenched as an aesthetic goal, leading him into a search for a realism in a purely Russian style, which he characterized as “formed on Russian fields, raised on Russian bread!”

After two opera projects which he failed to complete, he began work on what is considered one of the great operatic masterworks, Boris Godunov. The work evinces Mussorgsky’s basic tendency to draw characteristics from tradition and merge them with his own concept of Russian style—here the static tableau, a trait of French Grand Opera, is used to great advantage in places such as Boris’s coronation scene. However, finished in 1870, it took several years and revisions to acquire a premiere because it lacked some very basic expected components, including a prima donna role.

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