Modeste Moussorgsky stands out

Modeste (or Modest, depending on the source) Petrovich Moussorgsky was an impoverished genius who lived a sad life of alcoholism and depression. This only served to make his music even more romantic. You can hear his renowned Night on Bald Mountain in the famous (and controversial) closing section of Walt Disney's Fantasia.

I believe Moussorgsky's pieces are among the most evocative, emotion-stirring musical compositions ever written—and I'm particularly drawn to Dawn On the Mockva (or Moscow) River, the prelude to his only successful opera.

A founding member of a group of Russian composers who called themselves The Mighty Fist, Moussorgsky (or Mussourgsky, or even Mussurgsky), was extremely faithful to his neo-classic roots in the property-owning landed class of Peter the Great's Russia. His romantic music ranged from such light-hearted piano compositions as (Pictures at an Exhibition) to full orchestral (St. John's Night on Bare [or Bear] Mountain—better know as Night on Bald Mountain) to opera (Khovanshchina and (Boris Godounov.

Though Moussorgsky was, at least in his own mind, a virtual failure at everything he did and spent his later life an alcoholic, there is no diminishing the body of musical work he left (in some cases, left literally, for Rimsky-Korsakov to finish and score). The cold, harsh winters of Peter's capital, St. Petersburg, mirrored Moussorgsky's life—short flashes of summer warmth amid long months of struggling merely to exist.

He resigned his army commission after suffering a nervous breakdown. He was forced to work his parents estate after a revolt of serfs led nationally to their freedom. He was later dismissed from the Ministry of Communication when he suffered another breakdown. He was rejected, even by his own friends in the Moguchaya Kuchka, who derided him off and on as "that idiot." His operatic work was rejected by the state theatre at least twice, forcing him to do arguous revisions. His mother's death, and later his brother's, devastated him, until a month before his untimely death in 1881 at age 42, Moussorgsky was admitted for treatment of epileptic seizures brought on by his addiction.

Yet from this life of adversity and depression sprang a music that still brings joy and hope. A concert programme containing any Moussorgsky selection will be a success. As was seen elsewhere, few of the major classicists of the Twentieth Century failed to recognize the value of his work in their own careers.

Because Moussorgsky worked irregularly as a Russian customs clerk, many of his compositions are quite nationalistic, including his best-known piece, the legendary Pictures at an Exhibition, covered in 1971 by the prototypical synthesizer-rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

For many of us, this was a first introduction to the marvels of classical music, a sort of "bubble-gum classical" bootstrap, so to speak. I like to think my musical tastes have become more mature, but I still occasionally find myself whistling Moussorgsky's Promenade.

Pictures at an Exhibition was written in 1874 after the death of a close Moussorgsky friend, Victor Hartmann, a Russian painter and architect of many of St. Petersburg's beautiful national offices. When the Russian Imperial Library mounted a memorial exhibit of Hartmann's watercolors, Moussorgsky was greatly moved by his friend's artistic prowess.

He wrote to the Library's director "… the sounds and ideas hang in the air … I can hardly manage to scribble it all down on paper … " From his 10 favorite paintings, the composer created a piano suite using variations of the Promenade as intermezzos between the first five musical descriptions of his vision.

Years ago I heard the Russian virtuoso and recording artist Vladimir Ashkenazy play Pictures at an Exhibition on the piano and he opened his performance with … you guessed it—Dawn on the Mockva River. What a thrill, what a chill ran down my spine that night.

I much prefer Ashkenazy's piano suite of Pictures at an Exhibition over Ravel's maudlin scoring for orchestra, of which I have Leonard Bernstein's definitive New York Philharmonic/Columbia Records recording (on vinyl, naturally, which means I can't play it right now). The same CD includes Ashkenazy's recent arrangement for orchestra, in which he returns to older, more accurate printings of the Moussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov scoring than those to which Ravel had access.