Modest Mussorgsky

A gentry childhood at Karevo, 1839–1852

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born on 21 March 1839 by the Western calendar, or 9 March by the Julian calendar Russia then used, at the family estate of Karevo in Pskov Governorate, about 400 kilometres south of St Petersburg. His family were landowning nobility, and his grandmother had been a serf. His mother, Yulia Chirikova, was a trained pianist and gave him his first lessons at six.

In an autobiographical sketch written near the end of his life, Mussorgsky said the deepest early influence was his nurse's Russian folktales rather than his lessons. He tried to reproduce them at the piano before he knew the rules of playing. The technique came quickly anyway. He was playing small Franz Liszt pieces at seven, and at nine performed a John Field concerto for the family's guests. He published a first composition at about thirteen.

The Guards, and giving up a commission for music, 1852–1861

Mussorgsky was taken to St Petersburg at ten and entered the Cadet School of the Guards in 1852. He graduated in 1856 and was commissioned into the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the most fashionable regiment in the Russian army. In October of that year, on duty at a military hospital, he met Alexander Borodin, a doctor who was also a composer.

The meeting that redirected his life came at the musical evenings of Alexander Dargomyzhsky, where he met Mily Balakirev, César Cui, and the critic Vladimir Stasov, who became his closest ally. Balakirev began teaching him. In 1858 Mussorgsky resigned his commission to give his whole time to music, an unusual step for a young officer of his class and one that left him without a profession.

The Five, and a clerk's desk for the rest of his life

The circle that formed around Balakirev between 1856 and 1862 came to include Cui, Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin. They were young, largely self-trained, and opposed to what they saw as the imported German academicism of the new St Petersburg Conservatory. Their programme was a Russian national music built from village song, church chant and dance. Vladimir Stasov gave them their name in May 1867, praising a "mighty little handful" of Russian musicians in a review of a Balakirev concert. In English they are usually called The Five.

The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 cost the family half its estate, and by 1863 Mussorgsky needed a salary. He entered the civil service that December as a clerk in the engineering department of the Ministry of Communications. He spent nearly all of his remaining years in one government office or another. From about 1868 it was the forestry department of the Ministry of Imperial Domains, and from 1878 the state audit office, where Stasov had arranged him a lenient superior. He was finally dismissed early in 1880. His mother died in 1865, the year of his first serious bout of drinking.

Boris Godunov, refused and then revised, 1868–1874

Mussorgsky began Boris Godunov in 1868, working from Alexander Pushkin's drama about the tsar who was believed to have murdered a child heir to reach the throne, and from Nikolai Karamzin's history of Russia. He finished a first version in 1869. On 10 February 1871 the committee of the Imperial Theatres rejected it by six votes to one, the stated objection being that the opera had no leading female role.

He rewrote it, adding a Polish act that gave the pretender to the throne a love interest, and finished the revision in June 1872. Three scenes were staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in February 1873 to real enthusiasm, and the complete opera followed there on 8 February 1874, conducted by Eduard Nápravník. The house was sold out and the composer took around twenty curtain calls. The reviews were harsh, and the one that wounded him came from inside his own circle: César Cui called it an immature work, superb in parts and feeble in others.

What the opera did that was new was to build its vocal lines out of the shapes of ordinary Russian speech instead of conventional operatic melody, and to give the crowd itself a leading part. Mussorgsky had written to a friend in 1868 that his music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. Boris Godunov is where he carried that through at full length.

Pictures at an Exhibition, written for a dead friend, 1874

Viktor Hartmann was an architect and designer and one of Mussorgsky's closest friends. He died of an aneurysm on 4 August 1873, aged thirty-nine. The following February and March, Vladimir Stasov organised a memorial exhibition of more than four hundred of Hartmann's drawings, watercolours and designs at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, and Mussorgsky walked through it.

Between 2 and 22 June 1874 he wrote a suite for solo piano built on ten of the pictures, linked by a recurring Promenade that represents the composer himself moving between them. The ten are The Gnome, The Old Castle, Tuileries, Cattle, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle", Limoges Market, Catacombs, The Hut on Hen's Legs, and The Great Gate of Kiev. He dedicated it to Stasov.

Most of Hartmann's work has since been lost. Only about six of the originals behind the movements can still be identified. They include the costume design for the unhatched chicks, the watercolour of the Paris catacombs, the clock in the shape of Baba Yaga's hut, and the unbuilt design for a great gate at Kiev. The suite was never played in public in Mussorgsky's lifetime and was not printed until 1886, when it appeared in an edition by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Drinking, the hospital, and the Repin portrait, 1875–1881

Mussorgsky kept writing through the later 1870s. The song cycles Sunless (1874) and Songs and Dances of Death (1875 and 1877) both set poems by his relative Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov. He also worked for eight years on a second large opera, Khovanshchina, about a rebellion in Moscow in 1682, and never orchestrated it. His drinking, which had become serious in 1865, got steadily worse, and after he lost his government post early in 1880 he told a friend there was nothing left but begging.

In February 1881 he suffered a run of seizures with delirium tremens. Friends found him a comfortable room in the Nikolaevsky Military Hospital in St Petersburg. There, at Stasov's urging, the painter Ilya Repin came and painted him over four sittings in early March. No easel was available, so Repin propped the canvas on a table. The result is one of the most famous portraits in Russian art: a swollen, red-nosed, wild-haired man in a dressing gown, looking away from the viewer, entirely alive and plainly dying. Pavel Tretyakov bought it for 400 roubles without having seen it, and Repin gave the money towards a monument to the composer. It hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Mussorgsky died in the hospital on 28 March 1881, one week after his forty-second birthday, of the complications of alcoholism. He was buried at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg.

How Paris made his reputation, 1901–1922

No source records Mussorgsky ever visiting Paris. His music went without him, and France did more for his standing than Russia had. Writing in La Revue blanche in April 1901, Claude Debussy reviewed the song cycle The Nursery and said that nobody had ever spoken to what is best in us with a more tender and more profound accent. He admired an art without devices and without drying formulas. The speech-shaped vocal writing of Boris Godunov fed directly into Debussy's own opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, first performed in 1902.

Sergei Diaghilev did the rest. He brought five Historical Russian Concerts to the Paris Opéra in May 1907, and returned on 19 May 1908 with a staging of Boris Godunov, with Feodor Chaliapin in the title role and costumes by Alexander Golovin. It was the first production of the opera anywhere outside Russia and it was a triumph. A French line from the time had it that the Russians took Paris twice, once in March 1814 and again in May 1908 when Chaliapin sang Boris. The production used Rimsky-Korsakov's edition, which is what the world then knew.

In 1922 the conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel to orchestrate Pictures at an Exhibition, and conducted the premiere at the Paris Opéra that October. Ravel's version turned a piano suite that had never been performed in its composer's lifetime into one of the most played pieces in the orchestral repertory. Mussorgsky's own scores came back slowly: Pavel Lamm's edition of Boris Godunov in 1928 and David Lloyd-Jones's in 1975 eventually displaced Rimsky-Korsakov's, and Dmitri Shostakovich's 1959 version of Khovanshchina became the standard one.