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Famous Like Me > Composer > M > Modest Mussorgsky

Profile of Modest Mussorgsky on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Modest Mussorgsky  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 21st March 1839
   
Place of Birth: Karevo, Russia
   
Profession: Composer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Моде́ст Петро́вич Му́соргский) (March 21, 1839 – March 28, 1881; sometimes spelled Modeste Moussorgsky, and Russians often prefer to transliterate his family name now as the phonetically correct Musorgskii), was an innovative Russian composer famed for his colourful, exotic, and lush orchestral pieces dedicated to various subjects of medieval Russian history. His major works include the great national opera, Boris Godunov, and the piano suite called Pictures at an Exhibition.

Life

Mussorgsky's celebrated portrait by Ilya Repin, painted only a few days before the composer's death in 1881.

Mussorgsky was born in Karevo in the province of Pskov. Mussorgsky's family descended from the first Russian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk. Modest was prepared by his parents for a military career, but under the influence of Mily Balakirev quit the service when he was twenty-two and joined The Five, a group of composers dedicated to promoting a distinctly Russian kind of music. His first published works were an unfinished opera Salambbo and a cycle of songs. He wrote the opera Boris Godunov when he was twenty-nine. It was based on Pushkin's play of the same title. It became a great success. However, when the choruses sang against the czar were heard, the opera was withdrawn from the Imperial Opera. After the withdrawal of Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky left The Five and was bitterly alone.

During his lifetime, Mussorgsky was but little known, was an alcoholic (note the red nose in Repin's painting), lived in dismal poverty, and shared his lodging with fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who edited many of his works when he died. He died from alcohol intoxication on March 28, 1881 and was interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Rimsky-Korsakov then completed and recomposed some of Mussorgsky's works, and these were made famous through the criticism of Vladimir Stasov.

Works

The striking novelty of Mussorgsky's original compositions had not been rediscovered until the mid-20th century, when Dmitri Shostakovich reorchestrated his two operas on Muscovite history, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina.

One of Mussorgsky's wildest and most barbaric pieces (as the contemporary critics put it) is the orchestral work St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain, which was made famous in the US by its appearance in Disney's Fantasia.

His most imaginative and frequently performed work is the cycle of piano pieces describing paintings in sound called Pictures at an Exhibition. This composition, best known through an orchestral arrangement by Maurice Ravel, was written in commemoration of his friend, the architect Viktor Hartmann.

Mussorgsky left another opera, Sorochintsy Fair, incomplete at his death. However, a famous dance movement, the Hopak, is drawn therefrom.

Among his other works are a number of songs, including three song cycles: The Nursery (1872), Sunless (1874) and Songs & Dances of Death (1877).

Appearances in film and popular culture

Mussorgsky's flair for highly direct and memorable gestures has made his music popular with film and TV producers: the following examples could be multiplied many times over.

  • Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) famously incorporates A Night on the Bare Mountain (in a form that is Leopold Stokowski's heavily redacted version of Rimsky-Korsakov's revision).
  • Extracts from Pictures at an Exhibition and A Night on the Bare Mountain appear in the music score for the 1972 film Asylum (where the composer credit is to Douglas Gamley).
  • Part of 'The Hut on Fowl's Legs' from Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel's orchestration) was used for the theme music of the BBC's 1977 WWII documentary series The Secret War.
  • 'The Hut on Fowl's Legs' and 'The Great Gate of Kiev' in orchestrated form were also appropriated in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.
  • An adaptation of A Night on the Bare Mountain appears in Saturday Night Fever (1977).
  • In 1980, Woody Allen's 'Stardust Memories' used an extract from the opening of A Night on the Bare Mountain for a comic sequence where a character's 'anger' has escaped and run amok.
  • The UK's political satire sit-com The New Statesman (1987-92), which starred Rik Mayall, used the opening 'Promenade' from Pictures at an Exhibition as its theme-tune.
  • The song-cycle Sunless lends its title to the 1982 film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker; the significance of the reference is not readily apparent, but the connection is acknowledged explicitly by Marker towards the end of the film.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Modest Mussorgsky