Modest Mussorgsky produced his Pictures at an Exhibition to perpetuate the memory of a friend. In the process, he created a monument far more massive and lasting than his subject.
Mussorgsky was an ardent Russian nationalist, but he was far more interested in folk art than in the grandiose ornamental designs of the aristocracy. Mussorgsky's career began in the military, but he resigned from the life of a fastidious officer to study music and supported himself as a civil servant.
Yet, his soul was far less complacent than one would expect from a life-long bureaucrat – he lived in a commune and the radical ideology he absorbed there infused his music, as he devoted himself to seeking truth in art by crafting a natural style without classical artifice.
Victor Hartmann was a close friend who shared Mussorgsky's ideals in his own field of architecture and painting. When Hartmann died in 1874, aged only 39, Mussorgsky was devastated. In abject bitterness, he wrote: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat live on and creatures like Hartmann must die?” But soon his incomprehension took a more constructive tack. The following year saw a memorial exhibit of 400 Hartmann works, including sketches, watercolors and costume designs produced mostly during the artist's travels abroad. Locales include Poland, France and Italy; the final movement depicts an architectural design for the capital city of Ukraine. Mussorgsky was deeply moved. Seized with inspiration, he quickly reacted to the exhibition by writing a suite of ten piano pieces dedicated to the organizer.
The work opens with a brilliant touch–a “promenade” theme that reemerges throughout as a transition amid the changing moods of the various pictures. By alternating 6/4 and 5/4 time, its regular metric “walking” pace is thrown off-balance and cleverly suggests the hesitant gait of an art-lover strolling through a museum, attracted by upcoming pleasures but hesitant to leave the object at hand without a final glance at a telling detail.
The ten pictures Mussorgsky depicts are a gnome-shaped nutcracker; a troubadour plaintively singing outside an ancient castle; children vigorously playing and quarrelling in a park; a lumbering wooden Polish ox-cart; a ballet of peeping chicks as they hatch from their shells; an argument between two Warsaw Jews, one haughty and vain, the other poor and garrulous; shrill women and vendors in a crowded marketplace; the eerie, echoing gloom of catacombs beneath Paris; the hut of a grotesque bone-chomping witch of Russian folk-lore; and a design for an entrance gate to Kiev. Mussorgsky clearly chose these subjects for the variety of moods they invoked and the opportunities they presented for a wide array of musical depictions.
Alcoholism and severe depression not only cut short Mussorgsky's life but plagued his most creative years and prevented him from advocating his work, which succumbed to the dismissive attitude of the cultural gatekeepers. Fame came only after his early death at age 42, when well-meaning admirers indulgently undertook to edit his operas in order to correct what they perceived to be artistic flaws. Only in more recent times have the originals been revived to display their frank elemental power.
The Pictures at an Exhibition met a similar fate. The score remained unpublished until 1886, five years after Mussorgsky's death. But then, almost immediately, an amazing phenomenon began–while the original version generated little interest among pianists, over two dozen composers were seized by a compulsion to orchestrate it, the most famous of which was Maurice Ravel.
And what about the piano version that started it all? Although there had been others, it was a recording of an extraordinary recital in Sofia, Bulgaria by Sviatoslav Richter in 1958 that refocused public attention on the original. This recording fully vindicated Mussorgsky's work as a masterpiece in its own right, without need of translation, embellishment or improvement. Hartmann would have been proud of his friend's work! —Peter Gutmann