“The devil knows what this is.” 
“This is rubbish.” 
“This could be of use.” 

Mily Balakirev did not hesitate to hurl an insult at his students. Balakirev remained brutally honest throughout his life; fifteen years later, he huffed at another pupil—Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky—for being apprehensive to take on Lord Byron’s controversial Manfred. He eviscerated his students, but behind his harshness were good intentions. Balakirev was the unofficial leader of the Mighty Handful, five Russian composers whose aim was to write music steeped in traditional Russian culture. While we revere Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakov as masters of their craft, Tsar Alexander III considered them to be extremists. Musical culture in Imperial Russia was inundated with French influence, and the thought of including traditional folk material—Pagan rituals, witchcraft, and other “undignified” themes—struck the Western-minded nobility as shameful. 

In A Night on Bald Mountain, Modest Mussorgsky leans heavily on the supernatural elements of Kupala Night. Traditionally, Pagan societies believed that Kupala Night (also known as St. John’s Eve) was the day dark spirits would enter the human realm and wreak havoc among villagers. If the people did not burn fires and bathe in natural water sources to protect themselves, all hell would break loose. Some villages still celebrate Kupala Night; superstition runs deep in many Slavic cultures. 

In eleven minutes, Mussorgsky’s illustrative orchestration conjures witches, demons, Satan, and the Black Mass. A crescendo begins in distant strings, the flurry of notes grows quickly and soon whips like the wind. A musical thunderstorm overtakes the orchestra as the repeated strings work to create an anxious, dangerous atmosphere. Chromatic runs shriek from the woodwind section before a demonic brass theme booms from the back of the ensemble. The dark spirits begin to terrorize the villagers as an accented peasant dance is presented by the double reeds. This theme mutates into a frightening loop that snarls from all sections of the orchestra, growing more devilish as the piece continues. 

Although A Night on Bald Mountain has become a well-known piece of orchestral repertoire (in no small part to the fantastically spooky depiction in Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia) it is not Mussorgsky’s original that we’ve come to know. After Mussorgsky’s death (1881) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov reworked the tone poem. More than two minutes of original music are cut. The tranquil ending in which dawn dispels the demons and ghouls is entirely new material by Rimsky-Korsakov. Church bells ring and a serene melody washes over the orchestra: the sun—flutes and clarinets in perfect harmony—finally rises and brings the terror of Kupala Night to a close.