× Upcoming Events Thank You to Our Sponsors! Hospitality Partners WSO Memorials WSO Contributors Donate Now WSO Board and Staff Past Events
Home Thank You to Our Sponsors! Hospitality Partners WSO Memorials WSO Contributors Donate Now WSO Board and Staff
Pictures at an Exhibition
MODEST MUSORGSKY

MODEST MUSORGSKY

Born March 21, 1839, in Karevo, Ukraine
Died March 28, 1881, in St. Petersburg, Russia

Pictures at an Exhibition

Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel

Last performed by the Wichita Symphony on October 8 and 9, 2011, Daniel Hege conducting

  • Promenade
  • Gnomus
  • Promenade
  • Il Vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
  • Promenade
  • Tuileries (Children Quarreling After Play)
  • Bydlo
  • Promenade
  • Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells
  • Two Men - One Rich, the Other Poor
  • The Market Place at Limoges
  • Catacombs (Sepulchrum Romanum)
  • Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua
  • The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga)
  • The Great Gate of Kyiv

It wasn’t the first time a work of visual art inspired a composer – works by Liszt and Saint-Saëns come to mind as earlier examples – but it was probably the first time that an exhibition of one man’s art brought about a piece of music. Modest Musorgsky and Victor Hartman, an architect and artist, were close friends. Following Hartman’s death at the age of 39 in 1873, the art and music critic Vladimir Stasov organized an exhibition in St. Petersburg of over four hundred of Hartman’s drawings, watercolors, and sketches. Musorgsky contributed at least one piece to the collection.

After attending the exhibit’s opening in February 1874, Musorgsky sat down to compose Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite of eleven piano pieces linked by a recurring Promenade. He completed the work by June 26 the same year, a comparatively quick pace of work for Musorgsky. While Musorgsky probably played the completed work for friends, there is no record of a public performance during Musorgsky’s lifetime. The piano score music wasn’t published until 1886, five years after the composer’s death.

Musorgsky (recent scholars have generally dispensed with the double ‘s’ often used in spelling his name) was a member of a group of Russian composers known as the kuchka or the “Mightly Little Heap,” a nickname attributed to Vladimir Stasov. The “heap” included Miliy Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Musorgsky. What distinguished these men from composers like Tchaikovsky and Rubenstein was that the “heap” were essentially self-taught amateur musicians with other careers. Musorgsky was a civil servant; Borodin, a chemist; and Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer. They also distinguished themselves from Tchaikovsky’s cosmopolitan and western musical style by espousing Russian nationalism and rejecting the classical techniques of western music.

We hear examples of nationalism throughout Pictures. The opening Promenade captures Russian folk and liturgical music elements with its “call and response.” An unaccompanied melody begins, followed by the richly harmonized response, and the pattern repeats. Modal scales that depart from western major and minor scales occur in places like the Promenade, the Old Castle, and the Great Gate of Kyiv. Chromatic scales depict fantastical imagery as heard in Gnomus, Catacombs, and The Hut on Fowl’s Legs.

Although there is no evidence that Musorgsky contemplated orchestrating Pictures, most pianists would agree that the score conjures up many possibilities. The piece inspires an orchestrator’s imagination and demands the full range of a pianist’s palette of touches and timbres. Unlike Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, all leading pianist-composers of the West during the 19th century, Musorgsky avoids contrapuntal writing and doesn’t use sweeping passages of arpeggios.

As a piano work, Pictures has innumerable difficulties. There are towering chords. Some leap around the keyboard; others lie awkwardly under the hands. Thunderous octave passages summon forth an orchestral sound or generate the speed of rapidly bowed strings. While Picture’s octave passages recall Liszt at times, the music doesn’t have the delicate filigree passagework that Chopin and Liszt often require. In Pictures, the pianist needs strength, good tone, and endurance.

Few piano pieces as Pictures inspired so many orchestrations. Mikhail Touschmalov, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, orchestrated parts of the Suite in 1886, perhaps as part of his studies. Many others, such as Maurice Ravel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Leopold Stokowski, orchestrated the entire Suite, or at least most of it. Almost two dozen orchestrations exist, plus numerous transcriptions for different instruments and ensembles ranging from solo guitar and organ to brass ensemble to a heavy metal rock band. (Try sampling the German heavy metal band Mekong Delta’s version on YouTube).

Ravel completed his orchestration of Pictures in 1922 on a commission from the conductor and impresario Serge Koussevitzky, who carefully guarded his exclusive right to perform Ravel’s version. In the aftermath of Koussevitzky’s premiere, music publishers raced to commission new orchestration to take advantage of the work’s newfound popularity. Most of these orchestrations faded into obscurity, and Ravel’s orchestration is the most commonly heard version today.

Pictures at an Exhibition begins with a Promenade. Along with Musorgsky, we stride into the museum’s exhibit and begin to ponder the artwork. A solo trumpet begins, alternating with the brass section in a liturgical call and response. Eventually, the entire orchestra joins in with a rich, glorious sound. The Promenade will recur throughout Pictures, but never the same way twice. The Promenade’s changing mood conveys us from picture to picture while creating a unifying structure to the entire work. Vladimir Stasov described the Promenade as Musorgsky depicting himself “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly to come close to a picture that attracted his interest, and at times, thinking sadly of his departed friend.”

The first picture is of Gnomus, the dwarf. Hartman’s original sketch was of a nutcracker. Musorgsky captures the fantastical design with a highly chromatic and dissonant piece that Ravel translates into rumbles in the bass instruments and punctuated with outbursts from the winds and brass. In the middle section, eerie glissandos in the strings create a color that a piano cannot make.

A leisurely and shorter Promenade follows and takes us to The Old Castle. The bassoon and the unusual addition of a saxophone evoke an old folklike melody. We hear a low G-sharp in the bass that repeats a long-short-long-short pattern throughout the entire piece. If you recall Ravel’s Bolero and its constant snare drum pattern, the quality of a drone or bagpipe serves a similar purpose as a background here.

An even briefer but more assertive Promenade leads us next to Tuileries. Here, Hartman’s original watercolor depicts the famous Parisian gardens where a group of children at play ends up quarreling. This movement is a wonderful example of music that paints a picture. Ravel’s woodwinds capture the taunting of children in the familiar “nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah” sneer of childhood. A warmer middle section represents mothers trying to console their children but to no avail.

We go next to rural backroads where cattle or oxen plod along the road in Bydlo, lugging an ox-cart behind them. Low strings and winds depict the heaviness of the hooves and the turning of the wheels. Ravel features a solo tuba in Musorgsky’s folklike melody. Listen to how Ravel adds and subtracts layers of orchestral texture as the cart approaches us and then fades into the distance.

From the low bass range that concludes Bydlo, Ravel shifts to the high wind range to create a striking contrast for the beginning of the next Promenade. This return is more tranquil and reflective. It will also be the last time in Ravel’s orchestration to experience a separately marked Promenade. The music segues immediately into the Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells. Hartman’s picture was for a costume design used in a ballet. In this humorous piece, the woodwinds represent the chirping of the chicks, and the strings playing chromatic scales describe the chicks as they scurry about the barnyard.

The music leads directly into the contrasting textures of a sketch of two men, one rich, the other poor, and believed to have been in Musorgsky’s possession. Two different orchestral textures portray each man. The first in Ravel’s bold unisons of winds and brass capture the comfortable life of the rich man, and then the second with muted trumpet portrays the shivering of the poor man. The contrasting elements then merge simultaneously.

In his piano score, Mussorgsky follows this piece with one more iteration of the Promenade, and Ravel chooses to delete it since it’s a close reprise of the opening Promenade. Instead, Ravel uses the contrasts of texture in the music to move the work forward from this point and introduces The Marketplace at Limoges. The bustle of market activity and the friendly neighborhood gossip moves briskly with an ending that accelerates into an abrupt and stark contrast of Catacombs, a depiction of Parisian catacombs, where reportedly six million skeletal remains lie. Low, biting brass chords with plenty of chromatic dissonances create a dark, mysterious, and unsettling moment in the music. Long-held chords, alternating between loud and soft, suspend time and replicate the effect of vast space.

Catacombs leads directly into the ghostly contrast of Cum Mortius in Lingua Mortua (With the dead in a dead language). Here in the presence of the dead, Ravel creates a spectral backdrop with tremolos in the violins. We hear the music of the Promenade in a call and response between the oboes and basses. Perhaps remembering his friend, Musorgsky also reflects that these dead in the Catacombs once promenaded in life.

Another abrupt shift from the softest dynamic level to a percussive fortissimo launches us into The Hut on Fowl’s Leg, subtitled Baba-Yaga. Hartman’s drawing depicts the bizarre hut that folklore relates was mounted on chicken legs and which Hartman designed as an ornate clock. Baba-Yaga, the hut’s resident, was a witch in Slavic folklore who gathered her victims, usually children, ate them, and ground up their bones afterward with a mortar and pestle. Baba also flew through the air on her mortar. Musorgsky was less interested in the clock and tried to depict the more frightening elements of the witch’s story. Like other movements that deal with fantastical imagery, this movement is also heavily chromatic. Ravel takes full advantage of repetitive phrasing and the percussive nature to vary his orchestration throughout the piece. As you listen, how do the music and orchestration evoke fright?

With a rush, the conclusion of Baba-Yaga sweeps upward in a chromatic scale ending in a blaze of E-flat major, announcing the beginning of The Great Gate at Kyiv. Ravel orchestrates this famous moment with brass and winds, amplifying the glory moments later at the repeat of the opening with the entire orchestra. Hartman’s drawing was for a competition to design a great gate commemorating the first failed assassination attempt of Tsar Alexander II. Authorities canceled the competition for lack of funds, and the commemorative gate was never built. (There were at least five more attempts on Alexander’s life until he was assassinated in 1881.)

Musorgsky’s music for the Great Gate references a Slavonic hymn quietly orchestrated by Ravel with clarinets and bassoon, captures the peal of church bells, and at its climax, weaves the music of the Promenade into the texture and its final statement of glory.

At this weekend’s concerts by the Wichita Symphony, instead of pictures inspiring music, we flip the process and let the music inspire a new exhibition of visual imagery by astronomer and multi-media artist Dr. José Francisco Salgado of KV265. Using his background as an astronomer, Dr. Salgado uses stunning photography of the cosmos, including many images from the Hubble Space Telescope, to present a new show of The Universe at an Exhibition.

Pictures at an Exhibition is scored by Ravel for a large orchestra of three flutes, including two piccolos, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets plus bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons plus contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two harps, celesta, and strings. In a large percussion section, Ravel uses timpani, glockenspiel, tubular bells, xylophone, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, whip, rattle, snare drum, and bass drum.

Pictures last approximately thirty-five minutes.

Notes by Don Reinhold ©2022

WSU SOM 2
Pictures at an Exhibition
MODEST MUSORGSKY

MODEST MUSORGSKY

Born March 21, 1839, in Karevo, Ukraine
Died March 28, 1881, in St. Petersburg, Russia

Pictures at an Exhibition

Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel

Last performed by the Wichita Symphony on October 8 and 9, 2011, Daniel Hege conducting

  • Promenade
  • Gnomus
  • Promenade
  • Il Vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
  • Promenade
  • Tuileries (Children Quarreling After Play)
  • Bydlo
  • Promenade
  • Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells
  • Two Men - One Rich, the Other Poor
  • The Market Place at Limoges
  • Catacombs (Sepulchrum Romanum)
  • Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua
  • The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga)
  • The Great Gate of Kyiv

It wasn’t the first time a work of visual art inspired a composer – works by Liszt and Saint-Saëns come to mind as earlier examples – but it was probably the first time that an exhibition of one man’s art brought about a piece of music. Modest Musorgsky and Victor Hartman, an architect and artist, were close friends. Following Hartman’s death at the age of 39 in 1873, the art and music critic Vladimir Stasov organized an exhibition in St. Petersburg of over four hundred of Hartman’s drawings, watercolors, and sketches. Musorgsky contributed at least one piece to the collection.

After attending the exhibit’s opening in February 1874, Musorgsky sat down to compose Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite of eleven piano pieces linked by a recurring Promenade. He completed the work by June 26 the same year, a comparatively quick pace of work for Musorgsky. While Musorgsky probably played the completed work for friends, there is no record of a public performance during Musorgsky’s lifetime. The piano score music wasn’t published until 1886, five years after the composer’s death.

Musorgsky (recent scholars have generally dispensed with the double ‘s’ often used in spelling his name) was a member of a group of Russian composers known as the kuchka or the “Mightly Little Heap,” a nickname attributed to Vladimir Stasov. The “heap” included Miliy Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Musorgsky. What distinguished these men from composers like Tchaikovsky and Rubenstein was that the “heap” were essentially self-taught amateur musicians with other careers. Musorgsky was a civil servant; Borodin, a chemist; and Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer. They also distinguished themselves from Tchaikovsky’s cosmopolitan and western musical style by espousing Russian nationalism and rejecting the classical techniques of western music.

We hear examples of nationalism throughout Pictures. The opening Promenade captures Russian folk and liturgical music elements with its “call and response.” An unaccompanied melody begins, followed by the richly harmonized response, and the pattern repeats. Modal scales that depart from western major and minor scales occur in places like the Promenade, the Old Castle, and the Great Gate of Kyiv. Chromatic scales depict fantastical imagery as heard in Gnomus, Catacombs, and The Hut on Fowl’s Legs.

Although there is no evidence that Musorgsky contemplated orchestrating Pictures, most pianists would agree that the score conjures up many possibilities. The piece inspires an orchestrator’s imagination and demands the full range of a pianist’s palette of touches and timbres. Unlike Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, all leading pianist-composers of the West during the 19th century, Musorgsky avoids contrapuntal writing and doesn’t use sweeping passages of arpeggios.

As a piano work, Pictures has innumerable difficulties. There are towering chords. Some leap around the keyboard; others lie awkwardly under the hands. Thunderous octave passages summon forth an orchestral sound or generate the speed of rapidly bowed strings. While Picture’s octave passages recall Liszt at times, the music doesn’t have the delicate filigree passagework that Chopin and Liszt often require. In Pictures, the pianist needs strength, good tone, and endurance.

Few piano pieces as Pictures inspired so many orchestrations. Mikhail Touschmalov, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, orchestrated parts of the Suite in 1886, perhaps as part of his studies. Many others, such as Maurice Ravel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Leopold Stokowski, orchestrated the entire Suite, or at least most of it. Almost two dozen orchestrations exist, plus numerous transcriptions for different instruments and ensembles ranging from solo guitar and organ to brass ensemble to a heavy metal rock band. (Try sampling the German heavy metal band Mekong Delta’s version on YouTube).

Ravel completed his orchestration of Pictures in 1922 on a commission from the conductor and impresario Serge Koussevitzky, who carefully guarded his exclusive right to perform Ravel’s version. In the aftermath of Koussevitzky’s premiere, music publishers raced to commission new orchestration to take advantage of the work’s newfound popularity. Most of these orchestrations faded into obscurity, and Ravel’s orchestration is the most commonly heard version today.

Pictures at an Exhibition begins with a Promenade. Along with Musorgsky, we stride into the museum’s exhibit and begin to ponder the artwork. A solo trumpet begins, alternating with the brass section in a liturgical call and response. Eventually, the entire orchestra joins in with a rich, glorious sound. The Promenade will recur throughout Pictures, but never the same way twice. The Promenade’s changing mood conveys us from picture to picture while creating a unifying structure to the entire work. Vladimir Stasov described the Promenade as Musorgsky depicting himself “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly to come close to a picture that attracted his interest, and at times, thinking sadly of his departed friend.”

The first picture is of Gnomus, the dwarf. Hartman’s original sketch was of a nutcracker. Musorgsky captures the fantastical design with a highly chromatic and dissonant piece that Ravel translates into rumbles in the bass instruments and punctuated with outbursts from the winds and brass. In the middle section, eerie glissandos in the strings create a color that a piano cannot make.

A leisurely and shorter Promenade follows and takes us to The Old Castle. The bassoon and the unusual addition of a saxophone evoke an old folklike melody. We hear a low G-sharp in the bass that repeats a long-short-long-short pattern throughout the entire piece. If you recall Ravel’s Bolero and its constant snare drum pattern, the quality of a drone or bagpipe serves a similar purpose as a background here.

An even briefer but more assertive Promenade leads us next to Tuileries. Here, Hartman’s original watercolor depicts the famous Parisian gardens where a group of children at play ends up quarreling. This movement is a wonderful example of music that paints a picture. Ravel’s woodwinds capture the taunting of children in the familiar “nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah” sneer of childhood. A warmer middle section represents mothers trying to console their children but to no avail.

We go next to rural backroads where cattle or oxen plod along the road in Bydlo, lugging an ox-cart behind them. Low strings and winds depict the heaviness of the hooves and the turning of the wheels. Ravel features a solo tuba in Musorgsky’s folklike melody. Listen to how Ravel adds and subtracts layers of orchestral texture as the cart approaches us and then fades into the distance.

From the low bass range that concludes Bydlo, Ravel shifts to the high wind range to create a striking contrast for the beginning of the next Promenade. This return is more tranquil and reflective. It will also be the last time in Ravel’s orchestration to experience a separately marked Promenade. The music segues immediately into the Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells. Hartman’s picture was for a costume design used in a ballet. In this humorous piece, the woodwinds represent the chirping of the chicks, and the strings playing chromatic scales describe the chicks as they scurry about the barnyard.

The music leads directly into the contrasting textures of a sketch of two men, one rich, the other poor, and believed to have been in Musorgsky’s possession. Two different orchestral textures portray each man. The first in Ravel’s bold unisons of winds and brass capture the comfortable life of the rich man, and then the second with muted trumpet portrays the shivering of the poor man. The contrasting elements then merge simultaneously.

In his piano score, Mussorgsky follows this piece with one more iteration of the Promenade, and Ravel chooses to delete it since it’s a close reprise of the opening Promenade. Instead, Ravel uses the contrasts of texture in the music to move the work forward from this point and introduces The Marketplace at Limoges. The bustle of market activity and the friendly neighborhood gossip moves briskly with an ending that accelerates into an abrupt and stark contrast of Catacombs, a depiction of Parisian catacombs, where reportedly six million skeletal remains lie. Low, biting brass chords with plenty of chromatic dissonances create a dark, mysterious, and unsettling moment in the music. Long-held chords, alternating between loud and soft, suspend time and replicate the effect of vast space.

Catacombs leads directly into the ghostly contrast of Cum Mortius in Lingua Mortua (With the dead in a dead language). Here in the presence of the dead, Ravel creates a spectral backdrop with tremolos in the violins. We hear the music of the Promenade in a call and response between the oboes and basses. Perhaps remembering his friend, Musorgsky also reflects that these dead in the Catacombs once promenaded in life.

Another abrupt shift from the softest dynamic level to a percussive fortissimo launches us into The Hut on Fowl’s Leg, subtitled Baba-Yaga. Hartman’s drawing depicts the bizarre hut that folklore relates was mounted on chicken legs and which Hartman designed as an ornate clock. Baba-Yaga, the hut’s resident, was a witch in Slavic folklore who gathered her victims, usually children, ate them, and ground up their bones afterward with a mortar and pestle. Baba also flew through the air on her mortar. Musorgsky was less interested in the clock and tried to depict the more frightening elements of the witch’s story. Like other movements that deal with fantastical imagery, this movement is also heavily chromatic. Ravel takes full advantage of repetitive phrasing and the percussive nature to vary his orchestration throughout the piece. As you listen, how do the music and orchestration evoke fright?

With a rush, the conclusion of Baba-Yaga sweeps upward in a chromatic scale ending in a blaze of E-flat major, announcing the beginning of The Great Gate at Kyiv. Ravel orchestrates this famous moment with brass and winds, amplifying the glory moments later at the repeat of the opening with the entire orchestra. Hartman’s drawing was for a competition to design a great gate commemorating the first failed assassination attempt of Tsar Alexander II. Authorities canceled the competition for lack of funds, and the commemorative gate was never built. (There were at least five more attempts on Alexander’s life until he was assassinated in 1881.)

Musorgsky’s music for the Great Gate references a Slavonic hymn quietly orchestrated by Ravel with clarinets and bassoon, captures the peal of church bells, and at its climax, weaves the music of the Promenade into the texture and its final statement of glory.

At this weekend’s concerts by the Wichita Symphony, instead of pictures inspiring music, we flip the process and let the music inspire a new exhibition of visual imagery by astronomer and multi-media artist Dr. José Francisco Salgado of KV265. Using his background as an astronomer, Dr. Salgado uses stunning photography of the cosmos, including many images from the Hubble Space Telescope, to present a new show of The Universe at an Exhibition.

Pictures at an Exhibition is scored by Ravel for a large orchestra of three flutes, including two piccolos, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets plus bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons plus contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two harps, celesta, and strings. In a large percussion section, Ravel uses timpani, glockenspiel, tubular bells, xylophone, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, whip, rattle, snare drum, and bass drum.

Pictures last approximately thirty-five minutes.

Notes by Don Reinhold ©2022

WSU SOM 2