Page 19 - Phil Great Collaborations March 2024 digital program book

PROGRAM NOTES

MODEST MUSSORGSKY
orchestrated by MAURICE RAVEL
Pictures at an Exhibition

Modest Mussorgsky was born at the grand Chirikov Estate (now a museum dedicated
to his life and works) 250 miles south of Saint Petersburg, Russia on 21 March 1839
and died in Saint Petersburg in 1881. His Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano suite
consisting of a (repeated) promenade and ten movements, composed in June 1874. This
famous French orchestration by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was personally commissioned
by Serge Koussevitsky (1874-1951), who conducted the new work’s premiere in Paris on 19
October 1922 and made its first recording in 1930 with the Boston Symphony.
Pictures at an Exhibition was originally an 1874 suite for solo piano. It is
a musical response to a Saint Petersburg art exhibition of works by the
architect and painter Viktor Hartmann (1834-1873), who was a close friend
of the composer Modest Mussorgsky. Both young men were interested in
nationalistic Russian artworks, and Hartmann gave the composer two of
his paintings in 1868 entitled “Jewish Man in a Fur Cap” and “Sandomirskii
(Yiddish man)”. These would inspire the sixth movement of his later piano
suite (“Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle”). Mussorgsky dedicated one of
the songs in his song cycle The Nursery (1870) to Hartmann, who praised his
operatic writing in Boris Godunov.
The piano suite represents eleven items from the Hartmann exhibition
in ten movements, interrupted by an Andante promenade in 11/4 (notated
in alternating 5/4 and 6/4 measures). In a letter in Russian to Stasov (the
dedicatee of the suite), Muusorgsky said, “My dear généralissime, Hartmann
is boiling as Boris boiled—sounds and ideas hung in the air, I am gulping and
overeating, and can barely manage to scribble them on paper. I am writing
the 4th No.—the transitions are good (on the ‘promenade’). I want to work
more quickly and steadily. My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes…”
After the composer’s death, his colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov edited
and published it (1886), and a corrected scholarly edition was issued to
mark the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death (1939). His original
manuscript was published in facsimile in 1975.
Some of the images that inspired Mussorgsky have not survived. His second
movement evokes shepherd’s pipes or the strumming of open strings: entitled
The Old Castle, was inspired by a painting Stasov described as “a medieval
castle, before which a troubadour sings a song.” The third movement, Tuileries
(Children Quarrelling at Play), brings to life an avenue in the Tuileries Gardens,
west of the Louvre, “with a swarm of children and nurses.” The fourth
movement, Bydlo, depicts a ponderous wagon with huge wooden wheels (bydło

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S eason 2 0 2 3 / 2 4 17
Season 2023/24