Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, in the Pskov region of western Russia, in March 1839, the son of a landowning family of distant aristocratic descent. He was sent to military school in Saint Petersburg at thirteen, served briefly in the Preobrazhensky Guards, and resigned his commission in 1858 to devote himself to composition. He had no formal training; his musical education came from his association with Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the group that became known as the *Mighty Handful*.

His major works pushed against the Western European conventions his contemporaries were absorbing. The opera *Boris Godunov*, composed across two versions in 1869 and 1872, remained the most radical attempt of its time to base operatic language on the rhythms of Russian speech and prayer. The song cycles *The Nursery* (1868–72), *Sunless* (1874) and *Songs and Dances of Death* (1875–77), the orchestral *Night on Bald Mountain* (revised by Rimsky-Korsakov for posthumous performance), and the piano suite *Pictures at an Exhibition* (1874, later orchestrated by Ravel) all worked outside conventional harmonic practice in ways that influenced Debussy, Janáček and the early Stravinsky.

Mussorgsky’s alcoholism shortened his life. He died in Saint Petersburg in March 1881, a week after his forty-second birthday. *Khovanshchina* was left incomplete and completed by Rimsky-Korsakov for posthumous performance. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his operatic and orchestral work in twentieth-century performance.