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modest mussorgsky writer

modest mussorgsky writer

modest mussorgsky writer

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Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Petrovitch Mussorgsky (born Karevo, Pskov district, 21 March 1839; died St Petersburg, 28 March 1881) was a Russian composer.

Mussorgsky is famous for his operas and songs. He discovered new ways of writing for the voice which were very tuneful but which also suited the Russian language. His most famous opera is Boris Godunov. He wrote an overture called Night on a Bare Mountain. Another very famous piece is called Pictures at an Exhibition. He wrote it for the piano, but many years after his death another composer called Maurice Ravel orchestrated it and this is the version people usually hear today.

Some of his works were re-orchestrated and “improved” by the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In recent years people have started to think that what Mussorgsky wrote originally was better.

The Five

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Модест Петрович Мусоргскийtr. Modést Petróvich MúsorgskiyIPA: [mɐˈdɛst pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈmusərkskʲɪj] (audio speaker iconlisten); 21 March [O.S. 9 March] 1839 – 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1881) was a Russian composer, one of the group known as “The Five”. He was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.

modest mussorgsky writer
modest mussorgsky writer

Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other national themes. Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.

For many years, Mussorgsky’s works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have posthumously come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available.

Life and career

Mussorgsky was the son of a landowner but had peasant blood, his father’s grandmother having been a serf. According to his autobiographical sketch, written in 1881, Mussorgsky learned about Russian fairy tales from his nurse. “This early familiarity with the spirit of the people, with the way they lived, lent the first and greatest impetus to my musical improvisations.” His mother, herself an excellent pianist, gave Modest his first piano lessons, and at seven he could play some of Franz Liszt’s simpler pieces.

In August 1849 his father took Modest and his other son, Filaret, to St. Petersburg, where Modest attended the Peter-Paul School in preparation for a military career. At the same time, mindful of Modest’s musical bent, their father entrusted the boys to Anton Gerke, future professor of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

1852

In 1852 Mussorgsky entered the School for Cadets of the Guard. There, in his first year he composed his Podpraporshchik (Porte-Enseigne Polka), published at his father’s expense. Although not the most industrious of students, he gave proof of tremendous curiosity and wide-ranging intellectual interests.

In 1856, by now a lieutenant, Mussorgsky joined the Preobrazhensky Guards, one of Russia’s most aristocratic regiments, where he made the acquaintance of several music-loving officers who were habitués of the Italian theatre.

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In 1856 Moussorgsky joined the Russian army where he met the piano player and composer ‘Balakirev’ who taught him composition. As he could not finish his studies in music, Moussorgsky did not know all stylistic means of composition perfectly and thus had to follow his instinct in his works becoming the pathmaker of the musical impressionism as well as expressionism: He was the first to compose realistic pictures, e.g. “Pictures at an Exhibition”. Having no success during his lifetime Moussorgsky spent all of his fortune ending up a poor man addicted to alcohol.

On March 21, 1839

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born on March 21, 1839, in his ancestral estate of Karevo, Pskov province, Russia. He was the 30th generation from Rurik the Great, the first King of ancient Kiev Rus. Mussorgsky’s family were wealthy landowners and belonged to Russian landed gentry.

Young Mussorgsky studied piano from the age of six under the tutelage of his mother, who herself was a trained pianist. At the age of nine he was able to perform pieces by Franz Liszt and a piano concerto by John Field in public. At ten he began his studies in St. Petersburg’s elite Peterschule (St. Peter’s School), where his piano teacher was virtuoso Anton Herke.

In 1852, at the age of 12, Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled “Porte-enseigne Polka”. Around that time he was described by Alexander Borodin as an “elegant piano-playing dilettante” at a private party. Mussorgsky continued his music studies while attending the Cadet School of the Imperial Guards. He graduated from the school in 1856 and was posted to the Imperial Guards Regiment in St. Petersburg.

A Life for the Tsar

In 1857, through his fellow officer Ceasar Cui, Mussorgsky met composers Alexander Dargomyzsky and Mili Balakirew. He studied composition under Balakirev, including the piano sonatas and symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. At that time Mussorgsky’s own compositions were leaning more towards the foreign models: his four-hand piano sonata (1860) and “Intermezzo in modo classico” for piano solo were composed as European-sounding pieces. Soon Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influences of Balkirev and became involved in a production of “A Life for the Tsar”, an opera by Mikhail Glinka. He also worked on two original operas: from 1858-61 he was writing “Oedipus in Athens” and from 1863-66 he composed “Salammbo”, based on the eponymous novel by Gustave Flaubert.

modest mussorgsky writer
modest mussorgsky writer

Maturity

In the next two years, Mussorgsky met several figures of importance in Russia’s cultural life, Dargomyzhsky, Cui (a fellow officer), Stasov, and Balakirev among them. Having produced a few songs and piano pieces, as well as a number of compositional exercises under Balakirev’s tutelage, Mussorgsky resigned his commission in 1858, after suffering a painful crisis. This may have had a spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev, the young man referred to “mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity”), but its exact nature is unclear.

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In 1859, the 20 year old gained valuable theatrical experience when he assisted in the preparation of a production of Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar, on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; he also met Lyadov, and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow—after which he professed a love of “everything Russian.”

The ages of 19 and 22

In spite of this epiphany, Mussorgsky’s music still leaned more towards foreign models: With Balakirev he was mostly studying German music (including the Beethoven symphonies), and a four-hand piano sonata which he produced, in 1860, contains his only movement in sonata form. Nor is any nationalistic impulse easily discernible in the opera, Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the Intermezzo in modo classico for piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867).

The latter was the only important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: The reasons for this probably lie in the painful reemergence of his subjective crisis in 1860, and the purely objective difficulties which resulted from the Emancipation of the Serfs the following year—as a result of which the family was deprived of half its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment.

Night on Bald Mountain

Mussorgsky began writing songs and piano works. In 1867, he produced several orchestra pieces including the original version of his now-famous St. John’s Night on Bare Mountain which today is often called Night on Bald Mountain. It is usually played around Halloween because it is so realistically spooky-sounding.

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It is based on a Russian legend that claims the black god Chernobog (Satan in the form of a black goat) presides over a witches’ sabbath at Kiev’s Mount Triglav on the night of June 23, the eve of St. John’s Day. The music is very descriptive and ends with chimes striking the new day, which causes the evil spirits to vanish. Mussorgsky revised the piece several times and Rimsky-Korsakov arranged it again after Mussorgsky died. It is this final version that popularized in Walt Disney’s Fantasia and still performed today.

1869

The greatest of Mussorgsky’s creations was the opera Boris Godunov, based on Pushkin and Karamazin, with a thoroughly Russian historical subject. He completed the first version in 1869 and a second version in the 1870s, but it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s version that was first performed outside Russia. The opera provides an important part for a bass in the role of Boris. Other operas by Mussorgsky include Khovanshchina, completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov. A later version by Shostakovich restores more of the original text. The opera Sorochintsy Fair, after Gogol, completed by Lyadov and others, includes the orchestral favourite A Night on the Bare Mountain–an orchestral witches’ sabbath.

modest mussorgsky writer
modest mussorgsky writer

1874

Mussorgsky’s 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition, a tribute to the versatile artist Hartman, has proved the most popular of all the composer’s works, both in its original version for piano and in colourful orchestral versions, of which Maurice Ravel’s has proved the most generally acceptable. Linked by ‘Promenades’ for the visitor to the exhibition, Mussorgsky represents in music a varied collection, from the ‘Market of Limoges’ and the ‘Catacombs’ to the final ‘Great Gate of Kiev’–a monumental translation into music of an architectural design for a triumphal gateway.

Mussorgsky wrote a number of choral works and songs, many of the latter of considerable interest. Including the group The Nursery. ‘The Song of the Flea’, based on Goethe’s Mephistophelean song in Faust, is a bass favourite.

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