Paintings - Ed Wennink

Moussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition

Alwin Bär - piano

Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky ( 21 March 1839 - 28 March 1881)

Moussorgsky was the youngest son of a well-to-do landowner, but had peasant blood, his paternal grandmother having been a serf. According to a not altogether reliableautobiographical sketch written in 1881, under his nurse's influence he became familiar with Russian folk tales, and it was mainly this contact with the spirit of the life of the people which impelled him to improvise music before he had learnt even the most elementary rules of piano playing. His mother gave him his first lessons, and he made such progress that at the age of seven he could play short pieces by Liszt. When he was nine he performed a Field concerto before a large audience in his parents' house, and in August 1849 he began to have piano lessons with Anton Herke, a pupil of Henselt. His general education was continued first at preparatory school, then with a tutor, and in 1852 he entered the Cadet School of the Guards in St Petersburg. He was in the school choir, and the religious instructor, Father Krupsky, encouraged him to study the church music of Bortnyansky and other Russian composers of the early 19th century. The piano lessons with Herke ended in in 1854. His life was extremely unstable, and at a time of his death some of his most important compositions were left unfinished. His greatest archievements were as a composer of operas and solo songs. In June 1874 he wrote the cycle of piano pieces Kartinki s vïstavki ('Pictures at an exhibition'), suggested by a memorial exhibition of the architectural drawings, stage designs and watercolors of his friend Victor Hartmann, who had died the year before. After 1874 a gradual falling-off in quality is perceptible in all Moussorgsky's work