Reminders

• Small Group “Belle Nuit” Sectional: Jody Ames’ house, April 23 (Wednesday), at 7:30 pm.
• Concert Dates: Saturday, May 17 (Crowden School); Sunday, May 18 (St. Paul’s, Oakland).

Background of the Week: Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881)

His mother gave him piano lessons, and at nine he played a Field concerto before an audience in his parents' house. In 1852 he entered the Guards' cadet school in St. Petersburg. Although he had not studied harmony or composition, in 1856 Mussorgsky tried to write an opera; the same year he entered the Guards. He persuaded the composer Balakirev to give him lessons, and began composing songs and piano sonatas.

After a nervous crisis in 1858, Mussorgsky resigned his army commission. A visit to Moscow fired his patriotic imagination and compositional energies. The 1861 emancipation of the serfs obliged him to spend the next years helping to manage the family estate, and a symphony came to nothing, but he continued composing. He joined the Ministry of Communications and lived in a commune with five other young men who ardently cultivated advanced ideas about art, religion, philosophy and politics. Mussorgsky's private and public lives eventually clashed: in 1865 he underwent his first serious bout of dipsomania (probably in reaction to his mother's death), and in 1867 was dismissed from his government post.

Mussorgsky spent summer 1867 at his brother's country house and wrote his first important orchestral work, St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain. On return to St. Petersburg, he became interested in Dargomïzhsky's experiments in operatic naturalism. He re-entered government service in 1869 and, in more settled conditions, completed Boris Godunov. Early versions of the opera were rejected, but excerpts were performed and a vocal score published. In 1874 an opera company finally accepted the work and mounted a successful production.

Mussorgsky began another historical opera, Khovanshchina, and was promoted at the ministry. His progress was interrupted by unsettled domestic circumstances and because heavy drinking left him incapable of sustained creative effort. But several other compositions belong to this period, including the song cycle Songs and Dances of Death and Pictures at an Exhibition, a brilliant and bold piano series inspired by a memorial exhibition of drawings by Victor Hartmann. Ideas for a comic opera, Sorochintsy Fair, competed with work on Khovanshchina, and both operas remained unfinished at Mussorgsky's death. In 1878 he was allowed leave from the ministry for a concert tour with the contralto Darya Leonova. After Mussorgsky was again obliged to leave government service in 1880, Leonova gave him employment and a home. It was to her that he turned on 23 February 1881 in a state of nervous excitement, suffering from alcoholic epilepsy and saying that there was nothing left for him but to beg in the streets. Removed to a hospital, he died a month later.

Many of Mussorgsky's unfinished works were edited and published posthumously by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov, who to a greater or lesser degree “corrected” what Mussorgsky had composed. Boris Godunov in particular was reshaped and repolished, with drastic cuts, rewriting and rescoring, insertion of new music and transposition of scenes. It was only much later, through study of the composer's original drafts, that the true nature of his rough art could be properly understood: Mussorgsky shared with some painters of his day a disdain for formal beauty and other manifestations of “art for art's sake.” He desired to relate his art as closely as possible to life, especially that of the Russian masses, to nourish it on events and employ it as a means for communicating human experience.

(Adapted from the Grove Encyclopedia of Music.)

Shameless Plugs:

• Duruflé Requiem. The Arlington Community Church Choir (plus a few extra voices from Bella Musica, BCCO, and the Contra Costa Chorale) performs the Duruflé Requiem with string quartet, organ, and tympani. 7:30 pm, April 18, at the Church, 52 Arlington Blvd. Free; plenty of parking.
• Workshop with John Poole. A 6-day workshop with internationally-known choral conductor John Poole will be held at Trinity Episcopal Church, San Francisco, June 22 – 29. Music will be J.C. Bach’s “Unser Herzens Freude,” Mozart’s “Kyrie in D, K 341,” Vaughn Williams’ “Voice Out of the Whirlwind” and a Mass by Joseph Jongen, with a mini-concert on Sunday, June 29. Tuition will be $150, including all music. Contact Arlene Sagan (510-525-5393) or Helene Whitson (510-849-4689) if interested.