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Modest Mussorgsky 1839-1881 
Born Karevo, 21 March 1839; died St. Petersburg, 28 March 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 he tried
to write an opera; the same year he entered the Guards. In 1857 he met Dargomïzhsky
and Cui, and through them Balakirev and Stasov. He persuaded Balakirev to give him
lessons and composed songs and piano sonalas.
In 1858 Mussorgsky passed through a nervous or spiritual crisis and resigned his
army commission. A visit to Moscow in 1859 fired his patriotic imagination and his
compositional energies, but although his music began to enjoy public performances
his nervous irritability was not entirely calmed. The emancipation of the serfs in
March 1861 obliged him to spend most of the next two years helping manage the family
estate; a symphony came to nothing and Stasov and Balakirev agreed that 'Mussorgsky
is almost an idiot'. But he contiuned to compose and in 1863-6 worked on the libretto
and music of an opera, Salammbô, which he never completed. At this time he
served at the Ministry of Communications and lived in a commune with five other young
men who ardently cultivated and exchanged advanced ideas about art, religion, philosophy
and politics. Mussorgsky's private and public lives eventually came into conflict.
In 1865 he underwent his first serious bout of dipsomania (probably as a reaction
to his mother's death that year) and in 1867 he was dismissed from his post.
Mussorgsky spent summer 1867 at his brother's country house at Minkino, where he
wrote, among other things, his first important orchestral work, St. John's Night
on the Bare Mountain. On his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn Mussorgsky, like
the other members of the Balakirev-Stasov circle (ironically dubbed the 'Mighty Handful'),
became interested in Dargomïzhsky's experiments in operatic naturalism. Early
in 1869 Mussorgsky re-entered government service and, in more settled conditions,
was able to complete the original version of the opera Boris Godunov. This was rejected
by the Mariinsky Theatre and Mussorgsky set about revising it. In 1872 the opera
was again rejected, but excerpts were performed elsewhere and a vocal score published.
The opera committee finally accepted the work and a successtul production was mounted
in February 1874.
Meanwhile Mussorgsky had begun work on another historical opera, Khovanshchina, at
the same time gaining promotion at the ministry. Progress on the new opera was interrupted
partly because of unsettled domestic circumstances, but mainly because heavy drinking
left Mussorgsky incapable of sustained creative effort. But several other compositions
belong to this period, including the song cycles Sunless and Songs and Dances of
Death and the Pictures at an Exhibition, for piano, a brilliant and bold series inspired
by a memorial exhibition of drawings by his friend Victor Hartmann. Ideas for a comic
opera based on Gogol's Sorochintsy Fair also began to compete with work on Khovanshchina;
both operas remained unfinished at Mussorgsky's death. During the earlier part of
1878 he seems to have led a more respectable life and his director at the ministry
even allowed him leave for a three-month concert tour with the contralto Darya Leonova.
After he was obliged to leave the government service in January 1880, Leonova helped
provide him with employment and a home. It was to her that he tumed on 23 February
1881 in a state of nervous excitement, saying that there was nothing left for him
but to beg in the streets; he was suffering from alcoholic epilepsy. He was removed
to hospital, where he died a month later.
Many of Mussorgsky's works were unfinished, and their editing and posthumous publication
were mainly carried out by 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, wholesale rewriting and rescoring, insertion of new music and
transposition of scenes. It was only many years later that, with a return to the
composer's original drafts, the true nature of his rough art could be properly understood,
for Mussorgsky shared with some of the painters of his day a disdain for formal beauty,
technical polish and other manifestations of 'art for art's sake'. His desire was
to relate his art as closely as possible to life, especially that of the Russian
masses, to nourish it on events and to employ it as a means for communicating human
experience.
Extracted with permission
from
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music
edited by Stanley Sadie
© Macmillan Press Ltd., London.
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