Intermediate
Pictures At An Exhibition
1:17
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Browse piano sheets by Modest Mussorgsky on Zen Virtual Piano. A commemorative exhibit of the paintings of Viktor Hartmann, a gifted architect and painter and a close friend of Mussorgsky’s who had recently died at 39, inspired Mussorgsky to pay musical tribute to his friend with a piano suite based on his impressions of the paintings. He composed Pictures at an Exhibition as a set of piano pieces in June 1874, and the pictures are connected, in the first half of the work at any rate, by a “Promenade” that depicts a visitor strolling through the gallery from picture to picture. A melody that changes with each painting, as if the last picture lingered, makes the visitor’s walk into the music’s structure. The suite was not performed or published during the composer’s lifetime and did not become widely known until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922, and it did not become a regular part of the piano repertoire until the middle of the 20th century, after symphony orchestras had popularized it. A suite not performed or published in the composer’s lifetime says something about how music can outlive its first silence. Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born at Karevo in the district of Pskov on 21 March 1839, the son of a landowner, though he had peasant blood, his father’s grandmother having been a serf. His mother, herself an excellent pianist, gave him his first piano lessons, and at seven he could play some of Franz Liszt’s simpler pieces. A mother who was herself a pianist and a seven-year-old playing Liszt’s simpler pieces put music in the house early. In 1856, by then a lieutenant, he joined the Preobrazhensky Guards and made the acquaintance of several music-loving officers, and through Dargomyzhsky he met Mily Balakirev, who became his teacher. Having decided to devote himself to music, he quit the army in 1858, and from 1863 he worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communications. The 65 songs he composed, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian life with great vividness and insight and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language. Songs that follow the inflections of spoken Russian suggest a composer listening to speech as closely as to melody. He began his opera Sorochintsy Fair, inspired by Gogol’s tale, but left it unfinished, and he died in St. Petersburg on 28 March 1881. A composer who left the army for music and then took a civil service post shows how uneven the road to a composing life could be.
Browse piano sheets by Modest Mussorgsky on Zen Virtual Piano.
A commemorative exhibit of the paintings of Viktor Hartmann, a gifted architect and painter and a close friend of Mussorgsky’s who had recently died at 39, inspired Mussorgsky to pay musical tribute to his friend with a piano suite based on his impressions of the paintings. He composed Pictures at an Exhibition as a set of piano pieces in June 1874, and the pictures are connected, in the first half of the work at any rate, by a “Promenade” that depicts a visitor strolling through the gallery from picture to picture. A melody that changes with each painting, as if the last picture lingered, makes the visitor’s walk into the music’s structure.
The suite was not performed or published during the composer’s lifetime and did not become widely known until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922, and it did not become a regular part of the piano repertoire until the middle of the 20th century, after symphony orchestras had popularized it. A suite not performed or published in the composer’s lifetime says something about how music can outlive its first silence.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born at Karevo in the district of Pskov on 21 March 1839, the son of a landowner, though he had peasant blood, his father’s grandmother having been a serf. His mother, herself an excellent pianist, gave him his first piano lessons, and at seven he could play some of Franz Liszt’s simpler pieces. A mother who was herself a pianist and a seven-year-old playing Liszt’s simpler pieces put music in the house early.
In 1856, by then a lieutenant, he joined the Preobrazhensky Guards and made the acquaintance of several music-loving officers, and through Dargomyzhsky he met Mily Balakirev, who became his teacher. Having decided to devote himself to music, he quit the army in 1858, and from 1863 he worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communications. The 65 songs he composed, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian life with great vividness and insight and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language. Songs that follow the inflections of spoken Russian suggest a composer listening to speech as closely as to melody. He began his opera Sorochintsy Fair, inspired by Gogol’s tale, but left it unfinished, and he died in St. Petersburg on 28 March 1881. A composer who left the army for music and then took a civil service post shows how uneven the road to a composing life could be.
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Common questions
A commemorative exhibit of paintings by his friend Viktor Hartmann, an architect and painter who had died at 39, which inspired Mussorgsky to write a piano suite based on his impressions of the paintings.
Not until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922. The piano suite was not performed or published during Mussorgsky’s lifetime.
His mother, an excellent pianist, gave him his first lessons, and later the composer Mily Balakirev became his teacher after Dargomyzhsky introduced them.