Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
The Story Behind Mussorgsky's Great Masterpiece
In February of 1874, a year after Victor Hartmann died at the age of thirty-nine, Mussorgsky (b. Korevo, Pskov, 1839; d. St.Petersburg, 1881), attended an exhibition of Hartmann's works.
The two had been close friends for some time and their common ground had been an interest in gleaning inspiration from Russian history and folklore for the arts: music, visual arts and literature. Mussorgsky was inspired and tied these paintings and music together in his masterpiece "Pictures at an Exhibition."
Movements
Promenade depicts the composer walking from picture to picture and comes in six times in the work. Sometimes lively, sometimes ponderous, this movement is meant to show the difference in feeling the stroller has as each new painting is viewed.
Gnomus was Hartmann's sketch of a wooden nutcracker which was carved to depict a comical old face between whose jaws nuts were broken. This type of nutcracker was very popular at the time and it was the basis for Tchaikowsky's hero in his ballet "The Nutcracker Suite."
The Old Castle gives the impression of an old Italian castle, perhaps partly in ruins, with someone singing beneath the castle walls. The accompanying music is a sustained and plaintive melody.
Tuileries, which is subtitled Dispute of Children After Play, is a musical description of Hartmann's watercolor of quarreling children in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. It is a lively, fresh and exciting exercise.
Bydlo is a Polish word for cattle and 1869 Hartmann spent a month in Poland, where he drew many vignettes of the Ghetto, including another movement, The Two Polish Jews, which painting was owned by Mussorgsky. Bydlo describes a lumbering ox-cart with huge wooden wheels sloshing through muddy country roads.
Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells was the painting that was a costume plate for Trilbi, a ballet. The music is very descriptive of little chicks fighting to get out of their 'jails.'
Two Polish Jews. The One Rich, The Other Poor, is often referred to as Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, a title that was appended much later. This is the painting that Mussorgsky owned but in the intervening years has been lost. The music makes much of the difference between the two men: the pomposity and arrogance of the rich man and the triplets that denote the whiny, fearful and fast-talking poor man.
Limoges, the Market Place. Victor Hartmann had spent some time in Limoges and painted over 150 watercolors there, several of them concentrating on the noted cathedral of that French town. Many also dealt with the picturesque types Hartmann encountered on his quest for subjects. One of his sketches was of a woman (said to have been 112 years old), praying in the cathedral, as well as the women of the town gossiping to one another over their pushcarts. The music catches the chatter of the women perfectly.
There are three more movements in the suite, including the Catabombes, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga) and The Great Gate of Kiev. All are wonderfully delineated in the accompanying music, and will be discussed in the next article on Pictures at an Exhibition.
Source
Foreword to the piano score of Pictures at an Exhibition by Alfred V.Frankenstein.
For further reading see Modest Mussorgsky's Great Compositions
Modest Mussorgsky
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