Mussorgsky, Nigth on Bald Mountain

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, born in Karevo, Russia, on March 21, 1839, showed remarkable piano skills from a young age. Although his father was no external to music and his mother played the piano moderately well as an amateur, the little boy had to enter the Cadet School of the Guards in St. Petersburg at the age of thirteen, because in the opinion of his parents his musical talent should not be an impediment to forging a stable future.

Officer and musician
Graduated from the School with the rank of officer, Mussorgsky was faced with a serious nervous breakdown, as the development of his military career required him to move away from Saint Petersburg. In the salons of the city, he had the opportunity to meet various rising musicians: Cui, Borodin and Balakirev (with whom he would later participate, along with Rimski-Kórsakov, in the famous group "Mighty Five"), and had become a disciple of the latter so that leaving the city meant getting away not only from family and friends but also from music.

Cadet Modest Mussorgsky
(1839 -1881)

Leaving the military ranks
The vocational crisis that absorbed him lasted almost two years, until in 1859, at the age of twenty, in a moment of supreme lucidity and commendable sharpness, he decided to come out of the military ranks to devote himself entirely to musical art. Unfortunately, during the next decade, despite being a member in good standing of the aforementioned Mighty Five – formally established in 1862 –, he would be afflicted by new and deep emotional crises, caused by the dire economic situation of his family.

Official and musician
The family crisis forced him to enter a ministry as an administrative employee, where he would remain for no less than fifteen years, taking away thousands of precious hours from creative work. All in all, the end of the decade is a relatively fertile period, in which the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain is created. The years to come will register the birth of the suite Pictures at an Exhibition and, perhaps his most famous work, the opera Boris Godunov.

Night on Bald Mountain - Tone poem
The work is inspired by a Gogol tale relating the experience of a peasant who witnesses a coven on the night of San Juan. It was never published during Mussorgsky's lifetime, and the version that has become popular – the one we heard in the animated film Fantasia in Stokowski's arrangement – corresponds to the orchestral arrangement that his fellow countryman Nicolai Rimski-Kórsakov made of Mussorgsky´s sketches.

The rendition is by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado.