Musorgsky. Songs and Dances of Death. Pictures at an Exhibition

PROGRAMME:
Modest Musorgsky
The song cycle Songs and Dances of Death to lyrics by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov
Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)

Musorgsky’s vocal cycle Songs and Dances of Death (1875–1877) is one of the world’s most unusual embodiments of a subject known from medieval times. The idea behind the work, suggested by the art critic and the composer’s friend Vladimir Stasov, was influenced by Liszt’s famous Danse macabre (Musorgsky was rather critical of another work on the same theme, Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre). The theme of death, as Sviridov observed, is critical in Musorgsky’s music: he reveals it in many ways and each time in a new fashion (death as redemption and peace in Boris Godunov, “wicked death” as monstrous injustice in the confessional romance Epitaph addressed to his late friend Nadezhda Opochinina, and the voluntary death of the schismatics as a spiritual feat in Khovanshchina... ). In letters dating from the time the composer was writing Songs and Dances of Death he referred to the work as “She”. And here Death is truly capitalised, it is Death that is the only character in the cycle. Together with the poet Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Musorgsky created a composition of four independent movements united in this manner. In Lullaby, Death is a comfort, lulling a dying child; but at the end of the next part, Serenade, the mask of compassion and love is torn away and the triumphant declaration of Death (“You are mine!”) reveals her true face. The image of Death in Trepak is the most complex and ambiguous: the only bright part of the romance is a dream that Death imbues with exhausted “grief, lament and need” for the peasant. Isn’t there some happy and long-awaited release from the unbearable burdens of life in these almost heavenly visions? In the finale of the cycle the image of Death takes on truly universal dimensions. The composer changed the title of The Triumph of Death proposed by Golenishchev-Kutuzov to The Field Marshal, creating a musical image of Death to a victorious and terrifying march. Affected by the first performance of The Field Marshal, Musorgsky wrote to the poet “One can hear some stealthy, imperceptible and fatal love! It is... Death, coldly and passionately loving Death, enjoying Death.”
Shostakovich undertook the orchestration of Songs and Dances of Death in 1962 for Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich. The composer felt a great piety for Musorgsky, and created his own orchestral versions of Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina. He called Songs and Dances of Death a “great work”. Under the impression of Vishnevskaya’s performance of the music of the cycle, some years later Shostakovich conceived a unique continuation of his own about the faces of Death – the Fourteenth Symphony (to verse by Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke and Wilhelm Küchelbecker.

Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano cycle that Musorgsky composed in June 1874. This was a time of renewed artistic energy: to great acclaim the Mariinsky Theatre had staged the premiere of Boris Godunov, the song cycle Sunless had been composed and work was continuing apace on Khovanshchina. “Sounds and ideas have frozen in the air, I swallow them, sate myself, I can hardly succeed in scrawling them on paper... Work is going so well,” the composer wrote to Vladimir Stasov. The cycle is dedicated to the memory of the talented architect and artist Viktor Hartmann (1834–1873) and was composed following a visit to an exhibition organised by Stasov in February 1874. The idea of the work (indicated by the composer as A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann) and the unprecedented title bear witness to the unique nature of Pictures at an Exhibition, confirmed in the music of the cycle itself – unusually vivid, deep and giving birth to numerous ideas and their interpretations, both for performers and researchers.
The orchestrations of the cycle – currently around twenty – are interpretations of it. The most famous came from Ravel (1922). Ravel took great care with Musorgsky’s music (he published only one version of the music of the first piece, Promenade). At the same time, he freely interpreted several images: the final part of the “pictures” is Bydlo (the drawing depicted a large cart drawn by bulls; with Musorgsky a different image emerged – that of a heavy fate) and was transformed into a funeral procession to a drumbeat; there are also such vivid effects as the squawking and squeaking of chicks in The Ballet of the Un-hatched Chicks (after sketches for Yuli Gerber’s ballet Trilby).
Musorgsky’s Pictures are by no means musical illustrations of the exhibits at the memorial display. The idea itself, however, is a kind of journey through different countries and ages, recorded in drawings and watercolours, designs for buildings and other structures, sketches for theatre costumes and sets and the world of imagery they conjure up, and was seized on by the composer. In the manuscript of Catacombae. Sepulcrum romanum (the drawing that depicts this piece shows the artist himself), Musorgsky added a codicil about “the creative spirit of the late Hartmann” that drew him after him. To an even greater extent, the composer himself acts as a guide in the cycle by means of the music of the Promenade that flows throughout the work (it makes itself felt in the individual “pictures”). There is one further analogy to be made: Musorgsky appears as the narrator of a series of stories that draw the listener “deep” into each “picture”, bringing them to life through the artist and the musician’s imagination. We are faced with a chain of fantastical (Gnomus, Catacombae, The House on Chicken Legs. Baba Yaga) and utterly realistic images, scenes and even micro-novellas (Il vecchio Castello, Bydlo, The Ballet of the Un-hatched Chicks, Tuileries. Dispute d’enfants après jeux, Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle [the composer combined two drawings, one of a rich and one of a poor Jew], Limoges. Le Marché. La Grande Nouvelle). The culmination of the cycle is the final The Bogatyr Gates. In the Capital City of Kiev which unifies the past, the present and the future like an inspired anthem for Russia.
Vladimir Goryachikh