Night

Composers have always taken liberties with poems they have chosen to set as songs – most often by cutting them but also by changing the odd word or line here and there. But it was surely without precedent when, having set Night as Pushkin wrote it in 1864, Mussorgsky returned to the poem a few years later, rewrote it in a prose paraphrase of his own and made another song out of it with the same title. The reason why he did this is presumably not because he thought he could write better than Pushkin but because he was very interested at the time in naturalistic word setting, in translating Russian as it is spoken into musical terms, and verse is obviously not conducive to that. Certainly, the setting of the prose version of Night is less song-like, more recitative-like than the authentic Pushkin setting. Both versions are remarkable, however, for their ecstatic piano part throbbing with tremolandos and their “impressionistic” harmonies conceived years before any French composer dared commit himself to anything so progressive.