Pictures

The pictures of Pictures at an Exhibition are by the Russian architect Victor Hartman, who was clearly not only a designer but also an imaginative artist who took his sketchbooks with him on his travels in Europe. The exhibition was a memorial retrospective of his work, including sketches for a fanciful nutcracker (Gnomus), various scenes in France, a drawing of a passing wagon (Bydlo), costume designs for a ballet, scenes of Jewish life in Sandomir in Poland, an idea for clock based on a Russian folk tale (Baba Yaga) and a plan for a splendid new monument at Kiev. The music was inspired not only by Mussorgsky’s reactions to his late friend’s drawings but also, in the four Promenade movements, by his memories of himself making his way, in his characteristically overweight and slightly clumsy way, round the gallery of the Architects’ Association in St Petersburg in 1874.

"Hartmannn is bubbling over, just as Boris did," Mussorgsky wrote during the composition of Pictures at an Exhibition. "Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord. I am ingesting them and I am so gorging myself that I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough." The spontaneity of his inspiration produced such boldly unconventional piano writing - particularly in the cavernous acoustic of the Catacombs and the eerie episode that follows - that his contemporaries didn't know what to make of it. The Pictures were never performed in public during the composer's life time. Five years after his death, when they were first published in an edition by rimsky-Korsakov, Michael Touschmaloff became the first of many composers (eleven of them at the latest count) to attempt to realise Mussorgsky's ideas in orchestral form. Much the most successful, at least in the sense that is by far the most frequently performed, Ravel's version was commissioned by Koussevitsky for his concert series in Paris in 1922.

MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839-1881) orchestrated by MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

Pictures at an Exhibition (1874, orch.1922)

1 Promenade: Allegro giusto nel modo russico; senza allegrezza, ma poco sostenuto

2 Gnomus: Vivo

3 Promenade: Moderato commodo e con delicatezza

4 II vecchio castello: Andante

5 Promenade: Moderato non tanto, pesante

6 Tuileries (Children quarrelling after play): Allegretto non troppo, capriccioso

7 Bydlo: Sempre moderato pesante

8 Promenade: Tranquillo -

9 Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells: Scherzino (Vivo leggiero)

10 Two Polish Jews – One Rich, the other Poor: Andante

11 Limoges, the Market (Great News): Allegretto viva sempre scherzando –

12 Catacombae (Sepulchrum romanum): Largo –

13 Cum mortuis in lingua mortua: Andante non troppo, con lamento

14 The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga): Allegro con brio, feroce –

15 The Great Gate of Kiev: Allegro alla breve, maestoso, con grandezza

Mussorgsky was not very tall, but weighed 15 stone. This does not make him the heaviest composer ever, but it did contribute to making him conscious of being a clumsy sort of person both physically and socially. One particularly painful memory, which he feared would haunt him for the rest of his life, was an occasion in 1873 when his great friend Viktor Hartmann, the architect, was taken ill in the street in St Petersburg: ‘When you’ve got your wind again, old boy,’ he told him, ‘we’ll go on .. .’ – ‘That was all I could say,’ he told a mutual friend after Hartmann’s death, ‘when I knew that his death warrant had been signed: what clumsy fools we are! ‘

Mussorgsky made up for it, however. Though few (if any) of the buildings Hartmann designed remain standing, his memory has been preserved in a unique way by Mussorgsky’s music in Pictures at an Exhibition. In this work the composer presents himself walking, a little clumsily, round the Hartmann memorial exhibition at the St Petersburg Architects’ Association in 1874, projecting his own emotions into the pictures – watercolours of architectural monuments observed in Western Europe, sketches for a fanciful nutcracker or clock, costume designs for a ballet, scenes of Jewish life in Sandomierz in Poland, a drawing for a new monument in Kiev (now the Ukrainian capital Kyiv).

‘Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord,’ Mussorgsky wrote during the composition of the piano site in 1874; ‘I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.’ Ironically, it was the seething inspiration that caused the work in its original form to be ignored by pianists for at least 40 years after the composer’s death: it produced such boldly unconventional piano writing that no one knew what to make of it – except to transform it into an orchestral score. The first (partial) orchestral version – by Mikhail Tushmalov, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov – was written shortly after the work was published in 1886. The most successful and much the most widely performed is the one commissioned from Maurice Ravel, master of orchestration and Mussorgsky enthusiast, by Serge Koussevitzky in 1922.

The music

Pictures at an Exhibition is as much about Mussorgsky’s memories of his relationship with his friend Viktor Hartmann, as it is about Hartmann’s artworks themselves (at least one of which the composer lent to the exhibition from his own collection). Some of the movements are, in fact, based on variants of the theme of the opening Promenade. Rotundly harmonised in 15-stone chords and proceeding ponderously in alternating bars of 6/4 and 5/4, it clearly depicts the heavyweight composer making his way laboriously round the gallery where his late friend’s paintings were on view.

Not all the variations are conscious and deliberate. Between the snapping teeth and gaping jaws of Gnomus (The Nutcracker) the theme is only subliminally present. It is probably not present at all in II vecchio castello (The Old Castle), where the troubadour outside the wall strums a bass G sharp, however far his song (on alto saxophone) wanders from the original key. But then, in Tuileries, interspersed with the semiquaver quarrelling of the children at play, there is the prominent descending minor third of the Promenade. As the ox-cart rumbles past in Bydlo, the driver’s song on the tuba is almost certainly based on the main theme. Mussorgsky apparently did not see himself in the Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells, but the next picture was in his own collection and he seems to have identified with the domineering rich Jew, who with full orchestral octaves wins his argument over the fast-talking poor Jew on muted trumpet.

Obviously, Mussorgsky heard in Hartmann’s pictures at least as much as he saw in them. In Limoges, the Market he offers not only his view of the peasant women bustling round with their handcarts but also his idea of their argumentative chatter.

For the movement depicting the Roman catacombs in Paris he presents a remarkable study in cavernous acoustics. In the manuscript of Cum mortuis in lingua mortua Mussorgsky wrote: The creative spirit of Hartmann leads me to the skulls, calls me close to them, and the skulls glow softly from within.’ This is obviously one of the deliberate variations on the Promenade theme, with a personal significance for Mussorgsky and opportunity for some very eerie scoring by Ravel.

The next piece, a self-contained tone-poem, rehabilitates an old Russian legend. Hartmann had taken the hut on hen’s legs as an idea for a clock design; Mussorgsky restores it to its original inhabitant – the man-eating witch Baba Yaga – and recalls its original nightmare character.

Finally, Mussorgsky matches the splendour of Hartmann’s plans for a new gate in Kiev (which was never built, alas) with a correspondingly massive musical monument, ringing the bells in the tower, making a hymn out of the Slavonic inscription round the main arch, and bringing the procession to an end in a series of huge augmentations of the main theme.

Gerald Larner © 2017