Pictures at an Exhibition

Modest Mussorgksy (1839-1881)

Pictures at an Exhibition

arranged by Elgar Howarth

Promenade

Gnomus

Promenade - Il vecchio Castello

Promenade -Tuileries (Children quarrelling after play)

Bydlo

Promenade- Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells -

Two Polish Jews (one rich, the other poor)

Promenade - Limoges, the Market Place -

Catacombae (Sepulchrum Romanum)- Con Mortuis in lingua mortua

The Hut on Chickens’ Legs (Baba Yaga) -

The Great Gate of Kiev

Originally written for piano, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition were inspired by an exhibition arranged by the St Petersburg Architects’ association to commemorate the death of the composer’s architect friend Victor Hartmann in 1874. There were watercolours of architectural monuments Hartmann had observed in Western Europe, fanciful sketches for a nutcracker or clock, costume designs for a ballet, scenes of Jewish life in Sandomir in Poland and, most impressive of all, a drawing for a new monument at Kiev. Mussorgsky was so moved and so fascinated by what he saw that as well as writing music to illustrate the drawings that meant most to him he depicted himself, in the various episodes headed Promenade, walking somewhat clumsily round the gallery.

He stops first in front of Gnomus, a design for nutcrackers in the shape of a gnome, listens to a troubador serenade in Il vecchio Castello, hears children quarrelling in the Tuileries, watches a wagon trundle past in Bydlo, imagines from the costume designs how a Ballet of Chicks in their Shells would sound, overhears the one-sided conversation of Two Polish Jews (one rich, the other poor), observes the market women busy with their handcarts in Limoges, visits the Paris Catacombs where he has a ghoulish conversation with Hartman in Latin, retells the story of the man-eating witch Baba Yaga in her Hut on Chickens’ Legs and finally makes up for the sad fact that The Great Gate of Kiev was never built by constructing a massive monument in sound.

Long accepted as a challenge by musicians who fancy themselves as orchestrators - from Tushmalov to Stokowski and Gorchakov to Ashkenazy - Mussorgsky’s piano score found its most successful orchestral transformation in the version written by Ravel in 1922. Elgar Howarth’s brass arrangement, scored for sixteen instrumentalists in 1979, is a no less virtuoso achievement.

Modest Mussorgksy (1839-1881)

Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

Promenade

Gnomus

Promenade – Il vecchio castello

Promenade – Tuileries (Children quarrelling after play)

Bydlo

Promenade – Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells –

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle (Two Jews: on rich, the other poor) –

Promenade – Limoges, the Market Place –

Catacombae (Sepulchrum Romanum) – Con Mortuis in lingua mortua

The Hut on chickens’ legs (Baba Yaga) –

The great Gate of Kiev

A particularly painful memory for Mussorgsky, which he feared would haunt him for the rest of his life, was an occasion in 1873 when his great friend Victor 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!”

He made up for it however. Although there is no heritage of Hartmann buildings, his memory has been preserved in a unique way by the Pictures at an Exhibition directly inspired by the drawings and designs Mussorgsky saw at the Hartmann memorial exhibition at the St Petersburg Architects’ Association in 1874. “Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris did,” Mussorgsky wrote as he worked on the score in 1874. “Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord. 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 forty years after the composer’s death: it produced such boldly unconventional piano writing that no one knew what to make of it – apart, that is, from transforming it into an orchestral score.

The extent of Mussorgsky’s personal involvement in his observations on Hartmann’s work can be judged from the way in which some, if not all, of the pictorial episodes are based on variants of the opening Promenade – a rotundly harmonised pentatonic melody proceeding ponderously in alternating bars of 6/4 and 5/4 and clearly depicting the composer’s progress round the exhibition. Between the snapping teeth and gaping jaws of Gnomus (after a fanciful nutcracker design) the theme is not obviously present. It is probably not present at all in Il vecchio castello where the troubadour outside the castle walls strums a bass G sharp however far his song wanders from the original key. But then, in the Tuileries, interspersed with the semiquaver quarrelling of the children at play, there is the prominent descending minor third of the Promenade. As the wagon rumbles past in Bydlo, the driver’s song is almost certainly based on the same theme. While he apparently did not see himself in the costumes Hartmann designed for the Ballet of Chicks in their Shells, in Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle (after a pair of drawings his friend had given him) he seems to have identified with the domineering rich Jew, who wins his argument over the voluble poor Jew by sheer weight of sound.

Mussorgsky obviously heard as much in the pictures as he saw in them. In The Market Place at Limoges he offers not only his view of the peasant women bustling round with their handcarts but also an impression of their excited chatter. To match Hartmann’s view of the Catacombae he presents a remarkable pre-Stockhausen study in cavernous acoustics. It leads eerily into Con Mortuis in lingua mortua, the manuscript of which bears the words, “The creative spirit of Hartmann leads me to the skulls… and the skulls glow softly from within.” This episode, with its very personal significance for Mussorgsky, is obviously a deliberate variation on the Promenade theme.

The next piece rehabilitates an old Russian legend. Hartmann had taken the hut on chickens’ 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 the Great Gate of Kiev (which was never built, alas) with a correspondingly massive musical monument. Marching ceremoniously and heavily through it, he makes a chorale out of the Slavonic inscription round the main arch, mingles echoes of the Promenade with the pealing bells in the tower, and brings the procession to an end in a series of huge augmentations of the main theme.

Modest Mussorgksy (1839-1881)

Pictures at an Exhibition

Promenade

Gnomus

Promenade – Il vecchio Castello

Promenade – Tuileries (Children quarrelling after play)

Bydlo

Promenade – Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells –

Two Polish Jews (one rich the other poor)

Promenade – Limoges, the Market Place –

Catacombae (Sepulchrum Romanum) – Con Mortuis in lingua mortua

The Hut on chickens’ legs (Baba Yaga) –

The great Gate of Kiev

Mussorgsky weighed fifteen stones. That does not make him the heaviest composer ever but, since he did not have the height to match, 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 Victor 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!”

He made up for it however. Although 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, fanciful sketches for a nutcracker or clock, costume designs for a ballet, scenes of Jewish life in Sandomir in Poland, a drawing for a new monument at Kiev.

“Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris did,” Mussorgsky wrote during its composition in 1874. “Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” Ironically, it was the seething inspiration which caused the work in its original form to be ignored by pianists for at least forty years after the composer’s death: it produced such boldly unconventional piano writing that no one knew what to make of it - apart from transforming it into an orchestral score.

Pictures at an Exhibition is as much about Mussorgsky’s memories of his relationship with the artist as about the works 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. A pentatonic melody rotundly harmonised in 15-stone chords and proceeding ponderously in alternating bars of 6/4 and 5/4, it clearly depicts the composer making his way round the gallery where his late friends’ drawings 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 The old Castle, where the troubadour outside the wall strums a bass G sharp however far his song wanders from the original key. But then, in the Tuileries, interspersed with the semiquaver quarrelling of the children at play, there is the prominent descending minor third of the Promenade. As the wagon rumbles past in Bydlo, the driver’s song is almost certainly based on the main theme. Mussorgsky apparently did not see himself in the Ballet of Chicks in their Shells, but in the next picture (which was in his own collection) he seems to have identified with the domineering rich Jew, who wins his argument over the fast-talking poor Jew by sheer weight of sound.

Mussorgsky obviously heard as much in Hartmann’s pictures as he saw in them. In The Market Place at Limoges he offers not only his view of the peasant women bustling round with their handcarts but also his idea of their excited chatter. For the Roman Catacombs in Paris he presents a remarkable pre-Stockhausen study in cavernous acoustics. It leads eerily into Con Mortuis in lingua mortua, the manuscript of which bears the words, “The creative spirit of Hartmann leads me to the skulls, calls me close to them, and the skulls glow softly from within.” This episode, with its very personal significance for Mussorgsky, is obviously based on a deliberate variation of the Promenade theme.

The next piece, a self-contained tone poem, rehabilitates an old Russian legend. Hartmann had taken the hut on chickens’ 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 the Great Gate of Kiev (which was never built, alas) with a correspondingly massive musical monument. Marching ceremoniously and heavily through it, he makes a chorale out of the Slavonic inscription round the main arch, mingles echoes of the Promenade with the pealing bells in the tower, and brings the procession to an end in a series of huge augmentations of the main theme.

Modest Mussorgksy (1839-1881)

Pictures at an Exhibition

orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

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

Gnomus: vivo

Promenade: moderato commodo e con delicatezza

Il vecchio Castello: andante

Promenade: moderato non tanto, pesante

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

Bydlo: sempre moderato pesante

Promenade: tranquillo -

Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells: scherzino: vivo leggiero

Two Polish Jews - one rich, the other poor: andante

Limoges, the Market (Great News): allegretto vivo sempre scherzando -

Catacombae (Sepulchrum Romanum): largo -

Con Mortuis in lingua mortua: andante non troppo, con lamento

The Hut on chickens’ legs (Baba Yaga): allegro con brio, feroce-

The great Gate of Kiev: allegro alla breve, maestoso, con grandezza

Mussorgksy and Hartmann

Mussorgsky, who was not very tall, weighed fifteen stones. 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 Victor 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!”

He 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 Sandomir in Poland, a drawing for a new monument at Kiev.

“Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris did,” Mussorgsky wrote during its composition in 1874. “Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord . . 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 forty years after the composer’s death: it produced such boldly unconventional piano writing that no one knew what to make of it - except transform it into an orchestral score. The first orchestral version (by Mikhail Tushmalov, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov) was written as soon as the work was published. The most successful and much the most widely performed is the one commissioned from Maurice Ravel, master of orchestration and Mussorgksy enthusiast, by Serge Koussevitsky in 1922.

The pictures

Pictures at an Exhibition is as much about Mussorgsky’s memories of his relationship with the artist as about the works 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 - itself, it seems, a derivative of the clumsy Pierrot theme in Schumann’s Carnaval. 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 round the gallery where his late friends’ 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 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 the Tuileries, interspersed with the semiquaver quarrelling of the children at play, there is the prominent descending minor third of the Promenade. As the wagon 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 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 The Market Place at Limoges 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 Roman Catacombs in Paris he presents a remarkable study in cavernous acoustics (sounding rather less like Stockhausen in the orchestral version than in the prophetically inspired original). In the manuscript of Con 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 chickens’ 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 the Great Gate of 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

orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

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

Gnomus: vivo

Promenade: moderato commodo e con delicatezza

Il vecchio Castello: andante

Promenade: moderato non tanto, pesante

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

Bydlo: sempre moderato pesante

Promenade: tranquillo -

Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells: scherzino: vivo leggiero

Two Polish Jews - one rich, the other poor: andante

Limoges, the Market (Great News): allegretto vivo sempre scherzando -

Catacombae (Sepulchrum Romanum): largo -

Con Mortuis in lingua mortua: andante non troppo, con lamento

The Hut on hen’s legs (Baba Yaga): allegro con brio, feroce-

The great Gate of Kiev: allegro alla breve, maestoso, con grandezza

Mussorgsky and Hartmann

Mussorgsky, who was not very tall, weighed fifteen stones. 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 Victor 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!”

He 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 Sandomir in Poland, a drawing for a new monument at Kiev.

“Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris did,” Mussorgsky wrote during its composition in 1874. “Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord… I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” Ironically it was the seething inspiration which caused the work in its original form to be ignored by pianists for at least forty years after the composer’s death: it produced such boldly unconventional piano writing that no one knew what to make of it – except transform it into an orchestral score. The first orchestral version (by Mikhail Tushmalov) was written as soon as the work was published. The most successful and much the most widely performed is the one commissioned from Maurice Ravel, master of orchestration and Mussorgsky enthusiast, by Serge Koussevitsky in 1922.

The pictures

Pictures at an Exhibition is as much about Mussorgsky’s memories of his relationship with the artist as about the works themselves (two 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 Promenade that opens the work and recurs three times. 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 round the gallery where his late friends’ paintings were on view.

Not all the variations are conscious and deliberate. Between the snapping teeth and gaping jaws of Gnomus (a nutcracker design) the theme is only subliminally present. It is probably not present at all in 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 the Tuileries, interspersed with the semiquaver quarrelling of the children at play, there is the prominent descending minor third of the Promenade. As the wagon 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 Chicks in their Shells (a costume design for the ballet Trilby), but the next movement is based on two pictures, studies of Jews in Sandomir, in his own collection: 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 The Market Place at Limoges 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 Roman Catacombs (inspired by a sketch Hartmann made in the Catacombs in Paris) he presents a remarkable study in cavernous acoustics. In the manuscript of Con 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 the Great Gate of Kiev (which was never built, alas) with a correspondingly massive musical monument, ringing the bells in the tower, making a hymn (“As you are baptised in Christ”) out of the Slavonic inscription round the main arch, briefly recalling the Promenade, and bringing the procession to an end in a series of huge augmentations of the main theme.

Gerald Larner © 2008