Early years of the Imperial Guard Mussorgsky was born in
Karevo, Toropets Uyezd,
Pskov Governorate, Russian Empire, south of
Saint Petersburg. His wealthy and land-owning family, the noble family of
Mussorgsky, is reputedly descended from
Rurik, through the sovereign princes of
Smolensk. His mother, Julia Chirikova, was the daughter of a comparatively non-rich nobleman. Modest's paternal grandmother Irina used to be a
serf that could be sold without land in his grandfather's estate. At age six, Mussorgsky began receiving piano lessons from his mother, herself a trained pianist. His progress was sufficiently rapid that three years later, he was able to perform a
John Field concerto and works by
Franz Liszt for family and friends. At age 10, Mussorgsky and his brother were taken to Saint Petersburg to study at the elite German language
Petrischule (St. Peter's School). While there, Modest studied the piano with . In 1852, the 12-year-old Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled "Porte-enseigne Polka" at his father's expense. Mussorgsky's parents planned the move to Saint Petersburg so that both their sons would renew the family tradition of military service. Mussorgsky entered the Cadet School of the Guards at age 13. Controversy had arisen over the educational attitudes at the time of both this institute and its director, General Sutgof. According to a former student, singer and composer Nikolai Kompaneisky, Sutgof "was proud when a cadet returned from leave drunk with champagne." Music still remained important to Mussorgsky. Sutgof's daughter was also a pupil of Gerke, and Mussorgsky was allowed to attend lessons with her. His skills as a pianist made Mussorgsky much in demand by fellow-cadets; for them, he would play dances interspersed with his own
improvisations. In 1856, Mussorgsky – who had developed a strong interest in history and studied German philosophy – graduated from the Cadet School. Following family tradition, he received a commission with the
Preobrazhensky Regiment, the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Borodin later remembered: More portentous was Mussorgsky's introduction that winter to
Alexander Dargomyzhsky, at that time the most important Russian composer after
Mikhail Glinka. Dargomyzhsky was impressed with Mussorgsky's pianism. As a result, Mussorgsky became a fixture at Dargomyzhsky's soirées. There, as critic
Vladimir Stasov later recalled, he began "his true musical life." Over the next two years at Dargomyzhsky's, Mussorgsky met several figures of importance in Russia's cultural life, among them Stasov,
César Cui (a fellow officer), and
Mily Balakirev. Balakirev had an especially strong impact. Within days he took it upon himself to help shape Mussorgsky's fate as a composer. He recalled to Stasov, "Because I am not a theorist, I could not teach him harmony (as, for instance
Rimsky-Korsakov now teaches it) ... [but] I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both
Beethoven symphonies [as piano duets] and much else (
Schumann,
Schubert,
Glinka, and others), analyzing the form." Up to this point, Mussorgsky had known nothing but piano music; his knowledge of more radical recent music was virtually non-existent. Balakirev started filling these gaps in Mussorgsky's knowledge. In 1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev, Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music. He also suffered a painful crisis at this time. This may have had a spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev the young man referred to "mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity"), but its exact nature will probably never be known. In 1859, the 20-year-old gained valuable theatrical experience by assisting in a production of Glinka's opera
A Life for the Tsar on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; Mussorgsky also met (father of
Anatoly Lyadov) and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow – after which he professed love of "everything Russian". Mussorgsky and his brother were also inspired by the
gothic script, they were using an "M" personal sign instead of
family coat of arms, very similar to
the symbols of the early Rurikids. Despite this epiphany, Mussorgsky's music leaned more toward foreign models; a four-hand piano sonata that he produced in 1860 contains his only movement in
sonata form. Nor is any 'nationalistic' impulse easily discernible in the incidental music for
Vladislav Ozerov's play
Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the
Intermezzo in Modo Classico for piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867). The latter was the only important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: the reasons for this probably lie in the painful re-emergence of his subjective crisis in 1860 and the purely objective difficulties which resulted from the
emancipation of the serfs the following year – as a result of which the family was deprived of half its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment. By this time, Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influence of Balakirev and was largely teaching himself. In 1863 he began an opera –
Salammbô – on which he worked between 1863 and 1866 before losing interest in the project. During this period, he returned to Saint Petersburg and supported himself as a low-grade civil servant while living in a six-man "commune". In a heady artistic and intellectual atmosphere, he read and discussed a wide range of modern artistic and scientific ideas – including those of the provocative writer
Chernyshevsky, known for the bold assertion that, in art, "form and content are opposites". Under such influences he came more and more to embrace the idea of artistic realism and all that it entailed, whether this concerned the responsibility to depict life "as it is truly lived"; the preoccupation with the lower strata of society; or the rejection of repeating, symmetrical musical forms as insufficiently true to the unrepeating, unpredictable course of "real life". "Real life" affected Mussorgsky painfully in 1865 when his mother died; at this point, the composer had his first serious bout of alcoholism, which forced him to leave the commune to stay with his brother. However, the 26-year-old was on the point of writing his first realistic songs (including "Hopak" and "Darling Savishna", both of them composed in 1866 and among his first "real" publications the following year). The year 1867 was also the one in which he finished the original orchestral version of his
Night on Bald Mountain (which, Balakirev criticised and refused to conduct, with the result that it was never performed during Mussorgsky's lifetime).
Peak Mussorgsky's career as a civil servant was by no means stable or secure: though he was assigned to various posts and even received a promotion in these early years, Mussorgsky was declared "supernumerary" in 1867 – remaining "in service" but receiving no wages. However, decisive developments were occurring in his artistic life. Although it was in 1867 that Stasov first referred to the "
kuchka" (, lit.
bunch, English: "The Five") of Russian composers loosely grouped around Balakirev, Mussorgsky was by then ceasing to seek Balakirev's approval and was moving closer to the older
Alexander Dargomyzhsky. Inside
The Five and its close companions, Mussorgsky was nicknamed as "Humour", Balakirev was "Power", and Rimsky-Korsakov was "Sincerity". Since 1866, Dargomyzhsky had been working on his opera
The Stone Guest, a version of the
Don Juan story with a
Pushkin text that he declared would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that abolished the "unrealistic" division between
aria and
recitative in favor of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two. Under the influence of this work (and the ideas of
Georg Gottfried Gervinus, according to whom "the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech"), Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of
Nikolai Gogol's play
Marriage (
Zhenitba), with his priority being to render into music the natural accents and patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue. This work marked an extreme position in Mussorgsky's pursuit of naturalistic word-setting: he abandoned it unorchestrated after reaching the end of his "Act 1", and though its characteristically "Mussorgskyian" declamation is to be heard in all his later vocal music, the naturalistic mode of vocal writing more and more became merely one expressive element among many. A few months after abandoning
Zhenitba, the 29-year-old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of
Boris Godunov. This he did, assembling and shaping a text from Pushkin's play and
Karamzin's history. Mussorgsky completed the large-scale score the following year while living with friends and working for the Forestry Department. However, the finished opera was rejected for theatrical performance in 1871, apparently because of its lack of any "
prima donna" role. Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged "second version". During the next year, which he spent sharing rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov, he made changes that went beyond those requested by the theatre. In this version the opera was accepted, probably in May 1872, and three excerpts were staged at the
Mariinsky Theatre in 1873. It is often asserted that in 1872 the opera was rejected a second time, but no specific evidence for this exists. By the time of the first production of
Boris Godunov in February 1874, Mussorgsky had taken part in the ill-fated
Mlada project (in the course of which he had made a choral version of his
Night on Bald Mountain) and had begun
Khovanshchina. Though far from being a critical success – and in spite of receiving only a dozen or so performances – the popular reaction in favour of
Boris made this the peak of Mussorgsky's career.
Decline From this peak, a pattern of decline became increasingly apparent. At this point, the Balakirev circle was disintegrating, something Mussorgsky was especially bitter about. He wrote to
Vladimir Stasov, "[T]he Mighty Handful has degenerated into soulless traitors." In drifting away from his old friends, Mussorgsky had been seen to fall victim to "fits of madness" that could well have been alcoholism-related. His friend
Viktor Hartmann had died, and Mussorgsky's relative and recent roommate
Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (who furnished the poems for the song-cycle
Sunless and would go on to provide those for the
Songs and Dances of Death) had moved away to get married. Mussorgsky engaged a new and prominent personal private physician about 1870, Dr. George Leon Carrick, sometime Secretary and later President of the St. Petersburg Physicians' Society and a cousin of
Sir Harry Lauder. 's celebrated
portrait of Mussorgsky, painted 2–5 March 1881, only a few days before the composer's death While Mussorgsky suffered personally from alcoholism, it was also a behavior pattern considered typical for those of Mussorgsky's generation who wanted to oppose the establishment and protest through extreme forms of behavior. One contemporary noted, "an intense worship of
Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a 'pose,' for the best people of the [eighteen-]sixties." Another writes, "Talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink." Mussorgsky spent day and night in a Saint Petersburg tavern of low repute, the Maly Yaroslavets, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts. He and his fellow drinkers idealized their alcoholism, perhaps seeing it as ethical and aesthetic opposition. Although he found a comfortable room in a good hospitaland for several weeks even appeared to be rallyingthe situation was hopeless. In March 1881,
Ilya Repin painted the famous,
red-nosed portrait in what were to be the last days of the composer's life as Mussorgsky died a week after his 42nd birthday. Mussorgsky was interred at the
Tikhvin Cemetery of the
Alexander Nevsky Monastery in
Saint Petersburg. Mussorgsky, like others of "The Five", was perceived as an extremist by the emperor and much of his court. This may have been the reason
Tsar Alexander III personally crossed off
Boris Godunov from the list of proposed pieces for the Imperial Opera in 1888. ==Works==