Mussorgsky Modest Petrovich

Main article: History of music in Russia

Biography

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born on March 9 [21], 1839 in the village. Karevo of the Pskov province.

The first two children of the noble Mussorgsky family died in infancy, so the next, Filaret and especially Modinka, so beautiful and healthy, mother Yulia Ivanovna protected and took care of from all sides, dreaming of their future brilliant officer career. From the age of three, she taught Modest music, and at seven she gave him to a professional teacher. It was the mother who conducted most of the household affairs of her son, who never wanted and could not practically think.

1860

November 9, 1860. Modest, 21, in a letter to mentor Mili Balakirev (who is only three years older), is indignant. Russian Musical ^[1], etc. It asks to perform a spectacular agitato, part of the folk choir from the music for Vladislav Ozerov's play "Oedipus in Athens," while omitting such an important adagio, which should prepare the listener for the climax. "Is this careless company going to teach me?" Work on the music for the production was never completed.

The composer, who two years earlier retired from the Preobrazhensky regiment, lives as befits brilliant youth: he manners, speaks French, goes to the ballets of the "Puni musical scythe," discusses with Stasov the anatomy of female causal places, plays the piano masterfully and sings baritone. True, both in the soldier's barracks and in the St. Petersburg salon, adulterers and binge drunkards, if they do not completely bypass him, they almost do not captivate him at all. He deals with the composition chaotically: Balakirev, who did not recognize the conservatories, worked all his life according to the "show-correct" method, gave examples and corrected what seemed like mistakes. The process of mutual learning was also arranged in the nascent "Mighty Bunch."

1863: In a Petersburg apartment with five comrades

Since 1863, Modest Mussorgsky has been living in a rented St. Petersburg apartment rented with five comrades. Jokingly, it was called a "commune," inspired by the free-reform spirit of Chernyshevsky and his "What to do?"

In reality, life in an intellectual but cramped male hostel, and a new modest position in the office of the investigation of the reform of 1861, the liberation of peasants. Mussorgsky gives his brother, who has managed almost all family land affairs since the late 1850s, all the bureaucratic red tape and negotiations with former serfs. Despite Filaret's conscientious work, as a result, the family loses almost half of its possessions, and the remaining lands relying on Mussorgsky almost do not bring income in the new conditions. He does not find himself on the street (and demonstratively refuses the help of friends), but is forced to enlist as a clerk in the Main Engineering Directorate.

However, despite all the difficulties, it was during the "commune" that Mussorgsky composed the first full-fledged and independent works: romances and songs, and under the influence of "Judith" Serov takes on an opera based on Flaubert's "Salambo," in which his traditional love line impresses much less than the scenes of mass uprisings. The opera, as Mussorgsky will often have later, is written for a long time and remains unfinished.

1865: Death of mother. Hard drinking

March 17, 1865, the village of Karevo, Pskov province. Julia Ivanovna Mussorgskaya dies, as expected from dropsy. The world of Modest, the youngest of her sons, gives the first deep crack at this point. For 26 years of his life, he did not succeed in completely moving away from his parent ^[2].

After the death of his mother, Mussorgsky goes into such a terrible binge that brother Filaret and his wife temporarily take him to their country estate, where the mental and physical health of the young composer can, if not be restored, then stabilized. The loss of the closest person creates a storm inside, striving to break out, and the cleared mind through the gradually accumulating composer professionalism gives it musical forms.

1868: Experiments with recitatives in the opera "Marriage"

In "Mighty Bunch," where Balakirev, Mussorgsky, chemist Borodin, military engineer Kyui and naval officer Rimsky-Korsakov try to forge the future of Russian music, inspired on the one hand by Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, and on the other by Schumann, Liszt and Berlioz.

Creating the impression of a soft young man, enthusiastic and forever hovering in the clouds, Mussorgsky is considered the most unpromising in composer terms: he enthusiastically writes trio, sonatas, scherzo and sketches of symphonies, while still completely student, and according to the verdict of his comrades exorbitant and monstrous. He is fond of ancient plots (Oedipus), reads out Byron's Manfred, gradually begins to feel a craving for mysticism and for the first time discovers the "holy antiquity" of Moscow, which he defends before Balakirev, an apologist for St. Petersburg. In a hired apartment there is a Becker grand piano discharged by Mother, life consists of an endless series of techniques, walks and conversations, and dreams of a professional composer's career, despite the first failures, seem, if not tangible reality, then a matter of a very near future.

July 30, 1868. "Whether the speech is not (sic!) I will hear, no matter who says (the main thing, no matter what says), the musical presentation of such a speech works in my brains," Mussorgsky writes to Rimsky-Korsakov. He is busy creating an opera based on Gogol's "Marriage," for which, no matter how little, he is looking for a new musical language.

Mussorgsky wrote "Marriage" in the village, in the Tula province. The composer lived in a village hut, watched people, noticed characteristic images, typical features, speech turns and tried to "delineate as clearly as possible those changes in intonations that are in the characters during the dialogue," looked for a "sound expression of human thought."

Opéra dialogué, a dialogue opera, should bring to the fore the sound of voice, the curves of spoken intonation, present even in simple words and uncomplicated turns. Mussorgsky sees his way into using speech to make music, not just to convey meaning. He will try the same method in the cycle of songs "Children's," on it he will build "Khovanshchina." The connection between parallel streams of voice and instrumental music is weakened, resulting in the complex contrapuntal play of two equal participants. The importance is acquired not by small dramatic events and direct actions of the characters, but by endless conversations about what happened and what happened. The latter surprisingly echoes the ideas of continuity and operatic unity, which Richard Wagner is vigorously preaching at the same time in Europe. Formally, Mussorgsky (like other composers of The Mighty Bunch) did not accept Wagner's musical dramas, but, as history has shown, went in many ways a similar way.

"Marriage" was first performed at Caesar Cui's apartment by the forces of the members of the "Mighty Bunch" and the future wife of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Nadezhda Purgold. Mussorgsky's friends criticized the opera: they lacked beautiful melodies and it seemed that the author was too interested in working with the word. Yes, he violated musical standards, but was able to convey in the melody "life prose," "respect for the human language." The second performance was already after the death of Mussorgsky, in 1908, in the editorial office of Rimsky-Korsakov.

Although Dargomyzhsky with the "Stone Guest" anticipated him, Mussorgsky managed to achieve a greater truth of speech intonation in music. It is a pity that he never finished "Marriage," and it remained a laboratory, sketch work, a study on mastering the skill of recitative. As he himself wrote: "the experience of dramatic music in prose." In 1868, he anticipated 20th-century music.

The innovative musical project "Marriage," in places too complex and not fully doable, played its main role: gave impetus to the operas "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina." According to Mussorgsky himself: "After" Marriage, "Rubikon is transferred, and" Marriage "is a cage in which I am planted until I get tamed, and there I will."

1872: Beginning work on the opera "Khovanshchina"

Main article: Khovanshchina (opera)

1874: Premiere of the opera "Boris Godunov" and attacks by critics

October 19-20, 1875. Mussorgsky Stasova: "" Mighty Bunch "degenerated into soulless traitors:" scourge "turned out to be a child's whip."

"Boris Godunov" is performed and accepted with interest by the public, but criticism is far from so unanimous. The performance is expectedly scolded by the professor of the conservatory Alexander Fomintsyn (over which Mussorgsky previously mocked in the song "Classic"), as expected, Stasov praises him. But it is not without surprises. Nikolay Strakhov, a journalist and literary critic, suddenly decides to publicly write about the opera for the first and last time in his life. He stood up, even rebelled in defense of the great Russian classics, Pushkin, whose text was godless and clearly deliberately crippled, and in defense of the great Russian people, who were shown to be "rude, drunk and embittered."

Such a violent reaction from a person far from musical theater is very indicative. It shows that Mussorgsky worked a lot on the original text of Boris. Only here the goal of this is not to assert itself at the expense of the classics or to "correct" Pushkin, according to Strakhov, but to rework the literary work for the needs of the musical and psychological drama of the new medium of the opera. It is also clear that the people, a full-fledged character of the opera, are not idealized, as the advanced ideologists of Slavophile thought craved. The people of "Boris Godunov" are multifaceted and ambiguous: they pray and rage, cause pride and instill horror.

Mussorgsky listened to a lot in his life, so Strakhov's amateurish outpourings could not hurt him much, which cannot be said about the devastating article of a friend and colleague in the "Mighty Bunch" Caesar Cui. The sharp opinion expressed to a comrade in a professional circle is commonplace, but bringing him to the public is a precedent of a completely different order. The most offensive was the arrogant and moralizing tone, with which Kyui literally smeared the creator of "Boris" as an inexperienced student.

Mussorgsky himself believed that he was approaching the composition from the position of mature composer intelligence: he studied many literary and historical sources (which, however, invariably mixed with each other), created his own musical language and meticulously worked out the interweaving of psychological and melodic lines. Although Cui found the orchestration successful, he compared the whole opera with a medley, a set of musical scraps forcibly glued to each other. He branded Mussorgsky immature, superficial and not self-critical enough. In his analysis, Kyui applied Balakirev's favorite circle technique of breaking music into bars-atoms, praising the good and scolding the bad. At the same time, he completely overlooked the global organization of the score, which gradually opens up only when looking at it as a whole, which naturally turns out to be immeasurably larger than the sum of individual parts.

"Boris" stubbornly opposed the old methods of analysis and perception, radically broke patterns and went beyond all existing currents, trends and ideologies.

1881

Portrait of composer Ilya Repin

A big fan of the composer I.E. Repin, having learned about a serious illness, urgently went to St. Petersburg with the hope of having time to paint his portrait. At the beginning of Lent, the disease briefly receded, as if giving the artist a chance to work and the composer to pose. From the second to the fifth of March, Repin came to the Nikolaev military hospital, where a portrait was painted during four sessions.

Ilya Repin. Portrait of composer M.P. Musorgsky, 1881. GTG. Tretyakov acquired the work in the same year for his gallery of portraits of "the best people of Russia" in absentia, not seeing him, believing unanimous praise. The money received for the portrait, Repin donated to the monument to Mussorgsky.

The artist managed to create a bright image of the composer, largely atypical for the classical portrait genre, without embellishment, depicting him in a hospital gown against the background of the white wall of the ward. Repin does not hide signs of Mussorgsky's disease. According to Stasov, Repin records the composer's state of mind "in the face of eternity."

Death in St. Petersburg at the age of 42

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky died on March 16 [28], 1881 in St. Petersburg at the age of 42.

Compositions

Main article: Music by Modest Mussorgsky. List of works

Notes