Modest Mussorgsky
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five." He was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period and strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.
Many of Mussorgsky's works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other national themes. Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.
For many years, Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have posthumously come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available.
At the in Moscow, M. P. Musorgsky's Complete Works: Academic Edition is being published. As of 2026, six volumes have been issued, including the opera Boris Godunov: two volumes of the vocal score and four volumes of the full score. The vocal score was prepared by Nadezhda Teterina and Evgeny Levashev. The full score was prepared by Evgeny Levashev, Nadezhda Teterina, and Roman Berchenko.
Name
The spelling and pronunciation of the composer's name have caused some confusion.The family name derives from a 15th- or 16th-century ancestor, Roman Vasilyevich Monastyryov, who appears in the Velvet Book, the 17th-century genealogy of Russian boyars. Roman Vasilyevich bore the nickname "Musorga", and was the grandfather of the first Mussorgsky. The composer could trace his lineage to Rurik, the legendary ninth-century prince of Novgorod and founder of the Russian monarchy.
In Mussorgsky family documents, the spelling of the name varies: "Musarskiy", "Muserskiy", "Muserskoy", "Musirskoy", "Musorskiy", and "Musurskiy". The baptismal record gives the composer's name as "Muserskiy".
In early letters to Mily Balakirev, the composer signed his name "Musorskiy". The "g" made its first appearance in a letter to Balakirev in 1863. Mussorgsky used this new spelling to the end of his life, but occasionally reverted to the earlier "Musorskiy". The addition of the "g" to the name was likely initiated by the composer's elder brother Filaret to obscure the resemblance of the name's root to an unsavory Russian word:
Mussorgsky apparently did not take the new spelling seriously and played on the "rubbish" connection in letters to Vladimir Stasov and to Stasov's family, routinely signing his name Musoryanin, roughly "garbage-dweller".
The first syllable of the name originally received the stress, and does so to this day in Russia, including the composer's home district. The mutability of the second-syllable vowel in the versions of the name mentioned above gives evidence that this syllable did not receive the stress.
The addition of the "g" and the accompanying shift in stress to the second syllable, sometimes described as a Polish variant, was supported by Filaret Mussorgsky's descendants until his line ended in the 20th century. Their example was followed by many influential Russians, such as Fyodor Shalyapin, Nikolay Golovanov, and Tikhon Khrennikov, who, perhaps dismayed that the great composer's name was "reminiscent of garbage", supported the second-syllable stress that has also become entrenched in the West.
The Western convention of doubling the first "s", which is not observed in scholarly literature, likely arose because in many Western European languages a single intervocalic /s/ often becomes voiced to /z/, unlike in Slavic languages where the intervocalic /s/ is always unvoiced. Doubling the consonant thus reinforces its voiceless sibilant /s/ sound.
"Modest" is the Russian form of the name "Modestus" which means "moderate" or "restrained" in Late Latin. He was called "Modinka", diminutive form with the stressed O, by his close friends and relatives.
Life
Early years
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. 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. All agreed the Cadet School could be a brutal place, especially for new recruits. More tellingly for Mussorgsky, it was likely where he began his eventual path to alcoholism. 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.
Maturity
In October 1856, the 17-year-old Mussorgsky met the 22-year-old Alexander Borodin while both men served at a military hospital in Saint Petersburg. The two were soon on good terms. 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, 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 ... I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both Beethoven symphonies and much else, 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, 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 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, or in the Intermezzo in Modo Classico for piano solo. 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. The year 1867 was also the one in which he finished the original orchestral version of his Night on Bald Mountain.