Pictures at an Exhibition

Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano suite in ten movements, plus a recurring and varied Promenade theme, written in 1874, by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. It is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann put on at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, following his sudden death in the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost.
The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, and became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers and contemporary musicians, with Maurice Ravel's 1922 adaptation for orchestra being the most recorded and performed. The suite, particularly the final movement, "The Bogatyr Gates", is widely considered one of Mussorgsky's greatest works.

Composition history

The composition is based on pictures by the artist, architect, and designer Viktor Hartmann. It was probably in 1868 that Mussorgsky first met Hartmann, not long after the latter's return to Russia from abroad. Both men were devoted to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art and quickly became friends. They likely met in the home of the influential critic Vladimir Stasov, who followed both of their careers with interest. According to Stasov's testimony, in 1868, Hartmann gave Mussorgsky two of the pictures that later formed the basis of Pictures at an Exhibition. In 1870, Mussorgsky dedicated the second song of the cycle The Nursery to Hartmann. Stasov remarked that Hartmann loved Mussorgsky's compositions, and particularly liked the "Scene by the Fountain" in his opera Boris Godunov. Mussorgsky had abandoned the scene in his original 1869 version, but at the requests of Stasov and Hartmann, he reworked it for Act 3 in his revision of 1872.
The years 1873–74 are associated with the staging of Boris Godunov, the zenith of Mussorgsky's career as a composer—at least from the standpoint of public acclaim. Mussorgsky's distant relative, friend, and roommate during this period, Arseniy Golenishchev-Kutuzov, describing the January 1874 premiere of the opera, remarked: "During the winter, there were, I think, nine performances, and each time the theatre was sold out, each time the public tumultuously called for Mussorgsky." The composer's victory, however, was overshadowed by the hostile press he received from critics. Other circumstances conspired to dampen Mussorgsky's spirits. The disintegration of The Mighty Handful and their failure to understand his artistic goals contributed to the isolation he experienced as an outsider in Saint Petersburg's musical establishment. Golenishchev-Kutuzov wrote: " banner was held by Mussorgsky alone; all the other members had left it and pursued his own path..."
Hartmann's sudden death on 4 August 1873 from an aneurysm shook Mussorgsky along with others in Russia's art world. The loss of the artist, aged only 39, plunged the composer into deep despair. Stasov helped to organize a memorial exhibition of over 400 Hartmann works in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in February and March 1874. Mussorgsky lent to the exhibition the two pictures Hartmann had given him, and viewed the show in person. Later in June, two-thirds of the way through composing his song cycle Sunless, Mussorgsky was inspired to compose Pictures at an Exhibition, quickly completing the score in three weeks. In a letter to Stasov, probably written on 12 June 1874, he describes his progress:
The music depicts his tour of the exhibition, with each of the ten numbers of the suite serving as a musical illustration of an individual work by Hartmann.
Five days after finishing the composition, he wrote on the title page of the manuscript a tribute to Vladimir Stasov, to whom the work is dedicated. One month later, he added an indication that he intended to have it published.
Golenishchev-Kutuzov gives the following account of the work's reception among Mussorgsky's friends and colleagues and an explanation for his failure to follow through on his plans to publish it:
In August, Mussorgsky completed the last two songs of Sunless and then resumed work on Khovanshchina, composing the prelude to Act 1 in September.

Publication history

As with most of Mussorgsky's works, Pictures at an Exhibition has a complicated publication history. Although composed very rapidly, during June 1874, the work did not appear in print until 1886, five years after the composer's death, when an edition by the composer's friend and colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was published. This edition, however, was not a completely accurate representation of Mussorgsky's score but presented a revised text that contained a number of errors and misreadings.
Only in 1931, marking the 50th anniversary of the composer's death, was Pictures at an Exhibition published in a scholarly edition in agreement with his manuscript, to be included in Volume 8 of Pavel Lamm's M. P. Mussorgsky: Complete Collected Works.
In 1940, the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola published an important critical edition of Mussorgsky's work with extensive commentary.
Mussorgsky's hand-written manuscript was published in facsimile in 1975.

Hartmann's pictures

Mussorgsky based his musical material on drawings and watercolours by Hartmann produced mostly during the artist's travels abroad. Locales include Italy, France, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Today most of the pictures from the Hartmann exhibition are lost, making it impossible to be sure in many cases which Hartmann works Mussorgsky had in mind.
Arts critic Alfred Frankenstein gave an account of Hartmann, with reproductions of his pictures, in the article "Victor Hartmann and Modeste Mussorgsky" in The Musical Quarterly. Frankenstein wrote that he had identified seven pictures by catalogue number, corresponding to:

"Tuileries"
"Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks"
"Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle"
"Catacombs"
"The Hut on Hen's Legs"
"The Bogatyr Gates"

The surviving works that can be shown with certainty to have been used by Mussorgsky in assembling his suite, along with their titles, are as follows:

Movement	Title	Title	Picture
5. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks	Эскизы театральных костюмов к балету "Трильби"	Sketches of theatre costumes for the ballet Trilby
6. "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle"	Еврей в меховой шапке. Сандомир	Jew in a fur cap. Sandomierz
6. "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle"	Сандомирский	Sandomierz
8. Catacombs	Парижские катакомбы	Paris Catacombs
9. The Hut on Hen's Legs	Избушка Бабы-Яги на курьих ножках. Часы в русском стиле	The hut of Baba-Yaga on hen's legs. Clock in the Russian style
10. The Bogatyr Gates	Проект городских ворот в Киеве. Главный фасад	Project for city gates in Kiev. Main façade

Note: Mussorgsky owned the two pictures that together inspired No. 6, the so-called "Two Jews". The title of No. 6b, as provided by the Soviet editors of his letters, is Сандомирский . The bracketed word yevrey is the sanitized form of the actual word in the title, very likely the derogatory epithet жид.

Movements

's program, identified below, and the six known extant pictures suggest the ten pieces that make up the suite correspond to eleven pictures by Hartmann, with "Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle" accounting for two. The five Promenades are not numbered with the ten pictures and consist in the composer's manuscript of two titled movements and three untitled interludes appended to the first, second, and fourth pictures.
Mussorgsky links the suite's movements in a way that depicts the viewer's own progress through the exhibition. Two Promenade movements stand as portals to the suite's main sections. Their regular pace and irregular meter depict the act of walking. Three untitled interludes present shorter statements of this theme, varying the mood, colour, and key in each to suggest reflection on a work just seen or anticipation of a new work glimpsed. A turn is taken in the work at the "Catacombae" when the Promenade theme stops functioning as merely a linking device and becomes, in "Cum mortuis", an integral element of the movement itself. The theme reaches its apotheosis in the suite's finale, "The Bogatyr Gates".
The first two movements of the suite—one grand, one grotesque—find mirrored counterparts, and apotheoses, at the end. The suite traces a journey that begins at an art exhibition, but the line between observer and observed vanishes at the Catacombs when the journey takes on a different character.
The table below shows the order of movements.

	Title in score	English translation	Key	Meter	Tempo
	Promenade		B major	,	Allegro giusto, nel modo russico; senza allegrezza, ma poco sostenuto
1	Gnomus	The Gnome	E minor		Vivo and Meno mosso, pesante
	Promenade		A major	,	Moderato commodo assai e con delicatezza
2	Il vecchio castello	The Old Castle	G minor		Andante molto cantabile e con dolore
	Promenade		B major	,	Moderato non tanto, pesamente
3	Tuileries	Tuileries	B major		Allegretto non troppo, capriccioso
4	Bydło	Cattle	G minor		Sempre moderato, pesante
	Promenade		D minor	,,	Tranquillo
5	Балет невылупившихся птенцов Balet nevylupivshikhsya ptentsov	Ballet of Unhatched Chicks	F major		Scherzino
6	"Samuel" Goldenberg und "Schmuÿle"	"Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle"	B minor		Andante. Grave energico and Andantino
	Promenade		B major	,,	Allegro giusto, nel modo russico; poco sostenuto
7	Limoges. Le marché	Limoges. The Market	E major		Allegretto vivo, sempre scherzando
8	Catacombae	Catacombs	B minor		Largo
8	Cum mortuis in lingua mortua	With the Dead in a Dead Language	B minor		Andante non troppo con lamento
9	Избушка на курьих ножках Izbushka na kuryikh nozhkakh	The Hut on Hen's Legs	C minor		Allegro con brio, feroce and Andante mosso
10	Богатырские ворота Bogatyrskiye vorota	The Bogatyr Gates	E major		Allegro alla breve. Maestoso, con grandezza