25 Facts About Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period.

Modest Mussorgsky strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.

Many years, Modest Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers.

Modest Mussorgsky used this new spelling to the end of his life, but occasionally reverted to the earlier "Musorskiy".

Modest 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" .

Related searches

Modest Mussorgsky was called "Modinka", diminutive form with the stressed O, by his close friends and relatives.

At age six, Modest Mussorgsky began receiving piano lessons from his mother, herself a trained pianist.

Modest Mussorgsky's 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.

In 1852, the 12-year-old Modest Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled "Porte-enseigne Polka" at his father's expense.

Modest Mussorgsky's parents planned the move to Saint Petersburg so that both their sons would renew the family tradition of military service.

In October 1856 the 17-year-old Modest Mussorgsky met the 22-year-old Alexander Borodin while both men served at a military hospital in Saint Petersburg.

Modest Mussorgsky's manners were elegant, aristocratic: his speech likewise, delivered through somewhat clenched teeth, interspersed with French phrases, was rather precious.

In 1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music.

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 Modest Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment.

Modest Mussorgsky completed the large-scale score the following year while living with friends and working for the Forestry Department.

Modest Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged 'second version'.

Modest 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.

Modest Mussorgsky was interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg.

Modest Mussorgsky has been the inspiration for many Russian composers, including most notably Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev .

Modest Mussorgsky thus edited the work, making a final version in 1874.

Opera Khovanshchina was unfinished and unperformed when Modest Mussorgsky died, but it was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and received its premiere in 1886 in Saint Petersburg.

Important early recordings of songs by Modest Mussorgsky were made by tenor Vladimir Rosing in the 1920s and 1930s.

Modest Mussorgsky is, it seems to me, a thorough idiot", and Balakirev agreed: "Yes, Mussorgsky is little short of an idiot.

Western perceptions of Modest Mussorgsky changed with the European premiere of Boris Godunov in 1908.

Modest Mussorgsky's style impresses the Western ear as barbarously ugly.

Related searches