Pictures at an Exhibition

Modest Mussorgsky wrote this piano suite in ten movements in 1874. 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. They likely met in the home of the influential critic Vladimir Stasov, who followed both of their careers with interest. The work is dedicated to Stasov.
 
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. Thanks to Stasov’s commitment the exhibition Pictures at an Exhibition — To the Memory of Viktor Hartmann was organized with architectural plans, costume designs, stage settings, utensils and artifacts, free sketches and aquarelles which through their diversity were evidence of Hartmann’s original spirit. One of the visitors was Musorgsky; he probably felt closest to Hartmann‘s oeuvre, sharing the latter’s fascination with Russian folklore and its specific, rich coloration. 

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 (2–22 June 1874).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.
 
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. Mussorgsky owned the two pictures that together inspired No. 6, the so-called "Two Jews." 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 (July 1939). Frankenstein claimed to have identified seven pictures by catalogue number, corresponding to:

• "Tuileries" [Movement 3] (now lost)
• "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" [Movement 5]
• "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle" [Movement 6] (Frankenstein suggested two separate portraits, still extant, as the basis for "Two Jews: Rich and Poor")
• "Catacombs" [Movement 8]
• "The Hut on Hen's Legs" [Movement 9]
• "The Bogatyr Gates" [Movement 10]

 
Vladimir Stasov's programme 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 order of movements are as follows:
Promenade, The Gnome, Promenade, The Old Castle, Promenade, Tuileries (Children’s Quarrel after Games), Cattle, Promenade, Ballet of Unhatched Chicks, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, Promenade, Limoges The Market (The Great News), Catacombs (Roman Tomb), With the Dead in a Dead Language, The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga), and The Bogatyr Gates (In the Capital in Kiev). 
 
In some of the parts the link with Hartmann’s oeuvre is conspicuous: Catacombs is a splendid, but uncanny sketch with Hartmann in the crypts of Paris, surrounded by pale skeletons and an odour of silent corruption, captured by Mussorgsky in naked, raw chords. The section Cum mortuis in lingua mortua was annotated by the composer as follows: “The creative spirit of Hartmann leads me to the skulls, invoking them. Thereupon, the skulls began to glow softly.” The impressive sight of The Great Gate of Kiev — a fantastic sketch by Hartmann that, like many of his works, was never executed — is echoed in the accompaniment by obbligato bells. In The Tuileries we hear the children from Hartmann’s picture playing, laughing and squabbling in the gar- dens of Paris, while Hartmann’s costume designs for the ballet Trilby inspired Mussorgsky to compose his Ballet of the Chickens in Their Shells as a musical equivalent of busy scratching and charming cheeping. Linking other parts of the suite to Hartmann’s oeuvre is less evident. The pictorial inspiration for some of the musical sections cannot even be determined at all, as Hartmann is known to have made different versions of the same theme, or else because the original works have not yet been — and probably never will be — traced. The Old Castle is supposed to show a medieval castle with a troubadour in an Italian landscape, but no illustration corresponds to this description. For The Gnome, too, we only have Stasov’s word that the idea originated in a de- sign for a nutcracker, shaped as a grotesque dwarf with deformed legs. In other cases problems lie in ill-fitting details or vagueness. Bydło, for instance, is Mussorgsky‘s impression of a Polish oxcart, but neither the diabolic atmosphere nor the coachman — both suggested by the composer — are visible on Hartmann’s picture. Mussorgsky‘s scene with gossiping women in The Marketplace in Limoges cannot be traced to any of Hartmann’s sketches of this town. Baba-Yaga, then, is based on a design for a clock shaped like a hut on fowl’s legs, according to a Russian folktale the home of the witch Baba-Yaga. In Mussorgsky‘s fantasy this man-eating sorceress, specialized in pulverizing children’s bones in a stone pot, fumingly speeds through the air on her broomstick. Mussorgsky is probably going farthest in his manipulation of Hartmann’s materials in Samuel Goldenberg & Schmuÿle: here he combines two portraits (the rich and the begging Jew) into a polarized dialogue, the former figure on top of things in the treble of the orchestral score, the latter stumbling in the bass line. A masterly display of dramatic skills! Allegedly the portraits once belonged to Mussorgsky himself, and were lent out by him to the exhibition. The issues remain complex, though: did Mussorgsky really take his cue from these works, or were the characters mainly figments of his own imagination? That certainly is true for the Promenade which serves as the opening of the suite and recurs in shortened and changed shapes. Here we accompany the composer on his walk to and throughout the exhibition hall. The theme of the Promenade has also been incorporated into Cum mortuis in lingua mortua and The Great Gate of Kiev, where it turns into a hymn with a patriotic slant. 
 
Here are four albums:

​Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition. Behzod Abduraimov (piano). Release Date: 15 Jan 2021. Label: Alpha. Catalogue No: ALPHA653. Hi-Res FLAC (Lossless, 96 kHz, 24 bit). 
Awards:
Gramophone Awards, 2021, Shortlisted – Piano.
Gramophone Magazine, January 2012, Editor’s Choice.
Gramophone Magazine, Critics’ Choice 2021.
International Classical Music Awards, 2022, Nominated – Solo Instrument.
Presto Recording of the Week, 22 January 2021.
Radio 3 Record review, 23 January 2021, Record of the Week.
 
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition. Steven Osborne (piano). Release Date: 28 Jan 2013. Label: Hyperion. Catalogue No: CDA67896. Hi-Res FLAC (Lossless, 88.2 kHz, 24 bit). 
Awards:
BBC Music Magazine, March 2013, Disc of the Month.
Gramophone Awards, 2013, Winner – Instrumental.
Gramophone Magazine, March 2013, Editor’s Choice.
Presto Recording of the Week, 21 January 2013.
 
Mussorgsky-Stokowski: Pictures at an Exhibition. José Serebrier and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Release Date: 30 Aug 2005. Label: Naxos. Catalogue No: 8557645. FLAC (CD Quality, 44.1 kHz, 16 bit).
Awards:
Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2005, Disc of the Month.
Penguin Guide, Rosette.
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition. Jos Van Immerseel and Anima Eterna Brugge. Release Date: 31 Mar 2014. Label: Zigzag. Catalogue No: ZZT343. Hi-Res FLAC (Lossless, 96 kHz, 24 bit).
Awards:
Gramophone Magazine, July 2014, Editor’s Choice.
Presto Recordings of the Year, Finalist 2014.

​Reference:
Pictures at an Exhibition. (2024, November 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_at_an_Exhibition
 
Taes, S & Immerseel, J.V. (2014). Ravel Ma Mere l’Oye & Musorgsky/Ravel Pictrues at an Exhibition. Outhere Music Music.