A commemorative exhibit of Victor Hartmann’s paintings inspired Mussorgsky to pay a musical tribute to his friend by writing a piano suite based on his impressions of the paintings. He was a gifted architect and painter and a close friend of Mussorgsky’s, had recently passed away at the age of 39.
“What a terrible blow!” Mussorgsky exclaimed in a letter to the critic Vladimir Stasov in 1874. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, live on, when creatures like Hartman must die?” Victor Hartman, a gifted architect and painter and a close friend of Mussorgsky’s, had recently passed away at the age of 39. A commemorative exhibit of his painting inspired Mussorgsky to pay a musical tribute to his friend by writing a piano suite based on his impressions of the paintings. The suite was not performed or published during the composer’s lifetime, however, and it did not become universally known until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922. Pianists discovered the original version only after the work had already been popularized by symphony orchestras.
From the beginning, the original piece cried out for orchestration, partly because its piano writing was not idiomatic in the sense of Schumann, Chopin or Liszt, and partly because of the sharply profiled and contrasted musical characteristics that could be underscored to great effect if played by a full orchestra. Although several orchestrations have been made, it is in Maurice Ravel’s 1922 orchestration that Pictures at an Exhibition has conquered the world. It is understandable that Ravel was enthusiastic about Mussorgsky’s piece: he himself had often translated visual images into music in his works. He had known Pictures at an Exhibition since at least 1900, having played it through with his friends at informal musical evenings. For both Debussy and Ravel, Mussorgsky was one of the most important composers from the recent past.
In his piano cycle, Mussorgsky chose 10 of Hartman’s pictures for musical illustration. The pictures are separated – in the first half of the work at any rate – by a melody called “Promenade” that portrays the visitor at the gallery strolling from picture to picture. The melody changes with each recurrence: the impression left by the last picture seems to linger on as the visitor proceeds to the next painting.
The first picture, “Gnomus,” represents a toy nutcracker in the shape of a dwarf. Mussorgsky imagined how this creature would move if he came alive, as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s nutcracker did in the story on which Tchaikovsky would base his world-famous ballet 18 years later. The nutcracker’s strange and unpredictable movements are depicted quite vividly. We hear the “Promenade” again, and are then ushered into “Il vecchio castello” (“The Old Castle”), where a troubadour (a medieval courtly singer) sings a wistful song. In Ravel’s orchestration, this haunting melody is played by the alto saxophone.
The next picture – preceded again by the “Promenade”: – is titled in French: “Tuileries: Dispute d’enfants aprčs jeux” (“Tuileries: Dispute between Children at Play”). It shows children playing and quarreling in the Tuileries gardens in Paris. It is followed immediately – with no “Promenade” this time – by “Bydlo,” the Polish oxcart, slowly approaching and then disappearing on the muddy road as its ponderous melody gets first louder and then softer.
A much shortened “Promenade,” more lyrical in tone than before, leads into the first movement to have a Russian title in the original: “Balet nevylupivshikhsya ptentsov” (“Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks”). This movement is based on the designs Hartman had made for the ballet production at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. In the ballet, choreographed by the great Marius Petipa, a group of children appeared dressed up as canaries; others, according to a contemporary description, were “enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor,” with only their legs sticking out of the eggshells.
The next picture is titled, in the original, “‘Samuel’ Goldenburg und ‘Schmuyle’.” Hartman had painted a number of characters from the Jewish ghetto in Sandomierz, Poland, including a rich man in a fur hat and a poor one sitting with his head bent. These sketches of each man were separate; it was only Mussorgsky who brought them together, creating what has traditionally been understood as an argument between two Jews, one rich, the other poor. The rich Jew is represented by a slow-moving unison melody stressing the augmented second, considered an “Oriental” interval and indeed frequent in certain forms of Jewish chant and folk music with which Mussorgsky was familiar. The poor man is characterized by a plaintive theme whose repeated notes seem to be choking with tears. Then, the two themes are heard simultaneously. In Ravel’s orchestration, Goldenberg has the entire string section at his command, while Schmuyle tries to defend himself, desperately, to the sound of a single muted trumpet.
Limoges le marché (La grande nouvelle) (“Limoges, the Market: The Big News”) portrays the hustle and bustle of an open market in France where people are busy gossiping and quarrelling. Mussorgsky’s original manuscript contained a more detailed program that, although crossed out by the composer, is interesting enough to be quoted here:
The big news: Monsieur de Puissangeot has just recovered his cow “Fugitive.” But the good wives of Limoges are not interested in this incident because Madame de Remboursac has acquired very fine porcelain dentures while Monsieur de Panta-Pantaléon is still troubled by his obtrusive nose that remains as red as a peony.
What a contrast to go from there immediately to the “Catacombs.” Hartman’s watercolor shows the artist, a friend and their guide – who is holding a lantern – exploring the underground burial chambers in Paris. On the right, one can see a large pile of skulls which, in Mussorgsky’s imagination, suddenly begin to glow. The “Promenade” theme, which we haven’t heard in a while, reappears here completely transfigured. The inscription in the score says, Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (“With the dead in a dead language”). (Actually, Mussorgsky wrote con instead of cum, substituting the Italian word for its Latin equivalent.)
The next section, “Izbushka na kuryikh nozhkakh (Baba-Yaga)” (“The Hut on Fowl’s Legs: Baba Yaga”) evokes the witch of Russian folktales who lives in just such an edifice. According to legend, Baba Yaga lures children into her hut where she eats them. In one retelling, she “crushes their bones in the giant mortar in which she rides through the woods propelling herself with the pestle…” Hartman had designed a clock in the form of the famous hut; its design survives only as a sketch. Mussorgsky’s movement – whose rhythm has something of the ticking of a giant clock – has a mysterious-sounding middle section, after which the wilder and louder first material returns.
The “witch music” continues directly into the grand finale, “Bogatyrskie vorotá (vo stolnom gorode vo Kieve)” (“The Knight’s Gate in the Ancient Capital, Kiev”), inspired by an ambitious design that was submitted for a competition but never built. For the immense architectural structure, Mussorgsky provided a melody resembling a church hymn and presented in rich harmonies. This theme alternates with a more subdued second melody, harmonized like a chorale. Near the end, the “Promenade” theme triumphantly reappears, leading directly into the magnificent final climax where the gate, in a way, becomes a symbol for all the grandeur of old Russia.