Program Notes
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Night On Bald Mountain
(orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov)
Duration: ca. 12 minutes
Two of the composers on tonight’s program, Mussorgsky
and Sibelius, slipped into the abyss of alcoholism.
While Sibelius ended his musical career
early but lived a long life, Mussorgsky died at age
42, his talent hewn in self-destruction, and many of
his works left unrealized or unfinished.
Mussorgsky was part of a group of Russian musicians
known as the Mighty Handful, five young men
seeking a distinctive style of music removed from
Western European influence. As the core of the Russian
nationalist school, they stressed folk themes,
raw sonorities, primitive structures and quasioriental
melodies. Anything that Bach, Mozart and
Beethoven were, the Mighty Handful was not.
Mussorgsky seemed an odd choice for such a fraternity.
Although he showed an affinity for the piano
at an early age, he was by comparison with his colleagues
a poorly trained amateur who patched together
works in fragments and relied more on imagination
than theory. Although born into a noble
family with estate land, the Peasant Reform of 1861
deprived the family of half their acreage, forcing
the young Mussorgsky to support himself. He opted
out of an opportunity to join the Russian Imperial
Guard and took minor jobs as a civil servant, with
little pay. But it offered him time to compose, and
soon Mussorgsky was developing a highly original
style.
Two important influences shaped Mussorgsky’s
thinking. At age 20, he joined the production crew
of Mikhail Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar, which
opened his imagination to the possibilities of the
theater. About the same time, he embraced the writings
of the philosopher and revolutionary Nikolay
Chernyshevsky, who rejected the marriage of form
and content. Mussorgsky began reading voraciously
and formed aesthetic doctrines of his own, as well
as a compassion for the poor and downtrodden.
Music, he rationalized, must reflect the undercurrents
of life, not the high and noble. This would be
seminal to his work as a composer, and he set out
to apply radical innovations to his writing. Drink,
however, derailed him from developing more than
a handful of major pieces. The bulk of his work was
left to others to orchestrate or complete, including
three of his best-known pieces: Pictures at an Exhibition
(both the original piano score as well as Ravel’s
THE FLORIDA OR 38 CHESTRA | 2018-2019
orchestration), the opera Boris Godunov, and what
you will hear tonight, Night on Bald Mountain.
A Mighty Handful colleague, Rimsky-Korsakov,
greatly admired Mussorgsky but felt the need to improve
on his scores, which he felt revealed “disconnected
harmony, ugly part-writing, and unsuccessful
modulation.’’ So Rimsky-Korsakov – a master of
orchestration – took it upon himself to paint over St.
John’s Night on the Bare Mountain, as it was originally
called, a depiction of an all-night witch’s Sabbath
held atop a mountain near Kiev.
Most performances and recordings today use Rimsky
Korsakov’s 1886 arrangement, although scholars
have debated how much is Mussorgsky and how
much is Rimsky-Korsakov. But it was this version
that stuck, a blockbuster of sound, full of stirring
emotional color and grotesque portrayals of dancing
ghouls. It gained a wide audience in Leopold
Stokowski’s arrangement for Walt Disney’s 1940
animated classic, Fantasia.
The music is based on Nikolai Gogol’s story St. John’s
Eve and can be summarized as follows: “Subterranean
sounds of non-human voices. Appearance of
the spirits of darkness, followed by the Chernobog
(Slavic god of evil). Height of the Sabbath and distant
ringing of village church bell, which disperses
the spirits of darkness. Morning.’’
“It is a delightful outing of mock diabolism,’’ notes
the musicologist and author Jan Swafford, “with
whizzing violin effects for spirits, orgiastic writhings,
and lots of demonically braying trombones.’’
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Sinfonia Concertante
For Violin, Viola And Orchestra In E Flat, K. 364
Duration: ca. 30 minutes
Mozart never hired a marketing firm and didn’t
need one. His talent, and history, did it all for him.
By the time most of his 626 published compositions
began trickling through Europe, his posthumous
reputation was as solid as the marble statues that
today honor him the world over.
Mozart’s genius and reputation as a wunderkind
are common themes that don’t need repeating
here. What isn’t always discussed is the apparent
innocence and simplicity of so much of his music,
although Mozart was anything but innocent. Nor
was he simple.
A good example unfolds tonight with the Sinfonia
Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, a work of