Modest Mussorgsky

Mussorgsky was born at Karevo in the Pskov region of Russia and spent his working life in Saint Petersburg, supporting himself as a low-ranking civil servant. He had little formal training: Mily Balakirev taught him musical form, and he belonged to the Five, a circle of Russian nationalist composers around Balakirev. Much of his music draws on Russian history, folklore and church music, and his songs and operas follow the natural rhythm and rise and fall of Russian speech.

He ignored textbook rules that he considered outdated. His harmony is bold, with modal scales from folk song and Orthodox chant, chords built in fourths and unexpected progressions, and his phrases and metres are often irregular. After his death Rimsky-Korsakov edited much of his music, smoothing its harmony, rhythm and form; these versions made the works known, but many performers now prefer Mussorgsky's own texts.

Both forms of Night on Bald Mountain show this. Mussorgsky finished the orchestral piece St John's Eve on Bald Mountain on 23 June 1867, picturing a witches' sabbath in four stages: the witches gather, Satan's procession, a black mass, and the sabbath. Balakirev criticised it harshly, and it was neither performed in Mussorgsky's lifetime nor printed until 1968. He later reused the music in two stage projects, and in 1886 Rimsky-Korsakov turned the last of these into an orchestral fantasy whose ending, a church bell that scatters the spirits before dawn, comes from that last version. Pictures at an Exhibition, written for piano in June 1874, portrays drawings and designs by his friend Viktor Hartmann, shown in a memorial exhibition after Hartmann's sudden death in 1873.