Pictures at an Exhibition

Pictures at an Exhibition (or Pictures from an Exhibition) is a famous suite of 15 musical pieces, composed by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky in 1874. Mussorgsky wrote the work for piano, but it is probably better known in the form of various orchestrations and arrangements that have been produced by other musicians and composers (see below). Mussorgsky composed the work in commemoration of his friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, who was only 39 when he died in 1873; the original title for the suite was Hartmann.

Related Topics:
Suite - Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky - 1874 - Piano - Viktor Hartmann - 1873

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It was probably in 1870 and through the highly influential critic Vladimir Stasov that Mussorgsky had met Hartmann, whose devotion to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art must have made him a congenial spirit. It was at Stasov's instigation that a posthumous exhibition of over 400 of the artist's works was mounted in the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, in February and March 1874, and Pictures at an Exhibition, composed a few months later, takes the form of an imaginary musical tour around such a collection. As the pictorial basis for his musical 'exhibition', Mussorgsky mostly selected drawings and watercolours that Hartmann had produced during his travels abroad; oddly enough, only three of the ten pictures represented in the music actually appeared in the 1874 Hartmann exhibition (These are: 'Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks', 'The Hut on Fowl's Legs' (Baba Yaga)', and 'The Bogatyr Gate (at Kiev, the Ancient Capital)'). Sadly, we cannot in all cases be certain which Hartmann work Mussorgsky was alluding to, because not all the paintings and drawings have survived.

Related Topics:
Vladimir Stasov - Academy of Fine Arts - Bogatyr Gate

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Remarkably, Mussorgsky structures the suite in a manner that actually allows him to represent his own progress through the 'exhibition'. This he does by means of the opening 'Promenade' and the four interludes (only the last of which is also labelled 'Promenade') that are clear variations of its material: "My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes", he wrote in a letter to Stasov. More remarkable still, however, is the fact that by the end of the work the 'Promenade' theme has stopped functioning as a merely 'linking' device and instead started to appear within the actual 'pictures' themselves: the theme features prominently in the movements 'Con mortuis in lingua mortua' and 'The Bogatyr Gate (at Kiev, the Ancient Capital)' - mysterious in one, celebratory in the other.

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