Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) was the most radical and original of the group of Russian nationalist composers known as ‘The Five.’ A largely self-taught composer who earned his living as a civil servant, he sought a raw, truthful musical language rooted in Russian speech, folk song and history, impatient with the polish of the Western European tradition. His masterpiece is the opera Boris Godunov, a towering drama of guilt and power; alongside it stand songs of startling realism and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. His career was cut short by alcoholism (he died at forty-two), and he left much of his work unfinished or in rough form, later ‘corrected’ and orchestrated by friends such as Rimsky-Korsakov. Yet it is precisely his rough-hewn boldness, his harmonic daring and his unflinching directness that made him a profound influence on later composers, from Debussy and Ravel to the twentieth century.