Mussorgsky, Modest (Petrovich)

(born March 21, 1839, Karevo, Russia—died March 28, 1881, St. Petersburg) Russian composer. Composing without training in his teens, he met several of the composers with whom he later made up The Five, a group with the common goal of creating a nationalist school of Russian music. He received his first composition lessons from Mily Balakirev in 1857; he soon resigned from his military regiment to devote himself to music. He held a series of government jobs, but his worsening alcoholism eventually made him unemployable. His personal decline was accompanied by maturity as a composer, and he wrote his major works, including the symphonic poem (1867), the great opera (1868), and the famous piano cycle (1874). His 65 songs describe vivid scenes of Russian life and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language. After Mussorgsky's death, his works were published in drastically edited form, purged of their distinctive starkness and unorthodox harmonies; the original versions were made available in 1928.

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