LDV45

JEAN-PHILIPPE COLLARD 23 When he composed his Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874, Mussorgsky was at the height of a phase of intense creativity stimulated by the popular success of Boris Godunov . It was while visiting the exhibition of a friend, the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann, that the idea of this piece came to him. In the middle of composing it, Mussorgsky wrote to another friend, the music critic Vladimir Stasov: ‘Hartmann is boiling as Boris boiled – sounds and ideas have been hanging in the air; I am devouring them and stuffing myself. I barely have time to scribble them onto paper.’ He composed Pictures at an Exhibition in less than three weeks, in a kind of frenzy. The cycle consists of ten vignettes, all inspired by Hartmann’s illustrations, of which only five have been preserved, among them the Russian clockmounted on fowls’ legs and themonumental gate of the city of Kiev. These are interspersed at regular intervals with ‘promenades’, variations on a single theme that evoke the composer-visitor strolling from painting to painting. This highly individual formhas no equivalent anywhere else. Pictures at an Exhibition was never performed during Mussorgsky’s lifetime. It was Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of 1922 that rescued the work from oblivion. Even today, this orchestral transcription is played far more often than the original piano version.