"Pictures from an Exhibition"

If you're my age, that title might bring to mind this classic 1971 album cover from Emerson, Lake and Palmer. But the original Pictures from an Exhibition is a virtuoso piano suite that was written by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874. We heard it at the Seattle Symphony yesterday along with some other good stuff, but the famous Pictures was the highlight of the afternoon. Mussorgsky wrote it as a piano composition but it's been transcribed for full orchestra, with Ravel's arrangement being the most performed. The excellent guest conductor was Roberto Abbado, who comes from a family of maestros including Claudio Abbado, his uncle.

Mussorgsky, age 18

Mussorgsky, a bit later

Mussorgsky lived only 42 years and died miserably in a hospital a few days after this famous portrait was made by Ilya Repins. Let's just say Mussorgsky enjoyed his vodka and leave it at that. Like other alcoholic artistic geniuses, he managed to be incredibly productive during his short life-- he composed the Night on Bare Mountain, the opera Boris Godunov and dozens of other works. Probably all with a hangover.

But his most famous piece is Pictures from an Exhibition, written as a remembrance to the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. They were close friends, and when Hartmann died suddenly in 1873 Mussorgsky was devastated. An exhibition of over 400 of his paintings and watercolors inspired Mussorgsky to pay his own tribute by writing a series of piano pieces based on the pictures. He completed it in only three weeks at the same time he was putting the finishing touches on a couple of major operas.

Viktor Hartmann
1834-1873

Mussorgsky's music depicts an imaginary tour of the art collection, and the ten movements allude to specific pictures. Each is completely different, but tied together by a prelude or promenade during which you can imagine walking through the exhibition. Today most of the pictures from the Hartman exhibition are lost, but musicologists claim to have identified several. Many of them were made while Hartmann was traveling abroad in Poland and France.

Being more visually inclined than musically, I would have enjoyed looking at the Hartmann pictures while daydreaming through the music. Of course there wasn't enough room in the program to reproduce them, but I found several later on the good old Internet. Here's a few examples:

The Catacombs of Rome

The Poor Jew, Warsaw

Sketch of Little Chicks in Their Shells
from Ballet Trilby

The Great Gate of Kiev