Piano Music - Modest Mussorgsky

Modest Mussorgsky


1839 - 1881
Modest Mussorgsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic period, member of the group "The Five".


📖 "Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity."


📖 "My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music."


📖 "And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning."


📖 "In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz."


📖 "Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales."


📖 "I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera."


📖 "This is what I would like: my stage people should speak like living people; but besides this, their character and power of intonation, supported by the orchestra, which forms the musical pattern of their speech, must achieve their aim directly, that is, my music should be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades."
In Letter to L. Shestakova (1868)

Quotes by Modest Mussorgsky


🔔 Reload the page a few times if you see orange widgets instead of books and music.






Piano Music by Modest Mussorgsky


Porte-enseigne Polka, 1852 (1852), in SovM (1947), no.2

Souvenir d’enfance, 1857, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Scherzo, c♯, 1858, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Scherzo, B♭, 1858, orchd

Impromptu passionné, 1859, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Ein Kinderscherz, 1859, rev. 1860 (1873)

Sonata, C, 4 hands, 1860, Allegro and Scherzo [from Scherzo, c♯] only

Intermezzo in modo classico, 1862, orchd 1867, rearr. pf, 1867 (1873)

Iz vospominaniy detstva [From Memories of Childhood], 1865, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

1 Nyanya i ya [Nurse and I], 2 Pervoye nakazaniye: Nyanya zapirayet menya v temnuyu komnatu [First Punishment: Nurse Shuts me in a Dark Room]

Duma [Rêverie], on a theme of V.A. Loginov, 1865, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

La capricieuse, on a theme of L. Heyden, 1865

Shveya [The Seamstress], scherzino, 1871 (1872)

Kartinki s vïstavki [Pictures from an Exhibition], 1874, L viii/2, ed. Rimsky-Korsakov (1886)

Na yuzhnom beregu Krïma [On the Southern Shore of the Crimea], 1879 (1880)

Bliz yuzhnogo berega Krïma [Near the Southern Shore of the Crimea], 1880 (1880)

Méditation, albumleaf, 1880 (1880)

Une larme, 1880 (Moscow, 1880s)

Au village (Quasi fantasia), ?1880 (1882)

Arr. of Fair Scene and Hopak from Sorochintsï Fair





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