Like Pictures at an Exhibition and his opera Khovanshchina, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death number among the many works that required finishing or orchestrating by his composer friends. Today, they exist in many orchestrated versions, even serving as a jump-off point for Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, but the first version to exist was completed by Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, published in 1882, a year after Mussorgsky’s death.
Each of the four songs—Lullaby, Serenade, Trepak, and Field Marshal—are a poetic snapshot of a specific death; respectively, of a child, a girl, a drunken peasant, and a soldier. Mussorgsky set texts by Arseniy Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a younger friend of the composer, who lodged with Mussorgsky in the mid 1870s.
In some ways the collection is a tale of Mussorgsky’s domestic situation, setting words by one housemate, and later having it orchestrated by another, in Rimsky-Korsakov. It also tells of Mussorgsky’s preoccupations. Death was firmly on his mind, having experienced the loss of friends—the death of painter Victor Hartmann inspired him to write Pictures at an Exhibition—as well as suffering from frequent alcohol-induced health problems himself.
This cycle is certainly shadowed by death, but it’s interesting to note how death becomes an inevitable, inescapable fact, and in that way, a figure approaching the benign. (In this way, it bears a resemblance to Schubert’s calm, consoling figure who appears in the second stanza of Death and the Maiden.) In the first setting, Death appears at the door of a mother, then as a mysteriously seductive knight in the second, an enticing figure to a drunken figure in the third, and finally, the inevitable consequence of battle.
© Hugh Morris 2025
