Musorgsky’s style

Audacious harmonies Musorgsky composed at the piano, and often discovered striking and unorthodox harmonies through extemporising. In this way, he hit upon the remarkable bell harmonies which open the coronation scene of his opera Boris Godunov.

Language of the heart Musorgsky’s expressiveness derives to a degree from Schumann’s harmonic language. Yet one of his greatest achievements was the way his music reflects the fractured, multidimensional nature of the individual human soul or identity – whether the mighty yet tormented Tsar Boris (below, played by Theodor Scheidl in 1936) or a humble peasant woman. Compare and contrast Particularly when Musorgsky’s music is without the thread of a vocal line, an idea is often not so much answered as complemented or contrasted with another idea. ‘Dawn on the Moscow River’ which opens Khovanshchina offers a brilliant depiction through a mosaic of musical ideas – a technique Stravinsky, for instance, was to push further in his music from Petrushka onwards.

That martial sound An exception to the above technique, perhaps not surprisingly for a former guards officer, is when Musorgsky composes a march. For these, he structures the thematic material more conventionally: excellent examples include the festive march from Mlada, and the hair-raising march of the Streltsy in his incomplete opera Khovanshchina.