Program Music: “ Pictures at an Exhibition” Mussorgsky

1. Program Music:“Pictures at an Exhibition”Mussorgsky The Burning River Brass Arr. Michael Allen Powerpoint by Michael Macartney

2. Program Music • Program Music is intended to musically represent or accompany an extra musical theme such as a painting, geographical feature, emotion etc. The term is almost exclusively applied to works from the Romantic Period (1825-1910)

3. Examples of Program Music • Berlioz – Symphonie Fanstastique • Saint Saëns – Carnival of the Animals • Smetana – Die Moldau • Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

4. About the Composer • Mussorgsky wrote a colossal opera (Boris Godunov), five-dozen wonderful songs, and not much else. More accurately, he started many pieces, and the few he finished typically suffered editorial interference when they were published. At first it seemed to have been sheer indolence that curbed his output; eventually he paid more attention to drinking than to music, and that’s what did him in at age 42

5. Pictures at an Exhibition • Written by Mussorgsky for his late friend Victor Hartmann. Hartmann was an architect and painter who passed away in 1873. After his death an exhibition was organized in honor of Hartmann. A huge selection of his creations – over 400 watercolors, drawings, and jewelry designs – was exhibited in tribute at the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts. Mussorgsky was so moved by the display that he composed a piano suite in tribute, however it wasn’t published until 5 years after the composers death.

6. Tuileries • This movement comes from the painting “The Tuileries Gardens”. The gardens are located in Paris and like most of the paintings represented in this work this one was lost, however through Mussorgsky’s use of the “universal melody” and falling thirds you can imagine the children playing and taunting each other in the garden.

7. Pictures at an Exhibition • 10 of Hartmann’s pictures are represented through Mussorgsky’s music, however only 3 appeared in the actual exhibition. The others were in Mussorgsky’s private collection or he had seen them somewhere else.

8. Pictures at an Exhibition • The other 5 movements are the recurring Promenade theme used to illustrate the viewers walk from painting to painting and to unify the 15 movement work • He also uses this theme in the piece’s finale “The Great Gate of Kiev”

9. The Great Gate of Kiev

10. The Great Gate of Kiev • A competition was held to select the best design for a gateway to be built in Kiev to honor the failed assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1866. Hartmann won the competition. His entry showed a Moorish-looking structure topped with a cupola in the shape of an old Russian battle helmet, with a small crowd of people admiring the gate that dwarfs them.

11. The Great Gate of Kiev • Pictures at an Exhibition rises to this grand and glorious finale that leaves the listener feeling as if they had traveled to Kiev and are now standing in front of this tragically non-existent gate.

12. Program Music • This suite is a perfect example of Program Music because it takes pictures (an extra-musical idea) and uses themes, textures, and timbre to represent them musically. The beauty of this piece is that Hartmann’s lost artwork lives on through the music.