Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition[a] is a piano suite in ten movements, plus a recurring and varied Promenade theme, written in 1874 by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. It is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann put on at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, following his sudden death in the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost.
This article is about the original suite by Modest Mussorgsky and its orchestral arrangements. For other uses, see Pictures at an Exhibition (disambiguation).Pictures at an Exhibition
Kartinki s vïstavski
An exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's pictures
2–22 June 1874
1886
About 35 minutes
Ten, plus a recurring, varied Promenade theme
Solo piano
The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, and became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers and contemporary musicians, with Maurice Ravel's 1922 adaptation for orchestra being the most recorded and performed. The suite, particularly the final movement, "The Bogatyr Gates", is widely considered one of Mussorgsky's greatest works.
Mussorgsky based his musical material on drawings and watercolours by Hartmann produced mostly during the artist's travels abroad. Locales include Italy, France, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Today most of the pictures from the Hartmann exhibition are lost, making it impossible to be sure in many cases which Hartmann works Mussorgsky had in mind.
Arts critic Alfred Frankenstein gave an account of Hartmann, with reproductions of his pictures, in the article "Victor Hartmann and Modeste Mussorgsky" in The Musical Quarterly (July 1939).[11] Frankenstein claimed to have identified seven pictures by catalogue number, corresponding to:
The surviving works that can be shown with certainty to have been used by Mussorgsky in assembling his suite, along with their titles, are as follows:[1]
Note: Mussorgsky owned the two pictures that together inspired No. 6, the so-called "Two Jews". The title of No. 6b, as provided by the Soviet editors of his letters, is Сандомирский [еврей] (Sandomirskiy [yevrey] or Sandomierz [Jew]). The bracketed word yevrey (lit. "Hebrew") is the sanitized form of the actual word in the title, very likely the derogatory epithet жид (zhid or yid).[12]
Recording of the original manuscript[edit]
In 2009, the German pianist Lars David Kellner published the original version of Gnomus on his Mussorgsky album (Enharmonic) as a premiere. In 2014, the Russian pianist Andrej Hoteev presented (in a CD recording) a performance of "Pictures at an Exhibition" based on original manuscripts[17] he consulted in the Russian National Library at Saint Petersburg.[18] Hoteev found numerous discrepancies with conventional sheet music editions.[19] He believes his recorded version expresses the composer's original intent.[20] The most important deviations are documented with illustrations from the manuscripts in the accompanying CD booklet.[21]
Further notable recordings exist from Theodore Kuchar, Valery Gergiev, Rafael Kubelík, Fritz Reiner and Riccardo Muti.[22]
Stage adaptations[edit]
Staging by Kandinsky[edit]
In 1928, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky created a stage show by combining his own designs for the pictures with a performance of the piano score.[39] Since it was put on at Dessau, elements of the staging have been lost. However, it has proved possible to animate the surviving art work using video technology.
Staging by Gen Atem and S213[edit]
In a hall on Attisholz-Areal, Switzerland, Gen Atem and S213 had a premiere performance on the basis of Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's piano cycle in August 2021. Kaspar Zehnder and the Theatre Orchester Biel Solothurn provided the acoustical background in its entirety.[40][41]
Ballet by Alexei Ratmansky[edit]
In 2014, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky created the ballet Pictures at an Exhibition, based on the orchestral score, for the New York City Ballet. The set featured a 1913 painting by Wassily Kandinsky, unrelated to Kandinsky’s 1928 staging.[42]