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Pictures at an Exhibition

About the Composition

Modeste Mussorgsky
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Quick Look Composer: Modeste Mussorgsky
Arranger: Maurice Ravel
Program note originally written for the following performance:
National Symphony Orchestra: Leonard Slatkin, conductor/Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano, performs Liszt Jan 24 - 26, 2008
© Richard Freed

There are now about thirty-five orchestral versions of Pictures at an Exhibition, which Mussorgsky, of course, wrote as a suite for piano alone, but which Ravel made into a very successful work for orchestra. Some twenty years ago I performed an arrangement by someone other than Ravel-by the Russian conductor Sergei Gorchakov; that led me to explore several of the other alternatives, and eventually to arrange two separate composite versions, compiled from more than a dozen different orchestral settings.

Is there anything wrong with the Ravel? Not really. The usual complaint is that it "does not sound Russian," whatever that means. Ravel also left out one of the "Promenades." In addition, he altered the piano text considerably, and in fact worked from an edition of the piano score that was known at the time to be less than fully reliable. But it remains that his is the version that is the most performed, and it is quite spectacular.

Most conductors make emendations to Ravel's orchestration; those I have made were undertaken simply in an effort to bring certain passages more in line with the original material for piano. I have restored the missing "Promenade," basing my orchestration mostly on what Ravel did in the opening of the work. The section headed "Bydlo" now begins forte, as Mussorgsky indicated. The "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells" has two additional measures at the end. Some notes are changed in "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle." And the second statement of the chorale in the concluding "Great Gate at Kiev" now is loud rather than soft.

The other alterations are for the most part decidedly minor, but again a bit closer to what Mussorgsky put into his original version for piano. I have made no changes merely for the sake of change. I still love the way Ravel ended the work, and I would not dream of changing it. Nor would I suggest that what I've done with his score is the last word on the piece. Wouldn't it be interesting if someone were to orchestrate the edition that Vladimir Horowitz made of the piano version when he played the Pictures?

— Leonard Slatkin



Mussorgsky composed his piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874; Ravel orchestrated the work in 1922 under a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the premiere of this version on October 19 of that year, in Paris. Hans Kindler conducted the second "picture" alone ("The Old Castle") on November 3, 1932, and the NSO gave its first performance of the complete Ravel version, with Howard Mitchell conducting, on December 21, 1949; the most recent one was coonducted by Emil de Cou in a Millennium Stage concert on February 5, 2007. The NSO recorded two of the individual sections-"Bydlo" and "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells"-under Howard Mitchell for RCA Victor. The present concerts introduce Leonard Slatkin's new edition of the Ravel version.

Ravel's score calls for 2 piccolos, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, ratchet, slapstick, triangle, tam-tam, xylophone, glockenspiel, chimes, celesta, 2 harps, and strings. Duration, 33 minutes.


As is the case with so much of Mussorgsky's music, Pictures at an Exhibition has become most familiar in a form in which the composer himself did not create it. It was for the piano, not the orchestra, that Mussorgsky composed this suite, in response to a specific art exhibit that had great personal meaning for him. His friend Viktor Hartmann (Gartmann), a prominent architect, painter and scenic designer only five years older than the composer himself, died at age 39 in 1873, and a memorial exhibition of his works was mounted in St. Petersburg the following year. Mussorgsky recorded his impressions of it in this suite for piano which he composed as a further memorial gesture. The suite was not published until five years after Mussorgsky's own death; it received little attention from pianists for some time, but its orchestral possibilities were noted at once. Ravel, in fact, was neither the first nor the last to convert Mussorgsky's piano suite into an orchestral one, though it is his version alone that has taken a permanent place in the orchestral repertory, and in fact earned for the music a status as one of the grandest of showpieces for the virtuoso orchestra.

In that respect it might be considered odd that Rimsky-Korsakov, who devoted himself so wholeheartedly to completing and editing many of Mussorgsky's works, did not respond to those possibilities himself: he did, however, supervise the first orchestration, undertaken by his pupil Mikhail Tushmalov, and he conducted that version (comprising only seven of the "pictures" and omitting all the "Promenades" after the prefatory one) in 1891. Ravel's attention was drawn to Mussorgsky's music by his friend M.D. Calvocoressi, a prominent musicologist who wrote three books on the Russian composer. In 1913 Ravel and Stravinsky jointly undertook a new orchestration of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina for Diaghilev; by 1922 Ravel had become interested enough to ask Serge Koussevitky to commission him to transcribe Pictures at an Exhibition.

This composite Franco-Russian work introduced by a Russian conductor in Paris (October 19, 1922, under Koussevitzky) was in a sense the culmination of the long and productive period of musical cross-pollination that began in earnest with Berlioz's concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, seven years before the Hartmann exhibition itself and eight years before the birth of Ravel, and which in Ravel's time was continued by Diaghilev and the outstanding French and Russian musicians with whom he surrounded himself. The British conductor Sir Henry Wood, who had introduced a version of his own in 1915, withdrew it upon acquainting himself with Ravel's. Versions more or less contemporaneous with Ravel's, by his one-time pupil Leonidas Leonardi, and by the Russian-Finn Leo Funtek, didn't stand much of a chance. More recent ones by such figures as the mid-twentieth-century Russian conductor Sergei Gorchakov, the legendary conductor and frequent transcriber Leopold Stokowski, the Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, and the Bulgarian-born pianist and composer Emile Naumoff (whose contribution, an expanded version in the form of a piano concerto, with material from other Mussorgsky works, was given its premiere by him as soloist with the NSO under Mstislav Rostropovich in April 1994)-all these have tended to be regarded as interesting supplements to the Ravel version, rather than possible replacements for it. Leonard Slatkin, who has put together two separate conflations, drawing upon various orchestrations of the work, has recorded the Ravel version twice and continues to favor it; as explained in an essay of his own preceding these notes, his own new edition of it restores the one section Ravel omitted and touches up some of the other sections to bring them into closer conformity with Mussorgsky's original piano suite.

Several of the Hartmann works in that 1874 memorial exhibit were of a fantastic or bizarre nature; these elements held a special fascination for Mussorgsky, and clearly influenced his selection of the drawings and paintings represented in his suite. He did not trouble to be strictly faithful to the visual model in every instance, but the liberties he took only serve to underscore the personal nature of his ties with Hartmann and his feelings on the loss of his friend. As a further gesture in that direction, he incorporated his own personality in the form of the "Promenade" which introduces the suite and likes several of its sections together: "My own physiognomy," he remarked, "peeps out through the intermezzos."

The PROMENADE, following its energetic statement as prelude to the entire work, returns five times in various guises, each reflecting the character of one of the individual pictures, as noted in the following sequence.

GNOMUS. The opening "Promenade" is broken off abruptly by a confrontation with Hartmann's drawing of a nutcracker in the form of a gnarled and malevolent old gnome.

THE OLD CASTLE. The "Promenade" returns in a more wistful mood, leading to a water-color of a medieval castle before which a troubadour sings a melancholy ballad.

THE TUILERIES. CHILDREN QUARRELING AT PLAY. The "Promenade" leads into a wispy little scherzo that reminds us of the perceptive feeling for children shown by both composers in other works: Mussorgsky in his song-cycle The Nursery, Ravel in his Mother Goose and L'Enfant et les sortilèges.

BYDLO is a Polish word for "cattle." Hartmann's drawing was of cattle in a rural Polish village; Mussorgsky created a different picture, in which an oxcart passes by on enormous wooden wheels.

BALLET OF THE CHICKS IN THEIR SHELLS. A tenuous, fluttery statement of the "Promenade," first in the woodwinds and then in the strings, introduces a scherzino based on Hartmann's costume design for a ballet called Trilby, representing chicks dancing with only their legs protruding from their shells.

"SAMUEL" GOLDENBERG AND SCHMUYLE. Mussorgsky combined Hartmann's separate sketches of two men in the Sandomierz ghetto, one obviously well-to-do and full of himself, the other just as clearly a wheedling, groveling beggar. The title he gave the piece, with quotation marks around the somehow pretentious German form of the rich man's name, was regarded as being so blatantly anti-Semitic that Vladimir Stassov, the St. Petersburg critic who was so influential in the lives of Mussorgsky and the other members of Balakirev's group of nationalist composers, suppressed it before the score was published and replaced it with the heading "Two Polish Jews, One Rich, the Other Poor."

PROMENADE. This is the one section Ravel omitted from his version. Mr. Slatkin's transcription is based largely on Ravel's treatment of the work's opening number.

LIMOGES: THE MARKET. Another lively scherzo, more or less complementary to the earlier French scene, this one picturing gossiping women at an outdoor market.

CATACOMBAE. In this picture Hartmann depicted himself, lantern in hand, exploring the ancient catacombs under Paris, and here Mussorgsky used his "Promenade" as postlude rather than introduction. The opening section, Sepulchrum Romanum, is followed by a gently elegiac treatment of the "Promenade" inscribed Cum mortuis in lingua mortua ("With the dead in a dead language"). Mussorgsky noted in his score, "Hartmann's creative spirit leads me to a place of skulls and calls to them-the skulls begin to glow faintly from within."

THE HUT ON FOWL'S LEGS is the residence of Baba-Yaga, the grotesque witch of Russian folklore, who rode through the air in a mortar of glowing iron. The title in this case is misleading, in that Hartmann designed a clock face showing the witch's hut but the music depicts the witch's ride-which leads without pause into the final picture.

THE GREAT GATE AT KIEV. For the capstone of his memorial tribute Mussorgsky chose a picture that was itself a design for a monument: Hartmann's proposed reconstruction of the ancient Gate of the Bogatyrs at Kiev, in the massive traditional style, with the central section topped by a cupola in the shape of a Slavonic warrior's helmet. The "Promenade" returns in the jubilant coda, in which the spirit of liturgical chants is powerfully evoked. Program note originally written for the following performance:
National Symphony Orchestra: Leonard Slatkin, conductor/Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano, performs Liszt Jan 24 - 26, 2008
© Richard Freed

There are now about thirty-five orchestral versions of Pictures at an Exhibition, which Mussorgsky, of course, wrote as a suite for piano alone, but which Ravel made into a very successful work for orchestra. Some twenty years ago I performed an arrangement by someone other than Ravel-by the Russian conductor Sergei Gorchakov; that led me to explore several of the other alternatives, and eventually to arrange two separate composite versions, compiled from more than a dozen different orchestral settings.

Is there anything wrong with the Ravel? Not really. The usual complaint is that it "does not sound Russian," whatever that means. Ravel also left out one of the "Promenades." In addition, he altered the piano text considerably, and in fact worked from an edition of the piano score that was known at the time to be less than fully reliable. But it remains that his is the version that is the most performed, and it is quite spectacular.

Most conductors make emendations to Ravel's orchestration; those I have made were undertaken simply in an effort to bring certain passages more in line with the original material for piano. I have restored the missing "Promenade," basing my orchestration mostly on what Ravel did in the opening of the work. The section headed "Bydlo" now begins forte, as Mussorgsky indicated. The "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells" has two additional measures at the end. Some notes are changed in "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle." And the second statement of the chorale in the concluding "Great Gate at Kiev" now is loud rather than soft.

The other alterations are for the most part decidedly minor, but again a bit closer to what Mussorgsky put into his original version for piano. I have made no changes merely for the sake of change. I still love the way Ravel ended the work, and I would not dream of changing it. Nor would I suggest that what I've done with his score is the last word on the piece. Wouldn't it be interesting if someone were to orchestrate the edition that Vladimir Horowitz made of the piano version when he played the Pictures?

— Leonard Slatkin



Mussorgsky composed his piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874; Ravel orchestrated the work in 1922 under a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the premiere of this version on October 19 of that year, in Paris. Hans Kindler conducted the second "picture" alone ("The Old Castle") on November 3, 1932, and the NSO gave its first performance of the complete Ravel version, with Howard Mitchell conducting, on December 21, 1949; the most recent one was coonducted by Emil de Cou in a Millennium Stage concert on February 5, 2007. The NSO recorded two of the individual sections-"Bydlo" and "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells"-under Howard Mitchell for RCA Victor. The present concerts introduce Leonard Slatkin's new edition of the Ravel version.

Ravel's score calls for 2 piccolos, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, ratchet, slapstick, triangle, tam-tam, xylophone, glockenspiel, chimes, celesta, 2 harps, and strings. Duration, 33 minutes.


As is the case with so much of Mussorgsky's music, Pictures at an Exhibition has become most familiar in a form in which the composer himself did not create it. It was for the piano, not the orchestra, that Mussorgsky composed this suite, in response to a specific art exhibit that had great personal meaning for him. His friend Viktor Hartmann (Gartmann), a prominent architect, painter and scenic designer only five years older than the composer himself, died at age 39 in 1873, and a memorial exhibition of his works was mounted in St. Petersburg the following year. Mussorgsky recorded his impressions of it in this suite for piano which he composed as a further memorial gesture. The suite was not published until five years after Mussorgsky's own death; it received little attention from pianists for some time, but its orchestral possibilities were noted at once. Ravel, in fact, was neither the first nor the last to convert Mussorgsky's piano suite into an orchestral one, though it is his version alone that has taken a permanent place in the orchestral repertory, and in fact earned for the music a status as one of the grandest of showpieces for the virtuoso orchestra.

In that respect it might be considered odd that Rimsky-Korsakov, who devoted himself so wholeheartedly to completing and editing many of Mussorgsky's works, did not respond to those possibilities himself: he did, however, supervise the first orchestration, undertaken by his pupil Mikhail Tushmalov, and he conducted that version (comprising only seven of the "pictures" and omitting all the "Promenades" after the prefatory one) in 1891. Ravel's attention was drawn to Mussorgsky's music by his friend M.D. Calvocoressi, a prominent musicologist who wrote three books on the Russian composer. In 1913 Ravel and Stravinsky jointly undertook a new orchestration of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina for Diaghilev; by 1922 Ravel had become interested enough to ask Serge Koussevitky to commission him to transcribe Pictures at an Exhibition.

This composite Franco-Russian work introduced by a Russian conductor in Paris (October 19, 1922, under Koussevitzky) was in a sense the culmination of the long and productive period of musical cross-pollination that began in earnest with Berlioz's concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, seven years before the Hartmann exhibition itself and eight years before the birth of Ravel, and which in Ravel's time was continued by Diaghilev and the outstanding French and Russian musicians with whom he surrounded himself. The British conductor Sir Henry Wood, who had introduced a version of his own in 1915, withdrew it upon acquainting himself with Ravel's. Versions more or less contemporaneous with Ravel's, by his one-time pupil Leonidas Leonardi, and by the Russian-Finn Leo Funtek, didn't stand much of a chance. More recent ones by such figures as the mid-twentieth-century Russian conductor Sergei Gorchakov, the legendary conductor and frequent transcriber Leopold Stokowski, the Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, and the Bulgarian-born pianist and composer Emile Naumoff (whose contribution, an expanded version in the form of a piano concerto, with material from other Mussorgsky works, was given its premiere by him as soloist with the NSO under Mstislav Rostropovich in April 1994)-all these have tended to be regarded as interesting supplements to the Ravel version, rather than possible replacements for it. Leonard Slatkin, who has put together two separate conflations, drawing upon various orchestrations of the work, has recorded the Ravel version twice and continues to favor it; as explained in an essay of his own preceding these notes, his own new edition of it restores the one section Ravel omitted and touches up some of the other sections to bring them into closer conformity with Mussorgsky's original piano suite.

Several of the Hartmann works in that 1874 memorial exhibit were of a fantastic or bizarre nature; these elements held a special fascination for Mussorgsky, and clearly influenced his selection of the drawings and paintings represented in his suite. He did not trouble to be strictly faithful to the visual model in every instance, but the liberties he took only serve to underscore the personal nature of his ties with Hartmann and his feelings on the loss of his friend. As a further gesture in that direction, he incorporated his own personality in the form of the "Promenade" which introduces the suite and likes several of its sections together: "My own physiognomy," he remarked, "peeps out through the intermezzos."

The PROMENADE, following its energetic statement as prelude to the entire work, returns five times in various guises, each reflecting the character of one of the individual pictures, as noted in the following sequence.

GNOMUS. The opening "Promenade" is broken off abruptly by a confrontation with Hartmann's drawing of a nutcracker in the form of a gnarled and malevolent old gnome.

THE OLD CASTLE. The "Promenade" returns in a more wistful mood, leading to a water-color of a medieval castle before which a troubadour sings a melancholy ballad.

THE TUILERIES. CHILDREN QUARRELING AT PLAY. The "Promenade" leads into a wispy little scherzo that reminds us of the perceptive feeling for children shown by both composers in other works: Mussorgsky in his song-cycle The Nursery, Ravel in his Mother Goose and L'Enfant et les sortilèges.

BYDLO is a Polish word for "cattle." Hartmann's drawing was of cattle in a rural Polish village; Mussorgsky created a different picture, in which an oxcart passes by on enormous wooden wheels.

BALLET OF THE CHICKS IN THEIR SHELLS. A tenuous, fluttery statement of the "Promenade," first in the woodwinds and then in the strings, introduces a scherzino based on Hartmann's costume design for a ballet called Trilby, representing chicks dancing with only their legs protruding from their shells.

"SAMUEL" GOLDENBERG AND SCHMUYLE. Mussorgsky combined Hartmann's separate sketches of two men in the Sandomierz ghetto, one obviously well-to-do and full of himself, the other just as clearly a wheedling, groveling beggar. The title he gave the piece, with quotation marks around the somehow pretentious German form of the rich man's name, was regarded as being so blatantly anti-Semitic that Vladimir Stassov, the St. Petersburg critic who was so influential in the lives of Mussorgsky and the other members of Balakirev's group of nationalist composers, suppressed it before the score was published and replaced it with the heading "Two Polish Jews, One Rich, the Other Poor."

PROMENADE. This is the one section Ravel omitted from his version. Mr. Slatkin's transcription is based largely on Ravel's treatment of the work's opening number.

LIMOGES: THE MARKET. Another lively scherzo, more or less complementary to the earlier French scene, this one picturing gossiping women at an outdoor market.

CATACOMBAE. In this picture Hartmann depicted himself, lantern in hand, exploring the ancient catacombs under Paris, and here Mussorgsky used his "Promenade" as postlude rather than introduction. The opening section, Sepulchrum Romanum, is followed by a gently elegiac treatment of the "Promenade" inscribed Cum mortuis in lingua mortua ("With the dead in a dead language"). Mussorgsky noted in his score, "Hartmann's creative spirit leads me to a place of skulls and calls to them-the skulls begin to glow faintly from within."

THE HUT ON FOWL'S LEGS is the residence of Baba-Yaga, the grotesque witch of Russian folklore, who rode through the air in a mortar of glowing iron. The title in this case is misleading, in that Hartmann designed a clock face showing the witch's hut but the music depicts the witch's ride-which leads without pause into the final picture.

THE GREAT GATE AT KIEV. For the capstone of his memorial tribute Mussorgsky chose a picture that was itself a design for a monument: Hartmann's proposed reconstruction of the ancient Gate of the Bogatyrs at Kiev, in the massive traditional style, with the central section topped by a cupola in the shape of a Slavonic warrior's helmet. The "Promenade" returns in the jubilant coda, in which the spirit of liturgical chants is powerfully evoked.