Bohemia’s Woods and Fields

By way of the dark forest to the sunlit meadows and villages, From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields is a magnificent paean of praise to the Czech countryside.

Modest Mussorgsky was a member of a group of Russian nationalist composers known as ‘the Five’ or the ‘Mighty Handful’. The group consisted of Mily Balakirev (the founder and leader), César Cui, Mussorgsky himself, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin. Of the five Mussorgsky was musically the most intensely nationalistic to the extent of, in attempt to forge a genuinely Russian musical language, ignoring (or not bothering to learn, according to his critics) the ‘rules’ of ‘Germanic’ harmony and counterpoint. As a result of this his musical friends (mainly Rimsky-Korsakov) decided, after the composer’s death, to rewrite several of his works in order to correct ‘mistakes’ in both harmony and orchestration (we now, thankfully, have frequent opportunities to hear the original versions).

Pictures at an Exhibition was written as a memorial to Mussorgsky’s friend the artist/architect Victor Hartmann (1834–1873).

Painted just a few days before the composer’s death from chronic alcoholism, Ilya Repin’s famous portrait of Mussorgsky seems to capture both the brilliance and the tragedy of the man.

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