Night on Bald Mountain
in D minor
Модест Петрович Мусоргский 1839–1881
D minor
Key
Listen
Finding a recording…
Difficulty
Our estimate Advanced
—No community ratings yet0 votes
Sign in to add your rating.
Themes & character
Witches' sabbath·St John's Eve·Rejected in his lifetime·Rimsky-Korsakov revision
At a glance
- Key
- D minor
About the piece
Mussorgsky composed the first version in 1867, working, he said, with great speed and excitement, to depict a witches' sabbath on St John's Eve drawn from Russian folk belief: subterranean noises, the appearance of spirits, the arrival of Chernobog, and a wild sabbath that breaks up at the sound of a distant church bell.
His mentor Balakirev refused to perform it, and the piece went unheard in his lifetime. The version the world knows was reworked after Mussorgsky's death by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886, smoothing its harmonies considerably, and it reached a mass audience through Disney's Fantasia in 1940.
The composer
Модест Петрович Мусоргский
1839–1881
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five." He was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period and strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation.
Loading…