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Night on Bald Mountain

in D minor

Модест Петрович Мусоргский 1839–1881
Модест Петрович Мусоргский
D minor
Key

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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
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.

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