Mussorgsky's setting of Alexander Pushkin's The Night exists in two versions. The first was composed in 1864 and orchestrated in 1868. The second was composed later in 1864 and orchestrated in 1870 and 1871 (and neither orchestration should be confused with Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration and recomposition of the song in 1908). The first version sets the Pushkin text unaltered, while the second version radically re-orders the text and sets it to sometimes quite different music. Typically for Mussorgsky, both versions have their own validity in the arenas of modern performance and recording (compare them with the 1869 and the 1870 - 1871 versions of his opera Boris Godunov in this regard), although apparently Mussorgsky preferred the second version of the song.

In either case, The Night is filled with ardent yearning in an atmosphere of tremulous passion, as befits one of the few songs Mussorgsky dedicated to Nadezhda Opochinina, described as "in all likelihood the only woman he ever really loved." by Mussorgsky's biographer M.D. Calvocoressi. The modulations in the center of the song describing the beauty of the beloved's eyes are in both versions pure magic.

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