Modest Mussorgsky composed the song cycle Bez solntsa (Sunless, or, more literally, Without Sun) on six poems written by his close friend, the poet Arseni Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1848-1913). While the cycle was completed in November 1874, at least one song, "Ennui," was ready by June 2, a date that falls amid the composition of Pictures at an Exhibition. This was a time of major ups and downs for Mussorgsky; in January 1874 the premiere of the opera Boris Godunov had been given to the acclaim of the Russian public and, to Mussorgsky's dismay, utter rejection by music critics. Several sources make the claim that Mussorgsky spent this period mostly drunk and miserable, but he was also extraordinarily productive in 1874.

The overall mood of Sunless is bleak. Speech-like melody is generously applied in more or less literal realizations of Golenishchev-Kutuzov's texts, which deal primarily with insomnia, loneliness, and boredom. In the first three songs, "V chetyryokh stenakh" (Within Four Walls), "Menya ty v tolpe ne uznala" (You Did Not Recognize Me in the Crowd), and "Okonchen prazdny, shummy den" (The Idle, Noisy Day Has Ended), Mussorgsky uses the accompaniment very sparingly, limiting it mostly to single chords and octaves, including some fierce dissonances in "Within Four Walls." Midway in "The Idle, Noisy Day Has Ended," Mussorgsky introduces an accompaniment figure of falling sixths that is vaguely modal; this motive inspired Claude Debussy to borrow it for "Nuages," the first of his three orchestral Nocturnes. In "Skuchay" (Ennui) Mussorgsky allows himself a little chromatic phrase that hearkens back to the salon, albeit one that is stood on its head. In the final two settings, "Elegiya" (Elegy) and "Nad rekoy" (On the River), Mussorgsky produces accompaniment that is more in line with what we would expect from a member of the "Mighty Handful," although this too is modal in character and lightly applied. "On the River" makes use of an insistent half step that recalls the music written for Prince Golitsin's journey in Mussorgsky's opera Khovantschna.

In the context of the 1870s, Mussorgsky's Sunless cycle sounds like something that was beamed in from outer space, as there is hardly anything in it that bears witness to that era. Curiously, in spite of the achievement made here, Mussorgsky and his circle seem to have had an uncharacteristically modest appraisal of the quality of Sunless. Mussorgsky's only relevant comment records that the cycle "turned out pretty well." Mussorgsky's patron Vladimir Stasov felt that "Ennui" was "not a first-rate song, but all the same it is one of Mussorgsky's good songs." Composer Alexander Borodin wrote that "[the songs] all remind one of Boris, or are the fruit of a purely intellectual invention, and produce a very unsatisfactory impression." Something of Mussorgsky's intentions may be gleaned from a remark that he made to Golenishchev-Kutuzov; "here is nothing more than feeling." In a purely psychological sense, Sunless is an absolute rendering of the mental state associated with advanced depression and its symptomatic effects.

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1.Between Four Walls

Mussorgsky's "Within Four Walls" is the first song in the cycle called Sunless or Without Sun of 1874, a setting of six poems by his close friend Count Arseni Golenishchev-Kutuzov. Like Mussorgsky, Golenishchev-Kutuzov was an impoverished son of the nobility, and, like Mussorgsky, he had a pessimistic, even fatalistic, view of the world. Together Golenishchev-Kutuzov and Mussorgsky wrote some of the bleakest works in the art song repertoire.

"Within Four Walls" is a very brief work of only 17 bars, lasting about two minutes. Yet it is both emotionally and musically a very subtle and highly nuanced piece. Centering relentlessly around a pedal D in the piano, first in the bass, later in the middle voice, and then returning at the end to the bass, the accompaniment nevertheless moves to unexpected harmonies that are, inevitably, dragged back to the unyielding D. The melody is a perfect blend of recitative and aria, moving from arching lines of endless longing to deceptive cadences of bottomless despair. With phrases of irregular length articulated by frequent fermatas in the song's first half, "Within Four Walls" is as brilliantly composed as it is proufoundly pessimistic.

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