Aside, of course, from Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky's best and most characteristic piece for the piano was Intermezzo in modo classico. The work was composed in the winter of 1861, while Mussorgsky was still living in the country after the nervous breakdown brought on by debauchery of his years in Cadet School and later with the Preobrazhensky Guards. Like the best of Mussorgsky's early music (for example, the song "Tell me, O Star, Where Art Thou?"), the Intermezzo has its inspiration in a visual image.

Here is how his good friend Vladimir Stasov retells Mussorgsky's description of the work's inspiration: "...one beautiful, sunny, winter day—a holiday—he saw a whole crowd of peasants crossing the fields and plunging heavily through the snow-drifts; many of them fell down in the snow and then extricated themselves with some difficulty. 'This', said Mussorgsky, 'was at one and the same time beautiful and picturesque and serious and amusing. And suddenly in the distance appeared a crowd of young women, coming with songs and laughter along a level pathway. This picture flashed into my head in a musical form and unexpectedly there shaped itself the first "stepping up and down" medley à la Bach; the jolly laughing women presented themselves to me in the shape of a melody from which I then made the middle part of trio. But all this—in modo classico, in accordance with my musical preoccupation of the time."

While this is no doubt as true as any secondhand retelling from a notoriously unreliable source can be, it does in fact capture exactly how Mussorgsky's best early music was written. Unfortunately, the work sounds much more like a Russian pastiche in modo classico than a work inspired by Russian peasants in the snow. Indeed, the song of the laughing woman trio which Stasov has Mussorgsky describe does not even exist in the piano version of the piece but was added seven years later when Mussorgsky orchestrated the work in 1867, giving it the title Intermezzo symphonique in modo classico.

Mussorgsky dedicated the work to Borodin, his friend and fellow student of Balakirev.

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