The Solemn March or Festive March is one of the short works which Mussorgsky wrote as his part of the Mlada project. Proposed in early 1872 by the director of the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg, Mlada was an opera-ballet to be a jointly composed by four of the composers associated with the Balakirev circle. For his part, Mussorgsky was supposed to compose portions of the second and third acts in cooperation with Rimsky-Korsakov. Mussorgsky found the whole thing more than slightly ridiculous, and in the event actually composed very little original music for Mlada, preferring instead to re-use previously composed material.

One of the few original pieces was this Solemn March from Act II. Mussorgsky's music was intended to accompany the arrival of Polabian (Baltic Slav) Princes at the temple of Radegast in Retra. It is a loud, bombastic, and wholly uncharacteristic march with a central section built on Russian folk themes. One gets the sense that Mussorgsky was relieved when the projected foundered in the spring of 1872.

With a new central section based this time on Turkish folk tunes, Mussorgsky reused the Solemn March as his contribution to the proposed 25th Anniversary celebration of the reign of Alexander II in 1880, this time entitled The Capture of Kars. This project, too, foundered and Mussorgsky's march thus went twice unused.

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