Mussorgsky's last cycle Songs and Dances of Death was composed in 1877. The texts were by the amateur poet and dramatist Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1848-1913). The first setting, "Cradle Song," portrays a fearful mother's vigil over her dying child. Her dialogue with Death is poignant, but realized with utmost simplicity. We hear Death's insidious refrain "Hush-a-by, hush-a-by" four times, while the piano suggests the rocking of the cradle. Finally, Death announces "Calm your fear and despair! See, through the window peeps the pale morrow." False reassurance conceals his real intention—Death's lullaby calls the child unto himself, with the words "See, there he slumbers...my song stilled his pain."

The next song "Serenade" describes a sickly young woman before whom Death appears as a gallant suitor. As the critic Montagu-Nathan writes, "This sinister cavalier prosecutes a brief and horrible courtship...Flattering utterances are but a veil that will not long obscure the end." When at the close the melody fades into silence, Death casts aside his disguise with a triumphant cry of "Be still...you are mine!"

In No. 3, "Trepak," the accompaniment derives from the ancient Dies irae plainchant, heard in Liszt's Totentanz and the Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz, both of which Mussorgsky had heard in St. Petersburg. The accompaniment becomes the theme of the nationalistic "Trepak" danced by Death himself. In a snow-gripped forest, Death meets a drunken peasant, to whom he sings "a song fair and pleasant" before bidding him rest until daybreak.

The last song "The Field-Marshal" was probably inspired by Glinka's setting Midnight Review. Written two years after the others, Death is portrayed here as a ghostly commander, now proud in victory, riding through scenes of death and devastation on the battlefield. He summons his loyal victims to form up in parade and pass before him in ghostly review. Death's inexorable march theme quotes the Polish patriotic song "Z dymen pozarow." The original version included a remarkable chord cluster four measures from the close, which does not appear in Rimsky-Korsakov's edition, issued after Mussorgsky's own death in 1881.

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1.Lullaby

Mussorgsky wrote the saddest lullabies ever composed. Calistratus, of 1864 was the first, a peasant mother's doleful song on the limits of happiness. This was followed by Sleep, Sleep, Peasant's Son of 1865, setting a mournful lament from Alexander Ostrovsky's tragedy Voyevoda, and Yeremushka's Cradle Song of 1868, which is in subject matter not much different than Calistratus, but much deeper musically. However, these morose lullabies are at least lullabies for living children. With his Cradle Song of April 14, 1875, Mussorgsky had turned to the saddest of all subjects: the death of a child.

Setting a text by his close friend and roommate, Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Mussorgsky's Cradle Song, from what would become the song cycle Songs and Dances of Death, is not only an endlessly sorrowful song, but is, in effect, a duet between the mother of the dying child and the spirit of death who comes to take the child. The alternation of the mother's anguished and heart-rending cries to spare her child and implacable and unforgiving lullaby sung by death is handled masterfully, with sensitive and flexible vocal lines given to each. Mussorgsky's ability to create believable characterization through music of infinite and subtlety was his highest achievement as a composer and dramatist, and the Cradle Song from Songs and Dances of Death, one of his greatest and most profoundly moving songs, truly exemplifies Mussorgsky's

extraordinary creative accomplishment.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide

2.Serenade

There may well be an autobiographical element in the compositional proximity of Mussorgsky's setting of Serenade, from what would become his song cycle Songs and Dances of Death, on May 11, 1875, and his setting of Cruel Death: An Epitaph, composed six weeks later on June 29, 1875. The Serenade sets a text by Mussorgsky's roommate and close friend Count Arseny Golenishchina-Kutusov, describing death serenading a dying woman and consoling her with his sweet compliments and the promise of his languorous love. Cruel Death sets a text by Mussorgsky himself which begins, "Cruel death like a vulture's talons attacked your heart and killed you" and closes with "No, I cannot...I cannot go on." Mussorgsky dedicated Cruel Death "for the death of N. P. O...ci...noi...," that is, Nadezhda Opochinina, whom most biographers believe to be the only woman Mussorgsky ever loved. Serenade is dedicated to Ludmilla Shestakova, Glinka's sister, but that may have been because Opochinina was simply very, very sick at the time of composition.

The emotions evoked by the Serenade from Songs and Dances of Death are so painful to hear that for some it is almost impossible to listen to the song. And Mussorgsky's setting, with its gorgeous opening evocation of a warm spring night and its swaying crepuscular serenade, ideally embodies those emotions in music of unbearable intensity. While not perhaps the most perfect of the Songs and Dances of Death, Serenade is still one of the greatest songs Mussorgsky ever wrote and an extraordinarily moving testimony to the woman he loved.

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3.Trepak

Even before the premiere of Boris Godunov on February 8, 1874, Mussorgsky's life had begun to fall to ruins. The proximate cause of his destruction was acute and terminal alcoholism which deformed his sensitive personality and destroyed his compositional genius. But the premiere of Boris, with its terrible combination of tremendous public success and critical failure, especially the absolute failure of his friends to comprehend the profound originality of his opera, accelerated his disintegration. After the premiere of Boris, Mussorgsky was no longer capable of the sustained creative work necessary to complete the operas he had already begun; these remained unfinished at his death six years later. Only in a handful of songs did Mussorgsky's genius again manifest itself.

Those songs were, not surprisingly, about death. The first of them was "Trepak," the first of what would become his Songs and Dances of Death. Composed on February 17, 1875, "Trepak" may well be Mussorgsky's most perfectly conceived and executed song. Mussorgsky sets a text by his good friend and fellow fatalist Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, depicting death dancing with a muzhik lost in the snows of winter on the way home from a night's drinking. All that is great and original in Mussorgsky's song writing—the fusion of recitative and aria, the creation of a supple and sensitive vocal line, the use of "folk" idioms (in this case, the dance, the trepak), the focus of every musical element on the depiction of an image, in this case, a lifelike personification of death—is present in "Trepak."

© James Leonard, All Music Guide

4.Field-Marshall Death

By the time Mussorgsky composed The Field Marshal on June 5, 1877, he knew it would be the fourth of the songs in his cycle Songs and Dances of Death. But he did not believe it would be the last of the songs: Mussorgsky projected that the complete cycle would contain eight songs. Depending on your point of view, it is either a terrible pity that Mussorgsky did not complete the remaining four songs or a blessing that the world was spared another four songs as harrowing and terrifying as the four in existence.

Indeed, The Field Marshal is one of the most frightening and nihilistic songs ever written. Setting a text by Mussorgsky's very close friend and roommate Count Arseny Golenishchina-Kutusov depicting death as a mounted general surveying the corpses on a deserted moonlit battlefield, Mussorgsky's music is overwhelmingly powerful and profoundly moving. Merciless death, in a dissonant chord of unremitting agony, declares that the bones of the dead will never rise from their graves, thereby denying the Christian resurrection of the dead and damning them and all humanity to endless oblivion. In its marriage of unrelenting grimness to a one-of-a-kind musical language that was baldly, frighteningly stripped of all convention, The Field Marshal is one of the supreme achievements in all music.

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Songs and Dances of Death (song cycle; orch. by Shostakovich)

It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Mussorgsky to Shostakovich. He said flatly at one point, "I revere him" (Testimony The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 226), something Shostakovich never said about any other composer. His reverence for the music was inseparable from his reverence for the man: Shostakovich often spoke of Mussorgsky's aesthetic and moral honesty and his personal integrity. This veneration even extended to Mussorgsky attitude towards death which Shostakovich characterized as: "There isn't and can't be any peace, there isn't and can't be any solace—that's weakness" (Testimony The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 243).

It follows, therefore, that Shostakovich would revere Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. And, indeed he does: ". . . for many years my favorite work was Songs and Dances of Death" (Testimony The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 240). In the summer of 1962, Shostakovich consummated his veneration and orchestrated the work and sent it to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. In his orchestration of the cycle, Shostakovich took a completely different tack than did Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. Unlike his predecessors, Shostakovich did not alter the melodies or harmonies of the works into order to bring them into line with conventional notions of melody and harmony, thereby preserving the essence of Mussorgsky's musical thought. And unlike Rimsky's and Glazunov's, his orchestration is astringent to the point of being abrasive, lividly colored like a fresh wound and as brutal as the skeletal fist which inflicted it. Although Shostakovich makes no effort replicate the sound of Mussorgsky's, orchestration, although, in fact, his orchestration sound more like his own music, his sympathy for Mussorgsky enables his orchestration to bring out all the morbidity and fatalism of Mussorgsky's music.

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