Modest Mussorgsky (1839 – 1881): Boris Godunov
In 1860s St Petersburg, a band of musical insurgents known as the Moguchaya Kuchka (The Mighty Five) came together under the enthusiastic, occasionally overbearing leadership of Mily Balakirev. They were united by a desire to create a distinctly Russian school of classical music, free from what they regarded as excessive German and Italian influences.
The Kuchkists (as they became known) were also an unusual bunch and not least because none were academically trained musicians. Almost all of them had day jobs in other professions. But what they lacked in formal education, they more than compensated for in raw talent. Alongside Balakirev himself, the little band comprised Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, César Cui and Modest Mussorgsky.
Mussorgsky was the rawest of them all. If every self-respecting artistic group requires at least one mad genius, then the Mighty Five had theirs in Modest Mussorgsky. He was one of the most unconventional composers of the nineteenth century – suspicious of academic theory, impatient with established rules, and possessed of the distinctly unfashionable conviction that music ought to speak the language of ordinary people. He was also an alcoholic, a sometimes difficult companion, an inveterate procrastinator and, by the end of his life, a desperately lonely figure.
It was Mussorgsky’s stubborn determination to do things his own way that often led him into territory well off the radar of lesser mortals. But such independence of mind also came at a price. He could be woefully undisciplined, spectacularly unreliable with friends, and he had a habit of abandoning promising musical projects at inopportune moments. His highly original notions of harmony, counterpoint and orchestration were also liable to raise eyebrows among his fellow Kuchkists, who did not always find it easy to keep up with his more outlandish experiments.
The only thing not particularly unusual about Modest Mussorgsky was his upbringing. His parents were wealthy landowners in the rural Pskov district, some 250 miles south of St Petersburg, and his ancestry was suitably respectable. Indeed, one of his forebears was said to have been Rurik, the legendary ninth-century chieftain traditionally associated with the founding of the Russian monarchy. But for all his distinguished roots, Mussorgsky would spend much of his adult life cultivating an image of himself as a rough and ready man of the people. This was not entirely an affectation, either: for all his aristocratic origins, he possessed a genuine and instinctive sympathy for ordinary Russians.
A somewhat irreverent attitude to his ancient family name was also revealing. In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian surnames did not always have a fixed spelling, and Mussorgsky’s was no exception. Modest initially signed himself Musorskiy, but subsequently added an extra g, becoming Musorgskiy – an alteration made apparently at his brother’s request, in an effort to distance the family name from musor, the Russian word for rubbish. It was a sensible enough precaution, although Modest was not necessarily the sort of man to regard such niceties with excessive respect.
Indeed, he would often brazenly sign himself Musoryanin to his friends – literally, “garbage-dweller”. It was a characteristic piece of self-deprecation, suggestive of the distance he felt between himself and the social conventions of his background. His Christian name was also something of a joke waiting to happen. The name Modest denotes someone who is “moderate” or “restrained”, qualities which, as his friends might have observed, were not especially conspicuous in his personality – and even less so in much of his music.
The Mussorgsky family were traditional enough that a musical career was never seriously considered for the young Modest, despite him learning piano from his mother Julia from a young age, and quickly showing himself to possess a barnstorming talent. “My progress was such that at the age of seven, I was playing small pieces by Liszt”, the composer later recalled, “and at nine played a grand concerto by John Field before a large audience at my parents’ home.” Even in later life, when laid low by debilitating alcoholism, Mussorgsky retained the ability to wow an audience from the keyboard.
It was also during these early years that Mussorgsky acquired the captivating range of impressions that would shape so much of his mature art. The countryside surrounding his home made an especially deep impact: the rhythms of village life, the songs of the local countryfolk, the rituals of the Orthodox Church and the characters he encountered around the family estate, all contributed to an imaginative world that remained with him for the rest of his life.
Another important discovery were the Russian fairy tales recounted to him by his nanny. Modest would listen wide-eyed for a while and then rush to the piano to see if he could translate the story he’d just heard into music. In all, as Mussorgsky admitted later, “this early familiarity with the spirit of the people and with the way they lived, lent the first and greatest impetus to my musical improvisations”.
Despite having demonstrated such precocious talent at the piano, Modest was still not considered for a career in music. In their infinite wisdom, his parents decided that their super-talented pianist son would make an ideal soldier instead. They duly enrolled him in the St Petersburg Cadet School of the Guards, where Mussorgsky at least proved surprisingly adaptable to its tough disciplines.
A photograph survives of Mussorgsky at the age of seventeen, looking handsome, refined and positively resplendent in his military uniform. It’s also a poignant repudiation of the later popular image we have of the composer as a disheveled drunk. Unfortunately, the cadet school was where Modest began to learn some of his less congenial habits, among them a growing fondness for binge-drinking.
At least he remained just as devoted to his music, taking piano lessons throughout his teenage years, as well as turning out some of his earliest compositions. The most striking from this period was his light, cheerful and somewhat satirical piano piece, entitled Porte-Enseigne Polka.
Having graduated from the Cadet School at 17, Mussorgsky accepted a commission from the Preobrazhensky Regiment, also based in Petersburg, the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Despite his promising military career, it’s highly probable that Mussorgsky was by now weighing up whether this was really the life for him.
Not long after starting at the regiment, a chance encounter would have a deep impact on his future career. It was while stationed at a military hospital that Mussorgsky befriended a young doctor named Alexander Borodin, who was also very interested in music. The latter would always remember his first impressions of the young Mussorgsky, which were once again strikingly at variance with the wild, chaotic figure of his later years:
His little uniform was spic and span, close-fitting, his feet turned outwards, his hair smoothed down and greased, his nails perfectly cut, his hands well groomed like a lord’s. His manners were elegant, aristocratic: his speech likewise, delivered through somewhat clenched teeth, interspersed with French phrases, was rather precious. There was a touch—though very moderate—of foppishness. His politeness and good manners were exceptional. The ladies made a fuss of him.
Borodin would be Mussorgsky’s first important introduction to the wider musical world, and as future members of Balakirev’s famous circle, the two men would remain friends for the rest of their lives. But just as Borodin was himself weighing up his medical profession, he eventually found a successful way to combine it with his music, managing to forge a distinguished career as both an organic chemist and composer.
More significantly still that winter, Mussorgsky made contact with the well-connected Russian composer, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who was immediately impressed by Mussorgsky’s piano playing and invited him to become a regular at his weekly soirées. Mussorgsky duly impressed at the latter, though initially mainly as a pianist: “He sat at the piano”, Borodin recalled, “and, throwing up his hands coquettishly, played with extreme sweetness and grace… extracts from Trovatore, Traviata, and so on, and around him buzzed in chorus: ‘Charmant, délicieux!’ and suchlike”.
Over the next few years, Dargomyzhsky would put Mussorgsky in touch with other important, up and coming musical figures, such as César Cui and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as the great Mily Balakirev himself, the man who had appointed himself heir to Mikhael Glinka and taken it upon himself to shape the next generation of Russian composers.
Balakirev was immediately drawn to Mussorgsky’s raw, unschooled talent (which he always thought ideal for a young Russian musician), and took it upon himself to shape his creative direction. “Because I am not a theorist”, Balakirev later said, “I could not teach [Mussorgsky] harmony… [but] I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both Beethoven symphonies [as piano duets] and much else, analysing the form.”
In doing so, Balakirev would introduce his young student to a huge body of music Mussorgsky had simply not been aware of up until that point, and not just “classical” composers such as Haydn, Schumann, Mendelssohn, but also the more avant-garde figures of Berlioz and Liszt. It was hardly an exhaustive education, with Balakirev’s approach based as much on inspiration as instruction. But this relative lack of technical “schooling” may ultimately have been beneficial to Mussorgsky. It gave him the space he needed to find his own, highly distinctive voice.
Mussorgsky’s lessons with Balakirev also appear to have been the final factor in persuading him to leave the army. Although his father had passed away a couple of years earlier, the remaining Mussorgsky family was rich enough that they might have comfortably supported Modest over the coming years as he found his way in the musical world.
But then disaster struck from an unlikely direction. The famous Imperial decree declaring the emancipation of serfs in 1861 had a punitive effect on the Mussorgsky family economy (even if Modest himself would have sympathised with the ruling), and it would ultimately mean that Modest would never be able to live as an amateur musician. For much of the next two years he helped his family with re-working the family estate, which had now effectively been cut in half. After that, he simply had a find a job in order to support his musical endeavours, and this he would keep up – mainly through a series of low-level civil service posts – for the rest of his life.
Not entirely surprisingly, Mussorgsky’s musical career floundered a little while he and his family dealt with these upheavals. Although by now professing a newfound love “for all things Russian”, in the approved Balakirev way, he had little chance to show off his new patriotism. Even the music he wrote at this time, such as some incidental music for a play which he eventually abandoned, or an Intermezzo in Modo Classico for piano (later orchestrated), was rather Germanic in character and showed little individuality.
Mussorgsky also proved far from universally popular in the musical circles he frequented. By the mid-1860s, certain contemporaries already regarded him as something of a bumbling oaf. The music critic Vladimir Stasov, a supposed ally of the composer, would complain to Balakirev, “I have no use for Mussorgsky. His views may tally with mine, but I have never heard him express an intelligent idea. All in him is flabby, dull. He is, it seems to me, a thorough idiot.” And Balakirev appeared to readily agree: “Yes, Mussorgsky is little short of an idiot.” But it may also be that Mussorgsky was too independent minded to ever seem entirely amenable to his elders and betters.
Tellingly, it was only after Mussorgsky had finished his education with Balakirev – and to an extent freed himself from the latter’s sometimes overbearing influence – that he started to find his true voice. He had spent much of this period reading widely, absorbing ideas and thinking over the purpose of his art. What, precisely, should his music be about? And, more importantly, whose voice should it speak in? These were questions to which he was gradually beginning to formulate some decidedly unconventional answers.
He knew he wanted to take the anti-establishment, Russophile stance of The Five as a starting point. But he then wanted to develop it further and make it more about the Russian people rather than simply an abstract nationalist concept. He wanted to create a new form of musical realism (perhaps mirroring the growing realism of Russian and French literature of the time), to depict life “as it is truly lived”, especially for the lower strata of society. This he would achieve by combining Russian folksong elements with the rhythms and inflexions of Russian speech, while at the same time avoiding anything that smacked of artificial musical formula. Repetitive devices, predictable structures and any neat symmetry were all to be expunged from his music.
Such ideas were radical, and would prove so in the fearlessly bold, inventive scores Mussorgsky turned out in the years ahead. Some of his first mature work, including his songs, Hopak (a young woman enters into an unhappy marriage and takes solace in drinking and dancing) and Darling Savishna (a society reject’s desperate love song to a young woman) appeared in 1866. Both songs are excellent examples of Mussorgsky’s determination to bring ordinary Russian life into the concert room. They also illustrate two different sides of his imagination: the exuberant, earthy world of popular song and dance, and the more uncomfortable business of social observation. In both, he was already moving away from the conventions of the polite nineteenth-century art song, and towards something much closer to musical theatre.
Mussorgsky would go on to write over 60 songs in all, many to his own texts, describing scenes of Russian life with vividness and insight, combined with hyper-realistic inflections of the spoken Russian language.
The following year brought his first undisputed masterpiece (and probably most iconic work), a Gothic tone poem based upon Russian folklore, Night on Bare Mountain*, a thrilling, rather terrifying musical depiction of a witches’ sabbath, complete with sorcerers, demons, supernatural revelry and the eventual arrival of dawn.
*Probably now Mussorgsky’s best-known composition, not least after it was popularized by Disney’s Fantasia in 1940.
The work also reveals the full, authentic Mussorgsky for the first time: rough-edged, rhythmically unpredictable, harmonically adventurous and largely uninterested in orchestral polish. It was as radical as anything being written in the mid-1860s, and certainly too radical for his old teacher Mily Balakirev, who hated it so much that he refused to conduct it, with the result that Mussorgsky never got to hear the work in his lifetime.
Next came an unsuccessful, but admirable attempt at an opera, a setting of a two-act Gogol satire entitled Marriage, where Mussorgsky further developed his efforts in imitating the accents and patterns of the play’s naturalistic dialogue. “The highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech”, he wrote at the time. “This is what I would like: my stage people should speak like living people; but besides this, their character and power of intonation, supported by the orchestra, which forms the musical pattern of their speech, must achieve their aim directly, that is, my music should be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades.”
Although Mussorgsky completed just one act of Zhenitba, it would nonetheless turn out to be a useful practice run for the work that followed closely on its heels, his operatic masterpiece Boris Godunov.
The subject matter for Boris was drawn from Russian history, although Mussorgsky based much of his dramatic conception (which included writing the libretto himself) upon a celebrated play by Alexander Pushkin, which detailed the ill-fated reign of the work’s namesake.
Boris Godunov had been Tsar of Russia between 1598 and 1605, during a turbulent period marked by political instability, famine, popular unrest and the mysterious death of a young rival to the throne, Tsarevich Dmitry (the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible), thought to have been murdered by Godunov himself.
Mussorgsky was attracted not simply by the historical drama but by the psychological and social implications of the story. In particular, he wanted to create an unusually nuanced portrayal of Boris, making him more than just a conventional villain or misunderstood monarch. In Mussorgsky’s opera he becomes a psychologically complicated figure, haunted by guilt and increasingly unable to escape the consequences of his actions. His outward authority increasingly conceals an extremely disturbed inner world.
The other remarkable aspect to the opera is Mussorgsky’s way of using the Russian people as a character in their own right. Rather than concentrating exclusively upon the activities of kings, courtiers and politicians, he allows the ordinary population to become an essential part of the drama – a living, unpredictable presence, at times frightened, rebellious, bewildered and even opportunistic. He would explain this in a dedication written on the manuscript of the work, that “I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea.”
The score itself shows Mussorgsky at somewhere near his best, and also his most influential. There is just something so Russian-sounding about the music, from its solemn Dorian tonalities and folk-like melodies, to its allusions of Russian Orthodox chanting, to the grand ceremonial flourishes. But Mussorgsky also shows he has absorbed something from Wagner in the work’s often avant-garde use of harmony and instrumentation, creating moods ranging from the comical, to the joyous, to the deeply unsettling.
Having begun work on the opera in 1868, Mussorgsky completed what would turn out to be its first version by the following year. When it was then rejected by the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres Directorate – largely because of the absence of a substantial female role and the perceived lack of conventional operatic structure – it would have been entirely characteristic for the composer to walk off in a huff and start something else.
But Mussorgsky clearly believed in Boris and set about revising it without a word of reproach. The result was not merely a series of concessions to the theatrical authorities, but a substantial reworking of the opera, with new material, a broader dramatic canvas and a considerably greater richness and variety. Completed in 1872, this second version represented a significant improvement on the original, and Mussorgsky’s persistence was eventually rewarded. After further negotiations with the authorities, the opera was finally green lighted for its première at the Mariinsky Theatre in February 1874.
Just the fact that Mussorgsky was presenting a bona fide Russian opera at all was something of an act of bravery. At the time, Russian operatic life remained firmly under the influence of foreign composers, particularly the Italians, whose works enjoyed a popularity and prestige which their native counterparts struggled to match. As the late nineteenth century playwright Vladimir Alekseevich Tikhonov would observe of the early 1870s, “splendid performances of Russian operas were given, but the attendance was generally poor… to attend the Russian opera was not fashionable.”
But Boris Godunov would do much to challenge that, with the first night sold out and proving a great success with the public, while Mussorgsky was invited to take no less than twenty curtain calls at the end. In all, the opera would receive an encouraging 21 performances over the next two years, and Mussorgsky’s friend Rimsky-Korsakov suspected it might have been more but for what he suspected was lingering disapproval over the opera’s subject matter from the top – including the Russian royal family and official censors.
Despite the public success of the opera, it received a real hammering in the press, even from critics Mussorgsky might otherwise have regarded as allies. Some were uncompromisingly rude and hostile and relatively easy to disregard. But others, such as the less than uniformly positive verdict of Mussorgsky’s old colleague and fellow Kuchkist, César Cui, were harder to take.
Although Cui began by acknowledging Mussorgsky’s “great and original talent”, he then laid into Boris as “an immature work, superb in parts, feeble in others”. Its principal shortcomings, he argued, lay in “the disjointed recitatives and the disarray of the musical ideas”. Cui then proceeded to make his critique rather more personal, insisting that the problem was not any lack of creative ability, but Mussorgsky’s “immaturity, his incapacity for severe self-criticism, his self-satisfaction, and his hasty methods of composition”.
Happily, Cui’s opinion of the opera would somewhat soften over the coming decades as he came to properly recognise its raw, unmistakably Russian dramatic power. He had maybe just needed time to adjust to the wild originality of much of the music.
Another of Mussorgsky’s old Kuchkist colleagues was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a man who had also become a close friend of the composer. But Rimsky was also equivocal about Boris, as indeed he was about much of Mussorgsky’s music. “I both adore and abhor Boris Godunov”, Rimsky admitted. “I adore it for its originality, power, boldness, distinctiveness, and beauty; I abhor it for its lack of polish, the roughness of its harmonies, and, in some places, the sheer awkwardness of the music.” It was the latter elements that would convince Rimsky that the score was badly in need of some rescoring and rewriting to make it more palatable.
After Mussorgsky’s death, the well-meaning Rimsky would take it upon himself to make “corrected” editions of several important works of his old friend. Boris was no exception, even if Rimsky’s 1896 revision of the opera would doubtless help spread its influence. Having been confined to Russia for many years, the opera finally received its 1908 European premiere in Paris, a resounding success that would help the work become much better known for the first time. After that, performances quickly spread further afield, to Britain and then across the Atlantic to New York. The early twentieth century popularity of Boris eventually altered Mussorgsky’s reputation on the international scene, decades after his death, where formerly he had been widely dismissed as an inspired crank.
In Russia itself, future composers remained iffy about the opera’s technical shortcomings. Dmitri Shostakovich was one of them, and having found fault with both the original and Rimsky’s edition, he made up a further revised version in 1940. This process might have continued indefinitely, with each new generation of musicians arriving to put right the errors of their predecessors. Fortunately, a rather more enlightened appreciation of Mussorgsky’s achievement gradually began to emerge. What had once been dismissed as awkwardness, eccentricity or a lack of proper technique, came increasingly to be recognised for what it really was: a remarkably original and experimental approach to musical drama.
Almost as soon as Mussorgsky had completed one iconic Russian masterpiece, then he immediately set about writing another: Pictures at an Exhibition. This monumental solo piano suite was written in just three weeks during the summer of 1874, following the sudden, premature death of his friend, the architect and artist Viktor Hartmann. Mussorgsky was deeply affected by the loss, and a memorial exhibition of Hartmann’s paintings and architectural designs, organised in St Petersburg, provided the inspiration for the music he wrote to commemorate his friend.
Mussorgsky’s concept was ingenious. Each movement of his new work represented a different picture or design by Hartmann, while a recurring musical theme, the Promenade, represented Mussorgsky himself walking around the exhibition. In doing so, the composer was not simply providing musical illustrations of paintings – he was creating a journey through an imagined gallery, with each new exhibit prompting a different emotional and musical response.
The pictures themselves are varied and eclectic – from gnomes, mysterious castles and ox-carts, to markets, catacombs, and the magnificent great gate of Kiev, all providing a remarkably wide range of moods, from solemnity, to humour, to the grotesque, to the sublimely beautiful.
Amazingly, the work remained almost unknown for forty years after Mussorgsky’s death. Even the faithful Rimsky, who was hardly shy about applying a red pen to the work of his departed friend, left it alone. Its fortunes only changed in the 1920s, when Maurice Ravel, a long admirer of Mussorgsky, produced his celebrated orchestration, an undertaking which was as much an act of homage as a practical exercise in bringing the music to a wider audience.
The original piano version of course remains a wonderfully dramatic and idiosyncratic piece of writing, refreshingly unconcerned by the niceties of conventional pianism and, in places, seemingly determined to discover just how much punishment a piano can take.
In creative terms, Mussorgsky had had a wonderful six years since starting work on Boris in 1868. But much had also altered in that time. His old circle of friends and colleagues were changing in ways he didn’t always like. The old Balakirev circle, the Mighty Five, were breaking up after Balakirev’s retreat from public life. Mussorgsky, perhaps still thinking of Cui’s unkind Boris review, ungraciously complained that they had all “degenerated into soulless traitors.”
Aside from the heartache of losing his artist friend Hartmann, Mussorgsky also lost the comradeship of two other close friends, Rimsky-Korsakov and the poet Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, both of whom had been his housemates in the early 1870s. Both men had gone off and got married, leaving Mussorgsky alone in his increasingly squalid bachelor existence.
It was in the years following Boris that Mussorgsky’s drinking worsened and his life spiralled downwards. Yet his regular benders weren’t entirely accidental – to an extent they were also an affectation of his generation, a protest against the stuffy bourgeoise establishment. One contemporary noted, “an intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a ‘pose’ for the best people of the [eighteen] sixties.” According to another, “talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink.” Mussorgsky would often spend whole days (and sometimes nights) in a St Petersburg tavern of particularly low repute, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts.
Somehow, he managed sufficient periods of respite to still compose music of the highest order. After Pictures at an Exhibition came his Songs and Dances of Death, a cycle of four dramatic songs for voice and piano, in which Death appears as a living character, coming to claim a succession of very different victims. It is often speculated what might have made Mussorgsky focus on such bleak subject matter, and not least during these difficult, troubled years.
This was followed by a second great historical opera, which he all but finished: Khovanshchina, whose plot centres on political conspiracy, religious conflict and the struggle for Russia’s future during the late seventeenth century. While Boris was concerned with the troubled birth of a new Russian dynasty, Khovanshchina explores a country seemingly tearing itself apart as it stands on the threshold of modernisation.
During this time, Mussorgsky still managed to hold onto his old government service posts, though only just – and not least as his leaves of absence were becoming ever more common. By 1880 he was working at the Office of Government Control, and it was there that his employers’ patience finally ran out with the erratic, sometimes inebriated composer, and he was given the sack.
There was now “nothing left but begging” according to Mussorgsky, even if he still had his circle of supporters all willing to help. Living in semi-destitution, his health collapsed into a series of alarming seizures (almost certainly caused by his alcoholism), which eventually landed him in hospital in early 1881. It was during this final hospital stay that his friend, the painter Ilya Repin, visited and produced the now iconic portrait of the ill and battered composer. Seated on his hospital bed in a dressing gown, Mussorgsky’s hair is unkempt, his beard haggard, and his eyes stare out with an almost unnerving intensity. The red nose and blotchy complexion provide further, uncomfortable evidence of the damage inflicted by years of excessive drinking. It is a deeply affecting portrait, and not least because it captures a man whose extraordinary creative gifts had survived long after his personal circumstances had started to fall apart.
Sadly, recovery was now beyond Mussorgsky. A final seizure just a few days later, proved fatal, ending his life at the tragically early age of forty-two – although Repin later claimed the composer’s final collapse had been the fault of hospital staff, one of whom had mistakenly given the composer a bottle of brandy, which he had then all too eagerly downed.
Following Mussorgsky’s death, it would take many decades for his place in musical history to be properly ascertained. To many, he was a talented eccentric who destroyed himself with self-indulgence. To others, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, he was a genius with an embarrassing lack of proper technique. Aside from his revision of Boris, Rimsky would spend many years preparing a revised edition of several other works from the Mussorgsky canon – he would substantially rewrite Night on Bare Mountain, for example, with Rimsky’s version still the much better known to concert audiences today.
Certain perceptive observers, such as Russian composer Anatoly Lyadov, saw the pitfalls of Rimsky’s undertaking: “It is easy enough to correct Mussorgsky’s irregularities”, Lyadov commented. “The only trouble is that when this is done, the character and originality of the music are done away with, and the composer’s individuality vanishes.” To an extent Rimsky saw this too and hoped that in time someone else could produce a more “archaeologically exact edition” of his friend’s work.
For all the chaos of his life and its tragic brevity, Mussorgsky had nonetheless lived true to his assertion that “Art is a means of addressing humanity, not an aim in itself.” As one of Europe’s wildest and woolliest composers, he was a man who seemed to distrust musical formula of any kind, instead allowing his art to speak about the human condition without any filter.
A man somewhat out of time, Mussorgsky’s legacy has not always been well served. Some of his original, unredacted scores are only now receiving the attention they deserve. But perhaps this is part of what makes his music so compelling. Even today, it retains an extraordinary freshness, vitality and sense of discovery, continuing to surprise and move listeners more than a century after its creator’s death.