The suite of ten piano pieces Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, has been arranged over twenty times, perhaps the most famous and notable being that of Maurice Ravel.

Today most of the pictures from the Hartmann exhibit are lost, making it impossible to be sure in many cases which Hartmann works Mussorgsky had in mind.

Although Mussorgsky was proud of this youthful effort, his most ambitious and only significant orchestral work, his mentor Miliy Balakirev refused to perform it.

During his maturity, Repin painted many of his most celebrated compatriots, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy, the court photographer Rafail Levitsky, the scientist Dmitri Mendeleev, the imperial official Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the composer Modest Mussorgsky, the cellist Aleksandr Verzhbilovich, the philanthropist Pavel Tretyakov, and the Ukrainian poet and painter, Taras Shevchenko.

Mussorgsky makes this quite clear by the extent to which choral scenes propel the action.

Under the influence of this work ( and the ideas of Georg Gottfried Gervinus, according to whom " the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech "), Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of Nikolai Gogol's The Marriage ( Zhenitba ), with his priority being to render into music the natural accents and patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue.

Mussorgsky paints a telling picture of the common people, those who must suffer the effects of their rulers' struggle for power without understanding the causes.

This may account for his success as an orchestrator and as a transcriber of his own piano works and those of other composers, such as Mussorgsky, Debussy and Schumann.

In that capacity, he conducted the premieres of many operas by Russian composers, including those by Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

The story's title is based on Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky ( the source of a scene in Fantasia featuring Chernabog ).

( Mussorgsky was later to produce a third version – also with chorus, but featuring a new, quiet ending – for the unfinished opera The Fair at Sorochyntsi ; none of the three versions was performed in his lifetime ).

Titles of individual movements allude to works by Hartmann ; Mussorgsky used Hartmann as a working title during the work's composition.

The quintet Five Objects Darkly ( whose title is borrowed from a work by the painter Giorgio Morandi is a set of variations based on a musical fragment by Mussorgsky, and the earlier Little Symphony uses the chordal structure of Mussorgsky's Catacombs ' from Pictures at an Exhibition as a harmonic backbone.

The story's title was based on A Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky, a scene of Fantasia.

The sudden loss of the artist, aged only 39, shook Mussorgsky along with others in Russia's art world.

The surviving works by Hartmann that can be shown with any certainty to have been used by Mussorgsky in assembling his suite, along with their titles, are as follows:

Mussorgsky frequently uses liturgical music with considerable dramatic force.

When Lyudmila Shestakova, the sister of Mikhail Glinka, learned of Mussorgsky's plans, she presented him with a volume of Pushkin's dramatic works, interleaved with blank pages and bound, and using this Mussorgsky began work in October 1868 preparing his own libretto.

In 1871, Mussorgsky set about recasting and expanding the opera with enthusiasm, ultimately going beyond the requirements of the directorate of the Imperial Theatres, which called simply for the addition of a female role and a scene to contain it.

Mussorgsky augmented his adaptation of Pushkin's drama with his own lyrics, assisted by a study of the monumental History of the Russian State by Karamzin, to whom Pushkin's drama is dedicated.

After protracted difficulties in obtaining the production of his opera, Mussorgsky was compliant with Nápravník's demands, and even defended these mutilations to his own supporters.

Not just fellow hyper-Romantic Tchaikovsky, but also members of The Five are indebted to these techniques, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but even Modest Mussorgsky – often portrayed as uninterested in refined orchestration – revered Berlioz and died with a copy of Berlioz's Treatise on Instrumentation on his bed.

By 1971, with the releases Pictures at an Exhibition and Trilogy, Emerson began to fully credit classical composers, Modest Mussorgsky for the piano piece which inspired the first album, and Aaron Copland for " Hoedown " on the second.

Sutgof's daughter was also a pupil of Herke, and Mussorgsky was allowed to attend lessons with her.

In 1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev, Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music.

Western perceptions of Mussorgsky changed with the European premiere of Boris Godunov in 1908.

Gerald Abraham, a musicologist, and an authority on Mussorgsky: " As a musical translator of words and all that can be expressed in words, of psychological states, and even physical movement, he is unsurpassed ; as an absolute musician he was hopelessly limited, with remarkably little ability to construct pure music or even a purely musical texture.

In conjunction with critic and fellow nationalist Vladimir Stasov, in the late-1850s and early 1860s Balakirev brought together the composers now known as The Five — the others were Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

By the late 1860s, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov stopped accepting what they now considered his high-handed meddling with their work, and Stasov began to distance himself from Balakirev.

Mussorgsky, for instance, called the Saint Petersburg Conservatory a place where Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba, who taught music theory there, dressed " in professional, antimusical togas, first pollute their students ' minds, then seal them with various abominations.

Cui composed in almost all genres of his time, with the distinct exceptions of the symphony and the symphonic poem ( unlike his compatriots Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov ).

Fyodor's association with many of the leading figures in Russian music, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky, meant that Igor grew up in an intensely musical home.

This loose collection of composers gathered around Balakirev now included Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin — the five who have come to be associated with the name " Mighty Handful ", or sometimes " The Five ".

" Program of the opera St. John's Night, in three acts, after the tale by Gogol, written by P. Boborïkin, in the presence and with the help of Modest Mussorgsky, Yevgeniy Mussorgsky, and Vasiliy.

A few months after abandoning Zhenitba, the 29-year-old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of Boris Godunov.

Detail from Ilya Repin's celebrated portrait of Mussorgsky, painted 2 – 5 March 1881, only a few days before the composer's death.

Ilya Repin's celebrated portrait of Mussorgsky, painted only a few days before the composer's death.

The Mussorgsky cycle contains only four songs — too few to do justice to Mussorgsky's concept, Shostakovich felt.

The Mlada project was soon aborted, and Borodin, like the other members of The Mighty Handful who were involved — César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov — thought about ways to recycle the music he contributed.

" Mussorgsky spent day and night in a Saint Petersburg tavern of low repute, the Maly Yaroslavets, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts.

He praised the " sublime genius " of Wagner and saw some value in the work of other contemporary composers, for example Richard Strauss, Elgar, Mussorgsky, and Sibelius.

It also contains the Lazarev and Tikhvin Cemeteries, where ornate tombs of Leonhard Euler, Mikhail Lomonosov, Alexander Suvorov, Nikolay Karamzin, Modest Mussorgsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Ivanovic Rossi, Prince Garsevan Chavchavadze, a Georgian aristocrat, Sergei Witte and other famous Russians are preserved.

Ots loved to perform songs by Schubert, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and several other Russian composers, and was also a devoted interpreter of Estonian folk songs.