Night on Bald Mountain

Mussorgsky composed the original Night on Bald Mountain in eleven days during June 1867, fueled by what his letters describe as 'creative ecstasy' and what his biographers suspect was also vodka. The piece depicts a witches' sabbath on St. John's Eve — the Russian midsummer festival when, according to folklore, the devil holds court on a mountain summit and all manner of unholy revelry ensues. Mussorgsky, who grew up on a rural estate listening to peasant tales of exactly this kind, took to the subject with enthusiasm bordering on delirium.

Here's the complication: what most people know as Night on Bald Mountain isn't actually Mussorgsky's piece. Rimsky-Korsakov — Mussorgsky's friend, colleague, and posthumous meddler-in-chief — substantially rewrote and re-orchestrated it after Mussorgsky's death, smoothing out the rough harmonies, correcting the 'errors' in orchestration, and generally imposing his own aesthetic on music that was deliberately unpolished. The version in Disney's Fantasia, the version played by every orchestra in October, the version you know — that's Rimsky's. Mussorgsky's original is wilder, harsher, and in many musicians' opinion, better.

The Fantasia sequence paired Night on Bald Mountain with Schubert's Ave Maria, creating a narrative arc from darkness to light, from the demonic to the sacred, that Disney's animators illustrated with a giant devil figure named Chernabog looming over a mountain. It is, frame for frame, the most visually stunning sequence in the history of animation, and it permanently fused the music to an image that Mussorgsky never imagined. He was thinking about Russian peasant folklore. Disney gave him a fifty-foot winged demon. Both versions are valid.

Mussorgsky never heard the piece performed. It was rejected during his lifetime — too raw, too strange, too Mussorgsky — and only reached the public after Rimsky sanded off the edges. The original has been performed and recorded in recent decades, and listening to both versions back to back is a lesson in the politics of posthumous reputation. Rimsky meant well. He also meant to make Mussorgsky sound more like Rimsky-Korsakov. History is still deciding who was right.

Recording: Wikimedia Commons recording “Modest Mussorgsky - night on bald mountain”. Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AModest_Mussorgsky_-_night_on_bald_mountain.ogg