Pictures at an Exhibition

GRAM: Grand Rapids Art Museum

Leica X1

@ 2012 Photo Pro - Jeffrey P. Hopp

The video below is The Great Gate of Kiev. Mussorgsky's grand conclusion to his suite was inspired by a plan for a gateway for the city of Kiev in the massive old Russian style crowned with a cupola in the shape of a Slavic warrior's helmet. The majestic music suggests both the imposing bulk of the edifice and a brilliant procession passing through its arches. The work ends with a heroic statement of the Promenade theme and a jubilant pealing of the great bells of the city.

In the years around 1850, with the spirit of nationalism sweeping across Europe, several young Russian artists banded together to rid their art of foreign influences in order to establish a distinctive nationalist character for their works. Leading this movement was a group of composers known as "The Five," whose members included Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, César Cui and Mily Balakirev. Among the allies that The Five found in other fields was the artist and architect Victor Hartmann, with whom Mussorgsky became close personal friends. Hartmann's premature death at 39 stunned the composer and the entire Russian artistic community. Vladimir Stassov, a noted critic and the journalistic champion of the Russian arts movement, organized a memorial exhibit of Hartmann's work in February 1874, and it was under the inspiration of that showing that Mussorgsky conceived his Pictures at an Exhibition.