Night on a Bare Mountain (Mussorgsky)
Movements
Notes
It was as a teenager that the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky was first inspired to write his orchestral poem A Night on the Bare Mountain, in 1867. He was an ambitious young man with dreams to compose a full-scale opera called St John’s Eve, which he said would include the scene of a witches’ Sabbath. It is through Rimsky-Korsakov’s version that Night on Bald Mountain achieved lasting fame. Premiering in Saint Petersburg in 1886, the work became a concert favourite. Half a century later, the work obtained perhaps its greatest exposure through the Walt Disney animated film Fantasia (1940), featuring an arrangement by Leopold Stokowski, based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s version. Mussorgsky’s tone poem was not published in its original form until 1968. It has started to gain exposure and become familiar to modern audiences.