モデスト・ムソルグスキー

ムソルグスキーは1839年、ロシア西部プスコフ県の村カレヴォで、裕福な地主の家に生まれました。最初のピアノの先生は母で、子どものころから上手に弾いたと言われます。乳母が聞かせてくれたロシアの昔話にも夢中になったそうです。家の伝統に従ってサンクトペテルブルクの士官学校に進み、17歳でエリート部隊、近衛プレオブラジェンスキー連隊の士官になりました。Mussorgsky was born in 1839 in Karevo, a village in the Pskov region of western Russia, into a wealthy landowning family. His mother gave him his first piano lessons, and he is said to have played well as a child. He also loved the Russian folk tales his nanny told him. Following family tradition, he went to a military cadet school in Saint Petersburg, and at seventeen he became an officer in the elite Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment.

軍隊時代に作曲家ダルゴムイシスキーやバラキレフと知り合い、音楽の道に進むことを決めて、1858年に軍を辞めました。「ロシア五人組」の一員として、西洋の決まりごとにとらわれず、ロシア語の話し方そのままのような生々しい音楽をめざします。交響詩『禿山の一夜』（1867）、オペラ『ボリス・ゴドゥノフ』（1874年初演）が代表作です。During his army years he met the composers Alexander Dargomyzhsky and Mily Balakirev, and in 1858 he resigned his commission to devote himself to music. As a member of the Mighty Handful, he resisted Western academic conventions and aimed for raw, true-to-life music that followed the rhythms of spoken Russian. His major works include the tone poem St John's Night on Bald Mountain (1867) and the opera Boris Godunov (first staged in 1874).

1861年の農奴解放で家は財産の多くを失い、彼は役所で働きながら作曲を続けました。1871年からはしばらく、リムスキー＝コルサコフと同じ部屋で暮らしています。1873年に親友の画家ハルトマンが急死すると、翌年その遺作展を見て、ピアノ組曲『展覧会の絵』を一気に書き上げました。しかし孤独とお酒の問題が重なり、体はしだいに弱っていきます。When the serfs were freed in 1861, his family lost much of its wealth, and he took a job as a government clerk while he kept composing. From 1871 he even shared a room for a while with Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1873 his close friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, died suddenly. The next year Mussorgsky visited a memorial exhibition of Hartmann's work and quickly wrote the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. But loneliness and a drinking problem slowly wore down his health.

1881年3月、42歳の誕生日のちょうど1週間後に、サンクトペテルブルクの病院で亡くなりました。亡くなる少し前、画家レーピンが病室で描いた肖像画はとても有名です。多くの作品は未完成でしたが、リムスキー＝コルサコフが手直しして世に広めました。1922年にはラヴェルが『展覧会の絵』をオーケストラ用に編曲し、世界的な名曲になりました。In March 1881, exactly one week after his 42nd birthday, he died in a hospital in Saint Petersburg. The portrait that the painter Ilya Repin made of him in hospital shortly before his death is very famous. Many of his works were left unfinished, but Rimsky-Korsakov revised them and made them widely known. In 1922 Maurice Ravel arranged Pictures at an Exhibition for orchestra, and it became a world-famous classic.