Songs and Dances of Death

Songs and Dances of Death ( _ru. Песни и пляски смерти, "Pesni i plyaski smerti") is a song cycle for voice (usually bass or bass-baritone) and piano by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, written in the mid-1870s, to poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a relative of the composer.

Each song deals with death in a poetic manner although the depictions are realistic in that they reflect experiences not uncommon in 19th century Russia: child death, death in youth, drunken misadventure and war.

The song cycle is considered Mussorgsky's masterpiece in the genre.

ong Titles

The individual song titles and dates of composition are as follows:

1.«Колыбельная» Lullaby (1875)
*A mother cradles her sickening infant, who grows more feverish, then dies.2.«Серенада» Serenade (1875)
*The figure of Death waits outside the window of a dying woman, in the manner of a wooing lover.3.«Трепак» Trepak (1875)
*A drunken peasant stumbles outside into the snow, and becomes caught in a blizzard. As he perishes he dreams of summer fields.4.«Полководец» The Field-Marshal (1877)
*The figure of Death is depicted as an officer commanding the troops in battle, who asserts his enduring remembrance of them all.

Original libretto as well as Cyrillic option, and English/French translation found here: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=147

Versions by Other Hands

The songs were first orchestrated by Aleksandr Glazunov (Nos. 1 & 3) and Rimsky-Korsakov (Nos. 2 & 4) shortly after Mussorgsky's death. They were published in 1882. Mussorgsky had intended to orchestrate the cycle himself but never realised the ambition. In the Glazunov/Rimsky orchestration 'Trepak' is first.

Dmitri Shostakovich orchestrated the whole cycle in 1962 for the dedicatee, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. Seven years later, noting that he wanted to continue Mussorgsky's "too short" set of songs, he wrote his Fourteenth Symphony for soprano, bass and chamber orchestra, adding to the musical gallery of death';s appearances. [Volkov, Solomon, "St. Petersburg: A Cultural History" (New York: The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995), 106.] The Shostakovich orchestration had a substantial influence on many of his later works, and has since been adapted for bass and baritone voices.

References