Youtubeko deskribapena:
Leopold Stokowski (April 18, 1882 -- September 13, 1977), British-born American orchestral conductor
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (March 9, 1839 - March 16, 1881) was born into a wealthy rural, landowning family. At the age of six, he began to study piano with his mother. His parents initially set him out on the career of military officer. During this time, he met a musically-inclined army doctor: Alexander Borodin. The two became friends. In 1861, with Russia's emancipation of the serfs, his family lost significant income, and he was forced to earn a living. In 1863, he began a spotty career in the civil service, which dismissed him at least twice.
In 1856, he met the composer Dargomïzhsky, who in turn introduced him to Cesar Cui, Mily Balakirev, and a critic named Victor Stasov. Gradually, Borodin and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakoff joined to form a loose group known as the "Moguchaya Kuchka" ("the mighty handful" or "the mighty bunch"). All but Stasov nursed ambitions to compose, and all had very definite ideas about what Russian music should be. None of them had formal training in composition. Mussorgsky absorbed these main ideas of the Kuchka:
1. Russian music should express the Russian soul.
2. Russian music should be written in a Russian way.
The latter idea meant mainly a rejection of German classical forms in favor of one-off, "organic" forms and revered those artists who wrote accordingly, like Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz.
Mussorgsky learned composition mainly by doing. He alone of all the Kuchka grew up in the country, away from the city. He actually heard serfs sing daily as part of his normal environment, and the "crudities" attracted him in the first place. He began several opera projects: an Oedipus (1858-61), a Salammbô (1863-66); and most notably The Marriage (1868), based on Gogol. In 1867, Mussorgsky also composed St. John's Night on Bald Mountain (usually called Night on Bald Mountain.
After his abandonment of The Marriage, Mussorgsky began working on a Stasov suggestion, the opera Boris Godunov. The composer completed a version in 1869 and submitted it to the Mariinsky Theater, who rejected it. Mussorgsky took back the score and at once began to revise it, altering the work far beyond what the theater had asked for. In general, he moved from the musical realism of the first version to a folk-based arioso, extremely subtle and flexible dramatically. He resubmitted his new version in 1872 and after some wrangling with the censor, Boris premiered in 1874. This was to provide Mussorgsky his greatest public triumph.
However, all did not go smoothly. In 1865, following his mother's death, Mussorgsky began to go on drinking binges. He would disappear for days, even weeks at a time and turn up on friends' doorsteps physically ill. Nevertheless, he continued to compose, almost up to the end but completed very little and left two operas, Khovanshchina and Sorochintsï Fair incomplete.
He never was a steady worker
