Songs and Dances of Death

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Songs and Dances of Death (Russian: Песни и пляски смерти, Pesni y plyaski smerti) is a song cycle by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, written in the mid-1870s, to poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a relative of the composer.

[edit] Song Titles

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

1. «Колыбельная» Lullaby (1875)
2. «Серенада» Serenade (1875)
3. «Трепак» Trepak (1875)
4. «Полководец» The Field-Marshal (1877)

[edit] Versions by Other Hands

The cycle was orchestrated by Dmitri Shostakovich in the early 1960s for the dedicatee, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. The Shostakovich orchestration had a substantial influence on many of his later works, and has since been adapted for bass and baritone voices.