Songs and Dances of Death

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Mussorgsky in 1876
Mussorgsky in 1876
Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov
Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov

Songs and Dances of Death (Russian: Песни и пляски смерти, Pesni i 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)

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

[edit] Versions by Other Hands

Dmitri Shostakovich orchestrated the 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.[1] The Shostakovich orchestration had a substantial influence on many of his later works, and has since been adapted for bass and baritone voices.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Volkov, Solomon, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995), 106.
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