Night on Bald Mountain

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Night on Bare Mountain (Russian: Иванова ночь на лысой горе, Ivanova noch' na lïsoy gore, literally [St.] John's Night on [the] Bare Mountain ), is a tone poem by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, a Russian composer and member of The Five, Mily Balakirev's group dedicated to producing a distinctly Russian kind of music. The piece was originally inspired by a short story by Gogol in which a peasant witnesses a witches' sabbath on the Bald Mountain near Kiev on St John's Eve. As with so much of this composer's music, the work had a tortuous compositional history, and is now known in several contrasting versions.

[edit] Programmatic Basis

Mussorgsky's starting-point was the ancient Russian legend of a witches' sabbath taking place on St. John's Night (June 23-24) on Lysa Hora, near Kiev. The legend tells of nocturnal revels, led by the demon Chernobog (often depicted as a black goat), which only come to an end with the break of day. The composer's own verbal 'programme' for the music describes the essential course of all the work's nineteenth-century versions except the first (which does not possess the quiet ending composed later):

Subterranean din of supernatural voices. Appearance of Spirits of Darkness, followed by that of the god Chernobog. Glorification of the Black God. The Black Mass. Witches’ Sabbath, interrupted at its height by the sounds of the far-off bell of the little church in a village. It disperses the Spirits of Darkness. Daybreak.

[edit] Compositional History

It appears that Mussorgsky's first ideas for the work go back to 1860, when at the age of 21 he entertained thoughts of writing an opera based on Gogol's story The Eve of Ivan Kupala. Before long this idea had mutated into a plan for a one-act opera based on Baron Mengden’s play The Witches, which likewise would accommodate a horrifying witches’ sabbath. Both plans came to nothing.

However, in early June, 1867 Mussorgsky started to write the poem, it was finished in 12 days on June 23 as a complete orchestral score. Mussorgsky told his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov that he had completed what he called a 'tone-picture' for orchestra entitled 'St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain'. It was, he proudly declared, "a really Russian and original achievement, quite free from German profundity and routine, born ... on Russian soil and nurtured on Russian corn." He also stated — wrongly, as it turned out — that he would never re-model it: "with whatever shortcomings, it is born; and with them it must live if it is to live at all." Having finally completed the work, Mussorgsky was crushed when his mentor Mily Balakirev was savagely critical of it. The score of this 'first version' was put aside, and did not appear in print until 1968.

The first re-modelling of the work took place in 1872, when Mussorgsky revised and recast it for chorus and orchestra as part of Act III that he was assigned to contribute to the collaborative opera-ballet Mlada. In this new version the music was to form the basis of the "Festival of Chernobog" scene (a witches' sabbath in which the chorus sings in an infernal language) at the end of which Prince Yaromir is saved from the demons by the crowing of the cock at dawn. Mlada was a project doomed to failure, however, and this 'second version' languished along with the first.

The work's 'third version' came into existence eight years later, when the composer revived and revised the second version to function as a 'dream intermezzo' in his opera Sorochintzy Fair (1874–1880) — a work which was still incomplete at the time of his death in 1881.

[edit] Versions by Other Hands

In the years after Mussorgsky's death, his friends struggled to put his mostly unpublished and frequently unfinished works into the kind of order that would enable them to enter the repertoire. The majority of the editorial work was done by Rimsky-Korsakov — who in 1886 produced a heavily redacted edition of the piece that made a purely orchestral tone-poem out of a combination of elements from Mussorgsky's instrumental and choral versions: "When I started putting it in order with the intention of creating a workable concert piece", he wrote, "I took everything I considered the best and most appropriate out of the late composer’s remaining materials to give coherence and wholeness to this work." The resulting 'fourth version' (usually known as the 'Rimsky-Korsakov version') is by any standards a highly polished and effective score which has proved brilliantly successful — keeping Mussorgsky's name before a wide public and becoming one of the most popular works in the orchestral literature.

As time has passed, still more versions of the work have been produced. Millions of twentieth-century listeners owe their initial acquaintance with Mussorgsky's tone-poem to the use within Walt Disney's 1940 film Fantasia of a specially produced new version based on the Rimsky-Korsakov recomposition but heavily edited and further revised by Leopold Stokowski (Stokowski went on to produce an even freer re-orchestration and recomposition of the piece for concert performance).

The electronic age has spawned even more versions: Isao Tomita's synthesised realisation appeared alongside his electronic interpretation of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite in 1975 — while film and TV composers happily make their own adaptations of Mussorgsky's powerful and direct gestures (see, for example, Douglas Gamley's score to the 1972 film Asylum). Stokowski's Fantasia version has even been adapted (by Yoko Shimomura) for use in the video game Kingdom Hearts, in which Chernobog appears. Another abbreviated version appears in the video game Earthworm Jim, as the background music for "What the Heck!?", alternating with elevator music. There is a disco version available on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. A version of it also appeared on the Japanese rerelease of Kingdom Hearts, entitled Kingdom Hearts Final Mix. The track plays as the player fights Chernabog from Disney's movie Fantasia at the World's End.

The German progressive/thrash metal band Mekong Delta performed the metal version of the poem on their album Dances of Death (and other Walking Shadows) in 1990, it also appears in its entirety on their live album Live at an Excibition (1991) and the compilation Classics (1993).