This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839–1881), one of the most distinctive voices in 19th-century Russian music, was a member of the “Mighty Handful” that also included Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The Five’s mission was to break from Western European models and forge an authentically Russian style, drawing on folk melody, native idioms and Orthodox liturgy. Mussorgsky was perhaps the least conventional of the group, and the one whose music most strongly resisted later academic tidying up. His rejection of Western compositional norms, favoring speech-like vocal lines, abrupt modulations and stark orchestral colors, made him seem unrefined to contemporaries, but visionary to later composers.

The piece that is now called "Night on Bald Mountain" was not a single, straightforward composition. The piece audiences are most familiar with is Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1886 orchestration and revision, not Mussorgsky’s original score. The title “Bald Mountain” (or “Bare Mountain”) refers to a Slavic folkloric setting for witches’ sabbaths — a treeless hill where Satan presides over nocturnal revels.

Early in his youth, Mussorgsky became fascinated with the theme of a witches’ sabbath. Mussorgsky toyed with the idea of an opera based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story St. John’s Eve, with its blend of folk superstition and demonic rites. He never completed it, but in his sketches he laid out the thematic groundwork for the piece.

Subsequently, with Balakirev’s encouragement, Mussorgsky began an orchestral piece provisionally called "St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain." It was conceived as a vivid tone painting: midnight witches’ gathering, infernal dance, the appearance of the Devil and the tolling of church bells scattering the demons.

Mussorgsky finished an orchestral version in June 1867. This original "St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain" was wild, harmonically daring, rhythmically irregular. Balakirev, whose approval Mussorgsky still sought, disliked it and refused to perform it. Mussorgsky shelved the work.

Mussorgsky reused some of the material for the unfinished opera "Mlada" (a collaborative project of the Five), in which it formed a witches’ sabbath scene.

Mussorgsky adapted it yet again for his comic opera "The Fair at Sorochyntsi," where it comprised a dream-sequence titled "Glorification of Chernobog." Mussorgsky died in 1881 before finishing this opera.

After Mussorgsky’s death, Rimsky-Korsakov, convinced that the original was too crude for performance, created his own 1886 version — smoothing orchestration, regularizing rhythms and tightening structure. This is the version that is most often performed today though, in the late 20th century, orchestras began to perform the 1867 original.

The 1867 original work comprises a single movement that follows a narrative arc:

The composition starts off with harsh brass and strings. They announce a jagged, menacing motif. Harmonies shift abruptly, establishing an unstable, uncanny atmosphere.

There then follow fast, frenetic string figures and shrieking woodwinds that conjure a swirling sabbath that displays a drunken, frenzied character.

A massive, pounding theme in the brass suggests awe and terror in the face of the Devil’s arrival. Mussorgsky’s orchestration is deliberately raw, with blaring trumpets and trombones.

There is then a chaotic climax; harmonies stack dissonances with little regard for any kind of resolution. In Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, this section is cleaner and more symmetrical; in Mussorgsky’s, it lurches unpredictably.

Suddenly, the frenzy dissolves into a serene chorale in muted strings, over the toll of distant bells. The demons vanish; the morning sun dispels the nightmare. This abrupt transition is more violent in Mussorgsky’s version, more “blended” in Rimsky-Korsakov’s.

Mussorgsky's original 1867 version was never performed in his lifetime. Balakirev’s rejection stung, and Mussorgsky remained insecure about the piece.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s polished version premiered in 1886 in St. Petersburg to enthusiastic audience reception — its color and energy impressed, even if purists complained of its departure from Mussorgsky’s manuscript.

Leopold Stokowski’s 1940 orchestration for Disney’s Fantasia gave the piece global fame, cementing it as a kind of archetype for musical depictions of the diabolical.

"Night on Bald Mountain" is Mussorgsky's only major orchestral tone poem. It stands in stark contrast to his mostly operatic and song output (Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina). It reveals his gift for raw, pictorial drama in purely instrumental form.

Mussorgsky’s original, with its irregular phrasing and harsh dissonance, anticipated aspects of early 20th-century Russian modernism — especially the pagan scenes of Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring."

In this 2020 performance of Mussorgsky's 1867 original version of "Night on Bald Mountain" Paavo Järvi conducts the Estonian Festival Orchestra.