In 1874, Mussorgsky wrote a piano suite in memory of his friend Viktor Hartmann — a painter and architect who had died suddenly at thirty-nine. The suite moves through ten of Hartmann’s works like a walk through a memorial exhibition, connected by a recurring Promenade theme that is Mussorgsky himself, moving from picture to picture. A gnome. A medieval castle. Children quarreling in a Paris market. An oxcart so heavy the wheels barely turn. A witch’s hut. And finally, the great gate of Kiev — massive, monumental, the brass building until the hall shakes.
Ravel orchestrated it in 1922 at the request of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and the result became more famous than the original. That’s unusual enough to note. He assigned a saxophone to the “Old Castle” and gave the heaviest movement, Bydlo, entirely to a solo tuba. The orchestration reimagines the piano color.
The piano original is worth knowing too. But Ravel’s version is the one that has become a piece of its own.