Modest Musorgsky

Modest Musorgsky was the most radical member of the Five, the nationalist circle of Russian composers who sought a musical language free of Austro-German convention. An army officer who later worked as a civil servant, largely self-taught and drawn to blunt, speech-like vocal writing over conventional lyricism, he composed slowly and left much unfinished. Boris Godunov, his only completed opera, was revised once in his own lifetime and later reorchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, whose version dominated performance for decades before the composer's starker original was rehabilitated. Alcoholism overtook his later life, and he died at forty-two, leaving Khovanshchina and Sorochintsy Fair unfinished.