The completion of the second version of Boris was followed by a long period of frequently interrupted work on another
historically themed opera, Khovanshchina. By the summer of 1873 Mussorgsky was again having drinking problems. In 1874 he composed his grandly imaginative suite for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition, a tribute to a close friend, the recently deceased painter Victor Hartmann. The next year he began work on his most important song cycle, Songs and Dances of Death for bass and piano, and in 1876, having already reworked Night on Bald Mountain to include a “demonic chorus,” he revised it yet again for use in an operatic setting of Gogol’s short story Sorochintsy Fair—one of many instances in which he threw recycled material into a compositional breach.
 

Heavy drinking disrupted Mussorgsky’s life again in 1878, and within two years he was dismissed from government service. Two groups of friends offered him stipends, one on the condition that he finish Khovanshchina, the other on the condition that he finish Sorochintsy Fair. He completed neither. In early 1881 he suffered alcoholic seizures and was taken to a military hospital, where he spent his last month, dying a week after turning 42. A portrait painted by Ilya Repin just before the end shows the composer in his dressing gown, hair unkempt, nose reddened, a crazed look in his eyes.
 

At his death Mussorgsky left an oeuvre in disarray, having published little besides a handful of songs and the vocal score to Boris Godunov. It is rare today that a piece of his is heard as he wrote it. What looms largest in the repertoire are posthumous editions of his work, much of it tidied up and “corrected” by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Songs and Dances of Death appeared in 1882, edited by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Khovanshchina was completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1883. (Ravel and Stravinsky would team up on a new version of Khovanshchina in 1913, and Shostakovich would try his hand in 1958-59, the version prefered today.) Rimsky’s edition of Night on Bald Mountain was brought out in 1886. Mussorgsky’s original version—the one Balakirev would not perform—was indeed flawed: a disheveled clump of gestures with no convincing line of action. Rimsky based his edition on Mussorgsky’s final version, the one for Sorochintsy Fair, eschewing the choral parts and making flamboyant use of his skills as an orchestra-tor, he created what amounted to a new work.
 

Most striking was Rimsky’s complete refashioning of Boris Godunov, undertaken in spite of the fact that Mussorgsky had left not one but two finished versions of the opera. Between 1892 and 1907, Rimsky reorchestrated, reharmonized, cut, and revised the score numerous times, arriving finally at the version that was used by Sergey Diaghilev in his Paris production of 1908. This was considered the “standard” version of the score until the 1980s, when Mussorgsky’s 1872 version began a comeback. Pictures at an Exhibition, never intended as an orchestral piece, is now best known in that form thanks to Ravel’s splendid 1922 orchestration, one of more than 20 such treatments of the piece.
 

Mussorgsky held a utilitarian view of art and believed that its essential purpose was to communicate truth, although his focus in opera shifted from naturalistic modes of declamation to a more conventional approach that allowed some artifice. Because he was largely self-taught and developed a quirky idiom, he was dismissed by many (but not all) of his contemporaries as an idiot savant. That perception yielded in the 20th century to the recognition that Mussorgsky possessed a powerful intellect and was keenly aware of his surroundings—attuned to the innovations of Liszt and Wagner, and able to adapt the scenic and dramatic strategies of Meyerbeer and Verdi to his chosen material. He made his own notable innovations, concentrating in typically Russian fashion on the bold dramatic possibilities inherent in tableau structure, while tapping into the continuous, dynamic development of character and plot across individual acts that is characteristic of Western opera. Boris Godunov, in particular, exerted a powerful influence on 20th-century Russian composers—including Shostakovich and Prokofiev—as well as on Debussy, Ravel, Janacek, and Britten.
 

With the 20th century also came new appreciation for the modernity of Mussorgsky’s idiom—the side-slipping progressions that weaken the bonds of tonality, the distinctive use of modes and scales, and the prevalence of tritone relationships. As much as his novel harmonic language, what made Mussorgsky a protomodernist was his pessimistic view of human nature, his interest in isolated individuals with complex characters and motives, caught in the grip of political forces. To these characters and their situations he brought penetrating psychological insights, conveying “truth” with vivid imagination.