Composer Modest Mussorgsky composed “Pictures at an Exhibition” as a memorial to his friend, the Russian artist Viktor Hartmann, who had died in 1873 at age 39.
Shortly after the artist’s death, Mussorgsky visited a retrospective exhibit of Hartmann’s sketches, stage designs, and architectural studies and felt the need to capture the experience in music. By early summer 1874, he had completed the work, a lengthy and fiendishly difficult suite for solo piano. Later, this work was adapted for orchestral performance.
The suite consists of musical depictions of 10 paintings by Hartmann, interspersed with a recurring “Promenade” theme, or intermezzo, that represents a visitor—in this case, the composer himself—strolling through the exhibition.
Here is a very nice performance of these “pictures”, as conducted by Valery Gergiev:
