Night on Bald Mountain: Musorgsky's Witches' Sabbath
Written in 1867 for Saint John's Eve and never performed in the composer's lifetime: the story of Night on Bald Mountain and its many different versions.
Modest Petrovich Musorgsky finished the first version of this piece on 23 June 1867, the eve of Saint John, the very night in which the music is set. The original title was Saint John's Night on the Bald Mountain, and the subject a gathering of witches and evil spirits around the god of darkness. Musorgsky was proud of it and considered it a deeply Russian work. He never heard it performed: the piece everyone knows today is largely a reworking made after his death.
Saint John's Eve and the Witches' Mountain
In Slavic folk traditions, as in many other regions of Europe, the night between 23 and 24 June was regarded as a moment when the boundary between the visible world and that of the spirits grew thin. Witches were believed to gather on isolated heights to celebrate their rites. The name Lysaya gora, bald mountain, referred to several treeless hills, the best known of which lies near Kyiv.
Musorgsky also knew this tradition through literature. Nikolai Gogol had collected Ukrainian legends in Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, published between 1831 and 1832, which includes a story entitled Saint John's Eve. The composer also spoke of a play about witches he had thought of collaborating on, but the project came to nothing.
A Rejected Piece, Rewritten Several Times
Musorgsky submitted the score to Mily Balakirev, leader of the group of composers known as the Five, who criticised it harshly. The piece was not performed. In the following years Musorgsky reused its material in other projects: first in the collective opera-ballet Mlada, never completed, then in The Fair at Sorochyntsi, where the music accompanies the dream of a young peasant and includes a chorus and an ending with church bells.
On Musorgsky's death in 1881, his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov undertook to edit and publish his unfinished works. Starting from the dream version, he produced an independent symphonic poem, with brilliant orchestration and a serene conclusion at dawn, which was presented in Saint Petersburg in 1886. The original 1867 version, harsher and without the consoling ending, was rediscovered and published only in the twentieth century.
From the Sabbath to the Cinema
Rimsky-Korsakov's version follows a precise programme: subterranean voices, the appearance of the spirits of darkness, the glorification of the dark god, a frenzied sabbath. Then the distant sound of a village bell disperses the creatures of the night, and a clarinet and a flute describe the coming of day. This is the narrative structure audiences remember.
In 1940 Walt Disney included the piece in the film Fantasia, in an arrangement by Leopold Stokowski, depicting the god of darkness as a huge winged demon on a mountain top. The sequence ends with a procession of the faithful to the strains of Schubert's Ave Maria, setting light against darkness.
Night on Bald Mountain remains an exemplary case of how a folk legend can become music and then a collective image. What we hear today, however, is the work of several hands, and anyone wishing to know Musorgsky's original vision must seek out the 1867 version. Today both versions are recorded and performed in concert.