Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition:
A History, Analysis, Performance Guide, and Overview of Its Recording Legacy
by Elias-Axel Pettersson

Chapter 1: Musorgsky: A Brief History

1.1: Pronunciation of Musorgsky's Name

The name Модест Петрович Мусоргский has been transliterated from Cyrillic in many ways.  The first name is seen as either "Modest" or "Modeste."  Though the first spelling transliterates the Cyrillic letters literally, the stress in English (without the ‘e') would be on the first syllable: Mo-dest (pronounced the same as the synonym for ‘unassuming').  This is incorrect (though he was an unpretentious man!).  With the addition of a final ‘e', the first name takes on the correct Russian pronunciation: Mo-dest (the first syllable is an open vowel, ‘mah').

The family name is a more complicated matter.  As an Anglophone, I was shocked when I first heard my Russian friends pronounce the famous composer's last name, with the accent on the first syllable: Moo-sorg-sky.  This pronunciation is funny if one knows that the root of the name, мусор (mu-sor), politely translated in the dictionary as "sweepings," actually means "garbage" or "rubbish"[1] (in Russian slang, it also includes what is expelled from the nose.  In other words, his equivalent name in English might be something like "Snotsky"!).[2] The Western way of pronouncing the name, Moo-sorg-sky, reinforced by émigrés like the famous Russian bass, Fyodor Chaliapin (1873-1938), seems so ingrained that a plea for change seems futile.  To add to the continuing saga, there has been a move by some Russians to adopt the second-syllable stress.  Even Stalin's appointed tsar of Soviet music, Tikhon Khrennikov, made a point of stressing the second syllable in Musorgsky's name in a televised speech on the composer.[3]

But how does one spell his last name?  The most common spellings are: Musorgsky, Mussorgsky, Moussorgsky, Mussorgski, and even Mussorgskij.  In the first syllable, English usually prefers ‘u', whereas French prefers ‘ou'.  The second syllable is usually spelled ‘ssorg' (on Modeste's brother's insistence, the ‘g' was added to the name).  The first syllable is more stressed with ‘ss', but it is inconsistent with the singular ‘с' in Russian (which has an ‘s' sound).  The last syllable varies between the Russian spelling (‘sky') and its Jewish Polish counterpart (‘ski').  For the purposes of this paper, I will use the following spelling: Modeste [Petrovich] Musorgsky.

And what of the crucial ‘g'?  Family documents going back to the seventeenth century give a variety of odd spellings: Muserskoy, Musirskoy, Musarsky, Musersky, Musursky, and Musorsky.[4] The suffix -skoy suggests an accent on that syllable (i.e. Tolstóy, Shakhovskóy, or Kramskóy).  Musorgsky signed his own letters "Musorsky" (without the ‘g') until his thirty-sixth letter to Balakirev[5] (undated, 1861), whereupon he restored the ‘g' in all his subsequent letters.[6]

But how did he pronounce it, and when did he insert the ‘g'?  According to Tatiana Georgiyevna Musórgskaya, granddaughter of Musorgsky's brother, Filarète, her father and aunt both pronounced the name with the second syllable "ó" stressed in the Polish fashion (which is more sonorous than in Russian).[7] She alleged that Modeste followed his older brother's example.  This seems counter to Modeste's letters, where he often made fun of his own name (he was a prankster), even signing his letters: "Your soul's Musoryanin" (or "garbage dweller").[8] This would only work if he stressed the first syllable.  Otherwise, had he stressed the middle syllable, he could have employed an equally homely Russian word, sórgo (sorghum, a common crop).

So why the ‘g'?  One can deduce an answer from Stasov's writing (one private, the other public).  After his father's death in 1853, Modeste lived with his brother and mother in St. Petersburg.  After his mother moved back to the ancestral estate in 1862, Modeste moved in with Philarète (who was already married).  Then, in the fall of 1863, Modeste moved into a communal flat with some friends.  It was during this time that the ‘g' was introduced, apparently by Philarète.[9] Modern genealogists have confirmed that a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century ancestor of the Musorgskys, Roman Vasilyevich Monastïryov, went by the sobriquet Musorga, from which the family name was eventually derived.[10]

In summary: In 1862-63, Modeste Petrovich Músorsky, (age twenty-three), impelled by his elder brother Philarète, inserted a ‘g' into his name and affected a new accentuation, Musórgsky, obscuring any resemblance to the lowly word Philarète resented (he was a landed aristocrat).  The composer, however, could never change the minds of his friends, who were used to the old pronunciation.  Eventually (by 1870 at the lastest), he gave up, retaining the ‘g' in his writing, but tolerating (or perhaps using) the earlier pronunciation: Músorgsky.[11]

[1] http://dictionary.reverso.net/

[2] Taruskin, Richard. Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993: Pronouncing the Name: xvii-xxxi.  Taruskin's in-depth discussion about Musorgsky's name is fascinating and dispels, once and for all, the myths surrounding its pronunciation and history.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.: Nikolai Novikov. "Ego rodoslovnaya," SovM, No. 3 (1989): 32.

[5] Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev (1837-1910): Russian composer and leader, by default, of the Могучая кучка (Moguchaya kuchka: "Mighty heap" in Russian; it is better known in the West as simply "The Five").  The other composers in this groups included Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (1833-37), César Antonovich Cui (1835-1918), Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), and, of course, Musorgsky.

[6] Bertensson, Sergei and Jay Leyda. The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 1947: 4 (letter is omitted in this volume).

[7] Taruskin, Richard. Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993: Pronouncing the Name: xvii-xxxi.

[8] Bertensson, Sergei and Jay Leyda. The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 1947: 153.

[9]Taruskin, Richard. Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993: Pronouncing the Name: xvii-xxxi.

[10] Ibid.  He is mentioned in the Barkhatnaya kniga, the sixteenth-century genealogy of the boyars (which traces the composer's ancestry straight back to Ryurik, the fabled ninth-century founder of the Russian state) as grandfather of the first actual Musor(g)sky.  See Karatïgin, "Rodoslovnaya."

[11] Ibid.