Books › Musical biographies / 2 The American history and encyclopedia of music / W.L. Hubbard, ed, 1908 › scan 96
Scan 96
Musical biographies / 2 The American history and encyclopedia of music / W.L. Hubbard, ed, 1908
11 lines. Read by computer on 8 September 2026. Printed page 74. See the scan on archive.org.
1Moussorgsky
2attention to the study of Beethoven and Schumann and Glinka, but could not confine himself to a serious study of technics and professed the greatest contempt for musicians whose works were purely examples of technical skill. In order to make a living Moussorgsky did some translating and took a position in the Government Civil Engineering Department. A life of excess affected his health and caused the loss of his position, and in 1866 he went to live with a brother at Minkino. In 1868 having finished his opera, Boris Godounov, he took it to St. Petersburg, but no one would undertake it until he had revised and shortened it, so it was not performed until 1874. It reached its twentieth performance during that season, and in 1889 it was performed in Moscow. Thus encouraged, he began to write an opera around the story of Princess Khovanstchina. In 1870 he went to St. Petersburg to live, working for a time in the Government Department of Forests and afterwards in the Department of Control; but he was permanently dismissed in 1879, when he went on a concert tour through Central and Eastern Russia with the distinguished singer, Mlle. Leonov. This enterprise promised to better Moussorgsky's circumstances, but it came too late. After leading a life of excess, and in his latter years indulging in the use of drugs, his health was completely gone and he died on his forty-second birthday in the St. Nicholas Military Hospital in St. Petersburg. His disposition seems to have been passionate and impatient of control, proud and self-willed. He had the greatest amount of self-confidence and of belief in his own originality. The most imaginative of musicians, his object was to copy nature as exactly as possible; regardless of laws and forms of music, to portray living truth.
4His songs are usually regarded as his finest work, and though they are often formless, incoherent expressions of moods, their force always strikes to the heart. His series of children's songs, entitled The Nursery, gives remarkable pictures of the many phases of childhood, and the Song-Cycles, Sunlight, and Songs and Dances of Death, written near the end of his life, portray his own anguish and struggle. His opera, Boris Godounov, based on Pushkin's powerful historical drama, is a wonderful piece of character painting, as is also his other opera, Khovanstchina. Many of his compositions have been revised and edited by other Russian musicians, among them Boris Godounov, revised by Rimsky-Korsakow in 1896, and the chorus, La Nuit au Mont-Chauve, and Khovanstchina also revised by Rimsky-Korsakow. Among other compositions are ten sketches for piano called Pictures from an Exhibition; Une Larne; On the Southern Shores of Crimea; A Child's Joke; The Sempstress; The Matchmaker, of which he completed only one act; Joshua Navin and the Destruction of Sennacherib, both based on Hebraic themes; choruses, Salammbô and Œdipus; the songs, Gopak, The Little Feast, Dawn, Night, Peasant Cradle Song, The Seminarist, Savischna, Hebrew Song, The Dneiper, The Swaggerer, The Nurse and the Child.
6Mouton (moo-tôn), Jean de Hollingue. 1475-1522.
7Well-known contrapuntist and composer; born at Holling, near Metz, in the Department de la Somme, France. He was a pupil of Josquin Després and afterward the teacher of Willaert. He was chapel-singer to Louis XII. and Francis I., and canon at Thérouanne and St. Quentin, where he died. An edition of five of his masses is one of the earliest examples of a whole book of compositions of one master. Among his published works are nine masses; seventy-five motets and psalms and some French songs. The book of five masses which Fétis thinks to have been published in 1508 was at one time quite common, but is now very rare and the copy of the second edition is considered the only complete one. Twenty-one of the motets were printed during Mouton's lifetime and in the British Museum is a copy of the twenty-two motets printed in 1555 by Le Roy, and also a complete score of this work.
9Mozart (mō'-tsärt), Leopold. 1719-1787.
10His chief claim for interest is that he was the father of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose education he superintended with reverent care. His own musical education was obtained mainly as a chorister in Augsburg, his native town, and later in Salzburg,
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.