Mlada: Festive March

• Mussorgsky composed this march for a projected opera-ballet project in which he, Borodin, Cui, Minkus and Rimsky-Korsakov were all to collaborate. The project was the brainchild of Stepan Gedeonov, director of the Imperial Theatres. The project was eventually abandoned due to its expense.¹
• Mussorgsky wasn’t thrilled about this commission. He didn’t like the plot:

“I am ashamed to take pen in hand, when I am supposed to depict the glorification of Satan and the other nonsense written by someone in the olden days—possibly with a befuddled mind.”

Mussorgsky²

• In Mlada, this march was meant to be entitled “Procession of Princes and Priests.” It was based upon a folk melody which Balakirev had collected in 1866.³
• Since the Mlada project was never finished or produced, several of the composers involved recycled the music they’d written for it. Mussorgsky reused the material from this march in his 1880 piece March with Trio alla Turca, subtitled The Capture of Kars.⁴

1.  Robert W. Oldani, “Musorgsky [Mussorgsky; Moussorgsky], Modest Petrovich,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 19, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000019468. 
2. Quoted in Melanie Unseld, trans. Annelies McVoy and David Feurzeig, liner notes to Mussorgsky: St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain et al, Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, Sony 62034, CD, 1997.
3.  Richard Taruskin, “Mlada (i),” Grove Music Online (2002), accessed December 4, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-5000903246. 
4. Ibid.