Editing Modest Mussorgsky (section)

===Peak===
[[File:Modest Musorgskiy 1876 (cropped).jpg|thumb|203x203px|Mussorgsky in 1876]]
Mussorgsky's career as a civil servant was by no means stable or secure: though he was assigned to various posts and even received a promotion in these early years, Mussorgsky was declared "supernumerary" in 1867 – remaining "in service" but receiving no wages. However, decisive developments were occurring in his artistic life. Although it was in 1867 that Stasov first referred to the "[[The Five (composers)|kuchka]]" ({{langx|ru|кучка|link=no}}, lit. ''bunch'', English: "The Five") of Russian composers loosely grouped around Balakirev, Mussorgsky was by then ceasing to seek Balakirev's approval and was moving closer to the older [[Alexander Dargomyzhsky]]. Inside ''The Five'' and its close companions, Mussorgsky was nicknamed as "Humour", Balakirev was "Power", and Rimsky-Korsakov was "Sincerity".<ref>{{cite web |title=Искренность и золотая рыбка |trans-title=Sincerity and Golden Fish |url=http://mopargolovo.ru:80/15/корррр.Pargolovo_04_2019_compressed.pdf |website=mopargolovo.ru |publisher=Pargolovo Official Site |access-date=4 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190819164741/http://mopargolovo.ru/15/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%80%D1%80%D1%80.Pargolovo_04_2019_compressed.pdf |archive-date=19 August 2019 |page=8 |language=ru |date=29 April 2019 |url-status=live }}</ref>

Since 1866, Dargomyzhsky had been working on his opera ''[[The Stone Guest (Dargomyzhsky)|The Stone Guest]]'', a version of the ''[[Don Juan]]'' story with a [[Alexander Pushkin|Pushkin]] text that he declared would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that abolished the "unrealistic" division between [[aria]] and [[recitative]] in favor of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two.

[[File:Komissarzhevsky as Pretender.jpg|thumb|upright|Fyodor Komissarzhevsky as The Pretender in ''Boris Godunov'']]Under the influence of this work (and the ideas of [[Georg Gottfried Gervinus]], according to whom "the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech"), Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of [[Nikolai Gogol]]'s play ''[[Marriage (play)|Marriage]]'' (''[[Zhenitba]]''), with his priority being to render into music the natural accents and patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue. This work marked an extreme position in Mussorgsky's pursuit of naturalistic word-setting: he abandoned it unorchestrated after reaching the end of his "Act 1", and though its characteristically "Mussorgskyian" declamation is to be heard in all his later vocal music, the naturalistic mode of vocal writing more and more became merely one expressive element among many.

A few months after abandoning ''Zhenitba'', the 29-year-old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of [[Boris Godunov]]. This he did, assembling and shaping a text from Pushkin's play and [[Nikolay Karamzin|Karamzin]]'s history. Mussorgsky completed the large-scale score the following year while living with friends and working for the Forestry Department. However, the finished opera was rejected for theatrical performance in 1871, apparently because of its lack of any "[[prima donna]]" role. Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged "second version". During the next year, which he spent sharing rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov, he made changes that went beyond those requested by the theatre. In this version the opera was accepted, probably in May 1872, and three excerpts were staged at the [[Mariinsky Theatre]] in 1873. It is often asserted that in 1872 the opera was rejected a second time, but no specific evidence for this exists.

By the time of the first production of ''[[Boris Godunov (opera)|Boris Godunov]]'' in February 1874, Mussorgsky had taken part in the ill-fated ''[[Mlada]]'' project (in the course of which he had made a choral version of his ''[[Night on Bald Mountain]]'') and had begun ''[[Khovanshchina]]''. Though far from being a critical success – and in spite of receiving only a dozen or so performances – the popular reaction in favour of ''Boris'' made this the peak of Mussorgsky's career.