More Mirrors: Mussorgsky Matches Mozart

This month last year, pianist Andrej Hoteev and singer Elena Pankratova released a recording of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Songs and Dances of Death, informed by original manuscripts. This recording brought Pictures and its various interpretations back into my forethoughts. The late professor of piano Nancy Bricard also consulted original manuscripts in her 2002 edition of Pictures. In her foreword to her edition, she claims that the composer “did not use the sonata form.” While this may be true, the opening of the last movement titled “The Great Gate of Kiev” resembles a sonata without development:

Exposition
mm. 1-29 Loud heraldic first theme in main key
mm. 30-46 Soft hymnic second theme in a subordinate key

Recapitulation
mm. 47-63 First theme again in main key
mm. 64-78 Second theme again, but transposed into the main key

(Hoteev even recommends, in his liner notes, inserting a brief silence before the start of the second theme, which is common at this juncture in traditional sonata forms.) However, the subordinate key is not the key a perfect fifth above the movement’s main key of E-flat, but the key of a perfect fifth below. This inversion of usual tonal practice extends beyond key choice, as the example below suggests. This example lines up a reduction of the exposition and recapitulation of a typical sonata-form movement—I chose the first movement of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik—with a reduction of the beginning of “The Great Gate of Kiev.” Whole notes represent roots of chords. T, S, and D refer to tonic, subdominant, and dominant. I chose clefs that made the mirroring between the two movements visually apparent. The subscripted p refers to the “parallel” transformation in German-language music theory, which allows for a change of chordal root without change of function, as I have further shown with the baritone clef, the F clef in the middle of the staff.

[click image to enlarge]

Notice how authentic motions (D-T) in Mozart match plagal motions (S-T) in Mussorgsky, and how each second theme in its respective exposition reaches an apogee—in the thirty-ninth measure of each!—four perfect fifths away from the main key’s tonic, then gradually eases back toward this tonic in the measures that follow.