Description: Childhood and early years -- The making of a composer I -- The making of a composer II -- The early songs I -- Salammbo -- The early songs II -- St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain: more songs -- The marriage: towards Boris -- Boris Godunov: composition and production -- Boris Godunov: the music -- Life alongside Boris I: The nursery completed -- Life alongside Boris II: Khovanshchina begun -- Two relationships: Pictures at an exhibition and Sunless -- Khovanshchina -- Songs and dances of death: last songs -- Sorochintsy Fair -- Final years -- Postlude: the century since.
Review Quotes: "A masterfully wrought, well-illustrated and elegantly crafted biography...The book is destined to become a cornerstone of English-language Russian music scholarship and is recommended reading." --Slavic and East European Journal
"A no-holds-barred biography.... Brown enthusiastically traces Musorgsky's entire output in a rich historical and social context. He draws freely on the latest scholarship to give us a new vision of the composer.... In addition to being a state-of-the-art guide to the composer's life and works, it is a useful introduction to the history of mid-19th-century Russian music. For those undaunted by the density of Brown's musical examples, his illumination of this impressive body of work can only foster deeper appreciation and further investigation."--New York Times Book Review