Probably the most famous and brilliant orchestration of a keyboard work ever made, this is (however) far from being the only one. No other work for the piano has been arranged so often; in addition to other orchestrations (two of which actually preceded Ravel’s, including one in 1915, slightly cut, by Henry Wood) there are versions for piano and orchestra, brass band, wind ensemble, guitar, organ, even one by a rock group. All this is of course a tribute to the extraordinary range of colour in Mussorgsky's original, composed in 1874 to mark a memorial exhibition of drawings and water-colours by his recently deceased friend Victor Hartmann. For his part Ravel had developed a fascination and enthusiasm for Russian music, finding its rhythmic originality and orchestral clarity greatly inspiring in the face of the ubiquitous and persuasive influence of German late-Romanticism on much French music of the time, instead of which Mussorgsky's totally uninhibited, jaggedly contrasting effects point the way towards Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

But the idea was not Ravel's own. The commission was from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who gave the premiere at the Paris Opéra in October 1922; for the subsequent history of the work, see the three ‘problems’ just below.

sources

PfA  Mussorgsky's autograph manuscript of the original work for pianoforte solo (1874), published in facsimile by State Music Publishers, Moscow in 1975

PfE  First edition, edited by Rimsky-Korsakov after Mussorgsky's death (he died in 1881) and published by Bessel, St Petersburg in 1886; Rimsky made some alterations, even a few different notes

PfUm  First authentic edition, edited by Pavel Lamm and published by State Music Publishers, Moscow in 1931

Where a reading is the same in all these, it is said below to be simply thus “in Pf ”.