“The Nursery is a cycle of seven songs for soprano and piano, for which Mussorgsky wrote the lyrics himself. The cycle originally consisted of just the first five songs. It was published in that form in 1872, with illustrations by the painter Repin, a friend of Mussorgsky. The later Bessel edition (1908) also contains the last two songs. The first song, With the Nanny, was created during the period when Mussorgsky was working on his first opera, The Marriage, of which only the first act was completed. There appears to be a clear relationship between these songs and that opera. Both contain some form of sound reproduction of the spoken word. The text intonation is fixed within the music, which leads to unexpected harmonic turns and a fluid rhythm in an irregular time signature.

The four songs that follow form a unit and were composed during the period when Mussorgsky was working on his most important work: the opera Boris Godunov. These songs also contain the naturalistic elements described above, but lyrical and even dramatic (‘opera-like’) elements, as well. The last two songs were composed almost two years later and are stylistically similar to the previous ones. Both songs contain a dialogue between mother and child, but they contrast greatly in terms of musical setting.

What is amazing about this cycle is the way in which Moussorgsky manages to put himself in the child’s position in a musical sense, and in his own unique way and with a minimum of means, he manages to achieve a maximum of content. All the prototypical moods of a child take place, such as cheerfully asking for a story, grumbling angrily in the corner, the fear of a beetle, and the loving care for a doll. Nowhere, however, does Moussorgsky fall into the extreme caricatures of The Marriage. With a little effort, one can distinguish the influence of Balakirev, Schumann, Liszt (who had a high opinion of this cycle) and Meyerbeer, while the visual power suggested in the music presages the twentieth century.

When Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam asked me in early 1994 to think about making the instrumentation for The Nursery and the Songs and Dances of Death, I was initially hesitant. It wasn’t just that the combination of voice and piano as a genre is difficult to transcribe because of the balance issues. But also because, following my transcription of the song cycle Without Sun in 1989, I was afraid of stepping into the somewhat dubious role of ‘Mussorgsky arranger.’ After all, since Moussorgsky’s death in 1881, many composers have made arrangements of his brilliant but uneven oeuvre, with varying degrees of success. On the one hand, we have Ravel’s faithful orchestral adaptation of the Pictures of an Exhibition; on the other, there is that pinnacle of musical paternalism: Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Night on Bare Mountain, in which little of the original is retained. Still, I couldn’t resist, partly because of the many piano-extract-like elements within the original accompaniment. These elements seem to me mainly down to the fact that besides these songs, Mussorgsky was almost entirely occupied writing an opera. In addition, he would have been acquainted with a lot of German and French opera repertoire in the form of reductions for voice and piano. All in all, it turned out that the piano accompaniment was quite easy to transcribe and it was perhaps no coincidence that I took the orchestral configuration of Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye as a point of departure: a work based on the Mother Goose fairy tales, and equally composed from the perspective of a child. Because of the small size of the orchestra, I could aim for the same effect as a ‘muted opera orchestra,’ so that the singing voice has all the space it needs.

The adaptation of The Nursery for soprano and chamber orchestra was made at the request of Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam with financial support from the Nestlé Composition Fund.”

– Theo Verbey