Night on Bald Mountain is a tone poem by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, a Russian composer and member of The Five, Mily Balakirev's group dedicated to producing a distinctly Russian kind of music. The piece was originally inspired by a short story by Gogol in which a peasant witnesses a witches' sabbath on the Bald Mountain near Kiev on St John\'s Eve. As with so much of this composer\'s music, the work had a tortuous compositional history, and is now known in several contrasting versions. The version that made the pieces name was the orchestration reworked by Rimsky Korsakov and published after Mussorgky's death.
Night on Bald Mountain is a tone poem by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, a Russian composer and member of The Five, Mily Balakirev's group dedicated to producing a distinctly Russian kind of music. The piece was originally inspired by a short story by Gogol in which a peasant witnesses a witches' sabbath on the Bald Mountain near Kiev on St John\'s Eve. As with so much of this composer\'s music, the work had a tortuous compositional history, and is now known in several contrasting versions. The version that made the pieces name was the orchestration reworked by Rimsky Korsakov and published after Mussorgky's death.