The Unillustrated Post

Why are there no pictures in this post? After all, the old coot who writes it has always overwhelmed us with pictures before. What's wrong with this guy?

Ignorance.

That's it and there's no way to whitewash the fact.

According to the instructions which come with this blog stuff, you can take illustrations either from your own albums on the computer or from other sources on the net. Great. I tried that. I wanted to write the touching story of the friendship between Victor Hartmann and Modest Mussorgsky. I wanted to wring tears from all of you with the famous quotation from Mussorgsky when his friend died, thus inspiring the writing of one of his most famous compositions, Pictures at An Exhibition. I was going to talk about how the piece had originally been written for piano and later scored for orchestra by Maurice Ravel, he of Bolero fame.

Yes, this was going to be a real killer of a blog post. I was going to describe several of the parts in Pictures, especially the Promenade, Bydlo, The Hut on Fowl's Legs, and The Great Gate at Kiev. For that last, I was going to tell the story of how the city of Kiev (formerly the capital city of ancient Russia before it got into the habit of being invaded all the time) had invited artists and architects to submit drawings and designs for a proposed triumphal arch to be built in that city. It would have been something like the one Napoleon had built in Paris or the one which honored The Grand Army of the Republic in New York City after the "unpleasantness" from 1861-1865. In other words, it was to have been something like the triumphal arches the Romans used to build all the time to celebrate military success in far-away places like Egypt, Persia, Greece, Spain, and Gaul.

But, rather like the fellow in the Bible who was made fun of for beginning to build a tower and then running out of funds before it was finished, Kiev decided to abandon the project after all these guys had submitted drawings and plans. As Modest' Mussorgsky shuffled through his dead friend's paintings and sketches, he came across the drawing of the triumphal arch that never was. So he decided to build it himself. While repetitive, the piece is truly glorious and could send shivers down the spine of a brass monkey. That's the piece with which he ended Pictures.

I wanted to use three portraits of Modest' Petrovich Mussorgsky. They are right there in several places, complete with statements that they are now in the public domain, because the guy has been dead since before there was hair. I was going to use the one of him in a cadet uniform in his teens. Then I would have used one of the early middle age portraits, actual photographs, which show him in a suit with shoulder length hair well combed and a well-trimmed beard. Finally, to show how life and death had eroded him away from a brilliant composer to just another Russian drunk, I was going to use the painting which shows him all disheveled and with a bulbous nose the color of a turnip.

But no. I couldn't do any of that. Why? I didn't know how. I tried several approaches and couldn't get any of the pictures to move from where they were to my blog. If I'd been able to do it, I might have thrown in a portrait of the decedent, himself, Victor Hartmann. He must have been quite a guy. Mussorgsky's friendship for him caused him terrible grief when Hartmann died. What he said was, "Why does a dog, a cat, a rat live on, and creatures like Hartmann must die?"