A Lesson in Moderation from Mussorgsky

Isaac brought up the point that it might be difficult to draw a connection between Nursing and the music we are studying, and I agreed. However, I did a quick google search for Mussorgsky - the composer of Pictures at an Exhibition, which we will study next week - and nurse, and it turns out he wrote several songs about his memories of childhood.

A collection of related songs is called a Song Cycle, and Mussorgsky wrote a song cycle called The Nursery. Now, the nurses in these songs are not the medical nurses, but more like Nannies, so I admit the stretch.

Mussorgsky was an army officer for a time, and became friends with an Army doctor, who was also a fellow Russian composer, Alexander Borodin. Read more about that here. He and Borodin would be two of the five greatest composers from Russia known as "the Mighty Handful".

Unfortunately, Mussorgsky, as well as several of his friends suffered and died from alcoholism. From his Wikipedia entry:

While alcoholism was Mussorgsky's personal weakness, it was also a behavior pattern considered typical for those of Mussorgsky's generation who wanted to oppose the establishment and protest through extreme forms of behavior. One contemporary notes, "an intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a 'pose,' for the best people of the [eighteen-]sixties." Another writes, "Talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink." Mussorgsky spent day and night in a Saint Petersburg tavern of low repute, the Maly Yaroslavets, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts. He and his fellow drinkers idealized their alcoholism, perhaps seeing it as ethical and aesthetic opposition. This bravado, however, led to little more than isolation and eventual self-destruction 

Does this misguided view of binge drinking and peer pressure sound familiar? It didn't work out for Mussorgsky and his friends, and this story serves as a good lesson in moderation.