The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures at an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was ‘insane’ and ‘a perfect idiot’. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer with psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve a command of the realist idiom in his stage works? Illustrated with some of Mussorgsky’s finest works, the biographical narrative includes excerpts from Songs and Dances of Death, Boris Godunov, Night on Bald Mountain and, of course, Pictures at an Exhibition.