Modest Mussorgsky could trace his bloodline to the Rurik dynasty, yet he signed letters to friends as the garbage-dweller, a joke rooted in the Russian word for rubbish buried inside his family name. This episode follows a piano prodigy born into wealth in 1839, performing Liszt for family audiences at nine, who was shipped to the Cadet School of the Guards at 13, where a director took pride in seeing teenage cadets return drunk on champagne. That culture seeded the alcoholism that would eventually kill him.

We trace his transformation from a manicured, French-spouting officer described by Borodin into a radical artist after the 1861 emancipation of the serfs stripped his family's wealth. Living in a St. Petersburg commune and reading Chernyshevsky, he rejected Balakirev's Western lessons and set out to make music mirror the jagged cadence  ...