Modest Mussorgsky
1839-1881A former army officer turned government clerk who composed in his free time. His piano suite "Pictures at an Exhibition" turns a walk through an art gallery into ten musical scenes, one per painting.
What is a "National School" of music?
For a long time, composers all across Europe mostly followed the same German and Austrian traditions you've already met — the same kinds of symphonies, sonatas, and forms. Starting in the mid-1800s, that began to change: composers in Russia, Norway, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and elsewhere started weaving their own countries' folk songs, dances, legends, and history into classical music instead. Historians call this trend "National Schools" — music that sounds unmistakably Russian, or Norwegian, or Bohemian, rather than a copy of a Western European style.
Russia's Mighty Five
Russia's National School is the most famous example, and its story starts with a group of five composers in St. Petersburg who banded together to create a distinctly Russian classical sound: Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. A music critic nicknamed them "Moguchaya Kuchka" — "The Mighty Handful" or "The Mighty Five" — and the name stuck. Instead of imitating Western Europe, they drew on Russian folk songs, Orthodox church music, and Russian fairy tales and history for their material.
Music that paints pictures
Their music often paints vivid pictures or tells a story, continuing the "programme music" idea from the Romantic era but pushed even further: Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" turns a walk through an art gallery into music, one piece per painting, while Rimsky-Korsakov became famous for orchestration so colorful that his music is often described as sounding like it has its own picture attached, even without a title.
Composers with day jobs
Here's a fun detail: most of the Five weren't full-time musicians. Borodin was a chemistry professor and medical researcher who composed in his spare time; Rimsky-Korsakov started out as a naval officer; Cui was a military engineer who taught fortification-building. Balakirev, the group's self-taught leader, was really the only one who focused on music full-time. That's part of why their music broke so many of the era's polished conservatory rules — they were passionate amateurs writing the music they wanted to hear, not students following a textbook.