In the fall of 1859, 20-year-old Modest Mussorgsky wrote Shamil’s Solemn March for a male choir accompanied by the piano, using fragments of Muslim prayers as a verbal text. Imam Shamil was the leader of the highlanders of Dagestan and Chechnya in their struggle for independence from the Russian crown. In August 1859, he surrendered, becoming an honorary prisoner of Emperor Alexander II, and two months later arrived in St. Petersburg. The Solemn March was probably conceived by Mussorgsky as a response to current events and presented as a gift to his friend, an expert in Islamic culture, Alexander Arsenyev. Until now, this work has not been performed in its entirety, as the first sheet of the autograph has been lost. At the end of 2021, musicologist Vasilisa Aleksandrova discovered in the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of Russia a handwritten copy of the choir, made at the end of the 19th century, and in 2022, Nadezhda Teterina and Evgeny Levashev prepared a scientific version of the score. This recording is the world premiere of Shamil’s Solemn March in its full version.
