Night on Bald Mountain
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Night on Bald Mountain is the common name for St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain, a tone poem by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, a Russian composer and member of The Five, Mily Balakirev's group dedicated to producing a distinctly Russian kind of music.
The piece exists in several forms. The composer rearranged it to include chorus for use in the opera Sorochintsï Fair. After Mussorgsky's death, it was rearranged by Rimsky-Korsakov, though the Rimsky-Korsakov version took incredible liberties, adding entirely new themes and, arguably, changing the tone of the work. There is also a Stokowski version which was popularized in the Disney movie Fantasia (1940) in a memorable sequence starring the demon Chernabog.
The most popular version is the Rimsky-Korsakov edit, though in recent years there has been renewed interest in the Mussorgsky original, which was dismissed as too radical for its time, but which is now seen as somewhat visionary.
The piece was inspired by a short story by Gogol in which St. John witnesses a witches' sabbath on the Bald Mountain near Kiev.