Saint Petersburg, 1858. A group of composers known as The Five meet at Balakirev's. Young Modest Mussorgsky, both a civil servant and a musician, has become a fixture there. He tells about the first opera he plans to compose. Then he goes to the country where he discovers the lowly conditions of the peasants and the bloody conflicts with the rich land owners. He works on Gogol's 'The Marriage', trying to render into music the natural accents of the play's naturalistic dialogue. But his efforts do not pan out. On the other hand, he starts writing his opera on the story of Boris Godunov. The Marinsky Theatre refuses to stage the work. The Five, and Mussorgsky among them, are libeled and the group starts disintegrating. When 'Boris Godunov' is finally performed in 1874, it is a popular success.
as Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky
as Vladimir Stasov
as Mily Balakirev
as Alexander Borodin
as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
as Cesar Cui
as Alexander Dargomyzhky
as Yuliya Platonova
as Aleksandra
as Nadezhda
as Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna
as Mussorgsky's mother
as Dormidont Ivanovich
as Rzhevsky
as Kartsev
as von Metz
as Gagin
as Ilya Repin
as Osip Afanasyevich Petrov
as peasant in a scene
