Incorporation of the music of Night on Bald Mountain as a dream sequence involving the hero was a late addition to the scenario in the course of composition, despite the fact that such an episode is not suggested by the original story.

Although Mussorgsky managed to complete some numbers and even some of the orchestration (the whole prelude and the Andantino of Parasya's Dumka), significant portions of the scenario were left only in bare sketches, or without any music at all.

Several subsequent composers and editors (cited below) played partial or maximal roles in bringing the work into a performable state.

Two of the Ukrainian folk tunes that Mussorgsky incorporated into this opera (Act 1) were used also by Rimsky-Korsakov in his own Christmas Eve, which was likewise based on a story by Gogol.

Source:[1] Note: The Shebalin edition incorporates the Dream Vision of the Peasant Lad (Russian: Сонное видение паробка).

Afanasy hides on a shelf, and in walk Cherevik and Kum, with friends, alarmed by a rumor that someone has seen the red jacket and the devil.

Gritsko enters, extracting a promise from Cherevik to have the wedding to Parasya the next day, and the two older men are released.]

[Kum and Gritsko enter, and Cherevik blesses the two lovers, only to be met by Khivrya's rage, which prompts the Gypsy to call on the lads to restrain her.]

In 1881 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov suggested that Anatoly Lyadov finish the composition of the work, the libretto to be completed by Mussorgsky's old friend Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov.

Yury Sakhnovsky edited and orchestrated some fragments which, together with material edited by Lyadov, Karatygin, and Rimsky-Korsakov (i.e., the Night on Bald Mountain music) constituted a staged "premiere" of sorts, performed at the Moscow Free Theatre on 8 October 1913 (Old Style), with spoken dialogue inserted for scenes without music by Mussorgsky.

This fully sung version – but without the Night on Bald Mountain sequence – was staged on 13 October 1917 (Old Style) at the Theatre of Musical Drama in Petrograd.