Vladimir Stasov's portrait by Ilya Repin.

Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov (often seen as Stassov; Russian: Влади́мир Васи́льевич Ста́сов; 14 January [O.S. 2 January] 1824, Saint Petersburg – 23 October [O.S. 10 October] 1906, Saint Petersburg),^[1] son of Russian architect Vasily Petrovich Stasov (1769–1848), was probably the most respected Russian critic during his lifetime. He graduated from the School of Jurisprudence in 1843, was admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1859, and was made honorary fellow of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1900, together with his friend Leo Tolstoy.

Stasov became a huge figure—and, some critics argue, a tyrant—in mid-19th-century Russian culture. He discovered a large number of its greatest talents, inspired many of their works and fought their battles in numerous articles and letters to the press. As such, he carried on a lifelong debate with Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev, who considered Stasov "our great all-Russian critic.".^[2] He wanted Russian art to liberate itself what he saw as Europe's hold. By copying the west, he felt, the Russians could be at best second-rate. However, by borrowing from their own native traditions, they might create a truly national art that could match Europe's with its high artistic standards and originality. By "national," Stasov felt, art should not only portray people's lives but also be meaningful to them and show them how to live.^[3]

Career[link]

Building "The Five"[link]

In 1847, Stasov published a monograph on Mikhail Glinka's use of folk motifs in his music; from that time, Stasov advocated Russianness over European influence in music. In the years which followed he served as an elder advisor to the group of Russian composers known as "The Five". He also warmed to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky after hearing the composer play the finale of his Little Russian Symphony at a Christmas 1872 gathering at Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's home. Shortly after this gathering, Stasov prompted Tchaikovsky to write a piece based on Shakespeare's The Tempest.^[4] He also drafted a program, inititally for Hector Berlioz, that Tchaikovsky eventually used for his Manfred Symphony.^[5] In between those two works, Stasov suggested an opera based on Alfred de Vigny's historical romance Cinq-Mars. Tchaikovsky was then intent on writing Eugene Onegin, and Charles Gounod had already written an opera based on Cinq-Mars.^[6]

Repin and the Peredvizhniki[link]

Beginning in the 1870s, Stasov ardently supported the realistic painters known as Peredvizhniki as well as Ilya Repin.

Intolerant of difference[link]

Vladimir Stasov's grave in the cemetery of Alexander Nevsky Lavra

When artists did not follow his precepts, Stasov could become both intolerant and vocal. Stasov called the finale of the Little Russian "one of the most important creations of the whole Russian school." Otherwise, his verdict on Tchaikovsky's work was negative: "The Conservatoire, academic training, eclecticism and overworking of musical materials laid its dread, destructive hand on him. Of his total output, a few works [Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Francesca da Rimini, and the String Quartets 2 and 3] are first-rate and highly original; the remainder are mediocre or weak."^[7]

Nor was he consoling about Modest Mussorgsky, a composer who, as a member of "The Five," he had helped nurture but about whom, for all the public praise of his musical gifts, there was always a note of intellectual condescension.^[8] Founder Mily Balakirev confided to Stasov that he thought Mussorgsky "almost an idiot."^[9] Stasov replied, "I think he is a total idiot."^[10]

He was harsher still with the modernist art magazine Mir iskusstva and its founders, Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev when the magazine appeared in 1898. He called Diaghilev "a decadent cheerleader" in print and Mir iskusstva "the courtyard of the lepers" (an image borrowed from Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris).^[11]

Stasov's correspondence with leading personalities of Russian art life is invaluable. He is known also for his opposition to music critic and erstwhile friend Alexander Serov concerning the relative merits of Glinka's two operas.

He was so impressed by the literary talent of the Jewish schoolboy Samuil Marshak that he arranged an exception from the Pale of Settlement laws for him and his family.

Stasov's brother, Dmitry Stasov (1828-1918), was a notable advocate who took part in the foundation of the Russian Music Society. His daughter, Elena Stasova (1873-1966), was a prominent Marxist revolutionary and functionary in the Soviet government.^[12]

Footnotes [link]

Sources [link]

• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007).
• Figes, Orlando, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
• Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York:New York: Random House, 1995).
• Volkov, Solomon, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, A division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995).

External links [link]

• Answers.com entry for Vladimir Stasov
• Tchaikovsky-research.net article on Vladimir Stasov

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Vladimir Stasov

Vladimir (English) Владимир (Russian)
-  City[citation needed]  -
View of Vladimir
Location of Vladimir Oblast in Russia
Vladimir Location of Vladimir in Vladimir Oblast
Coordinates: 56°09′N 40°25′E / 56.15°N 40.417°E / 56.15; 40.417Coordinates: 56°09′N 40°25′E / 56.15°N 40.417°E / 56.15; 40.417
Coat of arms	Flag
City Day	The first Sunday of September[citation needed]
Administrative status (as of April 2011)
Country	Russia
Federal subject	Vladimir Oblast[1]
Administratively subordinated to	City of Vladimir[1]
Administrative center of	Vladimir Oblast[1]
Municipal status (as of August 2009)
Urban okrug	Vladimir Urban Okrug[2]
Administrative center of	Vladimir Urban Okrug[2]
Head[citation needed]	Sergey Sakharov[citation needed]
Representative body	Council of People's Deputies[citation needed]
Statistics
Area	308 km2 (119 sq mi)[citation needed]
Population (2010 Census, preliminary)	345,598 inhabitants[3]
- Rank in 2010	51st
Population (2002 Census)	315,954 inhabitants[4]
- Rank in 2002	58th
Density	1,122 /km2 (2,910 /sq mi)[5]
Time zone	MSK (UTC+04:00)[6]
Founded	990 or 1108(see text)
Dialing code(s)	+7 4922[citation needed]
Official website
Vladimir on WikiCommons

Vladimir (Russian: Влади́мир; IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr]) is a city and the administrative center of Vladimir Oblast, Russia, located on the Klyazma River, 200 kilometers (120 mi) to the east of Moscow along the M7 motorway. Population: 345,598 (2010 Census preliminary results);^[3] 315,954 (2002 Census);^[4] 349,702 (1989 Census).^[7]

Vladimir was one of the medieval capitals of Russia, and two of its cathedrals are a World Heritage Site. It is served by the Semyazino Airport, and during the Cold War Vladimir was host to Dobrynskoye air base.

History[link]

Foundation date controversy[link]

Assumption Cathedral was a venerated model for cathedrals all over Russia

The area occupied by the city of Vladimir has been inhabited by humans (at least intermittently) for approximately 25,000 years (see Sungir). Traditionally, the founding date of Vladimir has been acknowledged as 1108, as the first mention of Vladimir in the Primary Chronicle appears under that year. This view attributes the founding of the city, and its name, to Vladimir Monomakh, who inherited the region as part of the Rostov-Suzdal Principality in 1093. In 1958, the 850th anniversary of the city foundation was celebrated, with many monuments from the celebrations adorning the city squares.

In the 1990s, a new opinion developed that the city is older than this. Scholars reinterpreted certain passages in the Hypatian Codex, which mentions that the region was visited by Vladimir the Great, the "father" of Russian Orthodoxy, in 990, so as to move the city foundation date to that year. The defenders of the previously uncontested founding year of 1108 dispute the claims of those who support the new date, arguing that the new theory was fabricated in order to provide a reason to have a celebration in 1995.

The neighboring town of Suzdal, for instance, was mentioned in 1024, and yet its 12th century inhabitants alluded to Vladimir as a young town and treated its rulers with arrogance. In the words of a major chronicle, they said that the people of Vladimir were "their kholops and scions". In the seniority conflicts of the 12th and early 13th centuries, Vladimir was repeatedly described as a "young town" compared to Suzdal and Rostov. The Charter of Vladimir, the basic law of the city passed in 2005, explicitly mentions 990 as the date of the city's foundation.^[8]

Golden Age[link]

St. Demetrius' Cathedral is famous for its masterfully carved exterior, representing the Biblical story of King David. The photo was taken in 1912.

Regardless of which founding date is most accurate, the city's most historically significant events occurred after the turn of the 12th century. Serving its original purpose as a defensive outpost for the Rostov-Suzdal principality, Vladimir had little political or military influence throughout the reign of Vladimir Monomakh (1113–1125), or his son Yury Dolgoruky ("long arms") (1154–1157).

It was only under Dolgoruky's son, Andrei Bogolyubsky (1157–1175), that it became the center of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality. Thus began the city's Golden Age, which lasted until the Mongol invasion of Russia in 1237. During this time Vladimir enjoyed immense growth and prosperity, and Andrei oversaw the building of the Golden Gates and the Cathedral of the Assumption. In 1164, Andrei even attempted to establish a new metropolitanate in Vladimir, separate from that of Kiev, but was rebuffed by the Patriarch of Constantinople.^[9]

Scores of Russian, German, and Georgian masons worked on Vladimir's white stone cathedrals, towers, and palaces. Unlike any other northern buildings, their exterior was elaborately carved with the high relief stone sculptures. Only three of these edifices stand today: the Assumption Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint Demetrius, and the Golden Gate. During Andrei's reign, a royal palace in Bogolyubovo was built, as well as the world-famous Intercession Church on the Nerl, now considered one of the jewels of ancient Russian architecture. Andrei was assassinated at his palace at Bogolyubovo in 1175.

Decline[link]

The main church of the Princesses' Convent was built by Ivan III of Moscow to replace an old crumbling church where the consorts of the Vladimir-Suzdal monarchs had been buried

Vladimir was besieged by the Mongol-Tatar hordes under Batu Khan, and finally overrun on February 8, 1238. A great fire destroyed thirty-two limestone buildings on the first day alone, while the grand prince's family perished in a church where they sought refuge from the flames. The grand prince himself managed to escape, only to fall at the Battle of the Sit River the following month.

After the Mongols, Vladimir never fully recovered, and even though the most important Rus prince (usually the Prince of Moscow, but sometimes of Tver or another principality) was styled the Grand Prince of Vladimir, the title had become merely an honorific symbol of majesty. From 1299 to 1325, the city was seat of the metropolitans of Kiev and All Rus, until Metropolitan Peter moved the see to Moscow. The Grand Prince of Vladimir were originally crowned in Vladimir's Assumption Cathedral, but when Moscow superseded Vladimir as the seat of the Grand Prince, the Assumption Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin, loosely copied by the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti from Vladimir's original, became the site where the grand princes were crowned. Even after the rise of Moscow though, Grand Princes of Moscow built several new churches in Vladimir, notably the Annunciation church at Snovitsy (ca. 1501), three kilometers north-west of the city, and a charming church in the Knyaginin nunnery (ca. 1505), with murals dating to 1648.

Remains of the prince-saint Alexander Nevsky were kept in the ancient Nativity abbey of Vladimir until 1703, when Peter the Great had them transferred to the Monastery (now Lavra) of Aleksandr Nevsky in St. Petersburg. The Nativity church itself (1191–1196) collapsed several years later, when an attempt was made to make more windows in its walls in an effort to brighten the interior.

Administrative and municipal status[link]

Administratively, along with seventeen rural localities, it is incorporated as the City of Vladimir—an administrative unit with the status equal to that of the districts.^[1] Municipally, the City of Vladimir is incorporated as Vladimir Urban Okrug.^[2]

Climate[link]

Vladimir experiences a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfb) with long, cold winters and short, warm summers.

Sightseeing[link]

Modern Vladimir is a part of the Golden ring of the ancient Russian cities and a significant tourist center. Its three chief monuments, White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal, inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List, are the following:

1. The magnificent five-domed Assumption Cathedral was designed as a sepulcher of grand princes and dedicated to the holy icon Theotokos of Vladimir, which had been brought to the city by Andrew the Pious. The cathedral was constructed in 1158–1160, expanded in 1185–1189, and painted by the great Andrei Rublev and Daniil Chyorny in 1408. In 1810, they added a lofty bell-tower in Neoclassical style.
2. The warrior-like cathedral of St. Demetrius was built in 1194–1197 as a private chapel of Vsevolod the Big Nest in the courtyard of his palace and was consecrated to his holy patron, St. Demetrius. For all its formal unity, the cathedral represents a truly international project of Russian and Byzantine masters, Friedrich Barbarossa's masons, and carvers sent by Queen Tamar of Georgia.
3. The Golden Gate, originally a tower over the city's main gate, was built in 1158–1164. The gate acquired its present form after having been grossly reconstructed in the late 18th century, to prevent the dilapidated structure from tumbling down.

Other remarkable monuments of pre-Mongol Russian architecture are scattered in the vicinity. For more information on them, see Suzdal, Yuriev-Polsky, Bogolyubovo, and Kideksha.

Modern Vladimir[link]

Lenina Avenue in Vladimir

Economy[link]

Vladimir is home to several electrical and chemical factories, several food processing plants, two large thermal power stations, and the headquarters of the 27th Guards Missile Army of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Tourism related to the historical sites is a major contributor to the city economy.

Education[link]

Vladimir is home to the following education establishments:

• Vladimir State University
• Vladimir Judicial Institute of the Ministry of Justice
• Vladimir Business Institute
• The American Home English & Russian Language School

Vladimir is also home to the Federal Centre for Animal Health and Welfare.

Transport[link]

Vladimir is linked to Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod by railway and the M7 highway. Local transport includes buses, trolleybuses,fixed-route minivans, and taxis. Taxi and some minivan service is available 24 hours a day.

Sports[link]

The city association football team, FC Torpedo Vladimir, currently plays in the Football Championship of the National League (former Russian First Division), having entered the second level of Russian professional football after seventeen years of competing in Russian Second Division and Russian Third League. Vladimir VC (previously known as Skat and Dinamo Vladimir) represents the city in Volleyball Major League B – Zone Europe.

Vladimir is also home to Polaris-Vladimir ice hockey club, which competes in regional hockey competitions and Russian minor leagues, and both male and female Luch table-tennis teams.

International relations[link]

Twin towns and sister cities[link]

Vladimir is twinned with:^[11]

• Anghiari, Italy
• Baotze, China
• Bloomington-Normal, United States
• Campobasso, Italy
• Canterbury, United Kingdom
• Cebu, Philippines^[12]
• Chongqing, China
• Erlangen, Germany
• Kerava, Finland
• Kardzhali, Bulgaria
• Nara, Japan
• Sarasota, United States
• Trento, Italy
• Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic
• Jelenia Góra, Poland

Notable people[link]

• Valentin Afonin, association football player
• Nikolai Andrianov, gymnast
• Vladimir Artemov, gymnast
• Aleksey Batalov, actor
• Mikhail Lazarev, admiral
• Yuri Levitan, radio announcer
• Alexey Prokurorov, cross-country skier
• Yuri Ryazanov, gymnast
• Vasily Shulgin, politician
• Mikhail Speransky, statesman
• Aleksandr Stoletov, physicist
• Nikolai Stoletov, general
• Sergei Taneyev, composer
• Dmitri Vyazmikin, association football player
• Denis Yevsikov, association football player
• Nikolay Zhukovsky, scientist
• Anna Loginova, fashion model

References[link]

Notes[link]

Sources[link]

• Законодательное Собрание Владимирской области. Закон №130-ОЗ от 10 декабря 2001 г. «Об административно-территориальном устройстве Владимирской области и о порядке его изменения», в ред. Закона №24-ОЗ от 27 апреля 2011 г «О внесении изменений в статьи 8, 9 Закона Владимирской области "Об административно-территориальном устройстве Владимирской области и о порядке его изменения"». Вступил в силу со дня официального опубликования (13 декабря 2001 г.). Опубликован: "Владимирские ведомости", №232, 13 декабря 2001 г. (Legislative Assembly of Vladimir Oblast. Law #130-OZ of December 10, 2001 On the Administrative-Territorial Structure of Vladimir Oblast and on Procedures for Its Change, as amended by the Law #24-OZ of April 27, 2011 On Amending Articles 8, 9 of the Law of Vladimir Oblast "On the Administrative-Territorial Structure of Vladimir Oblast and on Procedures for Its Change". Effective as of the day of the official publication (December 13, 2001).).
• Законодательное Собрание Владимирской области. Закон №189-ОЗ от 26 ноября 2004 г. «О наделении статусом городского округа муниципального образования город Владимир Владимирской области», в ред. Закона №108-ОЗ от 10 августа 2009 г «О внесении изменений в Закон Владимирской области "О наделении статусом городского округа муниципального образования город Владимир Владимирской области"». Вступил в силу со дня официального опубликования (1 декабря 2004 г.). Опубликован: "Владимирские ведомости", №333, 1 декабря 2004 г. (Legislative Assembly of Vladimir Oblast. Law #189-OZ of November 26, 2004 On Granting Urban Okrug Status to the Municipal Formation of the City of Vladimir of Vladimir Oblast, as amended by the Law #108-OZ of August 10, 2009 On Amending the Law of Vladimir Oblast "On Granting Urban Okrug Status to the Municipal Formation of the City of Vladimir of Vladimir Oblast". Effective as of the day of the official publication (December 1, 2004).).

Further reading[link]

• Craft Brumfield, William (2004). A History of Russian Architecture. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-98394-3. 

External links[link]

• Official website of Vladimir (Russian)
• Vladimir travel guide from Wikitravel
• Tourist information on Vladimir
• The American Home in Vladimir

v t e Cities and towns in Vladimir Oblast Administrative center: Vladimir Alexandrov Gorokhovets Gus-Khrustalny Kameshkovo Karabanovo Kirzhach Kolchugino Kosteryovo Kovrov Kurlovo Lakinsk Melenki Murom Petushki Pokrov Raduzhny Sobinka Strunino Sudogda Suzdal Vladimir Vyazniki Yuryev-Polsky

v t e Golden Ring of Russia Alexandrov Bogolyubovo Gorokhovets Gus-Khrustalny Ivanovo Kideksha Kostroma Moscow Palekh Pereslavl-Zalessky Plyos Rostov Sergiyev Posad Suzdal Tutayev Uglich Vladimir Yaroslavl Yuryev-Polsky

Portrait of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1898 by Valentin Serov (detail)

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian: Никола́й Андре́евич Ри́мский-Ко́рсаков, Nikolaj Andreevič Rimskij-Korsakov, Russian pronunciation: [nʲɪkəˌlaj ˌrʲim.skʲɪj ˈkorsəkəf], 18 March [O.S. 6 March] 1844,^{[a 1]} – 21 June [O.S. 8 June] 1908) was a Russian composer, and a member of the group of composers known as The Five.^{[a 2]} He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy tale and folk subjects.

Rimsky-Korsakov believed, as did fellow composer Mily Balakirev and critic Vladimir Stasov, in developing a nationalistic style of classical music. This style employed Russian folk song and lore along with exotic harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements in a practice known as musical orientalism, and eschewed traditional Western compositional methods. However, Rimsky-Korsakov appreciated Western musical techniques after he became a professor of musical composition, harmony and orchestration at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871. He undertook a rigorous three-year program of self-education and became a master of Western methods, incorporating them alongside the influences of Mikhail Glinka and fellow members of The Five. His techniques of composition and orchestration were further enriched by his exposure to the works of Richard Wagner.

For much of his life, Rimsky-Korsakov combined his composition and teaching with a career in the Russian military—at first as an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy, then as the civilian Inspector of Naval Bands. He wrote that he developed a passion for the ocean in childhood from reading books and hearing of his older brother's exploits in the navy. This love of the sea might have influenced him to write two of his best-known orchestral works, the musical tableau Sadko (not his later opera of the same name) and Scheherazade. Through his service as Inspector of Naval Bands, Rimsky-Korsakov expanded his knowledge of woodwind and brass playing, which enhanced his abilities in orchestration. He passed this knowledge to his students, and also posthumously through a textbook on orchestration that was completed by his son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg.

Rimsky-Korsakov left a considerable body of original Russian nationalist compositions. He prepared works by The Five for performance, which brought them into the active classical repertoire (although there is controversy over his editing of the works of Modest Mussorgsky), and shaped a generation of younger composers and musicians during his decades as an educator. Rimsky-Korsakov is therefore considered "the main architect" of what the classical music public considers the Russian style of composition.^[1] His influence on younger composers was especially important, as he served as a transitional figure between the autodidactism which exemplified Glinka and The Five and professionally trained composers which would become the norm in Russia by the closing years of the 19th century. While Rimsky-Korsakov's style was based on those of Glinka, Balakirev, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt, he "transmitted this style directly to two generations of Russian composers" and influenced non-Russian composers including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas and Ottorino Respighi.^[2]

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Rimsky-Korsakov birthplace in Tikhvin

Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, 200 kilometres (120 mi) east of Saint Petersburg, into an aristocratic family with a long line of military and naval service—his older brother Voin, 22 years his senior, became a well-known navigator and explorer.^[3]

Rimsky-Korsakov later recalled that his mother played the piano a little, and his father could play a few songs on the piano by ear.^[4] It is said that Rimsky-Korsakov inherited his mother's tendency to play too slowly.^[5] Beginning at six, he took piano lessons from various local teachers and showed a talent for aural skills,^[6] but he showed a lack of interest, playing, as he later wrote, "badly, carelessly, ... poor at keeping time".^[7]

Although he started composing by age 10, Rimsky-Korsakov preferred literature over music.^[8] He later wrote that from his reading, and tales of his brother's exploits, he developed a poetic love for the sea "without ever having seen it".^[9] This love, and prompting from Voin, encouraged the 12-year-old to join the Imperial Russian Navy.^[8] He studied at the School for Mathematical and Navigational Sciences in Saint Petersburg and, at 18, took his final examination in April 1862.^[6]

Rimsky-Korsakov as a naval cadet

While at school, Rimsky-Korsakov took piano lessons from a man named Ulikh.^[10] These lessons were sanctioned by Voin, who now served as director of the school,^[3] because they would help the youth to develop social skills and overcome his shyness.^[8] Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that while "indifferent" to lessons, he developed a love for music, fostered by visits to the opera, and, later, orchestral concerts.^[11] Ulikh perceived that he had serious musical talent, and recommended another teacher, Feodor A. Kanille (Théodore Canillé).^[12] Beginning in the autumn of 1859, Rimsky-Korsakov took lessons in piano and composition from Kanille, whom he later credited as the inspiration for devoting his life to musical composition.^[13] Through Kanille, he was exposed to a great deal of new music, including Mikhail Glinka and Robert Schumann.^[8] Despite Rimsky-Korsakov's now liking his music lessons, Voin cancelled them when Rimsky-Korsakov was 17, as he felt they no longer served a practical need.^[8] Kanille told Rimsky-Korsakov to continue coming to him every Sunday,^[13] not for formal lessons but to play duets and discuss music.^[14] In November 1861, Kanille introduced the 18-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov to Mily Balakirev. Balakirev in turn introduced him to César Cui, and Modest Mussorgsky; all three of these men were already known as composers, despite only being in their 20s.^[15] Rimsky-Korsakov later wrote, "With what delight I listened to real business discussions [Rimsky-Korsakov's emphasis] of instrumentation, part writing, etc! And besides, how much talking there was about current musical matters! All at once I had been plunged into a new world, unknown to me, formerly only heard of in the society of my dilettante friends. That was truly a strong impression".^[16]

The Russian military clipper Almaz in New York Harbor in 1863. Rimsky-Korsakov served as a midshipman on this ship, and later wrote about this cruise.

Balakirev encouraged Rimsky-Korsakov to compose and taught him the rudiments when he was not at sea.^[8] Balakirev also prompted him to enrich himself in history, literature and criticism.^[17] When he showed Balakirev the beginning of a symphony in E-flat minor that he had written, Balakirev insisted he continue working on it despite his lack of formal musical training.^[18] By the time Rimsky-Korsakov sailed on a two-year-and-eight-month cruise aboard the clipper Almaz in late 1862, he had completed and orchestrated three movements of the symphony.^{[19][a 3]} He composed the slow movement during a stop in England, and mailed the score to Balakirev before going back to sea.^[20] At first, his work on the symphony kept Rimsky-Korsakov occupied during his cruise.^[8] He purchased scores at every port of call, along with a piano upon which to play them, and filled his idle hours studying Berlioz's treatise on orchestration.^[8] He found time to read the works of Homer, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and he saw London, Niagara Falls, and Rio de Janeiro during his stops in port.^[8] Eventually, the lack of outside musical stimuli dulled the young midshipman's hunger to learn, and he wrote to Balakirev that after two years at sea he had neglected his musical lessons for months.^[8] "Thoughts of becoming a musician and composer gradually left me altogether", he later recalled; "distant lands began to allure me, somehow, although, properly speaking, naval service never pleased me much and hardly suited my character at all."^[21]

Mentored by Balakirev; time with The Five[link]

Once back in Saint Petersburg in May 1865, Rimsky-Korsakov's onshore duties consisted of a couple of hours of clerical duty each day,^[8] but he recalled that his desire to compose "had been stifled ... I did not concern myself with music at all."^[22] He wrote that contact with Balakirev in September 1865 encouraged him "to get accustomed to music and later to plunge into it".^[23] At Balakirev's suggestion, he wrote a trio to the scherzo of the E-flat minor symphony, which it had lacked up to that point, and reorchestrated the entire symphony.^[24] Its first performance came in December of that year under Balakirev's direction in Saint Petersburg.^[24][25] A second performance followed in March 1866 under the direction of Konstantin Lyadov (father of composer Anatoly Lyadov).^[25]

Correspondence between Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev clearly shows that some ideas for the symphony originated with Balakirev.^[8] Balakirev seldom stopped at merely correcting a piece of music, and would often recompose it at the piano.^[8] Rimsky-Korsakov recalled,

A pupil like myself had to submit to Balakirev a proposed composition in its embryo, say, even the first four or eight bars. Balakirev would immediately make corrections, indicating how to recast such an embryo; he would criticize it, would praise and extol the first two bars, but would censure the next two, ridicule them, and try hard to make the author disgusted with them. Vivacity of composition and fertility were not at all in favor, frequent recasting was demanded, and the composition was extended over a long space of time under the cold control of self-criticism.^[26]

Mily Balakirev encouraged Rimsky-Korsakov to continue composing.

Rimsky-Korsakov recalled that "Balakirev had no difficulty in getting along with me. At his suggestion I most readily rewrote the symphonic movements composed by me and brought them to completion with the help of his advice and improvisations".^[27] Though Rimsky-Korsakov later found Balakirev's influence stifling, and broke free from it,^[28] this did not stop him in his memoirs from extolling the older composer's talents as a critic and improviser.^[26] Under Balakirev's mentoring, Rimsky-Korsakov turned to other compositions. He began a symphony in B minor, but felt it too closely followed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and abandoned it. He completed an Overture on Three Russian Themes, based on Balakirev's folksong overtures, as well as a Fantasia on Serbian Themes that was performed at a concert given for the delegates of the Slavonic Congress in 1867.^[8] In his review of this concert, nationalist critic Vladimir Stasov coined the phrase Moguchaya kuchka for the Balakirev circle (Moguchaya kuchka is usually translated as "The Mighty Handful" or "The Five").^[8] Rimsky-Korsakov also composed the initial versions of Sadko and Antar, which cemented his reputation as a writer of orchestral works.^[25]

Rimsky-Korsakov socialized and discussed music with the other members of The Five; they critiqued one another's works in progress and collaborated on new pieces.^[8] He became friends with Alexander Borodin, whose music "astonished" him.^[29] He spent an increasing amount of time with Mussorgsky.^[8] Balakirev and Mussorgsky played piano four-hand music, Mussorgsky would sing, and they frequently discussed other composers' works, with preferred tastes running "toward Glinka, Schumann and Beethoven's late quartets".^[30] Mendelssohn was not thought of highly, Mozart and Haydn "were considered out of date and naïve", and J.S. Bach merely mathematical and unfeeling.^[30] Berlioz "was highly esteemed", Liszt "crippled and perverted from a musical point of view ... even a caricature", and Wagner discussed little.^[30] Rimsky-Korsakov "listened to these opinions with avidity and absorbed the tastes of Balakirev, Cui and Mussorgsky without reasoning or examination". Often, the musical works in question "were played before me only in fragments, and I had no idea of the whole work". This, he wrote, did not stop him from accepting these judgments at face value and repeating them "as if I were thoroughly convinced of their truth".^[30]

Rimsky-Korsakov became especially appreciated within The Five, and among those who visited the circle, for his talents as an orchestrator.^[25] He was asked by Balakirev to orchestrate a Schubert march for a concert in May 1868, by Cui to orchestrate the opening chorus of his opera William Ratcliff and by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, whose works were greatly appreciated by The Five and who was close to death, to orchestrate his opera The Stone Guest.^[25]

In the fall of 1871, Rimsky-Korsakov moved into Voin's former apartment, and invited Mussorgsky to be his roommate. The working arrangement they agreed upon was that Mussorgsky used the piano in the mornings while Rimsky-Korsakov worked on copying or orchestration. When Mussorgsky left for his civil service job at noon, Rimsky-Korsakov then used the piano. Time in the evenings was allotted by mutual agreement.^[25] "That autumn and winter the two of us accomplished a good deal", Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, "with constant exchange of ideas and plans. Mussorgsky composed and orchestrated the Polish act of Boris Godunov and the folk scene 'Near Kromy.' I orchestrated and finished my Maid of Pskov."^[31]

Professorship, marriage, inspector of bands[link]

In 1871, the 27-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov became Professor of Practical Composition and Instrumentation (orchestration) at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory,^[32] as well as leader of the Orchestra Class.^[25] He retained his position in active naval service, and taught his classes in uniform (military officers in Russia were required to wear their uniforms every day, as they were considered to be always on duty).^[33]

Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where Rimsky-Korsakov taught from 1871 to 1906

Rimsky-Korsakov explained in his memoirs that Mikhaíl Azanchevsky had taken over that year as director of the Conservatory,^[25] and wanting new blood to freshen up teaching in those subjects,^[34] had offered to pay generously for Rimsky-Korsakov's services.^[35] Biographer Mikhail Zetlin suggests that Azanchevsky's motives might have been twofold. First, Rimsky-Korsakov was the member of the Five least criticized by its opponents, and inviting him to teach at the Conservatory may have been considered a safe way to show that all serious musicians were welcome there.^[36] Second, the offer may have been calculated to expose him to an academic climate in which he would write in a more conservative, Western-based style.^[37] Balakirev had opposed academic training in music with tremendous vigor,^[38] but encouraged him to accept the post to convince others to join the nationalist musical cause.^[39]

Rimsky-Korsakov's reputation at this time was as a master of orchestration, based on Sadko and Antar.^[40] However, he had written these works mainly by intuition.^[40] His knowledge of musical theory was elemental; he had never written any counterpoint, could not harmonize a simple chorale, nor knew the names or intervals of musical chords.^[40] He had never conducted an orchestra, and had been discouraged from doing so by the navy, which did not approve of his appearing on the podium in uniform.^[41] Aware of his technical shortcomings,^[42] Rimsky-Korsakov consulted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,^[43] with whom he and the others in The Five had been in occasional contact.^[44] Tchaikovsky, unlike The Five, had received academic training in composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory,^[45] and was serving as Professor of Music Theory at the Moscow Conservatory.^[46] Tchaikovsky advised him to study.^[47]

Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that while teaching at the Conservatory he soon became "possibly its very best pupil [Rimsky-Korsakov's emphasis], judging by the quantity and value of the information it gave me!"^[48] To prepare himself, and to stay at least one step ahead of his students, he took a three-year sabbatical from composing original works, and assiduously studied at home while he lectured at the Conservatory. He taught himself from textbooks,^[49] and followed a strict regimen of composing contrapuntal exercises, fugues, chorales and a cappella choruses.^[32]

Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, née Purgold, wife of the composer

Rimsky-Korsakov eventually became an excellent teacher and a fervent believer in academic training.^[48][50][51] He revised everything he had composed prior to 1874, even acclaimed works such as Sadko and Antar, in a search for perfection that would remain with him throughout the rest of his life.^[32] Assigned to rehearse the Orchestra Class, he mastered the art of conducting.^[32] Dealing with orchestral textures as a conductor, and making suitable arrangements of musical works for the Orchestra Class, led to an increased interest in the art of orchestration, an area into which he would further indulge his studies as Inspector of Navy Bands.^[32] The score of his Third Symphony, written just after he had completed his three-year program of self-improvement, reflects his hands-on experience with the orchestra.^[32]

Professorship brought Rimsky-Korsakov financial security,^[52] which encouraged him to settle down and to start a family.^[52] In December 1871 he proposed to Nadezhda Purgold, with whom he had developed a close relationship over weekly gatherings of The Five at the Purgold household.^[53] They married in July 1872, with Mussorgsky serving as best man.^[52] The Rimsky-Korsakovs had seven children.^[54] One of their sons, Andrei, became a musicologist, married the composer Yuliya Veysberg and wrote a multi-volume study of his father's life and work.^[55]

Nadezhda became a musical as well as domestic partner with her husband, much as Clara Schumann had been with her own husband Robert.^[52] She was beautiful, capable, strong-willed, and far better trained musically than her husband at the time they married^[56]—she had attended the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in the mid-1860s, studying piano with Anton Gerke (one of whose private students was Mussorgsky)^[57] and music theory with Nikolai Zaremba, who also taught Tchaikovsky.^[58] Nadezhda proved a fine and most demanding critic of her husband's work; her influence over him in musical matters was strong enough for Balakirev and Stasov to wonder whether she was leading him astray from their musical preferences.^[32] Musicologist Lyle Neff wrote that while Nadezhda gave up her own compositional career when she married Rimsky-Korsakov, she "had a considerable influence on the creation of [Rimsky-Korsakov's] first three operas. She travelled with her husband, attended rehearsals and arranged compositions by him and others"^[58] for piano four hands, which she played with her husband.^[32] "Her last years were dedicated to issuing her husband's posthumous literary and musical legacy, maintaining standards for performance of his works ... and preparing material for a museum in his name."^[58]

Portrait of Rimsky-Korsakov by Ilya Repin

In the spring of 1873, the navy created the post of Inspector of Naval Bands and appointed Rimsky-Korsakov. While this kept him on the navy payroll and listed on the roster of the Chancellery of the Navy Department, it allowed him to resign his commission.^[49][59] As Inspector, he visited naval bands throughout Russia, supervised the bandmasters and their appointments, reviewed the bands' repertoire, and inspected the quality of their instruments. He wrote a study program for a complement of music students who held navy fellowships at the Conservatory, and acted as an intermediary between the Conservatory and the navy. The post of Band Inspector came with a promotion to Collegiate Assessor, a civilian rank. "I parted with delight with both my military status and my officer's uniform", he later wrote. "Henceforth I was a musician officially and incontestably."^[60]

Rimsky-Korsakov applied himself with zeal to his duties,^[49] and indulged in a long-standing desire to familiarize himself with the construction and playing technique of orchestral instruments.^[60][61] These studies prompted him to write a textbook on orchestration.^[60] He used the privileges of rank to exercise and expand upon his knowledge. He discussed arrangements of musical works for military band with bandmasters, encouraged and reviewed their efforts, held concerts at which he could hear these pieces, and orchestrated original works, and works by other composers, for military bands.^[62]

In March 1884, an Imperial Order abolished the navy office of Inspector of Bands, and Rimsky-Korsakov was relieved of his duties.^[49] He worked under Balakirev in the Court Chapel as a deputy until 1894,^[63] which allowed him to study Russian Orthodox church music. He also taught classes at the Chapel, and wrote his textbook on harmony for use there and at the Conservatory.^[64]

[edit] Backlash and May Night

Rimsky-Korsakov's studies and his change in attitude regarding music education brought him the scorn of his fellow nationalists, who thought he was throwing away his Russian heritage to compose fugues and sonatas.^[51] After he strove "to crowd in as much counterpoint as possible" into his Third Symphony,^[65] he wrote chamber works adhering strictly to classical models, including a string sextet, a string quartet in F minor and a quintet for flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano. About the quartet and the symphony, Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, that they "were filled with a host of clever things but ... [were] imbued with a dryly pedantic character".^[66] Borodin commented that when he heard the symphony, he kept "feeling that this is the work of a German Herr Professor who has put on his glasses and is about to write Eine grosse Symphonie in C".^[67]

According to Rimsky-Korsakov, the other members of The Five showed little enthusiasm for the symphony, and less still for the quartet.^[68] Nor was his public debut as a conductor, at an 1874 charity concert where he led the orchestra in the new symphony, considered favorably by his compatriots.^[49] He later wrote that "they began, indeed, to look down upon me as one on the downward path".^[68] Worse still to Rimsky-Korsakov was the faint praise given by Anton Rubinstein, a composer opposed to the nationalists' music and philosophy. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that after Rubinstein heard the quartet, he commented that now Rimsky-Korsakov "might amount to something" as a composer.^[68] He wrote that Tchaikovsky continued to support him morally, telling him that he fully applauded what Rimsky-Korsakov was doing and admired both his artistic modesty and his strength of character.^[69] Privately, Tchaikovsky confided to Nadezhda von Meck, "Apparently [Rimsky-Korsakov] is now passing through this crisis, and how it will end will be difficult to predict. Either a great master will come out of him, or he will finally become bogged down in contrapuntal tricks".^[66]

Portrait of Mikhail Glinka by Ilya Repin. Rimsky-Korsakov credited his editing of Glinka's scores with leading him back toward modern music.

Two projects helped Rimsky-Korsakov focus on less academic music-making. The first was the creation of two folk song collections in 1874. Rimsky-Korsakov transcribed 40 Russian songs for voice and piano from performances by folk singer Tvorty Filippov,^[70][71] who approached him at Balakirev's suggestion.^[72] This collection was followed by a second containing 100 songs, supplied by friends and servants, or taken from rare and out-of-print collections.^[71][73] Rimsky-Korsakov later credited this work as a great influence on him as a composer;^[74] it also supplied a vast amount of musical material from which he could draw for future projects, either by direct quotation or as models for composing fakeloric passages.^[71] The second project was the editing of orchestral scores by pioneer Russian composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857) in collaboration with Balakirev and Anatoly Lyadov.^[49] Glinka's sister, Lyudmila Ivanovna Shestavoka, wanted to preserve her brother's musical legacy in print, and paid the costs of the project from her own pocket.^[75] No similar project had been attempted before in Russian music,^[71] and guidelines for scholarly musical editing had to be established and agreed.^[71] While Balakirev favored making changes in Glinka's music to "correct" what he saw as compositional flaws, Rimsky-Korsakov favored a less intrusive approach.^[71] Eventually, Rimsky-Korsakov prevailed.^[71] "Work on Glinka's scores was an unexpected schooling for me", he later wrote. "Even before this I had known and worshipped his operas; but as editor of the scores in print I had to go through Glinka's style and instrumentation to their last little note ... And this was a beneficent discipline for me, leading me as it did to the path of modern music, after my vicissitudes with counterpoint and strict style".^[76]

In the summer of 1877, Rimsky-Korsakov thought increasingly about the short story May Night by Nikolai Gogol. The story had long been a favorite of his, and his wife Nadezhda had encouraged him to write an opera based on it from the day of their betrothal, when they had read it together.^[77] While musical ideas for such a work predated 1877, now they came with greater persistence. By winter May Night took an increasing amount of his attention; in February 1878 he started writing in earnest, and he finished the opera by early November.^[71]

Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that May Night was of great importance because, despite the opera's containing a good deal of contrapuntal music, he nevertheless "cast off the shackles of counterpoint [emphasis Rimsky-Korsakov]".^[78] He wrote the opera in a folk-like melodic idiom, and scored it in a transparent manner much in the style of Glinka.^[49] Nevertheless, despite the ease of writing this opera and the next, The Snow Maiden,^[79] from time to time he suffered from creative paralysis between 1881 and 1888.^[80] He kept busy during this time by editing Mussorgsky's works and completing Borodin's Prince Igor (Mussorgsky died in 1881, Borodin in 1887).^[80]

Belyayev circle[link]

Portrait by Ilya Repin of M. P. Belyayev, founder of the Russian Symphony Concerts

Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that he became acquainted with budding music patron Mitrofan Belyayev (M. P. Belaieff) in Moscow in 1882.^[81] Belyayev was one of a growing coterie of Russian nouveau-riche industrialists who became patrons of the arts in mid- to late-19th century Russia; their number included railway magnate Savva Mamontov and textile manufacturer Pavel Tretyakov.^[82] Belyayev, Mamontov and Tretyakov "wanted to contribute conspicuously to public life".^[83] They had worked their way into wealth, and being Slavophilic in their national outlook believed in the greater glory of Russia.^[84] Because of this belief, they were more likely than the aristocracy to support native talent, and were more inclined to support nationalist artists over cosmopolitan ones.^[84] This preference paralleled a general upsurge in nationalism and Russophilia that became prevalent in mainstream Russian art and society.^[85]

By the winter of 1883 Rimsky-Korsakov had become a regular visitor to the weekly "quartet Fridays" ("Les Vendredis") held at Belyayev's home in Saint Petersburg.^[86] Belyayev, who had already taken a keen interest in the musical future of the teenage Alexander Glazunov, rented a hall and hired an orchestra in 1884 to play Glazunov's First Symphony plus an orchestral suite Glazunov had just composed. This concert and a rehearsal the previous year gave Rimsky-Korsakov the idea of offering concerts featuring Russian compositions, a prospect to which Belyayev was amenable. The Russian Symphony Concerts were inaugurated during the 1886–87 season, with Rimsky-Korsakov sharing conducting duties with Anatoly Lyadov.^[87] He finished his revision of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and conducted it at the opening concert.^[88] The concerts also coaxed him out of his creative drought; he wrote Scheherazade, Capriccio Espagnol and the Russian Easter Overture specifically for them.^[80] He noted that these three works "show a considerable falling off in the use of contrapuntal devices ... [replaced] by a strong and virtuoso development of every kind of figuration which sustains the technical interest of my compositions."^[89]

Rimsky-Korsakov was asked for advice and guidance not just on the Russian Symphony Concerts, but on other projects through which Belyayev aided Russian composers. "By force of matters purely musical I turned out to be the head of the Belyayev circle", he wrote. "As the head Belyayev, too, considered me, consulting me about everything and referring everyone to me as chief".^[90] In 1884 Belyayev set up an annual Glinka prize, and in 1885 he founded his own music publishing firm, through which he published works by Borodin, Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov at his own expense. To select which composers to assist with money, publication or performances from the many who now appealed for help, Belyayev set up an advisory council made up of Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov. They would look through the compositions and appeals submitted and suggest which composers were deserving of patronage and public attention.^[91]

The group of composers who now congregated with Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov became known as the Belyayev circle, named after their financial benefactor. These composers were nationalistic in their musical outlook, as The Five before them had been. Like The Five, they believed in a uniquely Russian style of classical music that utilized folk music and exotic melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements, as exemplified by the music of Balakirev, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Unlike The Five, these composers also believed in the necessity of an academic, Western-based background in composition—which Rimsky-Korsakov had instilled in his years at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.^[92] Compared to the "revolutionary" composers in Balakirev's circle, Rimsky-Korsakov found those in the Belyayev circle to be "progressive ... attaching as it did great importance to technical perfection, but ... also broke new paths, though more securely, even if less speedily ..."^[93]

Increased contact with Tchaikovsky[link]

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by Nikolay Kuznetsov, 1893

In November 1887, Tchaikovsky arrived in Saint Petersburg in time to hear several of the Russian Symphony Concerts. One of them included the first complete performance of his First Symphony, subtitled Winter Daydreams, in its final version.^[94] Another concert featured the premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov's Third Symphony in its revised version.^[94] Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky corresponded considerably before the visit and spent a lot of time together, along with Glazunov and Lyadov.^[95] Though Tchaikovsky had been a regular visitor to the Rimsky-Korsakov home since 1876,^[96] and had at one point offered to arrange Rimsky-Korsakov's appointment as director of the Moscow Conservatory,^[96] this was the beginning of closer relations between the pair. Within a couple of years, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, Tchaikovsky's visits became more frequent.^[97]

During these visits and especially in public, Rimsky-Korsakov wore a mask of geniality. Privately, he found the situation emotionally complex, and confessed his fears to his friend, the Moscow critic Semyon Kruglikov.^[98] Memories persisted of the tension between Tchaikovsky and The Five over the differences in their musical philosophies—tension acute enough for Tchaikovsky's brother Modest to liken their relations at that time to "those between two friendly neighboring states ... cautiously prepared to meet on common ground, but jealously guarding their separate interests".^[99] Rimsky-Korsakov observed, not without annoyance, how Tchaikovsky became increasingly popular among Rimsky-Korsakov's followers.^[100] This personal jealousy was compounded by a professional one, as Tchaikovsky's music became increasingly popular among the composers of the Belyayev circle, and remained on the whole more famous than his own.^[101] Even so, when Tchaikovsky attended Rimsky-Korsakov's nameday party in May 1893, Rimsky-Korsakov asked Tchaikovsky personally if he would conduct four concerts of the Russian Musical Society in Saint Petersburg the following season. After hesitation, Tchaikovsky agreed.^[102] While his sudden death in late 1893 prevented him from fulfilling this commitment in its entirety, the list of works he had planned to conduct included Rimsky-Korsakov's Third Symphony.^[103]

Increasing conservatism; second creative drought[link]

In March 1889, Angelo Neumann's traveling "Richard Wagner Theater" visited Saint Petersburg, giving four cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen there under the direction of Karl Muck.^[104] The Five had ignored Wagner's music, but The Ring impressed Rimsky-Korsakov:^[105] he was astonished with Wagner's mastery of orchestration. He attended the rehearsals with Glazunov, and followed the score. After hearing these performances, Rimsky-Korsakov devoted himself almost exclusively to composing operas for the rest of his creative life. Wagner's use of the orchestra influenced Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration,^[104] beginning with the arrangement of the polonaise from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov that he made for concert use in 1889.^[106]

Statue of Rimsky-Korsakov in Saint Petersburg

Toward music more adventurous than Wagner's, especially that of Richard Strauss and later Claude Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov's mind remained closed. He would fume for days afterwards when he heard pianist Felix Blumenfeld play Debussy's Estampes and write in his diary about them, "Poor and skimpy to the nth degree; there is no technique, even less imagination."^[107] This was part of an increasing musical conservatism on his part (his "musical conscience," as he put it), under which he now scrutinized his music and that of others', as well.^[108] Compositions by his former compatriots in The Five were not immune. While working on his first revision of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, in 1895 he would tell his amanuensis, Vasily Yastrebtsev, "It's incredible that I ever could have liked this music and yet it seems there was such a time."^[109] By 1901 he would write of growing "indignant at all [of Wagner's] blunders of the ear"—this about the same music which caught his attention in 1889.^[110]

In 1892 Rimsky-Korsakov suffered a second creative drought,^[80] brought on by bouts of depression and alarming physical symptoms. Rushes of blood to the head, confusion, memory loss and unpleasant obsessions^[111] led to a medical diagnosis of neurasthenia.^[111] Crises in the Rimsky-Korsakov household may have been a factor—the serious illnesses of his wife and one of his sons from diphtheria in 1890, the deaths of his mother and youngest child, as well as the onset of the prolonged, ultimately fatal illness of his second youngest child.^[111] He resigned from the Russian Symphony Concerts and the Court Chapel^[111] and considered giving up composition permanently.^[80] After making third versions of the musical tableau Sadko and the opera The Maid of Pskov, he closed his musical account with the past; he had left none of his major works before May Night in their original form.^[104]

Another death brought about a creative renewal.^[111] The passing of Tchaikovsky presented a twofold opportunity—to write for the Imperial Theaters and to compose an opera based on Nikolai Gogol's short story Christmas Eve, a work on which Tchaikovsky had based his opera Vakula the Smith. The success of Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve encouraged him to complete an opera approximately every 18 months between 1893 and 1908—a total of 11 during this period.^[80] He also started and abandoned another draft of his treatise on orchestration,^[64] but made a third attempt and almost finished it in the last four years of his life.^[64] (His son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg completed the book in 1912.^[64]) Rimsky-Korsakov's scientific treatment of orchestration, illustrated with more than 300 examples from his work, set a new standard for texts of its kind.^[64]

1905 Revolution[link]

In 1905, demonstrations took place at Saint Petersburg Conservatory as part of the 1905 Revolution; these, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, were triggered by similar disturbances at Saint Petersburg State University, in which students demanded political reforms and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Russia.^[112] "I was chosen a member of the committee for adjusting differences with agitated pupils", he recalled; however, almost as soon as the committee had been formed, "[a]ll sorts of measures were recommended to expel the ringleaders, to quarter the police in the Conservatory, to close the Conservatory entirely".^[112]

Ilya Repin, 17 October 1905

A lifelong liberal politically,^[113] Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that he felt someone had to protect the rights of the students to demonstrate, especially as disputes and wrangling between students and authorities were becoming increasingly violent.^[112] In an open letter, he sided with the students against what he saw as unwarranted interference by Conservatory leadership and the Russian Musical Society.^[112] A second letter, this time signed by a number of faculty including Rimsky-Korsakov, demanded the resignation of the head of the Conservatory.^[114] Partly as a result of these two letters, he wrote, approximately 100 Conservatory students were expelled, and he was removed from his professorship.^[114] Just before the dismissal was enacted, Rimsky-Korsakov received a letter from one of the members of the school directorate, suggesting that he take up the directorship in the interest of calming student unrest. "Probably the member of the Directorate held a minority opinion, but signed the resolution nevertheless," he wrote. "I sent a negative reply."^[115] Partly in defiance of his dismissal, Rimsky-Korsakov continued teaching his students from his home.^[116]

Not long after Rimsky-Korsakov's dismissal, a student production of his opera Kashchey the Deathless was followed not with the scheduled concert but with a political demonstration,^[117] which led to a police ban on Rimsky-Korsakov's work.^[117] Due in part to widespread press coverage of these events,^[118] an immediate wave of outrage to the ban arose throughout Russia and abroad; liberals and intellectuals deluged the composer's residence with letters of sympathy,^[119] and even peasants who had not heard a note of Rimsky-Korsakov's music sent small monetary donations.^[113] Several faculty members of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory resigned in protest, including Glazunov and Lyadov.^[120] Eventually, over 300 students walked out of the Conservatory in solidarity with Rimsky-Korsakov.^[121] By December he had been reinstated under a new director, Glazunov;^[118] Rimsky-Korsakov retired from the Conservatory in 1906.^[122] The political controversy continued with his opera The Golden Cockerel.^[121] Its implied criticism of monarchy, Russian imperialism and the Russo-Japanese War gave it little chance of passing the censors.^[121] The premiere was delayed until 1909, after Rimsky-Korsakov's death,^[121] and even then it was performed in an adapted version.^[121]

Rimsky-Korsakov's grave at Tikhvin Cemetery

In April 1907, Rimsky-Korsakov conducted a pair of concerts in Paris, hosted by impresario Sergei Diaghilev, which featured music of the Russian nationalist school. The concerts were hugely successful in popularizing Russian classical music of this kind in Europe, Rimsky-Korsakov's in particular.^[118] The following year, his opera Sadko was produced at the Paris Opéra and The Snow Maiden at the Opéra-Comique.^[118] He also had the opportunity to hear more recent music by European composers. He hissed unabashedly when he heard Richard Strauss's opera Salome, and told Diaghilev after hearing Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande, "Do not make me listen to all these horrors, or I shall end up liking them!"^[118] Hearing these works led him to appreciate his place in the world of classical music. He admitted that he was a "convinced kuchkist" (after kuchka, the shortened Russian term for The Five) and that his works belonged to an era that musical trends had left behind.^[118]

Death[link]

Beginning around 1890, Rimsky-Korsakov suffered from angina.^[111] While this ailment initially wore him down gradually, the stresses concurrent with the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath greatly accelerated its progress. After December 1907, his illness became severe, and he could not work.^[123] In 1908 he died at his Lubensk estate near Luga (modern day Plyussky District of Pskov Oblast), and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg, next to Borodin, Glinka, Mussorgsky and Stasov.^[118]

Legacy[link]

Compositions[link]

Portrait of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov by Valentin Serov (1898)

Rimsky-Korsakov followed the musical ideals espoused by The Five. He employed Orthodox liturgical themes in the Russian Easter Festival Overture, folk song in Capriccio Espagnol and orientalism in Scheherazade, possibly his best known work.^[1][124] He proved a prolific composer but also a perpetually self-critical one. He revised every orchestral work up to and including his Third Symphony—some, like Antar and Sadko, more than once.^[125] These revisions range from minor changes of tempo, phrasing and instrumental detail to wholesale transposition and complete recomposition.^[126]

Rimsky-Korsakov was open about the influences in his music, telling Vasily Yastrebtsev, "Study Liszt and Balakirev more closely, and you'll see that a great deal in me is not mine".^[127] He followed Balakirev in his use of the whole tone scale, treatment of folk songs and musical orientalism and Liszt for harmonic adventurousness.^[1] (The violin melody used to portray Scheherazade is very closely related to its counterpart in Balakirev's symphonic poem Tamara, while the Russian Easter Overtures follows the design and plan of Balakirev's Second Overture on Russian Themes.)^[1][124] Nevertheless, while he took Glinka and Liszt as his harmonic models, his use of whole tone and octatonic scales do demonstrate his originality. He developed both these compositional devices for the "fantastic" sections of his operas, which depicted magical or supernatural characters and events.^[108]

Rimsky-Korsakov maintained an interest in harmonic experiments and continues exploring new idioms throughout his career. However, he tempered this interest with an abhorrence of excess and kept his tendency to experiment under constant control.^[108] The more radical his harmonies became, the more he attempted to control them with strict rules—applying his "musical conscience", as he called it. In this sense, he was both a progressive and a conservative composer.^[108] The whole tone and octatonic scales were both considered adventurous in the Western classical tradition, and Rimsky-Korsakov's use of them made his harmonies seem radical. Conversely, his care about how or when in a composition he used these scales made him seem conservative compared with later composers like Igor Stravinsky, though they were often building on Rimsky-Korsakov's work.^[128]

Operas[link]

	Music samples Flight of the Bumblebee Flight of the Bumblebee performed by US Army Band The Flight of the Bumblebee Arrangement for two pianos by Russel Warner, performed by Neal and Nancy O'Doan The Song of the Indian Guest 1929 recording of transcription for violin and piano, featuring violinist Váša Příhoda
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While Rimsky-Korsakov is best known in the West for his orchestral works, his operas are more complex, offering a wider variety of orchestral effects than in his instrumental works and fine vocal writing.^[117] Excerpts and suites from them have proved as popular in the West as the purely orchestral works. The best-known of these excerpts is probably "The Flight of the Bumblebee" from The Tale of Tsar Saltan, which has often been heard by itself in orchestral programs, and in countless arrangements and transcriptions, most famously in a piano version made by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Other selections familiar to listeners in the West are "Dance of the Tumblers" from The Snow Maiden, "Procession of the Nobles" from Mlada, and "Song of the Indian Guest" (or, less accurately, "Song of India") from Sadko, as well as suites from The Golden Cockerel and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya.^[129]

The Operas fall into four categories:

• Historical drama: The Maid of Pskov, The Tsar's Bride, Pan Voyevoda, Servilya

• Epics: Sadko

• Folk operas: May Night, Christmas Eve

• Fairy tales and legends: The Snow Maiden, Kashchey the Deathless, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, The Golden Cockerel

• Stylistic experiments: Mlada, Mozart and Salieri, The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga

Of this range Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in 1902, "In every new work of mine I am trying to do something that is new for me. On the one hand, I am pushed on by the thought that in this way, [my music] will retain freshness and interest, but at the same time I am prompted by my pride to think that many facets, devices, moods and styles, if not all, should be with my reach."^[113]

American music critic and journalist Harold C. Schonberg wrote that the operas "open up a delightful new world, the world of the Russian East, the world of supernaturalism and the exotic, the world of Slavic pantheism and vanished races. Genuine poetry suffuses them, and they are scored with brilliance and resource."^[129] Nevertheless, Rimsky-Korsakov's music in these works often lacks dramatic power, a seemingly fatal flaw in an operatic composer.^[130] This may have been consciously done, as he repeatedly stated in his scores that he felt operas were first and foremost musical works rather than mainly dramatic ones. Ironically, the operas succeed in most cases by being deliberately non-dramatic.^[130]

Orchestral works[link]

The purely orchestral works fall into two categories. The best-known ones in the West and perhaps the finest in overall quality are mainly programmatic in nature—in other words, the musical content and how it is handled in the piece is determined by the plot or characters in a story, the action in a painting or events reported through another non-musical source.^[1] The second category of works are more academic, such as his First and Third Symphonies and his Sinfonette. In these, Rimsky-Korsakov still employed folk themes; however, he subjected these them to abstract rules of musical composition.^[1]

Opening themes of the Sultan and Scheherazade

Program music came naturally to Rimsky-Korsakov. To him, "even a folk theme has a program of sorts."^[1] He composed the majority of his orchestral works in this genre at two periods of his career—at the beginning, with Sadko and Antar, and in the 1880s, with Scheherezade, Capriccio Espagnol and the Russian Easter Overture. Despite the gap between these two periods, the composer's overall approach and the way he used his musical themes remained consistent. Both Antar and Scheherezade use a robust "Russian" theme to portray the male progagonists (the title character in Antar; the sultan in Scheherezade) and a more sinuous "Eastern" theme for the female ones (the peri Gul-Nazar in Antar and the title character in Scheherezade).^[131]

Where Rimsky-Korsakov changed between these two sets of works was in orchestration. While his pieces were always celebrated for their imaginative use of instrumental forces, the sparer textures of Sadko and Antar pale compared to the luxuriance of the more popular works of the 1880s.^[1] While a principle of highlighting "primary hues" of instrumental color remained in place, it was augmented in the later works by a sophisticated cachet of orchestral effects,^[1] some gleaned from other composers including Wagner, but many invented by himself.^[1] As a result, these works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups.^[117] The final tutti of Scheherazade is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of string patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion.^[132]

Rimsky-Korsakov's non-programmic music, though well-crafted, does not rise to the same level of inspiration as his programmatic works; he needed fantasy to bring out the best in him.^[1] The First Symphony follows the outlines of Schumann's Fourth extremely closely and is slighter in its thematic material than what he would compose later. The Third Symphony and Sinfonette each contains a series of variations on less-than-best music that can lead to tedium.^[1]

Smaller-scale works[link]

Rimsky-Korsakov composed dozens of art songs, arrangements of folk songs, chamber and piano music. While the piano music is relatively inimportant, many of the art songs possess a delicate beauty. While they yield in overy lyricism to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, otherwise they reserve their place in the standard repertory of Russian singers.^[1]

Rimsky-Korsakov also wrote a body of choral works, both secular and for Russian Orthodox Church service. The latter include settings of portions of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (despite his staunch atheism).^{[133][134][135]}

Transitional figure[link]

Critic Vladimir Stasov, who along with Balakirev had founded The Five, wrote in 1882, "Beginning with Glinka, all the best Russian musicians have been very skeptical of book learning and have never approached it with the servility and the superstitious reverence with which it is approached to this day in many parts of Europe."^[136] This statement was not true for Glinka, who studied Western music theory assiduously with Siegfried Dehn in Berlin before he composed his opera A Life for the Tsar^[137] However, it was true for Balakirev, who "opposed academicism with tremendous vigor,"^[38] and it was true initially for Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been imbued by Balakirev and Stasov with the same attitude.^[138]

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov by Emil Wiesel

One point Stasov omitted purposely, which would have disproved his statement completely, was that at the time he wrote it, Rimsky-Korsakov had been pouring his "book learning" into students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory for over a decade.^[139] Beginning with his three years of self-imposed study, Rimsky-Korsakov had drawn closer to Tchaikovsky and further away from the rest of The Five, while the rest of The Five had drawn back from him and Stasov had branded him a "renegade."^[139] Taruskin writes, "The older he became, the greater was the irony with which Rimsky-Korsakov looked back on his kuchkist days."^[140] When the young Semyon Kruglikov was considering a future in composition, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the future critic,

About a talent for composition ... I can say nothing as yet. You have tried your powers too little.... Yes, one can study on one's own. Sometimes one needs advice, but one must study ... All of us, that is, I myself and Borodin, and Balakirev, and especially Cui and Mussorgsky, did disdain these things. I consider myself lucky that I bethought myself in time and forced myself to work. As for Balakirev, owing to his insufficient technique he writes little; Borodin, with difficulty; Cui, carelessly; and Mussorgsky, sloppily and often incoherently."^[141]

Taruskin points out this statement, which Rimsky-Korsakov wrote while Borodin and Mussorgsky were still alive, as proof of his estrangement from the rest of The Five and an indication of the kind of teacher he eventually became.^[142] By the time he instructed Liadov and Glazunov, "their training hardly differed from [Tchaikovsky's]. An ideal of the strictest professionalism was instilled in them from the beginning."^[142] By the time Borodin died in 1887, the era of autodidactism for Russian composers had effectively ended. Every Russian who aspired to write classical music attended a conservatory and received the same formal education.^[143] "There was no more 'Moscow,' no 'St. Petersburg.' " Taruskin writes; "at last all Russia was one. Moreover, by century's end, the theory and composition faculties of Rubinstein's Conservatory were entirely in the hands of representatives of the New Russian School. Viewed against the background of Stasov's predictions, there could scarcely be any greater irony."^[144]

Students[link]

Rimsky-Korsakov taught theory and composition to 250 students over his 35-year tenure at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, "enough to people a whole 'school' of composers." This does not include pupils at the two other schools where he taught, including Glazunov, or those he taught privately at his home, such as Igor Stravinsky.^[145] Apart from Glazunov and Stravinsky, students who later found fame included Anatoly Lyadov, Alexander Spendiaryan, Sergei Prokofiev, Ottorino Respighi, Witold Maliszewski, Mykola Lysenko, Artur Kapp, and Konstanty Gorski. Other students included the music critic and musicologist Alexander Ossovsky, and the composer Lazare Saminsky.^[146]

Rimsky-Korsakov felt talented students needed little formal dictated instruction. His teaching method included distinct steps: show the students everything needed in harmony and counterpoint; direct them in understanding the forms of composition; give them a year or two of systematic study in the development of technique, exercises in free composition and orchestration; instill a good knowledge of the piano. Once these were properly completed, studies would be over.^[147] He carried this attitude into his conservatory classes. Conductor Nikolai Malko remembered that Rimsky-Korsakov began the first class of the term by saying, "I will speak, and you will listen. Then I will speak less, and you will start to work. And finally I will not speak at all, and you will work."^[148] Malko added that his class followed exactly this pattern. "Rimsky-Korsakov explained everything so clearly and simply that all we had to do was to do our work well."^[148]

Editing the work of The Five[link]

Rimsky-Korsakov's editing of works by The Five are significant. It was a practical extension of the collaborative atmosphere of The Five during the 1860s and 1870s, when they heard each other's compositions in progress and worked on them together, and was an effort to save works that would otherwise either have languished unheard or become lost entirely. This work included the completion of Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor, which Rimsky-Korsakov undertook with the help of Glazunov after Borodin's death,^[80] and the orchestration of passages from César Cui's William Ratcliff for its first production in 1869.^[25] He also completely orchestrated the opera The Stone Guest by Alexander Dargomyzhsky three times—in 1869–70, 1892 and 1902.^[32] While not a member of The Five himself, Dargomyzhsky was closely associated with the group and shared their musical philosophy.^[25]

Fyodor Chaliapin was a powerful exponent of the Rimsky-Korsakov version of Boris Godunov, which launched the work in the world's opera houses, but has since fallen out of favor. Portrait by Aleksandr Golovin.

Musicologist Francis Maes wrote that while Rimsky-Korsakov's efforts are laudable, they are also controversial. It was generally assumed that with Prince Igor, Rimsky-Korsakov edited and orchestrated the existing fragments of the opera while Glazunov composed and added missing parts, including most of the third act and the overture.^[149][150] This was exactly what Rimsky-Korsakov stated in his memoirs.^[151] However, both Maes and Richard Taruskin cite an analysis of Borodin's manuscripts by musicologist Pavel Lamm, which showed that Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov discarded nearly 20 percent of Borodin's score.^[152] According to Maes, the result is more a collaborative effort by all three composers than a true representation of Borodin's intent.^[153] Lamm stated that because of the extremely chaotic state of Borodin's manuscripts, a modern alternative to Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov's edition would be extremely difficult to complete.^[153]

More debatable, according to Maes, is Rimsky-Korsakov's editing of Mussorgsky's works. After Mussorgsky's death in 1881, Rimsky-Korsakov revised and completed several of Mussorgsky's works for publication and performance, helping to spread Mussorgsky's works throughout Russia and to the West. However Maes, in reviewing Mussorgsky's scores, wrote that Rimsky-Korsakov allowed his "musical conscience" to dictate his editing, and he changed or removed what he considered musical over-experimentation or poor form.^[110] Because of this, Rimsky-Korsakov has been accused of pedantry in "correcting", among other things, matters of harmony. Rimsky-Korsakov may have foreseen questions over his efforts when he wrote,

If Mussorgsky's compositions are destined to live unfaded for fifty years after their author's death (when all his works will become the property of any and every publisher), such an archeologically accurate edition will always be possible, as the manuscripts went to the Public Library on leaving me. For the present, though, there was need of an edition for performances, for practical artistic purposes, for making his colossal talent known, and not for the mere studying of his personality and artistic sins.^[154]

Maes stated that time proved Rimsky-Korsakov correct when it came to posterity's re-evaluation of Mussorgsky's work. Mussorgsky's musical style, once considered unpolished, is now admired for its originality. While Rimsky-Korsakov's arrangement of Night on Bald Mountain is still the version generally performed, Rimsky-Korsakov's other revisions, like his version of Boris Godunov, have been replaced by Mussorgsky's original.^[155]

Folklore and pantheism[link]

Rimsky-Korsakov may have saved the most personal side of his creativity for his approach to Russian folklore.^[156] Folklorism as practiced by Balakirev and the other members of The Five had been based largely on the protyazhnaya dance song.^[156] Protyazhnaya literally meant "drawn-out song", or melismatically elaborated lyric song.^[157] The characteristics of this song exhibit extreme rhythmic flexibility, an asymmetrical phrase structure and tonal ambiguity.^[157] After composing May Night, however, Rimsky-Korsakov was increasingly drawn to "calendar songs", which were written for specific ritual occasions.^[156] The ties to folk culture was what interested him most in folk music, even in his days with The Five; these songs formed a part of rural customs, echoed old Slavic paganism, and the pantheistic world of folk rites.^[156] Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that his interest in these songs was heightened by his study of them while compiling his folk song collections.^[158] He wrote that he "was captivated by the poetic side of the cult of sun-worship, and sought its survivals and echoes in both the tunes and the words of the songs. The pictures of the ancient pagan period and spirit loomed before me, as it then seemed, with great clarity, luring me on with the charm of antiquity. These occupations subsequently had a great influence in the direction of my own activity as a composer".^[74]

Rimsky-Korsakov's interest in pantheism was whetted by the folkloristic studies of Alexander Afanasyev.^[156] That author's standard work, The Poetic Outlook on Nature by the Slavs, became Rimsky-Korsakov's pantheistic bible.^[156] The composer first applied Afanasyev's ideas in May Night, in which he helped fill out Gogol's story by using folk dances and calendar songs.^[156] He went further down this path in The Snow Maiden,^[156] where he made extensive use of seasonal calendar songs and khorovodi (ceremonial dances) in the folk tradition.^[159]

Publications[link]

Rimsky-Korsakov's autobiography and his books on harmony and orchestration have been translated into English and published. Two books he started in 1892 but left unfinished were a comprehensive text on Russian music and a manuscript, now lost, on an unknown subject.^[160]

• My Musical Life. [Летопись моей музыкальной жизни – literally, Chronicle of My Musical Life.] Trans. from the 5th rev. Russian ed. by Judah A. Joffe; ed. with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. London: Ernst Eulenburg Ltd, 1974.
• Practical Manual of Harmony. [Практический учебник гармонии.] First published, in Russian, in 1885. First English edition published by Carl Fischer in 1930, trans. from the 12th Russian ed. by Joseph Achron. Current English ed. by Nicholas Hopkins, New York, New York: C. Fischer, 2005.
• Principles of Orchestration. [Основы оркестровки.] Begun in 1873 and completed posthumously by Maximilian Steinberg in 1912, first published, in Russian, in 1922 ed. by Maximilian Steinberg. English trans. by Edward Agate; New York: Dover Publications, 1964 ("unabridged and corrected republication of the work first published by Edition russe de musique in 1922").

Footnotes[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

In English:

In Russian:

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Films

Scores

Other

Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter (Russian: Святослав Теофилович Рихтер Sviatosláv Teofílovich Ríkhter, Russian pronunciation: [svʲjətəsˈlaf tʲɪəˈfʲiləvʲɪtɕ ˈrʲixtər], Ukrainian: Святослав Теофілович Ріхтер; March 20 [O.S. March 7] 1915 – August 1, 1997) was a Soviet pianist well known for the depth of his interpretations, virtuoso technique, and vast repertoire.^[1] He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.^[1]

Biography[link]

Childhood[link]

Richter was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. His father, Teofil Danilovich Richter (1872–1941), was a German expatriate pianist, organist, and composer who had studied in Vienna. His mother, Anna Pavlovna (née Moskaleva; 1892–1963), was from a landowning Russian family, and at one point had been a pupil of her future husband.^[2] In 1918, when Richter's parents were in Odessa, the Civil War separated them from their son, and Richter moved in with his aunt Tamara. He lived with her from 1918 to 1921, and it was then that his interest in art first manifested itself, although he first became interested in painting, which his aunt taught him.

In 1921 the family was reunited, and the Richters moved to Odessa, where Teofil taught at the Odessa Conservatory and, briefly, worked as organist of a Lutheran church. In early 1920s Richter became interested in music (as well as other art forms such as cinema, literature, and theatre) and started studying piano. Unusually, he was largely self-taught. His father only gave him a basic education in music, and so did one of his father's pupils, a Czech harpist.^[3]

Even at an early age, Richter was an excellent sight-reader and regularly practiced with local opera and ballet companies. He developed a lifelong passion for opera, vocal and chamber music that found its full expression in the festivals he established in Grange de Meslay, France, and in Moscow, at the Pushkin Museum. At age 15, he started to work at the Odessa Opera, where he accompanied the rehearsals.^[4]

Early career[link]

On March 19, 1934, Richter gave his first recital, at the Engineers' Club of Odessa; but he did not formally start studying piano until three years later, when he decided to seek out Heinrich Neuhaus, a famous pianist and piano teacher, at the Moscow Conservatory. During Richter's audition for Neuhaus (at which he performed Chopin's Ballade No. 4), Neuhaus apparently whispered to a fellow student, "This man's a genius". Although Neuhaus taught many great pianists, including Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu, it is said that he considered Richter to be "the genius pupil, for whom he had been waiting all his life," while acknowledging that he taught Richter "almost nothing."

Early in his career, Richter also tried his hand at composing, and it even appears that he played some of his compositions during his audition for Neuhaus. He gave up composition shortly after moving to Moscow. Years later, Richter explained this decision as follows: "Perhaps the best way I can put it is that I see no point in adding to all the bad music in the world".^[5]

Behind the Iron Curtain[link]

By the beginning of World War II, Richter's parents' marriage had failed and his mother had fallen in love with another man. Because Richter's father was a German, he was under suspicion by the authorities and a plan was made for the family to flee the country. Due to her romantic involvement, his mother did not want to leave and so they remained in Odessa. In August 1941 his father was arrested, and on 6 October 1941 was shot by the Soviets as a spy. Richter didn't speak to his mother again until shortly before her death nearly 20 years later in connection with his first US tour.

In 1945, Richter met and accompanied in recital the soprano Nina Dorliak. Richter and Dorliak thereafter remained companions until his death, although they never married. She accompanied Richter both in his complex life and career. She supported him in his last sickness, and died herself a few months later, on May 17, 1998.

It was rumored that Richter was homosexual and that having a female companion provided a social front for his sexual orientation, because in the Soviet world homosexual behavior was illegal.^[6][7] Richter had a tendency to be private and withdrawn and was not open to interviews. He never publicly discussed his personal life until in the last year of his life filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon convinced him to be interviewed for a documentary.

In 1949 Richter won the Stalin Prize, which led to extensive concert tours in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. He gave his first concerts outside the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia in 1950.^[8] In 1952, Richter was invited to play Franz Liszt in a film based on the life of Mikhail Glinka, called Kompozitor Glinka (Russian: Композитор Глинка, "The Composer Glinka"; a remake of the 1946 film Glinka). The title role was played by Boris Smirnov.

On February 18, 1952, Richter made his debut as a conductor when he led the world premiere of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E minor with Mstislav Rostropovich as the soloist.^[9]

In 1960, even though he had a reputation for being "indifferent" to politics, Richter defied the authorities when he performed at Boris Pasternak's funeral.^[10] (He had played Prokofiev's Violin Sonata No. 1 at Joseph Stalin's funeral in 1953, with David Oistrakh.)

Having received the Stalin and Lenin prizes and become People's Artist of the RSFSR, he gave his first tour concerts in the USA in 1960, and in England and France in 1961.^[11]

Tour in the West[link]

The West first became aware of Richter through recordings made in the 1950s. One of Richter's first advocates in the West was Emil Gilels, who stated during his first tour of the United States that the critics (who were giving Gilels rave reviews) should "wait until you hear Richter."^[12]

Richter's first concerts in the West took place in May 1960, when he was allowed to play in Finland, and on October 15, 1960, in Chicago, where he played Brahms's Second Piano Concerto accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Erich Leinsdorf, creating a sensation. In a review, noted music Chicago Tribune critic Claudia Cassidy, who was known for her unkind reviews of established artists, recalled Richter first walking on stage hesitantly, looking vulnerable (as if about to be "devoured"), but then sitting at the piano and dispatching "the performance of a lifetime".^[13] Richter's 1960 tour of the United States culminated in a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall.^[14]

Richter, however, claimed to dislike performing in the United States.^[15] He also claimed to dislike the high expectations of American audiences. Following a 1970 incident at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, when Richter's performance alongside David Oistrakh was disrupted by anti-Soviet protests, Richter vowed never to return.^[12] Rumors of a planned return to Carnegie Hall surfaced in the last years of Richter's life, although it is not clear if there was any truth behind them.^[16]

In 1961, Richter played for the first time in London. His first recital, pairing works of Haydn and Prokofiev, was received with hostility by British critics. Notably, Neville Cardus concluded that Richter's playing was "provincial", and wondered why Richter had been invited to play in London, given that London had plenty of "second class" pianists of its own. Following a July 18, 1961, concert, where Richter performed both of Liszt's piano concertos, the critics reversed course.^[17]

In 1963, after searching in the Loire Valley, France, for a venue suitable for a music festival, Richter discovered La Grange de Meslay several kilometres north of Tours. The festival was established by Richter and became an annual event.

In 1970, Richter visited Japan for the first time traveling across Siberia by railway and boat as he disliked airplanes. He played Beethoven, Schumann, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Bartok and Rachmaninov, as well as works by Mozart and Beethoven with Japanese orchestras. Richter visited Japan eight times.

Later years[link]

While he very much enjoyed performing for an audience, Richter hated planning concerts years in advance, and in later life took to playing at very short notice in small, most often darkened halls, with only a small lamp lighting the score. Richter claimed that this setting helped the audience focus on the music being performed, rather than on extraneous and irrelevant matters such as the performer's grimaces and gestures.^[18]

In 1986, Richter embarked on a six-month tour of Siberia with his beloved Yamaha piano, giving possibly as many as 150 recitals, at times performing in small towns that did not even have a concert hall. It is said that after one such concert, the members of the audience, who had never before heard classical music performed, gathered in the middle of the hall and started swaying from side to side to celebrate the performer.^[19] It is said that in his last years Richter contemplated giving concerts free of charge.^[20]

An anecdote illustrates Richter's approach to performance in the last decade of his life. After reading a biography of Charlemagne (he was an avid reader), Richter had his secretary send a telegram to the director of the theater in Aachen, Charlemagne's favoured residence city and his burial place, stating "The Maestro has read a biography of Charlemagne and would like to play at Aquisgrana (Aix-la-Chapelle)". The performance took place shortly thereafter.^[21]

As late as 1995, Richter continued to perform some of the most demanding pieces in the pianistic repertoire, including Ravel's Miroirs cycle, Prokofiev's Second Sonata and Chopin's études and Ballade No. 4.^[22][23]

Richter's last recorded orchestral performance was of three Mozart concerti in 1994 with the Japan Shinsei Symphony Orchestra conducted by his old friend Rudolf Barshai.^[24]

Richter's last recital was a private gathering in Lübeck, Germany, on March 30, 1995. The program consisted of two Haydn sonatas and Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Beethoven, a piece for two pianos, which Richter performed with pianist Andreas Lucewicz.^[25]

Richter died at Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow from a heart attack, after he suffered from a depressed state of mind caused by his inability to perform in public. At the time of his death, he was rehearsing Schubert's Fünf Klavierstücke, D. 459.^[26]

Repertoire[link]

As Richter once put it, "My repertory runs to around eighty different programs, not counting chamber works."^[27] Indeed, Richter's repertoire ranged from Handel and Bach to Szymanowski, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, Britten, and Gershwin, although the works he did not play are curious (they include Bach's Goldberg Variations, Beethoven's Waldstein and Moonlight sonatas and Fourth and Fifth piano concertos, Schubert's A-major sonata D. 959, Prokofiev's Third piano concerto, Chopin's first piano concerto and second sonata and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3).^[28]

Richter worked tirelessly to learn new pieces. For instance, in the late 1980s, he learned Brahms's Paganini and Handel Variations, and in the 1990s, several of Debussy's études and Gershwin, and works by Bach and Mozart which he had not previously included in his programs.

Central to his repertoire were the works of Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, J. S. Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev and Debussy.^[28] He is said to have learned the second book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier by heart in one month.^[29]

He gave the premiere of Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7, which he learned in four days, and No. 9, which Prokofiev dedicated to Richter. Apart from his solo career, he also performed chamber music with partners such as Mstislav Rostropovich, Rudolf Barshai, David Oistrakh, Oleg Kagan, Yuri Bashmet, Natalia Gutman, Zoltán Kocsis, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Benjamin Britten and members of the Borodin Quartet. Richter also often accompanied singers such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier, Galina Pisarenko and his long-time companion Nina Dorliak.^[30]

Richter also conducted the premiere of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra. This was his sole appearance as a conductor. The soloist was Rostropovich, to whom the work was dedicated. Prokofiev also wrote his 1949 Cello Sonata in C for Rostropovich, and he and Richter premiered it in 1950. Richter himself was a passable cellist, and Rostropovich was a good pianist; at one concert in Moscow at which he accompanied Rostropovich on the piano, they exchanged instruments for part of the program.

Approach to performance[link]

Richter explained his approach to performance as follows: "The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer's intentions to the letter. He doesn't add anything that isn't already in the work. If he is talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn't dominate the music, but should dissolve into it."^[31] Or, similarly: "I am not a complete idiot, but whether from weakness or laziness have no talent for thinking. I know only how to reflect: I am a mirror . . . Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to the one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart."^[32]

Richter's belief that musicians should "carry ... out the composer's intentions to the letter", led him to be critical of others and, most often, himself.^[31] After attending a recital of Murray Perahia, where Perahia performed Chopin's Third Piano Sonata without observing the first movement repeat, Richter asked him backstage to explain the omission.^[33] Similarly, after Richter realized that he had been playing a wrong note in Bach's Italian Concerto for decades, he insisted that the following disclaimer/apology be printed on a CD containing a performance thereof: "Just now Sviatoslav Richter realized, much to his regret, that he always made a mistake in the third measure before the end of the second part of the 'Italian Concerto'. As a matter of fact, through forty years -- and no musician or technician ever pointed it out to him -- he played 'F-sharp' rather than 'F'. The same mistake can be found in the previous recording made by Maestro Richter in the fifties."^[34]

Recordings[link]

Despite his large discography, Richter disliked the recording process,^[35] and most of Richter's recordings originate from live performances. Thus, his live recitals from Moscow (1948), Warsaw (1954 and 1972), Sofia (1958), New York City (1960), Leipzig (1963), Aldeburgh (multiple years), Prague (multiple years), Salzburg (1977) and Amsterdam (1986), are hailed as some of the finest documents of his playing, as are other myriad live recordings issued prior to and since his death on labels including Music & Arts, BBC Legends, Philips, Russian Revelation, and more recently Ankh productions.

Other critically acclaimed live recordings by Richter include performances of Scriabin's selected etudes, preludes and sonatas (multiple performances, different years), Schumann's C major Fantasy (multiple performances, different years), Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata (Moscow, 1960), Schubert's B-flat Sonata (multiple performances, different years), Ravel's Miroirs (Prague, 1965), Liszt's B minor Sonata (multiple performances, 1965–66), Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata (multiple performances, 1975) and selected preludes by Rachmaninoff (multiple performances, different years) and Debussy (multiple performances, different years).^[36]

However, despite his professed hatred for the studio, Richter took the recording process quite seriously.^[37] For instance, after a long recording session for Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, for which he had used a Bösendorfer piano, Richter listened to the tapes and, dissatisfied with his performance, told the recording engineer "Well, I think we'll remake it on the Steinway after all".^[38] Similarly, during a recording session for Schumann's Toccata, Richter reportedly chose to play this piece (which Schumann himself considered "among the most difficult pieces ever written"^[39]) several times in a row, without taking any breaks, in order to preserve the spontaneity of his interpretation.^{[citation needed]}

According to Falk Schwartz and John Berrie's 1983 article "Sviatoslav Richter -- A Discography",^[40] in the 1970s Richter announced his intention of recording his complete solo repertoire "on some 50 discs". This "complete" Richter project did not come to fruition, however, although twelve LPs worth of recordings were pressed between 1970 and 1973 and were subsequently re-issued (in CD format) by Olympia (various composers, 10 CDs) and RCA (Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier).

In 1961, Richter's recording with Erich Leinsdorf and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Performance - Concerto or Instrumental Soloist. That recording is still considered a landmark (despite Richter's claim he was dissatisfied with it),^[41] as are his studio recordings of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, Liszt's two Piano Concertos, Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto and Schumann's Toccata, among many others.^[42]

Honours and awards[link]

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the Russian Wikipedia.

• Stalin Prize (1950);
• People's Artist of the RSFSR (1955);
• Grammy Award (1960);
• Lenin Prize (1961);
• People's Artist of the USSR (1961);
• Robert Schumann Prize (1968);
• Honorary Doctor of the University of Strasbourg (1977);
• Léonie Sonning Music Prize (1986; Denmark);
• Hero of Socialist Labour (1975);
• Three Orders of Lenin (1965, 1975, 1985);
• Order of the October Revolution (1980);
• Glinka State Prize of the RSFSR (1987) - for concert programmes in 1986, performed in the cities of Siberia and the Far East;
• Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 4th class (1995);
• Russian Federation State Prize (1996);
• Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (France)
• Doctor of Music, honoris causa Oxford University^[43]
• Voted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012^[44]

In film[link]

Richter appeared in a 1952 Soviet film playing Liszt in a Kompozitor Glinka, (Russian: Композитор Глинка).

Quotations[link]

Memorable statements about Richter[link]

The Italian critic Piero Rattalino has asserted that the only pianists comparable to Richter in the history of piano performance were Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni.^[45]

Glenn Gould called Richter "one of the most powerful communicators the world of music has produced in our time".^[46]

Nathan Milstein described Richter in his memoir "From Russia to the West" as the following: "Richter was certainly a marvelous pianist but not as impeccable as he was reputed to be. His music making was too dry for me. In Richter's interpretation of Ravel's Jeux d'eau, instead of flowing water you hear frozen icicles."^[47]

Van Cliburn attended a Richter recital in 1958 in the Soviet Union. He reportedly cried during the recital and, upon returning to the United States, described Richter's playing as "the most powerful piano playing I have ever heard".^[48]

Arthur Rubinstein described his first exposure to Richter as follows: "It really wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Then at some point I noticed my eyes growing moist: tears began rolling down my cheeks."^[46]

Heinrich Neuhaus described Richter as follows: "His singular ability to grasp the whole and at the same time miss none of the smallest details of a composition suggests a comparison with an eagle who from his great height can see as far as the horizon and yet single out the tiniest detail of the landscape."^[49]

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of Richter: "Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The enormity of his talent staggers and enraptures. All the phenomena of musical art are accessible to him."^[50]

Vladimir Sofronitsky proclaimed that Richter was a "genius", prompting Richter to respond that Sofronitsky was a "god".^[51]

Vladimir Horowitz said: "Of the Russian pianists, I like only one, Richter."^[52]

Pierre Boulez wrote of Richter: "His personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument."^[53]

Marlene Dietrich, who was Richter's friend, wrote in her autobiography, Marlene: "One evening the audience sat around him on the stage. While he was playing a piece, a woman directly behind him collapsed and died on the spot. She was carried out of the hall. I was deeply impressed by this incident and thought to myself: “What an enviable fate, to die while Richter is playing! What a strong feeling for the music this woman must have had when she breathed out her life!” But Richter did not share this opinion, he was shaken".

Gramophone critic Bryce Morrison described Richter as follows: "Idiosyncratic, plain-speaking, heroic, reserved, lyrical, virtuosic and perhaps above all, profoundly enigmatic, Sviatoslav Richter remains one of the greatest recreative artists of all time."^[54]

Memorable statements by Richter[link]

On listening to Bach: "It does no harm to listen to Bach from time to time, even if only from a hygienic standpoint."^[55]

On Scriabin: "Scriabin isn't the sort of composer whom you'd regard as your daily bread, but is a heavy liqueur on which you can get drunk periodically, a poetical drug, a crystal that's easily broken."^[56]

On picking small venues for performance: "Put a small piano in a truck and drive out on country roads; take time to discover new scenery; stop in a pretty place where there is a good church; unload the piano and tell the residents; give a concert; offer flowers to the people who have been so kind as to attend; leave again."^[57]

On his plan to perform without a fee: "Music must be given to those who love it. I want to give free concerts; that's the answer."^[58]

On Neuhaus: "I learned a lot from him, even though he kept saying that there was nothing he could teach me. Music is written to be played and listened to and has always seemed to me to be able to manage without words... This was exactly the case with Heinrich Neuhaus. In his presence I was almost always reduced to total silence. This was an extremely good thing, as it meant that we concentrated exclusively on the music. Above all, he taught me the meaning of silence and the meaning of singing. He said I was incredibly obstinate and did only what I wanted to. It's true that I've only ever played what I wanted. And so he left me to do as I liked."^[59]

On playing: "...I don't play for the audience, I play for myself, and if I derive any satisfaction from it, then the audience, too, is content." ^[60]

Anecdotes[link]

• Richter usually refused to play piano transcriptions in concert, although on occasion he would perform opera transcriptions for his friends. In the 1940s, he apparently performed his own transcription of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for a group of friends in one sitting. Similarly, after being a witness at Riccardo Muti's wedding, Richter played from memory the entire first act of Puccini's Madama Butterfly for a small group of wedding guests.^{[citation needed]}

• Born in 1915 to a father of German extraction and a Russian noble mother, Richter recounts how he told Herbert von Karajan that he (Richter) was "a German, too", and Karajan replied "then I am a Chinese". Richter commented on Karajan's reaction by saying, "How do you like that?" (Karajan was of part-Greek and Slovenian descent.)

Media[link]

	Wanderer Fantasy noicon In this 1963 studio recording of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, Richter demonstrates his barnstorming technique and ability to control all aspects of his playing to bring out the structural features of a work as he moves from the end of the third movement into the beginning of the finale.
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References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Rasmussen, Karl Aage (2007). Svjatoslav Richter - Pianist. Gyldendal, Copenhagen. ISBN 978-87-02-03430-1. 
• Rasmussen, Karl Aage (2010). Szvjatoszlav Richter - A zongorista. Rozsavolgyi es Tarsa, Budapest. ISBN 978-963-87764-8-8. 
• Rasmussen, Karl Aage (2010). Sviatoslav Richter - Pianist. Northeastern University Press, Boston. ISBN 978-1-55553-710-4. 
• Monsaingeon, Bruno (2001). Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-571-20553-4. 
• Monsaingeon, Bruno (1998), Richter, the Enigma. Video interview-documentary. OCLC 41148757
• Rattalino, Piero (2005). Sviatoslav Richter. Il Visionario. Zecchini Editore. ISBN 88-87203-35-0. 

External links[link]

• Sviatoslav Richter at the Internet Movie Database
• Sviatoslav Richter at Find a Grave
• Website dedicated to Sviatoslav Richter, includes an extensive discography
• RECORDED RICHTER, complete discography that includes currently unavailable recordings and private recordings
• Brief obituary of Nina Dorliak
• Paul Geffen, 1999: Vita of Sviatoslav Richter
• Pete Taylor, 2010: Concert list program with Google Earth maps

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, 1870

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Моде́ст Петро́вич Мýсoргский; IPA: [mɐˈdʲest ˈmusərkskʲɪj]; 21 March [O.S. 9 March] 1839 – 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1881) was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.

Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes. Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.

For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have recently come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available.

Name[link]

The spelling and pronunciation of the composer's name has been a matter of some controversy.

The family name is derived from a 15th or 16th century ancestor, Roman Vasilyevich Monastïryov, who was mentioned in the Velvet Book, the 16th century genealogy of Russian boyars. Roman Vasilyevich bore the nickname "Musorga", and was the grandfather of the first 'Mussorgsky'. The composer is of the lineage of Ryurik, the legendary founder of the Russian state.^[1]

In Mussorgsky family documents, the spelling of the name varies: 'Musarsky', 'Musersky', 'Muserskoy', 'Musirskoy', 'Musorsky', and 'Musursky'. According to his baptismal record the composer's name is 'Musersky'.^[2]

In early (up to 1858) letters to Miliy Balakirev, the composer signed his name 'Musorsky' (Russian: Мусoрский, Musorskiy).^[3] The 'g' made its first appearance in a letter to Balakirev in 1863.^[4] Mussorgsky used this new spelling (Russian: Мусoргский, Musorgskiy) to the end of his life, but occasionally reverted to the earlier 'Musorsky'.^[5][6] The addition of the 'g' to the name was likely initiated by the composer's elder brother Filaret to obscure the resemblance of the name's root to an unsavory Russian word:^[7]

мýсoр (músor) — n. m. debris, rubbish, refuse^[8]

Mussorgsky apparently did not take the new spelling seriously, and played on the 'rubbish' connection in letters to Vladimir Stasov and Stasov's family, routinely signing his name 'Musoryanin', or 'garbage-dweller' (cf. dvoryanin: 'nobleman').^[9]

The Western convention of doubling the first 's', which is not observed in scholarly literature (e.g. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians), likely arose because in many Western European languages a single intervocalic 's' often becomes voiced to 'z' (e.g. 'music'), unlike Slavic languages where it remains unvoiced.

The first syllable of the name originally received the stress (i.e. 'MÚS-ər-ski'), and does so to this day in Russia and in the composer's home district. The mutability of the second-syllable vowel in the versions of the name recorded by the family documents mentioned above is evidence that this syllable did not receive the stress.^[10]

The addition of the 'g' and the accompanying shift in stress to the second syllable (i.e. 'Mu-SÓRK-ski'), sometimes described as a Polish variant, was supported by Filaret Mussorgsky's descendants until his line was extinguished in the 20th century. Their example was followed by many influential Russians, such as Fyodor Shalyapin, Nikolay Golovanov, and Tikhon Khrennikov, who, perhaps dismayed that the great composer's name was "reminiscent of garbage", supported the erroneous second-syllable stress that has also become entrenched in the West.^[11]

Life[link]

Early years[link]

Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, Toropets, Pskov region, Imperial Russia, 400 km (250 mi) south of Saint Petersburg. His wealthy and land-owning family, the noble family of Mussorgsky, is reputedly descended from the first Ruthenian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk. At age six Mussorgsky began receiving piano lessons from his mother, herself a trained pianist. His progress was sufficiently rapid that three years later he was able to perform a John Field concerto and works by Franz Liszt for family and friends. At 10, he and his brother were taken to Saint Petersburg to study at the elite Peterschule (St. Peter's School). While there, Modest studied the piano with the noted Anton Gerke. In 1852, the 12-year-old Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled "Porte-enseigne Polka" at his father's expense.

Mussorgsky's parents planned the move to Saint Petersburg so that both their sons would renew the family tradition of military service.^[12] To this end, Mussorgsky entered the Cadet School of the Guards at age 13. Sharp controversy had arisen over the educational attitudes at the time of both this institute and its director, a General Sutgof.^[13] All agreed the Cadet School could be a brutal place, especially for new recruits.^[14] More tellingly for Mussorgsky, it was likely where he began his eventual path to alcoholism.^[14] According to a former student, singer and composer Nikolai Kompaneisky, Sutgof "was proud when a cadet returned from leave drunk with champagne."^[15]

Music remained important to him, however. Sutgof's daughter was also a pupil of Herke, and Mussorgsky was allowed to attend lessons with her.^[13] His skills as a pianist made him much in demand by fellow-cadets; for them he would play dances interspersed with his own improvisations.^[16] In 1856 Mussorgsky – who had developed a strong interest in history and studied German philosophy – successfully graduated from the Cadet School. Following family tradition he received a commission with the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard.^[16]

Maturity[link]

In October 1856 the 17-year-old Mussorgsky met the 22-year-old Alexander Borodin while both men served at a military hospital in Saint Petersburg. The two were soon on good terms.^[17] Borodin later remembered,

His little uniform was spic and span, close-fitting, his feet turned outwards, his hair smoothed down and greased, his nails perfectly cut, his hands well groomed like a lord's. His manners were elegant, aristocratic: his speech likewise, delivered through somewhat clenched teeth, interspersed with French phrases, rather precious. There was a touch—though very moderate—of foppishness. His politeness and good manners were exceptional. The ladies made a fuss of him. He sat at the piano and, throwing up his hands coquettishly, played with extreme sweetness and grace (etc) extracts from Trovatore, Traviata, and so on, and around him buzzed in chorus: "Charmant, délicieux!" and suchlike. I met Modest Petrovich three or four times at Popov's in this way, both on duty and at the hospital."^[18]

Alexander Dargomyzhsky

More portentous was Mussorgsky's introduction that winter to Alexander Dargomyzhsky, at that time the most important Russian composer after Mikhail Glinka. Dargomyzhsky was impressed with Mussorgsky's pianism. As a result, Mussorgsky became a fixture at Dargomyzhsky's soirées. There, critic Vladimir Stasov later recalled, he began "his true musical life."^[19]

Over the next two years at Dargomyzhsky's, Mussorgsky met several figures of importance in Russia's cultural life, among them Stasov, César Cui (a fellow officer), and Mily Balakirev. Balakirev had an especially strong impact. Within days he took it upon himself to help shape Mussorgsky's fate as a composer. He recalled to Stasov, "Because I am not a theorist, I could not teach him harmony (as, for instance Rimsky-Korsakov now teaches it) ... [but] I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both Beethoven symphonies [as piano duets] and much else (Schumann, Schubert, Glinka, and others), analyzing the form."^[20] Up to this point Mussorgsky had known nothing but piano music; his knowledge of more radical recent music was virtually non-existent. Balakirev started filling these gaps in Mussorgsky's knowledge.^[21]

In 1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev, Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music.^[22] He also suffered a painful crisis at this time. This may have had a spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev the young man referred to "mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity"), but its exact nature will probably never be known. In 1859, the 20-year-old gained valuable theatrical experience by assisting in a production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; he also met Anatoly Lyadov and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow – after which he professed a love of "everything Russian".

In spite of this epiphany, Mussorgsky's music still leaned more toward foreign models; a four-hand piano sonata which he produced in 1860 contains his only movement in sonata form. Nor is any 'nationalistic' impulse easily discernible in the incidental music for Serov's play Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the Intermezzo in modo classico for piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867). The latter was the only important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: the reasons for this probably lie in the painful re-emergence of his subjective crisis in 1860 and the purely objective difficulties which resulted from the emancipation of the serfs the following year – as a result of which the family was deprived of half its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment.

Gustave Flaubert. Mussorgsky started an opera based on his Salammbô but did not finish it.

By this time, Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influence of Balakirev and was largely teaching himself. In 1863 he began an opera – Salammbô – on which he worked between 1863 and 1866 before losing interest in the project. During this period he had returned to Saint Petersburg and was supporting himself as a low-grade civil-servant while living in a six-man "commune". In a heady artistic and intellectual atmosphere, he read and discussed a wide range of modern artistic and scientific ideas – including those of the provocative writer Chernyshevsky, known for the bold assertion that, in art, "form and content are opposites". Under such influences he came more and more to embrace the ideal of artistic realism and all that it entailed, whether this concerned the responsibility to depict life "as it is truly lived"; the preoccupation with the lower strata of society; or the rejection of repeating, symmetrical musical forms as insufficiently true to the unrepeating, unpredictable course of "real life".

	Night on Bald Mountain Performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra. Courtesy of Musopen
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"Real life" affected Mussorgsky painfully in 1865, when his mother died; it was at this point that the composer had his first serious bout of either alcoholism or dipsomania. The 26-year-old was, however, on the point of writing his first realistic songs (including "Hopak" and "Darling Savishna", both of them composed in 1866 and among his first "real" publications the following year). 1867 was also the year in which he finished the original orchestral version of his Night on Bald Mountain (which, however, Balakirev criticised and refused to conduct, with the result that it was never performed during Mussorgsky's lifetime).

Peak[link]

Mussorgsky's career as a civil servant was by no means stable or secure: though he was assigned to various posts and even received a promotion in these early years, in 1867 he was declared 'supernumerary' – remaining 'in service', but receiving no wages. Decisive developments were occurring in his artistic life, however. Although it was in 1867 that Stasov first referred to the 'kuchka' ('The Five') of Russian composers loosely grouped around Balakirev, Mussorgsky was by then ceasing to seek Balakirev's approval and was moving closer to the older Alexander Dargomyzhsky .

Ivan Melnikov as the title character in Boris Godunov, 1874

Since 1866 Dargomïzhsky had been working on his opera The Stone Guest, a version of the Don Juan story with a Pushkin text that he declared would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that abolished the 'unrealistic' division between aria and recitative in favour of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two.

Under the influence of this work (and the ideas of Georg Gottfried Gervinus, according to whom "the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech"), Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of Nikolai Gogol's The Marriage (Zhenitba), with his priority being to render into music the natural accents and patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue. This work marked an extreme position in Mussorgsky's pursuit of naturalistic word-setting: he abandoned it unorchestrated after reaching the end of his 'Act 1', and though its characteristically 'Mussorgskyian' declamation is to be heard in all his later vocal music, the naturalistic mode of vocal writing more and more became merely one expressive element among many.

Fyodor Komissarzhevsky as The Pretender in Boris Godunov

A few months after abandoning Zhenitba, the 29-year-old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of Boris Godunov. This he did, assembling and shaping a text from Pushkin's play and Karamzin's history. He completed the large-scale score the following year while living with friends and working for the Forestry Department. In 1871, however, the finished opera was rejected for theatrical performance, apparently because of its lack of any 'prima donna' role. Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged 'second version'. During the next year, which he spent sharing rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov, he made changes that went beyond those requested by the theatre. In this version the opera was accepted, probably in May 1872, and three excerpts were staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1873. It is often asserted that in 1872 the opera was rejected a second time, but no specific evidence for this exists.

By the time of the first production of Boris Godunov in February 1874, Mussorgsky had taken part in the ill-fated Mlada project (in the course of which he had made a choral version of his Night on Bald Mountain) and had begun Khovanshchina. Though far from being a critical success – and in spite of receiving only a dozen or so performances – the popular reaction in favour of Boris made this the peak of Mussorgsky's career.

Decline[link]

From this peak a pattern of decline becomes increasingly apparent. Already the Balakirev circle was disintegrating. Mussorgsky was especially bitter about this. He wrote to Vladimir Stasov, "[T]he mighty Koocha has degenerated into soulless traitors."^[23] In drifting away from his old friends, Mussorgsky had been seen to fall victim to 'fits of madness' that could well have been alcoholism-related. His friend Viktor Hartmann had died, and his relative and recent roommate Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (who furnished the poems for the song-cycle Sunless and would go on to provide those for the Songs and Dances of Death) had moved away to get married.

Detail from Ilya Repin's celebrated portrait of Mussorgsky, painted 2–5 March 1881, only a few days before the composer's death.

While alcoholism was Mussorgsky's personal weakness, it was also a behavior pattern considered typical for those of Mussorgsky's generation who wanted to oppose the establishment and protest through extreme forms of behavior.^[24] One contemporary notes, "an intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a 'pose,' for the best people of the [eighteen-]sixties." Another writes, "Talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink."^[25] Mussorgsky spent day and night in a Saint Petersburg tavern of low repute, the Maly Yaroslavets, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts. He and his fellow drinkers idealized their alcoholism, perhaps seeing it as ethical and aesthetic opposition. This bravado, however, led to little more than isolation and eventual self-destruction.^[24]

	Pictures at an Exhibition (first part of three) Pictures at an Exhibition (second part of three) Pictures at an Exhibition (third part of three) Arrangement for two pianos
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For a time Mussorgsky was able to maintain his creative output: his compositions from 1874 include Sunless, the Khovanschina Prelude, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (in memory of Hartmann); he also began work on another opera based on Gogol, The Fair at Sorochyntsi (for which he produced another choral version of Night on Bald Mountain).

Grave of Modest Mussorgsky in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg

In the years that followed, Mussorgsky's decline became increasingly steep. Although now part of a new circle of eminent personages that included singers, medical men and actors, he was increasingly unable to resist drinking, and a succession of deaths among his closest associates caused him great pain. At times, however, his alcoholism would seem to be in check, and among the most powerful works composed during his last 6 years are the four Songs and Dances of Death. His civil service career was made more precarious by his frequent 'illnesses' and absences, and he was fortunate to obtain a transfer to a post (in the Office of Government Control) where his music-loving superior treated him with great leniency – in 1879 even allowing him to spend 3 months touring 12 cities as a singer's accompanist.

The decline could not be halted, however. In 1880 he was finally dismissed from government service. Aware of his destitution, one group of friends organised a stipend designed to support the completion of Khovanschina; another group organised a similar fund to pay him to complete The Fair at Sorochyntsi. However, neither work was completed (although Khovanschina, in piano score with only two numbers uncomposed, came close to being finished).

In early 1881 a desperate Mussorgsky declared to a friend that there was 'nothing left but begging', and suffered four seizures in rapid succession. Though he found a comfortable room in a good hospital – and for several weeks even appeared to be rallying – the situation was hopeless. Repin painted the famous red-nosed portrait in what were to be the last days of the composer's life: a week after his 42nd birthday, he was dead. He was interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg.

Mussorgsky, like others of 'The Five', was perceived as extremist by the Emperor and much of his court. This may have been the reason Tsar Alexander III personally crossed off Boris Godunov from the list of proposed pieces for the Imperial Opera in 1888.^[26]

Works[link]

Mussorgsky's works, while strikingly novel, are stylistically Romantic and draw heavily on Russian musical themes. He has been the inspiration for many Russian composers, including most notably Dmitri Shostakovich (in his late symphonies) and Sergei Prokofiev (in his operas).

In 1868/9 he composed the opera Boris Godunov, about the life of the Russian tsar, but it was rejected by the Mariinsky Opera. Mussorgsky thus edited the work, making a final version in 1874. The early version is considered darker and more concise than the later version, but also more crude. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestrated the opera in 1896 and revised it in 1908. The opera has also been revised by other composers, notably Shostakovich, who made two versions, one for film and one for stage.

Khovanshchina, a more obscure opera, was unfinished and unperformed when Mussorgsky died, but it was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and received its premiere in 1886 in Saint Petersburg. This opera, too, was revised by Shostakovich. The Fair at Sorochyntsi, another opera, was left incomplete at his death but a dance excerpt, the Gopak, is frequently performed.

Mussorgsky's most imaginative and frequently performed work is the cycle of piano pieces describing paintings in sound called Pictures at an Exhibition. This composition, best known through an orchestral arrangement by Maurice Ravel, was written in commemoration of his friend, the architect Viktor Hartmann.

One of Mussorgsky's most striking pieces is the single-movement orchestral work Night on Bald Mountain. The work enjoyed broad popular recognition in the 1940s when it was featured, in tandem with Schubert's 'Ave Maria', in the Disney film Fantasia.

Among the composer's other works are a number of songs, including three song cycles: The Nursery (1872), Sunless (1874) and Songs and Dances of Death (1877); plus Mephistopheles' Song of the Flea and many others. Important early recordings of songs by Mussorgsky were made by tenor Vladimir Rosing in the 1920s and 30s.^[27] Other recordings have been made by Boris Christoff between 1951 and 1957 and by Sergei Leiferkus in 1993.^[28]

Portrait gallery[link]

Criticism[link]

Contemporary opinions of Mussorgsky as a composer and person varied from positive to ambiguous to negative. Mussorgsky's eventual supporters, Stasov and Balakirev, initially registered strongly negative impressions of the composer. Stasov wrote Balakirev, in an 1863 letter, "I have no use whatever for Mussorgsky. All in him is flabby and dull. He is, I think, a perfect idiot. Were he left to his own devices and no longer under your strict supervision, he would soon run to seed as all the others have done. There is nothing in him."

Balakirev agreed: "Yes, Mussorgsky is little short of an idiot."

Mixed impressions are recorded by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, colleagues of Mussorgsky who, unlike him, made their living as composers. Both praised his talent while expressing disappointment with his technique. About Mussorgsky's scores Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, "They were very defective, teeming with clumsy, disconnected harmonies, shocking part-writing, amazingly illogical modulations or intolerably long stretches without ever a modulation, and bad scoring. ...what is needed is an edition for practical and artistic purposes, suitable for performances and for those who wish to admire Mussorgsky's genius, not to study his idiosyncrasies and sins against art."

Rimsky-Korsakov's own editions of Mussorgsky's works met with some criticism of their own. Rimsky-Korsakov's student, Anatoly Lyadov, found them to be lacking, writing "It is easy enough to correct Mussorgsky's irregularities. The only trouble is that when this is done, the character and originality of the music are done away with, and the composer's individuality vanishes."

Tchaikovsky, in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck was also critical of Mussorgsky: "Mussorgsky you very rightly call a hopeless case. In talent he is perhaps superior to all the [other members of The Five], but his nature is narrow-minded, devoid of any urge towards self-perfection, blindly believing in the ridiculous theories of his circle and in his own genius. In addition, he has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, roughness.... He flaunts ... his illiteracy, takes pride in his ignorance, mucks along anyhow, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent which are, moreover, not devoid of originality."

Not all of the criticism of Mussorgsky was negative. In a letter to Pauline Viardot, Ivan Turgenev recorded his impressions of a concert he attended in which he met Mussorgsky and heard two of his songs and excerpts from Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina):

Today I was invited to have dinner in old Petrov's house: I gave him a copy of your song, which pleased him greatly [...] Petrov still admires you as enthusiastically as in the past. In his drawing-room there's a bust of you, crowned with laurels, which still bears a strong resemblance to you. I also met his wife (the contralto) [Anna Vorobyova-Petrova, who created the role of Vanya in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar]. She is sixty years old... After dinner she sang two quite original and touching romances by Musorgsky (the author of Boris Godunov, who was also present), in a voice that is still young and charming and has a very expressive timbre. She sang them wonderfully! I was moved to tears, I assure you. Then Mussorgsky played for us and sang, with a rather hoarse voice, some excerpts from his opera and the other one that he is composing now – and the music seemed to me very characteristic and interesting, upon my honour! Old Petrov sang the role of the old profligate and vagabond monk [Varlaam's song about Ivan the Terrible] – it was splendid! I am starting to believe that there really is a future in all of this. Outwardly, Mussorgsky reminds one of Glinka – it is just that his nose is all red (unfortunately, he is an alcoholic), he has pale but beautiful eyes, and fine lips which are squeezed into a fat face with flabby cheeks. I liked him: he is very natural and unaffected, and does not put on any airs. He played us the introduction to his second opera [Khovanshchina]. It is a bit Wagnerian, but full of feeling and beautiful. Forward, forward! Russian artists!!

Western perceptions of Mussorgsky changed with the European premiere of Boris Godunov in 1908. Before the premiere, he was regarded as an eccentric in the west. Critic Edward Dannreuther, wrote, in the 1905 edition of The Oxford History of Music, "Mussorgsky, in his vocal efforts, appears wilfully eccentric. His style impresses the Western ear as barbarously ugly."

However, after the premiere, views on Mussorgsky's music changed drastically. Gerald Abraham, a musicologist, and an authority on Mussorgsky: "As a musical translator of words and all that can be expressed in words, of psychological states, and even physical movement, he is unsurpassed; as an absolute musician he was hopelessly limited, with remarkably little ability to construct pure music or even a purely musical texture."

Footnotes[link]

Sources[link]

• Brown, David, Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ISBN 0-19-816587-0.
• Musorgskiy, M., M. P. Musorgskiy: Letters, Gordeyeva, Ye. (editor), 2nd edition, Moscow: Music (publisher), 1984 [Мусоргский, М. П., М. П. Мусоргский: Письма, Гордеева, Е., Москва: Музыка, 1984]
• Smirnitsky, A., Russian-English Dictionary, Moscow: The Russian Language (publisher), 1985 [Смирницкий, А. И., Русско-английский словарь, Москва: Русский язык, 1985]
• Taruskin, R., Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993
• Volkov, Solomon, tr. Bouis, Antonina W., Saint Petersburg: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1995

External links[link]

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