Lalla Rookh is an Oriental romance by Thomas Moore, published in 1817. The title is taken from the name of the heroine of the frame tale, the daughter of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The work consists of four narrative poems with a connecting tale in prose.

Engaged to the young king of Bactria, Lalla Rookh goes forth to meet him, but falls in love with Feramorz, a poet from her entourage. The bulk of the work consists of four interpolated tales sung by the poet: The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan (loosely based upon the story of Al-Muqanna), Paradise and the Peri, The Fire-Worshippers, and The Light of the Harem. When Lalla Rookh enters the palace of her bridegroom she swoons away, but revives at the sound of a familiar voice. She awakes with rapture to find that the poet she loves is none other than the prince to whom she is engaged.

The name Lalla Rookh, or Lala-Rukh (), means "tulip cheeked" and is an endearment frequently used in Persian poetry.

Lalla Rookh was the basis of number of musical settings, including the song I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby by Frederic Clay & W. G. Wills (1877). It is also the basis of the operas Lalla-Rûkh, festival pageant (1821) by Gaspare Spontini, partly reworked into Nurmahal oder das Rosenfest von Caschmir (1822), Feramors by Anton Rubinstein (1862), and "The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan" by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1879), and an opéra-comique by Félicien David (1862). One of the interpolated tales, Paradise and the Peri, was set as a choral-orchestral work by Robert Schumann (1843).

References

External links

Lalla Rookh prepared for the web by Fran Pritchett

The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore, including Lalla Rookh

Category:Mughal Empire Category:Irish poems Category:Narrative poems Category:1817 poems

ru:Лалла-Рук

Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein () () was a Russian-Jewish pianist, composer and conductor. As a pianist he was regarded as a rival of Franz Liszt, and he ranks amongst the great keyboard virtuosos. He also founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which, together with Moscow Conservatory founded by his brother Nikolai Rubinstein, helped establish a reputation for musical skill among the subjects of the Tsar of Russia.

Biography

Prodigy

Rubinstein was born to Jewish parents in the village of Vikhvatinets in the district of Podolsk, Russia, (now known as Ofatinţi in Transnistria, Republic of Moldova), on the Dniestr River, about 150 kilometers northwest of Odessa. Before he was 5 years old, his paternal grandfather ordered all members of the Rubinstein family to convert from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy.

Rubinstein, brought up as a Christian at least in name, lived in a household where three languages were spoken—Yiddish, Russian and German. Much later, when his musical "Russianness" was called into question by musical nationalist Mily Balakirev and others in The Five, Rubinstein might have been thinking of this part of his childhood, among other things, when he wrote in his notebooks,

Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew. Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary. My conclusion is that I am neither fish nor fowl – a pitiful individual.

Conversion allowed the Rubinsteins to travel freely, something not permitted practicing Jews in Russia at the time. Rubinstein's father opened a pencil factory in Moscow. His mother, a competent musician, began giving him piano lessons at five. He apparently progressed rapidly. Within a year and a half, Alexander Villoing, a leading Moscow piano teacher, heard and accepted Rubinstein as a non-paying student. Rubinstein made his first public appearance, a charity benefit concert, in Moscow's Petrovsky Park at the age of nine. Later that year Rubinstein's mother sent him, accompanied by Villoing, to enroll at the Paris Conservatoire. Director Luigi Cherubini, however, refused an audition to Rubinstein, due to the many young prodigies who had flooded the Paris musical scene. Rubinstein and Villoing remained in Paris a year. In December 1840, Rubinstein played in the Salle Érard for an audience that included Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt. Chopin invited Rubinstein to his studio and played for him. Liszt acclaimed the young Rubinstein as his successor but advised Villoing to take him to Germany to study composition. Instead of following Liszt's advice, Villoing took Rubinstein on an extended concert tour of Europe and Western Russia. They finally returned to Moscow in June 1843, after an absence of three and a half years. Shortly before the pair returned, Liszt had played in Saint Petersburg and reiterated to Rubinstein's mother the advice which he had given Villoing. Determined to follow Liszt's advice, she wanted a thorough grounding in musical theory for both Rubinstein and his younger brother Nikolai. To raise money for this, she sent Rubinstein and Villoing on a tour of Russia. When the tour ended, the brothers were dispatched to Saint Petersburg to play for Tsar Nicholas I and the Imperial family at the Winter Palace. Anton was 14 years old; Nikolai was eight.

Berlin

In spring 1844, Rubinstein, Nikolai, his mother and his sister Luba travelled to Berlin. Here he met with, and was supported by, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Mendelssohn, who had heard Rubinstein when he had toured with Villoing, said he needed no further piano study but sent Nikolai to Theodor Kullak for instruction. Meyerbeer directed both boys to Siegfried Dehn for work in composition and theory. Also, a Greek Orthodox priest instructed the two boys in the catechism and Russian grammar, and both boys studied other subjects. These non-musical lessons were short-lived. Still, Rubinstein grew up to be a highly cultured, widely-read artist. He was fluent in Russian, German, French and English and could read Italian and Spanish literature.

Word came in the summer of 1846 that Rubinstein's father was gravely ill. Rubinstein was left in Berlin while his mother, sister and brother returned to Russia. At first he continued his studies with Dehn, then with Adolf Bernhard Marx, while composing in earnest. Now 17, he knew he could no longer pass as a child prodigy. He sought out Liszt in Vienna, hoping Liszt would accept him as a pupil.

Liszt's reaction to Rubinstein in Vienna was highly atypical of his famously generous nature. After Rubinstein had played his audition, Liszt is reported to have coldly said, "A talented man must win the goal of his ambition by his own unassisted efforts." At this point, Rubinstein was living in acute poverty. Liszt did nothing to help him. Other calls Rubinstein made to potential patrons came to no avail.

Rubinstein began giving piano lessons, continued composing, even wrote literary, philosophical and critical essays. After a year in Vienna he gave a concert in the Bösendörfersaal. It did not go well; months of composition had severely reduced his time practicing the piano. Together with a flautist he embarked on a concert tour of Hungary, then returned to Berlin and continued giving lessons.

Back to Russia

The Revolution of 1848 forced Rubinstein back to Russia. Spending the next five years mainly in Saint Petersburg, Rubinstein taught, gave concerts and performed frequently at the Imperial court. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, sister to Tsar Nicholas I, became his most devoted patroness. By 1852, he had become a leading figure in Saint Petersburg's musical life, performing as a soloist and collaborating with some of the outstanding instrumentalists and vocalists who came to the Russian capital.

He also composed assiduously. After a number of delays, including some difficulties with the censor, Rubinstein's first opera, Dmitry Donskoy (now lost except for the overture), was performed at the Bolshoy Theater in St. Petersburg in 1852. Three one-act operas written for Elena Pavlovna followed. He also played and conducted several of his works, including the Ocean Symphony in its original four-movement form, his Second Piano Concerto and several solo works. It was partly his lack of success on the Russian opera stage that led Rubinstein to consider going abroad once more to secure his reputation as a serious artist.

Abroad once more

In 1854 Rubinstein began a four-year concert tour of Europe. This was his first major concert tour in a decade. Now 24, he felt ready to offer himself to the public as a fully developed pianist as well as a composer of worth. He very shortly reestablished his reputation as a virtuoso. Ignaz Moscheles wrote in 1855 what would become a widespread opinion about Rubinstein: "In power and execution he is inferior to no one."

As was the penchant at the time, much of what Rubinstein played were his own compositions. At several concerts, Rubinstein alternated between conducting his orchestral works and playing as soloist in one of his piano concertos. One high point for him was leading the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra in his Ocean Symphony on November 16, 1854; as this was considered one of the most prestigious places to have a musical work performed, having the Ocean heard there was considered a high honor. Although reviews were mixed about Rubinstein's merits as a composer, they were more favorable about him as a performer when he played a solo recital a few weeks later.

Rubinstein spent one tour break, in the winter of 1856-7, with Elena Pavlovna and much of the Imperial royal family at Nice. These three months would become crucial ones. Rubinstein had already noted both his patroness's great intelligence and her great influence in terms of reform over her brother Nicholas I. (She would exercise a similar influence over her nephew, Alexander II, resulting in, among other things, the freeing of the serfs.) Now patroness and artist, with others present, began discussing plans to raise the level of musical education in their homeland. These discussions bore fruit at first in the founding of the Russian Musical Society (RMS) in 1859.

Opening the St. Petersburg Conservatory

The opening of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, the first music school in Russia and an outgrowth of the RMS, followed in 1862. Rubinstein not only founded it and was its first director but also recruited an imposing pool of talent for its faculty.

Some in Russian society were surprised that a Russian music school would actually attempt to be Russian. One "fashionable lady," when told by Rubinstein that classes would be taught in Russian and not a foreign language, exclaimed, "What, music in Russian! That is an original idea!" Rubinstein adds,

And surely it was surprising that the theory of Music was to be taught for the first time in the Russian language at our Conservatory.... Hitherto, if any one wished to study it, he was obliged to take lessons from a foreigner, or to go to Germany.

There were also those who feared the school would not be Russian enough. Rubinstein drew a tremendous amount of criticism from the Russian nationalist music group known as The Five. Mikhail Zetlin, in his book on The Five, writes,

The very idea of a conservatory implied, it is true, a spirit of academism which could easily turn it into a stronghold of routine, but then the same could be said of conservatories all over the world. Actually the Conservatory did raise the level of musical culture in Russia. The unconventional way chosen by Balakirev and his friends was not necessarily the right one for everybody else.

It was during this period that Rubinstein drew his greatest success as a composer, beginning with his Fourth Piano Concerto in 1864 and culminating with his opera The Demon in 1871. Between these two works are the orchestral works Don Quixote, which Tchaikovsky found "interesting and well done," though "episodic," and the opera Ivan IV Grozniy, which was premiered by Balakirev. Borodin commented on Ivan IV that "the music is good, you just cannot recognize that it is Rubinstein. There is nothing that is Mendelssohnian, nothing as he used to write formerly."

The American tour

By 1867, ongoing tensions with the Balakirev camp, along with related matters, led to intense dissension within the Conservatory's faculty. Rubinstein resigned and returned to touring throughout Europe. Unlike his previous tours, he began increasingly featuring the works of other composers. In previous tours, Rubinstein had played primarily his own works.

left|thumb|Portrait bust of Anton Rubinstein on his grave in Tikhvin Cemetery, Saint Petersburg At the behest of the Steinway & Sons piano company, Rubinstein toured the United States during the 1872-3 season. Steinway's contract with Rubinstein called on him to give 200 concerts at the then unheard-of rate of 200 dollars per concert (payable in gold—Rubinstein distrusted both United States banks and United States paper money), plus all expenses paid. Rubinstein stayed in America 239 days, giving 215 concerts—sometimes two and three a day in as many cities.

Rubinstein wrote of his American experience,

May Heaven preserve us from such slavery! Under these conditions there is no chance for art—one simply grows into an automaton, performing mechanical work; no dignity remains to the artist; he is lost.... The receipts and the success were invariably gratifying, but it was all so tedious that I began to despise myself and my art. So profound was my dissatisfaction that when several years later I was asked to repeat my American tour, I refused pointblank...

Despite his misery, Rubinstein made enough money from his American tour to give him financial security for the rest of his life. Upon his return to Russia, he "hastened to invest in real estate", purchasing a dacha in Peterhof, not far from Saint Petersburg, for himself and his family.

Later life

Rubinstein continued to make tours as a pianist and give appearances as a conductor. In 1887, he returned to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with the goal of improving overall standards. He removed inferior students, fired and demoted many professors, made entrance and examination requirements more stringent and revised the curriculum. He led semi-weekly teachers' classes through the whole keyboard literature and gave some of the more gifted piano students personal coaching. During the 1889-90 academic year he gave weekly lecture-recitals for the students. He resigned again—and left Russia—in 1891 over Imperial demands that Conservatory admittance, and later annual prizes to students, be awarded along racial quotas instead of purely by merit. These quotas were effectively to disadvantage Jews. Rubinstein resettled in Dresden and started giving concerts again in Germany and Austria. Nearly all of these concerts were charity benefit events.

Rubinstein also coached a few pianists and taught his only private piano student, Josef Hofmann. Hofmann would become one of the finest keyboard artists of the 20th century.

Despite his sentiments on ethnic politics in Russia, Rubinstein returned there occasionally to visit friends and family. He gave his final concert in Saint Petersburg on January 14, 1894. With his health failing rapidly, Rubinstein moved back to Peterhof in the summer of 1894. He died there on November 20 of that year, having suffered from heart disease for some time.

The former Troitskaya street in Saint Petersburg where he lived is now named after him.

Rubinstein's repartee

Rubinstein was as well known during his lifetime for his sarcasm as well as his sometimes penetrating insight. During one of Rubinstein's visits to Paris, French pianist Alfred Cortot played the first movement of Beethoven's Appassionata for him. After a long silence, Rubinstein told Cortot, "My boy, don't you ever forget what I am going to tell you. Beethoven's music must not be studied. It must be reincarnated." Cortot reportedly never forgot those words.

Rubinstein's own piano students were held just as accountable: he wanted them to think about the music they were playing, matching the tone to the piece and the phrase. His manner with them was a combination of raw, sometimes violent criticism and good humor. Hofmann wrote of one such lesson:

Once I played a Liszt rhapsody pretty badly. After a little of it, Rubinstein said, "The way you play this piece would be all right for Auntie or Mamma." Then rising and coming toward me, he said, "Now let us see how we play such things." [...]I began again, but I had not played more than a few measures when Rubinstein said loudly, "Have you begun?" "Yes, Master, I certainly have." "Oh," said Rubinstein vaguely, "I didn't notice." [...]Rubinstein did not so much instruct me. Merely he let me learn from him ... If a student, by his own study and mental force, reached the desired point which the musician's wizardry had made him see, he gained reliance in his own strength, knowing he would always find that point again even though he should lose his way once or twice, as everyone with an honest aspiration is liable to do''.

Rubinstein's insistence on absolute fidelity to the printed note surprised Hofmann, since he had heard his teacher take liberties himself in his concerts. When he asked Rubinstein to reconcile this paradox, Rubinstein answered, as many teachers have through the ages, "When you are as old as I am, you may do as I do." Then Rubinstein added, "If you can".

Nor did Rubinstein adjust the tenor of his comments for those of high rank. After Rubinstein had reassumed the directorship of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Tsar Alexander III donated the dilapidated old Bolshoi Theater as the Conservatory's new home—without the funds needed to restore and restructure the facility. At a reception given in the monarch's honor, the Tsar asked Rubinstein if he was pleased with this gift. Rubinstein replied bluntly, to the crowd's horror, "Your Imperial Majesty, if I gave you a beautiful cannon, all mounted and embossed, with no ammunition, would you like it?"

Pianism

"Van II"

Many of Rubinstein's contemporaries felt he bore a striking resemblance to Ludwig van Beethoven. Ignaz Moscheles, who had known Beethoven intimately, wrote, "Rubinstein's features and short, irrepressible hair remind me of Beethoven." Liszt referred to Rubinstein as "Van II." Rubinstein was even rumored to be the illegitimate son of Beethoven. Rubinstein neither confirmed nor denied this rumor. Neither did he remind anyone that he was born more than two years after Beethoven had died.

This resemblance to Beethoven was also felt to be in Rubinstein's keyboard playing. Under his hands, it was said, the piano erupted volcanically. Audience members wrote of going home limp after one of his recitals, knowing they had witnessed a force of nature.

Sometimes Rubinstein's playing was too much for listeners to handle. American pianist Amy Fay, who wrote extensively on the European classical music scene, admitted that while Rubinstein "has a gigantic spirit in him, and is extremely poetic and original ... for an entire evening he is too much. Give me Rubinstein for a few pieces, but Tausig for a whole evening." She heard Rubinstein play "a terrific piece by Schubert," reportedly the Wanderer Fantasie. The performance gave her such a violent headache that the rest of the recital was ruined for her.

Clara Schumann proved especially vehement. After she heard him play the Mendelssohn C minor Trio in 1857, she wrote that "he so rattled it off that I did not know how to control myself ... and often he so annihilated fiddle and cello that I ... could hear nothing of them." Nor had things improved in Clara's view a few years later, when Rubinstein gave a concert in Breslau. She noted her disapproval in her diary:

I was furious, for he no longer plays. Either there is a perfectly wild noise or else a whisper with the soft pedal down. And a would-be cultured audience puts up with a performance like that!

On the other hand, when Rubinstein played Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio with violinist Leopold Auer and cellist Alfredo Piatti in 1868, Auer recalls:

It was the first time I had heard this great artist play. He was most amiable at the rehearsal.... To this day I can recall how Rubinstein sat down at the piano, his leonine head thrown back slightly, and began the five opening measures of the principal theme.... It seemed to me I had never before heard the piano really played. The grandeur of style with which Rubinstein presented those five measures, the beauty of tone his softness of touch secured, the art with which he manipulated the pedal, are indescribable ...

Violinist and composer Henri Vieuxtemps adds:

His power over the piano is something undreamt of; he transports you into another world; all that is mechanical in the instrument is forgotten. I am still under the influence of the all-embracing harmony, the scintillating passages and thunder of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 57 [Appassionata], which Rubinstein executed for us with unimagined mastery.

Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick expressed what Schonberg calls "the majority point of view" in an 1884 review. After complaining of the over-three-hour length of Rubinstein's recital, Hanslick admits that the sensual element of the pianist's playing gives pleasure to listeners. Both Rubinstein's virtues and flaws, Hanslick commented, spring from an untapped natural strength and elemental freshness. "Yes, he plays like a god," Hanslick writes in closing, "and we do not take it amiss if, from time to time, he changes, like Jupiter, into a bull".

Sergei Rachmaninoff's fellow piano student Matvey Pressman adds,

He enthralled you by his power, and he captivated you by the elegance and grace of his playing, by his tempestuous, fiery temperament and by his warmth and charm. His crescendo had no limits to the growth of the power of its sonority; his diminuendo reached an unbelievable pianissimo, sounding in the most distant corners of a huge hall. In playing, Rubinstein created, and he created inimitably and with genius. He often treated the same program absolutely differently when he played it the second time, but, more astoundingly still, everything came out wonderfully on both occasions.

Rubinstein was also adept at improvisation—a practice at which Beethoven had excelled but by Rubinstein's time was on the wane. Composer Karl Goldmark wrote of one recital where Rubinstein improvised on a motive from the last movement of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony:

He counterpointed it in the bass; then developed it first as a canon, next as a four-voiced fugue, and again transformed it into a tender song. He then returned to Beethoven's original form, later changing it to a gay Viennese waltz, with its own peculiar harmonies, and finally dashed into cascades of brilliant passages, a perfect storm of sound in which the original theme was still unmistakable. It was superb.""

In his book The Great Pianists, former New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg describes Rubinstein's playing as that "of extraordinary breadth, virility and vitality, immense sonority and technical grandeur in which all too often technical sloppiness asserted itself." When caught up in the moment of performance, Rubinstein did not seem to care how many wrong notes he played as long as his conception of the piece he was playing came through. Rubinstein himself admitted, after a concert in Berlin in 1875, "If I could gather up all the notes that I let fall under the piano, I could give a second concert with them."

Part of the problem might have been the sheer size of Rubinstein's hands. They were huge, and many observers commented on them. Josef Hofmann observed that Rubinstein's fifth finger "was as thick as my thumb—think of it! Then his fingers were square at the ends, with cushions on them. It was a wonderful hand.". Pianist Josef Lhevinne described them as "fat, pudgy ... with fingers so broad at the finger-tips that he often had difficulty in not striking two notes at once." Equally outsized was what Rubinstein did with those hands. German piano teacher Ludwig Deppe advised American pianist Amy Fay to watch carefully how Rubinstein struck his chords: "Nothing cramped about him! He spreads his hands as if he were going to take in the universe, and takes them up with the greatest freedom and abandon!"

Tone

Schonberg has assessed Rubinstein's piano tone the most sensuous of any of the great pianists . Fellow pianist Rafael Joseffy compared it to "a golden French horn." Rubinstein himself told an interviewer, "Strength with lightness, that is one secret of my touch.... I have sat hours trying to imitate the timbre of [Italian tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini's] voice in my playing."

Pressman attested to the singing quality of Rubinstein's playing, and much more: "His tone was strikingly full and deep. With him the piano sounded like a whole orchestra, not only as far as the power of sound was concerned but in the variety of timbres. With him, the piano sang as Patti sang, as Rubini sang.

Pedalling

Stephen Hough says that it was Anton Rubinstein, not Arthur Rubinstein, who said that "the pedal is the soul of the piano."

Programs

Rubinstein's concert programs were often gargantuan. Hanslick mentioned in his 1884 review that the pianist played more than 20 pieces in one concert in Vienna, including three sonatas (the Schumann F sharp minor plus Beethoven's D minor and Op. 101 in A). Rubinstein was a man with an extremely robust constitution and apparently never tired; audiences apparently stimulated his adrenals to the point where he acted like a superman. He had a colossal repertoire and an equally colossal memory until he turned 50, when he began to have memory lapses and had to play from the printed note. Pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski heard Rubinstein toward the end of his career, remembering great moments alternating with memory slips and chaos.

Rubinstein was most famous for his series of historical recitals—seven consecutive concerts covering the history of piano music. Each of these programs was enormous. The second, devoted to Beethoven sonatas, consisted of the Moonlight, D minor, Waldstein, Appassionata, E minor, A major (Op. 101), E major (Op. 109) and C minor (Op. 111). Again, this was all included in one recital. The fourth concert, devoted to Schumann, contained the Fantasy in C, Kreisleriana, Symphonic Studies, Sonata in F sharp minor, a set of short pieces and Carnival. This did not include encores, which Rubinstein sprayed liberally at every concert.

Rubinstein concluded his American tour with this series, playing the seven recitals over a nine-day period in New York in May 1873.

Rubinstein played this series of historical recitals in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe. In Moscow he gave this series on consecutive Tuesday evenings in the Hall of the Nobility, repeating each concert the following morning in the German Club for the benefit of students, free of charge.

Rachmaninoff on Rubinstein

Sergei Rachmaninoff first attended Rubinstein's historical concerts as a twelve-year-old piano student.

Rachmaninoff biographer Barrie Martyn suggests that it might not have been by chance that the two pieces Rachmaninoff singled out for praise from Rubinstein's concerts—Beethoven's Appassionata and Chopin's "Funeral March" Sonata—both became cornerstones of Rachmaninoff's own recital programs. Martyn also maintains that Rachmaninoff may have based his interpretation of the Chopin sonata on Rubinstein's traversal, pointing out similarities between written accounts of Rubinstein's version and Rachmaninoff's audio recording of the work.

Rachmaninoff admitted that Rubinstein was not note-perfect at these concerts, remembering a memory lapse during Balakirev's Islamey, where Rubinstein improvised in the style of the piece until remembering the rest of it four minutes later. In Rubinstein's defense, however, Rachmaninoff said that "for every possible mistake [Rubinstein] may have made, he gave, in return, ideas and musical tone pictures that would have made up for a million mistakes."

Conducting

Rubinstein conducted the Russian Musical Society programs from the organization's inception in 1859 until his resignation from it and the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1867. He also did his share of guest conducting both before and after his tenure with the RMS. Rubinstein at the podium was as temperamental as when at the keyboard, provoking mixed reactions amongst both orchestral musicians and audiences.

Composition

See also List of compositions by Anton Rubinstein By 1850, Rubinstein had decided that he did not want to be known solely as a pianist, "but as a composer performing his symphonies, concertos, operas, trios, etc." Rubinstein was a prolific composer, writing no fewer than twenty operas (notably The Demon, written after Lermontov's Romantic poem, and its successor The Merchant Kalashnikov), five piano concertos, six symphonies and a large number of solo piano works along with a substantial output of works for chamber ensemble, two concertos for cello and one for violin, free-standing orchestral works and tone poems (including one entitled Don Quixote). Edward Garden writes in the New Grove,

Rubinstein composed assiduously during all periods of his life. He was able, and willing, to dash off for publication half a dozen songs or an album of piano pieces with all too fluent ease in the knowledge that his reputation would ensure a gratifying financial reward for the effort involved.

Rubinstein and Mikhail Glinka, considered the first important Russian classical composer, had both studied in Berlin with pedagogue Siegfried Dehn. Glinka, as Dehn's student 12 years before Rubinstein, used the opportunity to amass greater reserves of compositional skill that he could use to open up a whole new territory of Russian music. Rubinstein, conversely, chose to exercise his compositional talents within the German styles illustrated in Dehn's teaching. Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn were the strongest influences on Rubinstein's music.

Consequently, Rubinstein's music demonstrates none of the nationalism of The Five. Rubinstein also had a tendency to rush in composing his pieces, resulting in good ideas such as those in his Ocean Symphony being developed in less-than-exemplary ways. Garden writes,

As Paderewski was later to remark, 'He had not the necessary concentration of patience for a composer....' He was prone to indulge in grandiloquent cliches at moments of climax, preceded by over-lengthy rising sequences which were subsequently imitated by Tchaikovsky in his less-inspired pieces.

Nevertheless, Rubinstein's Fourth Piano Concerto

greatly influenced Tchaikovsky's piano concertos, especially the first (1874—5), and the superb finale, with its introduction and scintillating principal subject, is the basis of very similar material at the beginning of the finale of Balakirev's Piano Concerto in E-flat major; this finale was written down after Balakirev's death in 1910 by his collaborator and friend Sergey Lyapunov, who had heard Balakirev play it many times. The first movement of Balakirev's concerto had been written, partially under the influence of Rubinstein's Second Concerto, in the 1860s.

Following Rubinstein's death, his works began to be ignored, although his piano concerti remained in the repertoire in Europe until the First World War, and his principal works have retained a toehold in the Russian concert repertoire. Perhaps somewhat lacking in individuality, Rubinstein's music was unable to compete either with the established classics or with the new Russian style of Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

Over recent years, his work has been performed a little more often both in Russia and abroad, and has often met with positive criticism. Amongst his better known works are the opera The Demon, his Piano Concerto No. 4, and his Symphony No. 2, known as The Ocean.

References

Sources

In Russian

Apetyan, Z.A. ed., Vospominantya o Rakhmaninove (Reminiscences about Rachmaninoff) (Moscow, 1988)

Barenboim, Lev Aronovich, Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein (2 vol.), (in Russian), Moscow 1957-62

Khoprova, Tatyana ed., Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein, (in Russian), (Saint Petersburg, 1997) ISBN 5-8227-0029

Rubinstein, Anton Grigorevich, ed. L. Barenboim, Literaturnoye Naslediye(3 vol.), (in Russian), (Moscow, 1983)

In German

Litzmann, Berthold, Clara Schumann (3 vol.) (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1906)

In English

Bowen, Catherine Drinker, Free Artist (New York: Random House, 1939)

Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840-1875 (New York: W.W. Norton & Comoany Inc., 1978)

Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Years of Wandering, 1878-1885 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1986)

Cooke, James Francis, Great Pianists on Piano Playing (Philadelphia: Theo Presser Co., 1913)

Garden, Edward, ed. Stanley Sadie, "Rubinstein, Anton Grigor'yevich," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (London: Macmilian, 2001), 29 vols. ISBN 0-333-60800-3.

Gerig, Reginald R., Great Pianists and Their Techniques (Newton, Abbot, David & Charles, 1976)

Hanson and Hanson, Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Music (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1965)

Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995)

Martyn, Barrie, Rachmaninov: Composer, Pianist, Conductor (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1990)

Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York, Schirmer Books, 1991)

Riesemann, Oscar von, Rachmaninoff's Recollections (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1934)

Sachs, Harvey, Virtuoso (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982)

Schonberg, Harold C., The Great Pianists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, 1963)

Taylor, Philip S., Anton Rubinstein: A Life in Music (Bloomington: Illinois University Press, 2007). ISBN 0-253-34871-4.

Zetlin, Mikhail (Panin, George trans. and ed.), The Five: The Evolution of the Russian School of Music (Westpost, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1975, 1959)

External links

Some information on Anton Rubinstein

Networking Rubinstein - his contacts in his early career

Soundbites from String Quartet No.1 in G, Op.17 No.1

New York Times article, review of Rubinstein's final recital (1894)

New York Times article, by James Huneker (1917)

Category:Russian composers Category:Romantic composers Category:Opera composers Category:Russian classical pianists Category:Russian music educators Category:Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists Category:Russian Jews Category:Jewish classical pianists Category:Jewish composers and songwriters Category:Russian Orthodox Christians Category:1829 births Category:1894 deaths Category:Converts to Christianity Category:Founders and heads of educational institutions

ar:أنتون روبنشتاين zh-min-nan:Anton Rubinstein ca:Anton Rubinstein cs:Anton Rubinstein da:Anton Rubinstein de:Anton Grigorjewitsch Rubinstein et:Anton Rubinštein es:Antón Rubinstein eo:Anton Grigorjeviĉ Rubinŝtejn fr:Anton Rubinstein ko:안톤 루빈시테인 it:Anton Grigorevič Rubinštejn he:אנטון רובינשטיין ka:ანტონ რუბინშტეინი kk:Рубинштейн Антон Григорьевич hu:Anton Grigorjevics Rubinstejn arz:أنتون روبنشتاين nl:Anton Rubinstein ja:アントン・ルビンシテイン no:Anton Rubinstein nn:Anton Rubinstein pl:Anton Rubinstein pt:Anton Rubinstein ro:Anton Grigorievici Rubinstein ru:Рубинштейн, Антон Григорьевич simple:Anton Rubinstein sk:Anton Grigorievič Rubinštejn sl:Anton Rubinstein fi:Anton Rubinstein sv:Anton Rubinstein tr:Anton Grigoryeviç Rubenştayn uk:Рубінштейн Антон Григорович zh:安東·格里戈里耶維奇·魯賓斯坦

Professor Perri 6 is a noted British social scientist. He changed his name from David Ashworth to Perri 6 in 1983. Whilst not an academic at the time, many years later he said he was amused by the notion of "6, P" appearing in academic papers.

6 worked for Demos, a centre-left think tank with close ties to New Labour in the 1990s. He is currently Professor of Social Policy at Nottingham Trent University's School of Social Sciences. Much of 6's recent research is based on the cultural theory of risk, which he refers to as "neo-Durkheimian institutional theory". He has also done government-backed research for the Information Commissioner's Office, and has written on behalf of the think-tank Demos. He has also written for the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: J-PART, Social Policy and Society and Public Administration.

References

External links

Perri 6 (Demos page)

Category:British sociologists Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people Category:Place of birth missing (living people)

sv:Perri 6

Coordinates	36°45′0″N144°16′0″N
name	John Everett Millais
birth date	June 08, 1829
birth place	Southampton, England
death date	August 13, 1896
death place	Kensington, London
field	Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
training	Royal Academy of Art
movement	Pre-Raphaelite
works	Ophelia; Christ In The House Of His Parents.
awards	}}

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA (8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Early life

Millais (pronounced Mih-lay) was born in Southampton, England in 1829, of a prominent Jersey-based family. His prodigious artistic talent won him a place at the Royal Academy schools at the unprecedented age of eleven. While there, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (known as the "PRB") in September 1848 in his family home on Gower Street, off Bedford Square.

Pre-Raphaelite works

Millais' Christ In The House Of His Parents (1850) was highly controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Later works were also controversial, though less so. Millais achieved popular success with A Huguenot (1852), which depicts a young couple about to be separated because of religious conflicts. He repeated this theme in many later works. All these early works were painted with great attention to detail, often concentrating on the beauty and complexity of the natural world. In paintings such as Ophelia (1852) Millais created dense and elaborate pictorial surfaces based on the integration of naturalistic elements. This approach has been described as a kind of "pictorial eco-system".

This style was promoted by the critic John Ruskin, who had defended the Pre-Raphaelites against their critics. Millais' friendship with Ruskin introduced him to Ruskin's wife Effie. Soon after they met she modelled for his painting The Order of Release. As Millais painted Effie they fell in love. Despite having been married to Ruskin for several years, Effie was still a virgin. Her parents realized something was wrong and she filed for an annulment. In 1855, after her marriage to Ruskin was annulled, Effie and John Millais married. He and Effie eventually had eight children: Everett, born in 1856; George, born in 1857; Effie, born in 1858; Mary, born in 1860; Alice, born in 1862; Geoffroy, born in 1863; John in 1865; and Sophie in 1868. Their youngest son, John Guille Millais, became a notable naturalist and wildlife artist.

Effie's younger sister Sophy Gray sat for several pictures by Millais, prompting some speculation about the nature of their apparently fond relationship.

Later works

After his marriage, Millais began to paint in a broader style, which was condemned by Ruskin as "a catastrophe". It has been argued that this change of style resulted from Millais' need to increase his output to support his growing family. Unsympathetic critics such as William Morris accused him of "selling out" to achieve popularity and wealth. His admirers, in contrast, pointed to the artist's connections with Whistler and Albert Moore, and influence on John Singer Sargent. Millais himself argued that as he grew more confident as an artist, he could paint with greater boldness. In his article "Thoughts on our art of Today" (1888) he recommended Velázquez and Rembrandt as models for artists to follow. Paintings such as The Eve of St. Agnes and The Somnambulist clearly show an ongoing dialogue between the artist and Whistler, whose work Millais strongly supported. Other paintings of the late 1850s and 1860s can be interpreted as anticipating aspects of the Aesthetic Movement. Many deploy broad blocks of harmoniously arranged colour and are symbolic rather than narratival. From 1862, the Millais family lived at 7 Cromwell Place, Kensington, London.

Later works, from the 1870s onwards demonstrate Millais' reverence for old masters such as Joshua Reynolds and Velázquez. Many of these paintings were of an historical theme and were further examples of Millais' talent. Notable among these are The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower (1878) depicting the Princes in the Tower, The Northwest Passage (1874) and the Boyhood of Raleigh (1871). Such paintings indicate Millais' interest in subjects connected to Britain's history and expanding empire. Millais also achieved great popularity with his paintings of children, notably Bubbles (1886) – famous, or perhaps notorious, for being used in the advertising of Pears soap – and Cherry Ripe. His last project (1896) was to be a painting entitled The Last Trek. Based on his illustration for his son's book, it depicted a white hunter lying dead in the African veldt, his body contemplated by two Africans.

The Landscapes 1870-92

This fascination with wild and bleak locations is also evident in his many landscape paintings of this period, which usually depict difficult or dangerous terrain. The first of these, Chill October (1870) was painted in Perth, near his wife's family home. Chill October (Collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber), was the first of the large-scale Scottish Landscapes Millais painted periodically throughout his later career. Usually autumnal and often bleakly unpicturesque, they evoke a mood of melancholy and sense of transience that recalls his cycle-of-nature paintings of the later 1850s, especially Autumn Leaves (Manchester Art Gallery) and The Vale Of Rest (Tate Britain), though with little or no direct symbolism or human activity to point to their meaning. In 1870 Millais returned to full landscape pictures, and over the next twenty years painted a number of scenes of Perthshire where he was annually found hunting and fishing from August until late into the autumn each year. Most of these landscapes are autumnal or early winter in season and show bleak, dank, water fringed bog or moor, loch and riverside. Millais never returned to "blade by blade" landscape painting, nor to the vibrant greens of his own outdoor work in the early fifties, although the assured handling of his broader freer, later style is equally accomplished in its close observation of scenery. Many were painted elsewhere in Perthshire, near Dunkeld and Birnam, where Millais rented grand houses each autumn in order to hunt and fish. Christmas Eve, his first full landscape snow scene, painted in 1887, was a view looking towards Murthly castle.

Illustrations

Millais was also very successful as a book illustrator, notably for the works of Anthony Trollope and the poems of Tennyson. His complex illustrations of the parables of Jesus were published in 1864. His father-in-law commissioned stained-glass windows based on them for Kinnoull parish church, Perth. He also provided illustrations for magazines such as Good Words. In 1869 he was recruited as an artist for the newly founded weekly newspaper The Graphic.

Academic career

Millais was elected as an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1853, and was soon elected as a full member of the Academy, in which he was a prominent and active participant. He was granted a baronetcy in 1885, the first artist to be honoured with a hereditary title. After the death of The Lord Leighton in 1896, Millais was elected President of the Royal Academy, but he died later in the same year from throat cancer. He was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

Memorial statue

When Millais died in 1896, the Prince of Wales (later to become King Edward VII) chaired a memorial committee, which commissioned a statue of the artist. This was installed at the front of the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain) in the garden on the east side in 1905. On 23 November that year, the Pall Mall Gazette called it "a breezy statue, representing the man in the characteristic attitude in which we all knew him".

In 1953, Tate Director, Sir Norman Reid, attempted to have it replaced by Auguste Rodin's John the Baptist, and in 1962 again proposed its removal, calling its presence "positively harmful". His efforts were frustrated by the statue's owner, the Ministry of Works. Ownership was transferred from the Ministry to English Heritage in 1996, and by them in turn to the Tate. In 2000, under Stephen Deuchar's directorship, the statue was removed to the rear of the building.

Media

Millais' relationship with Ruskin and Effie has been the subject of several dramas, beginning with the silent film The Love of John Ruskin from 1912. There have also been stage and radio plays and an opera. The PRB as a whole have been the subjects of two BBC period dramas. The first, entitled The Love School, was shown in 1975, starring Peter Egan as Millais. The second was Desperate Romantics, in which Millais is played by Samuel Barnett. It was first broadcast on BBC 2 Tuesday, 21 July 2009.

In 2004, the artists Hamilton and Ashrowan produced a work referencing Millais' landscape painting The Sound of Many Waters (1876). The work was filmed at Rumbling Bridge on the River Braan in Perthshire, the site where Millais made the painting. It consisted of a 32 screen moving image installation at Perth Concert Hall, including a film of the Millais painting.

Selected works in museums

The Blind Girl: Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru Tate

The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower: Picture Gallery of Royal Holloway College

Gallery

See also

British art

English school of painting

List of British painters

List of paintings by John Everett Millais

List of Pre-Raphaelite paintings - including John Everett Millais

Notes and references

;Sources

Further reading

F.G. Stephens. Grosvenor 1886 Exhibition of the works of John Everett Millais, Bt (Notes from a catalogue, 1886)

Spielmann, Marion. Notes on Millais Exhibition R.A. 1898.

Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais. Volume 1, Volume 2 (London: Methuen, 1899).

Baldry, A. L. Sir John Everett Millais (London, G. Bell & Sons, 1908).

Lutyens (ed). Millais and the Ruskins 1967.

Bennett, Mary. Footnotes to the Millais Exhibition (Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool Bulletin, No 12 1967).

Bennett, Mary (catalogue) (Walker Art Gallery and Royal Academy catalogue 1967).

Lutyens, M. Letters from John Everett Millais, Bart P.R.A. and William Holman Hunt. O.M. (The Walpole Society, 1972-4).

Warner, Malcolm. The Drawings of John Everett Millais (Arts Council catalogue, 1979).

Eggeling, Dr Joe. Millais and Dunkeld The story of Millais’s Landscapes (1985).

National Portrait Gallery catalogue, 1999.

Mancoff, D. N. (ed). John Everett Millais beyond the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood (Londom and New Haven, 2001).

Barlow, Paul Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais, Ashgate 2005.

Rosenfeld, Jason and Smith, Alison (Tate Britain catalogue, 2007).

External links

The Millais Site includes many pictures and a complete list of his works

Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource includes almost two hundred paintings on canvas and works on paper by Millais

ArtRenewal.org gallery

National Museums Liverpool important Millais collection

Edward Platt on Millais

Kathleen Jamie on Millais

Millais's Ophelia in focus on Tate Online

John Everett Millais in the "History of Art"

smARThistory: Christ in the House of His Parents and Ophelia – Short video podcasts about the paintings

The Pre-Raph Pack Discover more about the artists, the techniques they used and a timeline spanning 100 years.

Category:Baronets in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom Category:English painters Category:English illustrators Category:People from Southampton Category:British people of Huguenot descent Category:Pre-Raphaelite painters Category:Royal Academicians Category:Burials at St Paul's Cathedral Category:Deaths from laryngeal cancer Category:Cancer deaths in England Category:Artists' Rifles soldiers Category:1829 births Category:1896 deaths Category:Royal Society of Portrait Painters

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