Anton Rubinstein was born at
Vikhvatinets in the
Podolsk district of the
Russian Empire, on the borders of
Moldavia, in 1829. A few years later his family moved to
Moscow, and after early instruction on the piano from his mother he took lessons from a teacher there, a certain Villoing, later to be the teacher of his brother
Nikolay. He gave his first public concert in Moscow at the age of ten. There followed four years of touring as a child virtuoso, years that took him to
Paris, to
Scandinavia,
Austria and
Germany, and to
London, where he played for
Queen Victoria. In
1844 the family settled in
Berlin, where Rubinstein took lessons in harmony and counterpoint from
Glinka's former teacher, the Prussian royal music librarian
Siegfried Dehn.
In 1846 Rubinstein's father died and the rest of the family returned to
Russia, while he remained abroad in
Vienna and in
Pressburg (the modern Bratislava), earning a living as he could by teaching and cynical about the support that the ever-generous
Liszt had seemed to offer, which took the form of a visit to his garret, with his entourage of disciples. As a pianist Rubinstein was to rival Liszt in fame, and the latter speaks of him with grudging respect as a composer and player, a clever fellow, but unduly influenced by the classicism of
Mendelssohn, adding a less charitable description of him as the pseudo-Musician of the future on the occasion of a visit to Weimar in 1854 for the first performance of his opera The
Siberian Huntsman.
Rubinstein's fortunes had changed as a result of a meeting with members of the
Russian Imperial family during the course of an earlier visit to Paris
. On his return to Russia in the winter of
1848 he found support from the
Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, a
German princess and sister-in-law of the
Tsar, and with her active encouragement he established in 1859 the
Russian Musical Society and three years later the
St Petersburg Conservatory. His brother Nikolay, whose childhood prowess as a pianist had had similar exposure, founded similar organizations in Moscow.
Tchaikovsky was to be among the first pupils at the St Petersburg Conservatory and among the first teachers on the staff of its humbler counterpart in Moscow.
The new Conservatory aroused immediate enmity, in particular from the nationalist group of composers, bullied into collaboration by the eccentric Balakirev. Rubinstein had opened battle by attacking the whole notion of national opera, pointing to the alleged failure of Glinka's work. Balakirev, self-taught as a composer, objected to formal German musical training, and it was left to following generations to benefit from a profitable synthesis of the primitive nationalism of the Five and the cosmopolitan sophistication of the Conservatories. Rubinstein, however, coupled technical assurance with a less overtly
Russian approach, although by the time of his death in 1894 he had come to a better understanding of
Russian nationalism in music, while a younger generation had come to understand the necessity of professional musical training.
The musical portrait,
Ivan the Terrible, is based on the work of
Lev Alexandrovich Mey, the literary source of four of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas and of numerous songs by the Five and by Tchaikovsky. In particular Rimsky-Korsakov's first opera, generally known as
The Maid of Pskov, which bears the alternative title Ivan the Terrible, is derived from a play by Mey recounting the story of the Tsar's attack on
Novgorod, leading to the death of Tucha and his beloved
Olga, the latter turning out to be the Tsar's daughter. Mey's drama serves as the source of Rubinstein's musical portrait, written in
1869, and arranged for piano duet by Tchaikovsky in the same year. Five years earlier Rubinstein had written a musical portrait of
Goethe's hero,
Faust and in
1870 there followed his musical picture after
Cervantes,
Don Quixote. Here was some concession, at least, to the extra-musical preoccupations espoused by Liszt in his symphonic poems, copies of some of which he had sent to Rubinstein in 1856. At the same time Ivan the Terrible does contain overtly
Russian elements, although it may lack the crude inspiration of the untutored nationalists.
- published: 05 Nov 2013
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