Anton Rubinstein - Ivan The Terrible (1869)

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• published: 05 Nov 2013
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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.