The Rubinstein brothers and Tchaikovsky constituted one of two musical circles active in Russia from the 1860s to the 1880s. The other major group, also centered in St. Petersburg, consisted of the five composers of the Balakirev circle: Milii Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. These were a curious group – Balakirev was a gentleman amateur like Glinka, while Cui and Mussorgsky were military officers. Mussorgsky soon abandoned the army for music (but had to take positions in the civilian bureaucracy to support himself), while Cui continued in the army as a fortress engineer, rising to the rank of general before his death. Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince and by profession a chemist, teaching at the Medical Academy and achieving some small discoveries in chemistry. Rimskii-Korsakov was a former naval officer and had even participated in the visit of the Russian fleet to New York in 1864, Tsar Alexander’s gesture of support for the Union cause in the American Civil War.
None of the circle had formal musical training, and not surprisingly their relationship with Rubinstein and the Conservatory was hostile. The hostility was stoked by their foremost defender among the music critics of the time, Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906). Stasov was a librarian at the St. Petersburg Public Library, but quickly acquired a name for himself as a writer both on music and the visual arts. The son of a well-known architect, he had traveled in Europe and was extremely erudite in the music and painting of the time. In both cases his esthetic was simple. He hated any remnant of classicism, and thus condemned all painting since 1500 and most of the music of the eighteenth century. He despised Italian opera, even Verdi, for its adherence to the conventions of aria, duet, and chorus, as well as for the insubstantiality of the plots. Another mark against it was its immense popularity with the aristocratic public in Russia, from the 1830s onward – in Stasov’s view a mark of the elite’s ignorance and love for showmanship. He was for free forms, forms that would adequately express the true nature of human beings, their inner world and their place in society, and thus he believed that art had to be realistic and national. In music that meant a certain preference for program music, and his European heroes were Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann. He advanced his views with wit, rudeness, savage personal attacks, and name-calling when he could, but his intelligence could not be denied. His great enemies in music were Wagner, the European classic tradition that he identified with the heritage of Mendelson, Anton Rubinstein, and the Conservatory. The Conservatory was his particular bugbear, for he thought that it would conserve traditional classic form in music and establish the dominance of German music in Russia – not “true” German music like that of Beethoven or Schumann, but a German-based cosmopolitanism.
Fortunately the Balakirev circle, soon to be christened the “mighty handful” or “mighty five,” originally a derisive epithet, was not as combative or as rigid as Stasov. They had their own views, developed under the leadership of Balakirev, the group’s main mentor at first, and later in the writings of Cui and the other composers. They were not as exclusively enamored of Russian themes as was Stasov: Balakirev and Mussorgsky from the first wrote program music and songs to non-Russian themes. Cui in particular made a very odd “nationalist.” The son of a Polish noblewoman and a French officer who stayed in Russia after 1812, he was born in Wilno and what training he had in music came from the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko. Among all of them, however, the atmosphere of the 1860s, as much as Stasov’s hectoring, encouraged an interest in Russian folk music and operas and instrumental music on Russian themes.
The Russian themes they chose reflected in a general way the concerns of the 1860s. The use of folk music went along with the intense interest in the peasantry that was the hallmark of the emancipation era. In Russian history they turned to the pivotal moments and the eternal questions of the role of the tsars, their aims, and their effect on Russia. Even in opera, where the portrayal of figures from the Romanov dynasty was prohibited, they presented the Russian past in all its complexity. Rimskii-Korsakov’s first successful opera, “The Maid of Pskov” (1873), addressed the paradoxes of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, while the greatest achievement of any of the five, Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” of 1868–1874, followed Pushkin’s play to portray a tsar whose ambition and greed for power destroyed him and his country in the process. He took the events of the Musketeer revolt of 1682 to portray the end of the old Russia and the dawning of the new in his second opera “Khovanshchina.” These were not political tracts, and Mussorgsky was no radical, but they did offer a reflection on the painful issues of the time, earning them later fame as “critical.” Mussorgsky’s innovations in harmony and other areas would also bring him great fame in the twentieth century, but in his lifetime the operas were only limited successes, and he died of alcoholism before he could finish “Khovanshchina.”
Of the rest of the five the most successful was undoubtedly Rimskii-Korsakov, who eventually joined the Conservatory and taught himself counterpoint and orchestration, becoming one of its most distinguished professors. His series of operas based on stories from Russian history and folklore became a mainstay of the Russian operatic repertory. Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” and his music on Central Asian themes won him a permanent place in world repertory, and his symphonies and other music continue to be popular in Russia. Balakirev, a contentious if charismatic personality, went through a religious crisis in the 1870s and stopped writing, only to take up music again in the 1880s. His religious and conservative views earned him the patronage of Alexander III’s court, and Balakirev received a position as director of the Imperial Chapel choir.
Cui, in contrast, wrote a great deal, including many articles on Russian music in French, but his extensive musical work has not retained an audience. As the move of Rimskii-Korsakov to the Conservatory shows, the five gradually moderated their hostility to the “cosmopolitans” over the decades, and musical life gradually became less contentious. Nikolai Rubinstein helped in this process, and even Stasov had to pull in his horns a bit, though he remained hostile to Tchaikovsky to the end.
Figure 13. Peter Tchaikovsky as a young man.
The Balakirev circle made a great deal of noise as well as music in Russian musical life, but Tchaikovsky overshadowed them in popularity, especially outside of Russia. He whole-heartedly adopted Rubinstein’s point of view that Russian composers needed to be trained properly and that meant in the Western manner, and he utterly lacked the hostility of Stasov and his followers to the formal conventions of Western music. Indeed Tchaikovsky’s idol was Mozart, and he believed that much of his inspiration for a musical career came from an early acquaintance with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Tchaikovsky’s father was a well-educated official and mining engineer of noble origin but without estates or independent means to leave to his son. After the Conservatory, Tchaikovsky was unwilling to take non-musical employment, and thus his appointment to the Moscow Conservatory was crucial to his survival. There in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Moscow he produced his first major works, the second, third, and fourth symphonies and the first and most famous piano concerto. He also began the work on the ballet “Swan Lake” and the opera “Evgenii Onegin,” both of which brought him enduring fame.
Tchaikovsky moved to St. Petersburg in 1877, abandoning his position at the Moscow Conservatory. He then was in contact with the center of the Russian opera and ballet world, and the results were soon seen. He added “Sleeping Beauty” and “Nutcracker” to his ballets, and “Mazeppa” and the “Queen of Spades” to his list of operas, as well as a violin concerto and two more symphonies, the fifth and the sixth (“Pathetique”) before his death in 1893.