Mussorgsky was counted among The Five, a group of composers who adopted a deliberately nationalist flavour; his colleagues were Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakir- ev, and Cйsar Cui. The name arose after Rimsky-Korsakov's performance of Slavonic music conducted by Balakirev in St Petersburg on May 24, 1867. In reviewing the concert, the critic Vladimir Stasov proudly proclaimed that henceforth Russia, too, had its own "mighty little heap" of native composers. The name caught on quickly and found its way into music history books. The Five were united in their aim to assert the musical independence of Russia from the West.
Rimsky-Korsakov held a number of influential posts: from 1874 to 1881 he was director of the Free Music School in St Petersburg; he served as conductor of concerts at the court chapel from 1883 to 1894; and he was chief conductor of the Russian symphony concerts between 1886 and 1900. In 1889 he led concerts of Russian music at the Paris World
Exposition, and in the spring of 1907 he conducted in Paris two historic Russian concerts in connection with Sergey Diag- hilev's Ballets Russes. Rimsky-Korsakov can be described as nationalistic in several senses. First, he rendered an inestimable service to Russian music as the de facto editor and head of a unique publishing enterprise financed by the Russian industrialist M. P. Belyayev and dedicated exclusively to the publication of music by Russian composers. Second, with two exceptions, the subjects of his operas are taken from Russian or other Slavic fairy tales, literature, and history. These include Snow Maiden (1882), Sadko, The Tsar's Bride (1899), The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City ofKitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, and Le Coq d'or (1909). And finally, in his superbly descriptive and masterful orchestration and sensuous melodies evoking mood, colour, and place, he demonstrates that Russia, in character, is essentially an oriental county.
The Early Twentieth Century
The early years of the last century saw the emergence of three major Russian composers: Aleksandr Scriabin (1871-1915), Sergey Rachmaninov (1873-1943), and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). The music of all three reveals some enduring features of nineteenth-century Russian music, as well as some of the themes that were to become prominent later in the twentieth century.
Scriabin, the supreme exponent of Russian mysticism, entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1888, where he studied the piano and composition; he later taught at the conservatory but from 1903 devoted himself entirely to composition and in 1904 settled in Switzerland. After 1900 he was much preoccupied with mystical philosophy, and his Symphony No. I, composed in that year, has a choral finale, to his own words, glorifying art as a form of religion. Ideas stemming from the theosophical movement, a blend of western occultism and eastern mysticism, similarly provided the basis of the orchestral Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1911), which called for the projection of colours onto a screen during the performance. From 1906 to 1907 Scriabin toured the United States, where he gave concerts with V. L Safonov and the conductor Modest Altschuler, and in 1908 he frequented theosophical circles in Brussels. In 1909 he returned to Russia. By then he was no longer thinking in terms of music alone; he was looking forward to an all-embracing "Mystery". This work was planned to open with a "liturgical act" in which music, poetry, dancing, colours, and scents were to unite to induce in the worshippers a "supreme, final ecstasy". He wrote the poem of the "Preliminary Action" of the "Mystery", but left only sketches for the music.
Scriabin's reputation stems from his grandiose symphonies and his sensitive, exquisitely polished piano music. His piano works include ten sonatas, an early concerto, and many preludes and other short pieces. As his thought became more and more mystical, egocentric, and ingrown, his harmonic style became ever less generally intelligible. Meaningful analysis of his work only began appearing in the 1960s, and yet his music had always attracted a devoted following among modernists.
Rachmaninov's music, although written mostly in the twentieth century, remains firmly entrenched in the nineteenth- century musical idiom. He was, in effect, the final expression of the tradition embodied by Tchaikovsky, a melodist of
Romantic dimensions still writing in an era of explosive change and experimentation. At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Rachmaninov was a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre. Although more of an observer than someone politically involved in the revolution, he also emigrated, with his family, in November 1906, to live in Dresden. There he wrote three of his major scores: the Symphony No. 2 in E Minor (1907), the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead (1909), and the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor (1909). In 1909 he made his first concert tour of the United States, highlighting his much-acclaimed pianistic debut in November of that year with the New York Symphony. In Philadelphia and Chicago he appeared with equal success in the role of conductor, interpreting his own symphonic compositions. Of these, the Symphony No. 2 is the most significant: it is a work of deep emotion and haunting thematic material. While touring, he was invited to become permanent conductor of the Boston Symphony, but he declined the offer and returned to Russia in February 1910.
The one notable composition of Rachmaninov's second period of residence in Moscow was his choral symphony The Bells (1913), based on Konstantin Balmont's Russian translation of the poem by F.dgar Allan Рое. This work displays considerable ingenuity in the coupling of choral and orchestral resources to produce striking imitative and textural effects, a hallmark of many later Russian composers, stamped by the influence of the Orthodox Church's choral tradition.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rachmaninov went into his second self-imposed exile, dividing his time between Switzerland and the United States. For the next 25 years he spent most of his time in an English-speaking country. But he missed Russia and the Russian people - the sounding board for his music, as he said. And this alienation had a devastating effect on his formerly prolific creative ability. He produced little of real originality but rewrote some of his earlier work. Indeed, he devoted himself almost entirely to giving concerts in the United States and Europe, a field in which he had few peers.
Stravinsky, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, was catapulted to early fame through his association with Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes (see Chapter 9) he composed a trio of sensational works that had their premieres in Paris: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Йlysйes on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the most famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as "the composer of The Rite of Spring" and the destructive modernist par excellence. But while Stravinsky may have felt daringly avant-garde to his contemporaries, in effect these works of his for Diaghilev had not lost touch with mainstream Russian tradition.