The Imperial Theatres were well-funded. As the main opera company in St Petersburg, the Russian Opera at last started to prosper now that funds were no longer being wasted on the Italian troupe, and the Mariinsky became the nation's premier stage (with the old Bolshoi Theatre, former home to the Italian Opera, demolished to make way for the new building of the St Petersburg Conservatoire). Tchaikovsky was one of the first composers to benefit: his penultimate opera The Queen of Spades was commissioned and lavishly produced by the Imperial Theatres in December 1890, the same month in which Borodin's posthumously completed Prince Igor was premiered there.
Unlike most of his peers, Tchaikovsky was a loyal and patriotic subject of Alexander III (he was the composer of a Coronation Cantata, performed in the Kremlin in 1883), but as a professional artist, he saw himself as a European as much as he saw himself as a Russian, and his music expresses his embrace of both traditions. He was also unashamed about pursuing beauty in an age which scorned too much emphasis on aesthetic considerations. In 1876 Tchaikovsky had acquired the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railway builder, which released him from his onerous teaching responsibilities, and in 1884 he received an imperial decoration, and an annual pension from the tsar. Once he had more time to compose, his career began to take off, and it was during this time that some of his best-known works were written and first performed, including the Rococo Variations (1877), the Violin Concerto (1881), the Piano Trio (1882), and the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (1878,1888 and 1893). Tchaikovsky was the first Russian composer to achieve fame abroad (he undertook several concert tours in Europe and also visited America), but it was only after his death in 1893 that the significance of his legacy was properly understood, particularly in the sphere of ballet music, which he transformed from being a mere accompaniment into a serious genre in its own right. The Russian aristocracy's love of ballet had led to Tchaikovsky's first commission to write the music for Swan Lake, first performed in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1877. Tchaikovsky willingly conformed to the dictates of the Imperial Theatres and enjoyed in particular a fruitful relationship with Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who was appointed director in 1881 and commissioned Tchaikovsky to collaborate with the distinguished choreographer Marius Petipa to write a score for Sleeping Beauty in 1889. The Nutcracker followed in 1892.
Tchaikovsky also made a serious contribution to the renewal of Russian church music, which had stagnated ever since Dmitry Bortnianskii had acquired a monopoly on its composition and performance for the Imperial Court Chapel while serving as its director in the late eighteenth century. Tchaikovsky had won the right to publish his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom (1878) from the church censor, but the ecclesiastical authorities later banned it from being performed in a church after it was sung at a public concert. Undeterred, Tchaikovsky wrote an All-Night Vigil (1881-2) after serious study of Slavonic chant, and in 1884 was commissioned by Alexander III to write nine sacred pieces.23 Other composers soon followed Tchaikovsky's example and helped to revive the sacred musical tradition in Russia.
23 See Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 142-4.
Russian concert life was also in need of renewal by the time of Alexander III's accession. The main symphony concert series, which had been inaugurated by the Russian Musical Society in 1859, had become increasingly reliant on the classical repertoire by the 1880s and was beginning to lack freshness. The wealthy merchant patron Mitrofan Beliaev promoted contemporary composers at the concert series he founded in St Petersburg in 1885, but the repertoire was exclusively Russian and conservative stylistically. The 'Russian Symphony Concerts' were of inestimable value in consolidating a national musical tradition which was now well and truly established, but they did not explore new territory: composers like Arensky, Liadov and Glazunov hardly belonged to the avant- garde. The Russian school had hitherto prided itself on its anti-establishment stance, but the Beliaev concerts ironically succeeded in truly institutionalising it.[88] As a bastion of the musical establishment, and now the eminence grise of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, where he had been professor since 1882, Rimsky- Korsakov certainly did not use his position as Beliaev's main advisor to change its orientation. Several of his own works were written for the 'Russian Symphony Concerts', including his celebrated symphonic suite Sheherazade (1888), whose 'oriental' theme is a feature of many Russian musical compositions of the nineteenth century. In his 1882 overview 'Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art', indeed, Stasov defined it as one of the distinguishing features of music of the 'new Russian school', that is to say, the composers who originally made up the 'mighty handful'. Nowhere in his article does he draw a link, however, between the 'orientalism' of Russian music and Russian imperial expansion into Asia, which lies behind the aggressive nationalism of Borodin's Prince Igor,
for example.[89]
Russian Culture Under Nicholas II (1894-1917)
Alexander's successor Nicholas II, was hardly less reactionary than his father, but it was during his reign that an explosion of creative talent took place across all the arts which produced what is now rightly regarded as a kind of Russian 'Renaissance'. For the first time Russian culture also became an international commodity as the great novels began to be translated into other languages, and performers, composers and artists began to acquire reputations abroad. By the end of the nineteenth century, St Petersburg could match any other European capital for elegance and refinement. Its cultural life was greatly enriched by contact with Paris, Vienna and Berlin, cities to which there were fast train connections, and Russian society was to open up still further following the 1905 Revolution, which led to an easing in censorship. The ascendancy at this time of the Mariinsky Theatre, which could now be counted amongst the world's leading opera houses, with appearances by singers and conductors from abroad and a superb native company, is emblematic. Moscow, meanwhile, could boast Russia's most distinguished new theatre company, and a Conservatoire which could now more than hold its own with its sister institution in St Petersburg (Rachmaninov and Scriabin both graduated with Gold Medals as pianists in 1892). From 1910 onwards the city became a centre for the avant-garde - a dynamic, bustling metropolis where the most daring art exhibitions were held.
88
See Stephen Walsh,