Sergei Prokofiev i5d

Sergei Prokofiev From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Sergei Prokofiev in New York, 1918

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (/prəˈkɒfiɛf, proʊ-, -ˈkɔː-, -ˈkoʊ-, -jɛf, -jɛv, -iəf/;[1][2][3] Russian: Сергей Сергеевич Прокофьев, tr. Sergej Sergejevič Prokofjev;[n 1] 23 April 1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian and Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous musical genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard works as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet – from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken – and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created – excluding juvenilia – seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, acello concerto, a Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas. A graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument, including his first two piano concertos. In 1915 Prokofiev made a decisive break from the standard composer-pianist category with his orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev – Chout,Le pas d'acier and The Prodigal Son – which at the time of their original production all caused a sensation among both critics and colleagues. Prokofiev's greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler andThe Fiery Angel. Prokofiev's one operatic success during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for the Chicago Operaand subsequently performed over the following decade in Europe and Russia. After the Revolution, Prokofiev left Russia with the official blessing of the Soviet minister Anatoly Lunacharsky, and resided in the United States, then , then Paris, making his living as a composer, pianist and conductor. During that time he married a Spanish singer, Carolina Codina, with whom he had two sons. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression diminished opportunities for Prokofiev's ballets and operas to be staged in America and western Europe. Prokofiev, who regarded himself as composer foremost, resented the time taken by touring as a pianist, and increasingly turned to Soviet Russia for commissions of new music; in 1936 he finally returned to his homeland with his family. He enjoyed some success there – notably with Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps above all with Alexander Nevsky.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR spurred him to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. In 1948 Prokofiev was criticized for "antidemocratic formalism" and, with his income severely curtailed, was forced to compose Stalinist works, such as On Guard for Peace. However, he also enjoyed personal and artistic from a new generation of Russian performers, notably Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich: for the latter, he composed his Symphony-Concerto, whilst for the former he composed his ninth piano sonata. Contents [hide]

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1Biography o

1.1Early childhood and first compositions

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1.2Formal education and controversial early works

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1.3The first ballets

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1.4First World War and Revolution

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1.5Life abroad

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1.6First visits to the Soviet Union

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1.7Return to Russia

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1.8War years

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1.9Post-war

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1.10Death

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2Posthumous reputation

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3Works

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4Recordings

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5Honours and awards

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6Bibliography o

6.1Autobiography and diaries

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6.2Memoirs, essays, etc.

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6.3Biographies

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6.4Other monographs

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6.5Dictionary articles

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7Notes and references

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8External links

Biography[edit] Early childhood and first compositions[edit] Prokofiev was born in 1891[n 2] in Sontsovka (now Krasne, Krasnoarmiisk Raion, Donetsk Oblast, eastern Ukraine), a remote rural estate in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of theRussian Empire. [5] His father, Sergei Alexeyevich Prokofiev, was an agronomist. Prokofiev's mother, Maria (née Zhitkova), came from a family of former serfs who had been owned by the Sheremetev family, under whose patronage serf-children were taught theatre and arts from an early age. [6][7][8][9] She was described by Reinhold Glière (Prokofiev's first composition teacher) as "a tall woman with beautiful, clever eyes ... who knew how to create an atmosphere of warmth and simplicity about her." [10] After their wedding in the summer of 1877, the Prokofievs had moved to a small estate in the Smolensk governorate. Eventually Sergei Alexeyevich found employment as a soil engineer, employed by one of his former fellow-students, Dmitri Sontsov, to whose estate in the Ukrainian steppes the Prokofievs moved.[11] By the time of Prokofiev's birth Maria, having previously lost two daughters, had devoted her life to music; during her son's early childhood she spent two months a year in Moscow or St Petersburg taking piano lessons.[12] Sergei Prokofiev was inspired by hearing his mother practicing the piano in the evenings – mostly works by Chopin andBeethoven – and composed his first piano composition at the age of five, an 'Indian Gallop', which was written down by his mother: this was in the F Lydian mode (a major scale with a raised 4th scale degree) as the young Prokofiev felt 'reluctance to tackle the black notes'.[13] By seven, he had also learned to play chess.[14] Much like music, chess would remain a ion, and he became acquainted with world chess champions José Raúl Capablanca, whom he beat in a simultaneous exhibition match in 1914, and Mikhail Botvinnik, with whom he played several matches in the 1930s.[15][n 3] At the age of nine he was composing his first opera, The Giant,[17] as well as an overture and various other pieces.

Formal education and controversial early works[edit] In 1902, Prokofiev's mother met Sergei Taneyev, director of the Moscow Conservatory, who initially suggested that Prokofiev should start lessons in piano and composition withAlexander Goldenweiser.[18] When Taneyev was unable to arrange this,[19] he instead organised that composer and pianist Reinhold Glière should spend the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching Prokofiev. [19] This first series of lessons culminated, at the 11-year-old Prokofiev's insistence, with the budding composer making his first attempt to write a symphony.[20] The following summer Glière revisited Sontsovka to give further tuition.[21] When decades later Prokofiev wrote about his lessons with Glière, he gave due credit to his teacher's sympathetic method but complained that Glière had introduced him to "square" phrase structure and conventional modulations which he subsequently had to unlearn.[22] Nonetheless, equipped with the necessary theoretical tools, Prokofiev started experimenting with dissonant harmonies and unusual time signatures in a series of short piano pieces which he called "ditties" (after the so-called "song form" – more accurately ternary form – they were based on), laying the basis for his own musical style.[23] Despite his growing talent, Prokofiev's parents hesitated over starting their son on a musical career at such an early age, and considered the possibility of his attending a quality high school in Moscow. [24] By 1904, his mother had decided instead on Saint Petersburg, and she and Prokofiev visited the

(then) capital to explore the possibility of their moving there for his education. [25] They were introduced to composer Alexander Glazunov, a professor at the Conservatory, who asked to see Prokofiev and his music; Glazunov was so impressed that he urged Prokofiev's mother that her son apply to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.[26] By this point, Prokofiev had composed two more operas, Desert Islandsand The Feast during the Plague, and was working on his fourth, Undina. [27] He ed the introductory tests and entered the Conservatory that same year.[28] Several years younger than most of his class, he was viewed as eccentric and arrogant, and he annoyed a number of his classmates by keeping statistics on the errors made by fellow students. [29] During this period, he studied under, among others, Alexander Winkler for piano,[30] Anatoly Lyadov for harmony and counterpoint, Nikolai Tcherepnin for conducting, and Nikolai RimskyKorsakov for orchestration (though when Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908, Prokofiev noted that he had only studied with him "after a fashion" – he was just one of many students in a heavily attended class—and regretted that he otherwise "never had the opportunity to study with him"). [31] He also shared classes with the composers Boris Asafyev and Nikolai Myaskovsky, the latter becoming a relatively close and lifelong friend.[32] As a member of the Saint Petersburg music scene, Prokofiev developed a reputation as a musical rebel, while getting praise for his original compositions, which he performed himself on the piano. [33] [34] In 1909, he graduated from his class in composition with unimpressive marks. He continued at the Conservatory, studying piano under Anna Yesipovaand continuing his conducting lessons under Tcherepnin.[35] In 1910, Prokofiev's father died and Sergei's financial ceased. [36] Fortunately he had started making a name for himself as a composer and pianist outside the Conservatory, making appearances at the St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music. There he performed several of his more adventurous piano works, such as his highlychromatic and dissonant Etudes, Op. 2 (1909). His performance of this impressed the organizers of Evenings sufficiently for them to invite Prokofiev to give the Russian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11.[37] Prokofiev's harmonic experimentation continued with Sarcasms for piano, Op. 17 (1912), which makes extensive use ofpolytonality.[38] He composed his first two piano concertos around this time, the latter of which caused a scandal at its premiere (23 August 1913, Pavlovsk). According to one , the audience left the hall with exclamations of "'To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!'", but the modernists were in rapture.[39] In 1911, help arrived from renowned Russian musicologist and critic Alexander Ossovsky, who wrote a ive letter to music publisher Boris P. Jurgenson (son of publishing-firm founder Peter Jurgenson [1836–1904]); thus a contract was offered to the composer.[40] Prokofiev made his first foreign trip in 1913, travelling to Paris and London where he first encountered Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.[41]

The first ballets[edit]

Prokofiev as drawn byHenri Matisse for the premiere of Chout (1921)

In 1914, Prokofiev finished his career at the Conservatory by entering the so-called 'battle of the pianos', a competition open to the five best piano students for which the prize was a Schreder grand piano: Prokofiev won by performing his own Piano Concerto No. 1.[42] Soon afterwards, he journeyed to London where he made with the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev commissioned Prokofiev's first ballet, Ala and Lolli; but when Prokofiev brought the work in progress to him in Italy in 1915 he rejected it as "non-Russian".[43] Urging Prokofiev to write "music that was national in character",[44] Diaghilev then commissioned the ballet Chout (The Fool, the original Russian-language full title was Сказка про шута, семерых шутов перешутившего (Skazka pro shuta, semerykh shutov pereshutivshavo), meaning "The Tale of the Buffoon who Outwits Seven Other Buffoons"). Under Diaghilev's guidance, Prokofiev chose his subject from a collection of folktales by the ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev;[45] the story, concerning a buffoon and a series of confidence tricks, had been previously suggested to Diaghilev by Igor Stravinsky as a possible subject for a ballet, and Diaghilev and his choreographer Léonide Massine helped Prokofiev to shape this into a ballet scenario.[46]Prokofiev's inexperience with ballet led him to revise the work extensively in the 1920s, following Diaghilev's detailed critique,[47] prior to its first production.[48] The ballet's premiere in Paris on 17 May 1921 was a huge success and was greeted with great iration by an audience that included Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel. Stravinsky called the ballet "the single piece of modern music he could listen to with pleasure," while Ravel called it "a work of genius."[49]

First World War and Revolution[edit] During World War I, Prokofiev returned to the Conservatory and studied organ in order to avoid conscription. He composed The Gambler based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name, but rehearsals were plagued by problems and the scheduled 1917 première had to be canceled because of the February Revolution. In the summer of that year, Prokofiev composed his first symphony, the Classical. This was his own name for the symphony, which was written in the style that, according to Prokofiev, Joseph Haydnwould have used if he had been alive at the time. [50] It is more or less Classical in style but incorporates more modern musical elements (see Neoclassicism). This symphony was also an exact contemporary of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19, which was scheduled to premiere in November 1917. The first performances of both works had to wait until 21 April 1918 and 18 October 1923, respectively. He stayed briefly with his mother in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. After completing the score of Seven, They Are Seven, a "Chaldean invocation" for chorus and orchestra,[51] Prokofiev was "left with nothing to do and time hung heavily on my hands". Believing that Russia "had no use for music at the moment", Prokofiev decided to try his fortunes in America until the turmoil in his homeland had ed. He set out for Moscow and Petersburg in March 1918 to sort out financial matters and to

arrange for his port.[52] In May he headed for the USA, having obtained official permission to do so from Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education, who told him: "You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life. We ought to work together. But if you want to go to America I shall not stand in your way."[53]

Life abroad[edit]

Sergei Prokofiev (c. 1918)

Arriving in San Francisco after having been released from questioning by immigration officials on Angel Island on 11 August 1918,[54] Prokofiev was soon compared to other famous Russian exiles (such as Sergei Rachmaninoff). His debut solo concert in New York led to several further engagements. He also received a contract from the music director of the Chicago Opera Association, Cleofonte Campanini, for the production of his new opera The Love for Three Oranges; [55] however, due to Campanini's illness and death, the premiere was postponed. [56] This delay was another example of Prokofiev's bad luck in operatic matters. The failure also cost him his American solo career, since the opera took too much time and effort. He soon found himself in financial difficulties, and, in April 1920, he left for Paris, not wanting to return to Russia as a failure. [57] In Paris Prokofiev reaffirmed his s with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.[58] He also completed some of his older, unfinished works, such as theThird Piano Concerto.[59] The Love for Three Oranges finally premièred in Chicago, under the composer's baton, on 30 December 1921. [60] Diaghilev became sufficiently interested in the opera to request Prokofiev play the vocal score to him in June 1922, while they were both in Paris for a revival of Chout, so he could consider it for a possible production.[61] Stravinsky, who was present at the audition, refused to listen to more than the first act.[61] When he then accused Prokofiev of "wasting time composing operas", Prokofiev retorted that Stravinsky "was in no position to lay down a general artistic direction, since he is himself not immune to error".[62] According to Prokofiev, Stravinsky "became incandescent with rage" and "we almost came to blows and were separated only with difficulty". [62] As a result, "our relations became strained and for several years Stravinsky's attitude toward me was critical." [61] In March 1922, Prokofiev moved with his mother to the town of Ettal in the Bavarian Alps, where for over a year he concentrated on an opera project, The Fiery Angel, based on the novel by Valery Bryusov. By this time his later music had acquired a following in Russia, and he received invitations to return there, but he decided to stay in Europe. In 1923, Prokofiev married the Spanish singer Carolina Codina (1897–1989, whose stage name was Lina Llubera) [63]before moving back to Paris.[64]

In Paris, several of his works (for example the Second Symphony) were performed, but the audiences' reception was now lukewarm and Prokofiev sensed that he "was evidently no longer a sensation".[65] However the Symphony appeared to prompt Diaghilev to commission Le pas d'acier (The Steel Step), a 'modernist' ballet score intended to portray the industrialisation of the Soviet Union. It was enthusiastically received by Parisian audiences and critics. [66] In around 1924, Prokofiev was introduced to Christian Science.[67] He began to practice its teachings, which he believed to be beneficial to his health and to his fiery temperament, [68] and to which, according to biographer Simon Morrison, he remained faithful for the rest of his life.[69] Prokofiev and Stravinsky restored their friendship, though Prokofiev particularly disliked Stravinsky's "stylization of Bach" in such recent works as the Octet and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments.[70][n 4] However, Stravinsky himself described Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day, after himself.[72]

First visits to the Soviet Union[edit] In 1927, Prokofiev made his first concert tour in the Soviet Union.[73] Over the course of more than two months, he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (as Saint Petersburg had been renamed), where he enjoyed a very successful staging of The Love for Three Oranges in the Mariinsky Theatre. [74] In 1928, Prokofiev completed his Third Symphony, which was broadly based on his unperformed opera The Fiery Angel. The conductor Serge Koussevitzky characterized the Third as "the greatest symphony since Tchaikovsky'sSixth."[75] In the meantime, however, Prokofiev, under the influence of the teachings of Christian Science, had turned against the expressionist style and the subject matter of The Fiery Angel.[76] He now preferred what he called a "new simplicity", which he believed more sincere than the "contrivances and complexities" of so much modern music of the 1920s. [77][n 5] During 1928–29, Prokofiev composed what was to be the last ballet for Diaghilev, The Prodigal Son. When first staged in Paris on 21 May 1929, with Serge Lifar in the title role, both audience and critics were particularly struck by the final scene in which the prodigal son drags himself across the stage upon his knees to be welcomed by his father.[79] Diaghilev had recognised that in the music to this scene, Prokofiev had "never been more clear, more simple, more melodious, and more tender." [80] Only months later, Diaghilev was dead.[81] That summer, Prokofiev completed the Divertimento, Op. 43 (which he had started in 1925) and revised his Sinfonietta, Op. 5/48, a work started in his days at the Conservatory.[82][n 6] In October that year, he had a car crash while driving his family back to Paris from their holiday: as the car turned over, Prokofiev pulled some muscles on his left hand.[83] Prokofiev was therefore unable to perform in Moscow during his tour shortly after the accident, but he was able to enjoy watching performances of his music from the audience.[84] Prokofiev also attended the Bolshoi Theatre's "audition" of his ballet Le pas d'acier, and was interrogated by of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) about the work: he was asked whether the factory portrayed "a capitalist factory, where the worker is a slave, or a Soviet factory, where the worker is the master? If it is a Soviet factory, when and where did Prokofiev examine it, since from 1918 to the present he has been living abroad and came here for the first time in 1927 for two weeks [sic]?" Prokofiev replied, "That concerns politics, not music, and therefore I won't answer." The RAPM condemned the ballet as a "flat and vulgar anti-Soviet anecdote, a counter-revolutionary composition bordering on Fascism". The Bolshoi had no option but to reject the ballet.[85] With his left hand healed, Prokofiev toured the United States successfully at the start of 1930, propped up by his recent European success.[86] That year Prokofiev began his first non-Diaghilev ballet On the Dnieper, Op. 51, a work commissioned by Serge Lifar, who had been appointed maitre de ballet at the Paris Opéra.[87] In 1931 and 1932, he completed his fourth and fifth piano concertos. The following year saw the completion of the Symphonic Song, Op. 57, which Prokofiev's friend Myaskovsky – thinking of its potential audience in the Soviet Union – told him "isn't quite for us ... it

lacks that which we mean by monumentalism – a familiar simplicity and broad contours, of which you are extremely capable, but temporarily are carefully avoiding." [88] By the early 1930s, both Europe and America were suffering from the Great Depression, which inhibited both new opera and ballet productions, though audiences for Prokofiev's appearances as a pianist were—in Europe at least—undiminished.[89] However Prokofiev, who saw himself as a composer first and foremost, increasingly resented the amount of time that was lost to composition through his appearances as a pianist.[90] Having been homesick for some time, Prokofiev began to build substantial bridges with the Soviet Union. Following the dissolution of the RAPM in 1932, he acted increasingly as a musical ambassador between his homeland and western Europe, [91] and his premieres and commissions were increasingly under the auspices of the Soviet Union. One such was Lieutenant Kijé, which was commissioned as the score to a Soviet film.[92] Another commission, from the Kirov Theatre (as the Mariinsky had now been renamed) in Leningrad, was the ballet Romeo and Juliet, composed to a scenario created by Adrian Piotrovsky and Sergei Radlov following the precepts of "drambalet" (dramatised ballet, officially promoted at the Kirov to replace works based primarily on choreographic display and innovation). [93] Following Radlov's acrimonious resignation from the Kirov in June 1934, a new agreement was signed with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on the understanding that Piotrovsky would remain involved. [94] However, the ballet's original happy ending (contrary to Shakespeare) provoked controversy among Soviet cultural officials;[95] the ballet's production was then postponed indefinitely when the staff of the Bolshoi was overhauled at the behest of the chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs,Platon Kerzhentsev.[96] Nikolai Myaskovsky, one of his closest friends, mentioned in a number of letters how he would like Prokofiev to stay in Russia. [97]

Return to Russia[edit] In 1936, Prokofiev and his family settled permanently in Moscow.[98] In that year he composed one of his most famous works, Peter and the Wolf, for Natalya Sats's Central Children's Theatre.[99] Sats also persuaded Prokofiev to write two songs for children – "Sweet Song", and "Chatterbox"; [100] these were eventually ed by "The Little Pigs", published as Three Children's Songs, Op. 68. [101] Prokofiev also composed the gigantic Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, originally intended for performance during the anniversary year but effectively blocked by Kerzhentsev, who demanded at the work's audition before the Committee on Arts Affairs, "Just what do you think you're doing, Sergey Sergeyevich, taking texts that belong to the people and setting them to such incomprehensible music?"[102] The Cantata had to wait until 5 April 1966 for a partial premiere (just over 13 years after the composer's death). [103] Forced to adapt to the new circumstances (whatever misgivings he had about them in private), Prokofiev wrote a series of "mass songs" (Opp. 66, 79, 89), using the lyrics of officially approved Soviet poets. In 1938, Prokofiev collaborated with Eisenstein on the historical epic Alexander Nevsky. For this he composed some of his most inventive and dramatic music. Although the film had a very poor sound recording, Prokofiev adapted much of his score into a largescale cantata for mezzo-soprano, orchestra and chorus, which was extensively performed and recorded. In the wake of Alexander Nevsky's success, Prokofiev composed his first Soviet opera Semyon Kotko, which was intended to be produced by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold. However the première of the opera was postponed because Meyerhold was arrested on 20 June 1939 by the NKVD (Joseph Stalin's Secret Police), and shot on 2 February 1940.[104] Only months after Meyerhold's arrest, Prokofiev was 'invited' to compose Zdravitsa (literally translated 'Cheers!', but more often given the English title Hail to Stalin) (Op. 85) to celebrate Joseph Stalin's 60th birthday.[105] Later in 1939, Prokofiev composed his Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7, and 8, Opp. 82–84, widely known today as the "War Sonatas." Premiered respectively by Prokofiev (No. 6: 8 April 1940), [106] Sviatoslav Richter (No. 7: Moscow, 18 January 1943) and Emil Gilels (No. 8: Moscow, 30 December 1944), [107] they were subsequently championed in particular by Richter. Biographer Daniel Jaffé argued that

Prokofiev, "having forced himself to compose a cheerful evocation of the nirvana Stalin wanted everyone to believe he had created" (i.e. in Zdravitsa) then subsequently, in these three sonatas, "expressed his true feelings".[108] As evidence of this, Jaffé has pointed out that the central movement of Sonata No. 7 opens with a theme based on a Robert Schumann lied, 'Wehmut' ('Sadness', which appears in Schumann's Liederkreis, Op. 39): the words to this translate "I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart. Nightingales ... sing their song of longing from their dungeon's depth ... everyone delights, yet no one feels the pain, the deep sorrow in the song."[109] Ironically (because, it appears, no one had noticed his allusion) Sonata No. 7 received a Stalin Prize (Second Class), and No. 8 a Stalin Prize First Class. [107] In the meantime, Romeo and Juliet was finally staged by the Kirov ballet, choreographed by Leonid Lavrovsky, on 11 January 1940.[110] To the surprise of all its participants, the dancers having struggled to cope with the music's syncopated rhythms and almost having boycotted the production, the ballet was an instant success,[111] and became recognised as the crowning achievement of Soviet dramatic ballet.[112]

War years[edit]

Prokofiev and his second wife, Mira Mendelson

Prokofiev had been considering making an opera out of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel War and Peace, when news of the German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 made the subject seem all the more timely. Prokofiev took two years to compose his original version of War and Peace. Because of the war he was evacuated together with a large number of other artists, initially to the Caucasus where he composed his Second String Quartet. By this time his relationship with the 25-year-old writer and librettist Mira Mendelson (1915–1968) had finally led to his separation from his wife Lina, although they were never technically divorced: indeed Prokofiev had tried to persuade Lina and their sons to accompany him as evacuees out of Moscow, but Lina opted to stay.[113] During the war years, restrictions on style and the demand that composers should write in a 'socialist realist' style were slackened, and Prokofiev was generally able to compose in his own way. The Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 80, The Year 1941, Op. 90, and the Ballade for the Boy Who Remained Unknown, Op. 93 all came from this period. In 1943 Prokofiev ed Eisenstein in AlmaAta, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to compose more film music (Ivan the Terrible), and the ballet Cinderella (Op. 87), one of his most melodious and celebrated compositions. Early that year he also played excerpts from War and Peace to of the Bolshoi Theatre collective. [114] However, the Soviet government had opinions about the opera which resulted in many revisions. [115] In 1944, Prokofiev spent time at a composer's colony outside Moscow in order to compose hisFifth Symphony (Op. 100). Prokofiev conducted its first performance on 13 January 1945, just a

fortnight after the triumphant premieres on 30 December 1944 of his Eighth Piano Sonata and, on the same day, the first part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. With the premiere of his Fifth Symphony, which was programmed alongside Peter and the Wolf and the Classical Symphony (these conducted by Nikolai Anosov), Prokofiev appeared to reach the peak of his celebrity as a leading composer of the Soviet Union.[116] Shortly afterwards, he suffered a concussion after a fall due to chronic high blood pressure.[117] He never fully recovered from this injury, and was forced on medical advice to restrict his composing activity.[118]

Post-war[edit]

Sergei Prokofiev with Mstislav Rostropovich

Prokofiev had time to write his postwar Sixth Symphony and his Ninth Piano Sonata (for Sviatoslav Richter) before the so-called "Zhdanov Decree". In early 1948, following a meeting of Soviet composers convened by Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo issued a resolution denouncing Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian of the crime of "formalism", described as a "renunciation of the basic principles of classical music" in favour of "muddled, nerveracking" sounds that "turned music into cacophony".[119] Eight of Prokofiev's works were banned from performance: The Year 1941, Ode to the End of the War, Festive Poem, Cantata for the Thirtieth Anniversary of October, Ballad of an Unknown Boy, the 1934 piano cycle Thoughts, and Piano Sonatas Nos 6 and 8.[120] Such was the perceived threat behind the banning of these works that even works that had avoided censure were no longer programmed:[121] by August 1948, Prokofiev was in severe financial straits, his personal debt amounting to 180,000 rubles. [120] Meanwhile, on 20 February 1948, Prokofiev's wife Lina was arrested for 'espionage', as she had tried to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, [122] she was sentenced by a three-member Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to 20 years of hard labour. [123] She was eventually released after Stalin's death in 1953 and in 1974 left the Soviet Union. [124] Prokofiev's latest opera projects, among them his desperate attempt to appease the cultural authorities, The Story of a Real Man, were quickly cancelled by the Kirov Theatre.[125] This snub, in combination with his declining health, caused Prokofiev progressively to withdraw from public life and from various activities, even his beloved chess, and increasingly he devoted himself exclusively to his own work.[126][127] After a serious relapse in 1949, his doctors ordered him to limit his activities, limiting him to composing for only an hour a day.[128] In spring 1949 he wrote his Cello Sonata in C, Op. 119, for the 22-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter.[129] For Rostropovich, Prokofiev also extensively recomposed his Cello Concerto, transforming it into a Symphony-Concerto, his last major masterpiece and a landmark in the cello and orchestra repertory today.[130] The last public performance he attended was the première of the Seventh Symphony in 1952.[131] The music was written for the Children's Radio Division.[132]

Death[edit]

Grave of Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev

Prokofiev died at the age of 61 on 5 March 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin. He had lived near Red Square, and for three days the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to carry Prokofiev's body out for the funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composers' Union. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.[133] He was an atheist.[134][135] The leading Soviet musical periodical reported Prokofiev's death as a brief item on page 116. The first 115 pages were devoted to the death of Stalin. Usually Prokofiev's death is attributed to cerebral hemorrhage. He had been chronically ill for the prior eight years; [136] the precise nature of Prokofiev's terminal illness remains uncertain. Lina Prokofiev outlived her estranged husband by many years, dying in London in early 1989. Royalties from her late husband's music provided her with a modest income, and she acted as storyteller for a recording of her husband's Peter and the Wolf (currently released on CD by Chandos Records[137]) with Neeme Järvi conducting the Scottish National Orchestra. Their sons Sviatoslav (1924–2010), an architect, and Oleg (1928–1998), an artist, painter, sculptor and poet, dedicated a large part of their lives to the promotion of their father's life and work.[138][139]

Posthumous reputation[edit]

A Soviet stamp marking Prokofiev's centenary in 1991

Arthur Honegger proclaimed that Prokofiev would "remain for us the greatest figure of contemporary music,"[140] and the American scholar Richard Taruskin has recognised Prokofiev's "gift, virtually unparalleled among 20th-century composers, for writing distinctively original diatonic melodies."[141] Yet for some time Prokofiev's reputation in the West suffered as a result of cold-war antipathies,[142] and his music has never won from Western academics and critics the kind of esteem currently enjoyed by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, composers purported to have a greater influence on a younger generation of musicians.[143] Today Prokofiev may well be the most popular composer of 20th-century music.[144] His orchestral music alone is played more frequently in the United States than that of any other composer of the

last hundred years, save Richard Strauss,[145] while his operas, ballets, chamber works, and piano music appear regularly throughout the major concert halls world-wide. The composer received honours in his native Donetsk Oblast, when the Donetsk International Airport was renamed to be "Donetsk Sergey Prokofiev International Airport," and when the Donetsk Musical and Pedagogical Institute was renamed in 1988 to "S.S. Prokofiev State Music Academy of Donetsk."

Works[edit] Main article: List of compositions by Sergei Prokofiev Important works include (in chronological order): 

Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat major, op. 10



Toccata in D minor, Op. 11, for piano



Piano Sonata No. 2 in D minor, Op. 14



Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16



Sarcasms, Op. 17, for piano



Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19



Scythian Suite, Op. 20, suite for orchestra



Chout, Op. 21, ballet in six scenes



Visions fugitives, Op. 22, set of twenty piano pieces



The Gambler, Op. 24, opera in four acts



Symphony No. 1 in D major Classical, Op. 25, an early neo-classical composition



Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26



The Love for Three Oranges, Op. 33, opera in four acts, includes the famous March from the Love for Three Oranges



Overture on Hebrew Themes, Op. 34, for clarinet and piano quintet



Quintet, Op. 39, for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double-bass



The Fiery Angel, Op. 37, opera in five acts



Symphony No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40



Le pas d'acier, ballet in two scenes, Op. 41



Divertimento, Op. 43



Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 44



The Prodigal Son, Op. 46, ballet in three scenes



Symphony No. 4 in C major, Op. 47 (revised as Op. 112)



Sinfonietta, Op. 5/48



Four Portraits from The Gambler, Op. 49



String Quartet No. 1 in B minor, Op. 50



Symphonic Song, Op. 57



Lieutenant Kije, Op. 60, suite for orchestra, includes the famous Troika



Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63



Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, ballet in four acts, contains the famous "Dance of the Knights" 



Orchestral suites extracted from Romeo and Juliet: 

Suite No. 1 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64bis



Suite No. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64ter



Suite No. 3 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 101 Ten Pieces for Piano from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75



Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67, a children's tale for narrator and orchestra



Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78, cantata for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra



Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80



The Three War Sonatas: 

Piano Sonata No. 6 in A major, Op. 82



Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat major, Op. 83



Piano Sonata No. 8 in B-flat major, Op. 84



Betrothal in a Monastery, Op. 86, opera.



Cinderella, Op. 87, ballet in three acts



War and Peace, Op. 91, opera in thirteen scenes



String Quartet No. 2 in F major, Op. 92



Flute Sonata in D, Op. 94 (later arranged as Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 94a))



Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100



Piano Sonata No. 9 in C major, Op. 103



Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, Op. 111



Ivan the Terrible, Op. 116, music for Eisenstein's classic film of the same name.



The Tale of the Stone Flower, Op. 118, ballet in two acts

 

Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 125, written forMstislav Rostropovich Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131

Recordings[edit] Overture on Hebrew Themes

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Overture on Hebrew Themes (1919), performed by of the Advent Chamber Orchestra

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Prokofiev was a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Piero Coppola, in the first recording of his Piano Concerto No. 3, recorded in London by His Master's Voice in June 1932. Prokofiev also recorded some of his solo piano music for HMV in Paris in February 1935; these recordings were issued on CD by Pearl and Naxos.[146] In 1938, he conducted the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestrain a recording of the second suite from his Romeo and Juliet ballet; this

performance was later released on LP and CD.[147] Another reported recording with Prokofiev and the Moscow Philharmonic was of the First Violin Concerto with David Oistrakh as soloist; Everest Records later released this recording on an LP. Despite the attribution, the conductor was Aleksandr Gauk. A short sound film of Prokofiev playing some of the music from his opera War and Peace and then explaining the music has been discovered.[148]

Honours and awards[edit] 

Six Stalin Prizes: (1943), 2nd degree – for Piano Sonata No. 7 (1946), 1st degree – for Symphony No. 5 and Piano Sonata No. 8 (1946), 1st degree – for the music for the film "Ivan the Terrible" Part 1 (1944) (1946), 1st degree – for the ballet "Cinderella" (1944) (1947), 1st degree – for Violin Sonata No. 1 (1951), 2nd degree – for vocal-symphonic suite "Winter bonfire" and the oratorio "On Guard for Peace" on poems by S. Marshak 

Lenin Prize (1957 – posthumous) – for Symphony No. 7



People's Artist of RSFSR (1947)



Order of the Red Banner of Labour

Bibliography[edit] Autobiography and diaries[edit] 

Prokofiev, Sergei (1979). David H. Appel, ed. Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer's Memoir. Guy Daniels (translator). New York: Doubleday & Co. ISBN 0-385-09960-6.



Prokofiev, Sergei (1991). Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber.



Prokofiev, Sergei (2000) [1960]. S. Shlifstein, ed. Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences. Rose Prokofieva (translator). The Minerva Group, Inc. ISBN 0-89875-149-7.



Prokofiev, Sergei (2006). Anthony Phillips (translator), ed. Diaries 1907–1914: Prodigious Youth. London/Ithaca: Faber and Faber/Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4540-8.



Prokofiev, Sergei (2008). Anthony Phillips (translator), ed. Diaries 1915–1923: Behind the Mask. London / Ithaca: Faber and Faber/Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-571-22630-6.



Prokofiev, Sergei (2012). Anthony Phillips (translator), ed. Diaries 1924–1933: Prodigal Son. London/ Ithaca: Faber and Faber/Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-571-23405-9.



Prokofiev, Sergei (2002). Dnyevnik 1907–1933 (3 vols, in Russian). Paris. ISBN 2-9518138-0-5. ISBN 2-9518138-1-3, ISBN 2-9518138-2-1



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Memoirs, essays, etc.[edit] 

Sats, Natalia (1979). Sketches From My Life. Sergei Syrovatkin (translator). Moscow: Raduga Publishers. ISBN 5-05-001099-3.



Shlifstein (ed.), Semyon (1956). Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences. Rose Prokofieva (translator). Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Biographies[edit] 

Dorigné, Michel (1994). Serge Prokofiev. Paris.



Jaffé, Daniel (1998). Sergey Prokofiev (2008 ed.). London.



Morrison, Simon (2009). The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years. Oxford.



Morrison, Simon (2013). The Love & Wars of Lina Prokofiev. London.



Nestyev, Israel (1946). Prokofiev, his Musical Life. New York.



Nestyev, Israel (1961). Prokofiev. Florence Jonas (translator). Stanford: Stanford University Press.



Nice, David (2003). Prokofiev: From Russia to the West 1891–1935. London.



Rakhmanova, Marina Pavlovna, ed. (1991). Сергей Прокофьев: к 110летию со дня рождения: письма, воспоминания, статьи [Sergei Prokofiev on the 110th anniversary of his birth: letters, reminiscences and articles] (in Russian). Moscow. ISBN 978-5-201-14607-8.



Samuel, Claude (1971). Prokofiev. London. ISBN 0-7145-0490-4.



Seroff, Victor (1968). Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet Tragedy. New York.



Vishnevetskiy, Igor (2009). Sergei Prokofiev (in Russian). Moscow. ISBN 9785-235-03212-5.

Other monographs[edit] 

Ezrahi, Christina (2012). Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia. Pittsburgh.ISBN 978-1-85273-158-8.



Tomoff, Kiril (2006). Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca. ISBN 978-0-8014-4411-1.

Dictionary articles[edit]



Slonimsky, Nicolas (ed).The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. New York, Schirmer Books, 1993. ISBN 0-02-872416-X



Taruskin, Richard. "Prokofiev, Sergei" in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1992) ISBN 0-333-73432-7

Modest Mussorgsky From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Mussorgsky" redirects here. For other uses, see Mussorgsky (disambiguation).

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, 1870

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Модест Петрович Мусоргский; IPA: [mɐˈdɛst pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈmusərkskʲɪj]; 21 March [O.S. 9 March] 1839 – 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1881) was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator ofRussian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music. Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes. Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have posthumously come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available. Contents [hide]



1Name



2Life o

2.1Early years

o

2.2Maturity

o

2.3Peak

o

2.4Decline



3Works



4Criticism



5References



6External links

Name[edit]

The aristocratic Mussorgsky brothers—Filaret (also known as "Yevgeniy", left), and Modest (right), 1858.

The spelling and pronunciation of the composer's name has occasioned some confusion. The family name derives from a 15th- or 16th-century ancestor, Roman Vasilyevich Monastyryov, who appears in the Velvet Book, the 17th-century genealogy of Russian boyars. Roman Vasilyevich bore the nickname "Musorga", and was the grandfather of the first Mussorgsky. The composer could trace his lineage to Rurik, the legendary 9th-century founder of the Russian state.[1] In Mussorgsky family documents the spelling of the name varies: "Musarskiy", "Mskiy", "Mskoy", "Musirskoy", "Musorskiy", and "Musurskiy". The baptismal record gives the composer's name as "Mskiy".[2] In early (up to 1858) letters to Mily Balakirev, the composer signed his name "Musorskiy" (Russian: Мусoрский).[3] The "g" made its first appearance in a letter to Balakirev in 1863. [4] Mussorgsky used this new spelling (Russian: Мусoргский, Musorgskiy) to the end of his life, but occasionally reverted to the earlier "Musorskiy". [5][6] The addition of the "g" to the name was likely initiated by the composer's elder brother Filaret to obscure the resemblance of the name's root to an unsavory Russian word:[7]

мусoр (músor) — n. m. debris, rubbish, refuse[8] Mussorgsky apparently did not take the new spelling seriously, and played on the "rubbish" connection in letters to Vladimir Stasov and to Stasov's family, routinely g his name Musoryanin, roughly "garbage-dweller" (compare dvoryanin: "nobleman").[6] The first syllable of the name originally received the stress (i.e., MÚS-ər-ski), and does so to this day in Russia and in the composer's home district. The mutability of the second-syllable vowel in the versions of the name mentioned above gives evidence that this syllable did not receive the stress.[9] The addition of the "g" and the accompanying shift in stress to the second syllable (i.e., MuSÓRK-ski), sometimes described as a Polish variant, was ed by Filaret Mussorgsky's descendants until his line ended in the 20th century. Their example was followed by many influential Russians, such as Fyodor Shalyapin, Nikolay Golovanov, andTikhon Khrennikov, who, perhaps dismayed that the great composer's name was "reminiscent of garbage", ed the erroneous second-syllable stress that has also become entrenched in the West. [10] The Western convention of doubling the first "s", which is not observed in scholarly literature (e.g., The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians), likely arose because in many Western European languages a single intervocalic /s/ often becomes voiced to /z/ (as in "music"), unlike in Slavic languages where it remains unvoiced. Doubling the consonant thus reinforces its voiceless sibilant /s/ sound.

Life[edit] Early years[edit]

Young Mussorgsky as a cadet in the Preobrazhensky Regiment of the Imperial Guard.

Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, Toropets Uyezd, Pskov Governorate, Russian Empire, 400 km (250 mi) south of Saint Petersburg. His wealthy and land-owning family, the noble family

of Mussorgsky, is reputedly descended from the first Ruthenian ruler, Rurik, through the sovereign princes of Smolensk. At age six Mussorgsky began receiving piano lessons from his mother, herself a trained pianist. His progress was sufficiently rapid that three years later he was able to perform a John Field concerto and works by Franz Liszt for family and friends. At 10, he and his brother were taken to Saint Petersburg to study at the elite German language Petrischule (St. Peter's School). While there, Modest studied the piano with the noted Anton Gerke. In 1852, the 12-year-old Mussorgsky published a piano piece titled "Porteenseigne Polka" at his father's expense. Mussorgsky's parents planned the move to Saint Petersburg so that both their sons would renew the family tradition of military service.[11] To this end, Mussorgsky entered the Cadet School of the Guards at age 13. Sharp controversy had arisen over the educational attitudes at the time of both this institute and its director, a General Sutgof.[12] All agreed the Cadet School could be a brutal place, especially for new recruits.[13] More tellingly for Mussorgsky, it was likely where he began his eventual path to alcoholism.[13] According to a former student, singer and composer Nikolai Kompaneisky, Sutgof "was proud when a cadet returned from leave drunk with champagne."[14] Music remained important to him, however. Sutgof's daughter was also a pupil of Gerke, and Mussorgsky was allowed to attend lessons with her.[12] His skills as a pianist made him much in demand by fellow-cadets; for them he would play dances interspersed with his ownimprovisations.[15] In 1856 Mussorgsky – who had developed a strong interest in history and studied German philosophy – graduated from the Cadet School. Following family tradition he received a commission with the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard.[15]

Maturity[edit] In October 1856 the 17-year-old Mussorgsky met the 22-year-old Alexander Borodin while both men served at a military hospital in Saint Petersburg. The two were soon on good . [16] Borodin later ed, His little uniform was spic and span, close-fitting, his feet turned outwards, his hair smoothed down and greased, his nails perfectly cut, his hands well groomed like a lord's. His manners were elegant, aristocratic: his speech likewise, delivered through somewhat clenched teeth, interspersed with French phrases, rather precious. There was a touch—though very moderate— of foppishness. His politeness and good manners were exceptional. The ladies made a fuss of him. He sat at the piano and, throwing up his hands coquettishly, played with extreme sweetness and grace (etc) extracts from Trovatore, Traviata, and so on, and around him buzzed in chorus: "Charmant, délicieux!" and suchlike. I met Modest Petrovich three or four times at Popov's in this way, both on duty and at the hospital."[17]

Alexander Dargomyzhsky

More portentous was Mussorgsky's introduction that winter to Alexander Dargomyzhsky, at that time the most important Russian composer afterMikhail Glinka. Dargomyzhsky was impressed with Mussorgsky's pianism. As a result, Mussorgsky became a fixture at Dargomyzhsky's soirées. There, critic Vladimir Stasov later recalled, he began "his true musical life."[18] Over the next two years at Dargomyzhsky's, Mussorgsky met several figures of importance in Russia's cultural life, among them Stasov, César Cui (a fellow officer), and Mily Balakirev. Balakirev had an especially strong impact. Within days he took it upon himself to help shape Mussorgsky's fate as a composer. He recalled to Stasov, "Because I am not a theorist, I could not teach him harmony (as, for instance Rimsky-Korsakov now teaches it) ... [but] I explained to him the form of compositions, and to do this we played through both Beethoven symphonies [as piano duets] and much else (Schumann, Schubert, Glinka, and others), analyzing the form."[19] Up to this point Mussorgsky had known nothing but piano music; his knowledge of more radical recent music was virtually non-existent. Balakirev started filling these gaps in Mussorgsky's knowledge.[20] In 1858, within a few months of beginning his studies with Balakirev, Mussorgsky resigned his commission to devote himself entirely to music.[21]He also suffered a painful crisis at this time. This may have had a spiritual component (in a letter to Balakirev the young man referred to "mysticism and cynical thoughts about the Deity"), but its exact nature will probably never be known. In 1859, the 20-year-old gained valuable theatrical experience by assisting in a production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar on the Glebovo estate of a former singer and her wealthy husband; he also met Konstantin Lyadov (father of Anatoly Lyadov) and enjoyed a formative visit to Moscow – after which he professed a love of "everything Russian". In spite of this epiphany, Mussorgsky's music still leaned more toward foreign models; a fourhand piano sonata which he produced in 1860 contains his only movement in sonata form. Nor is any 'nationalistic' impulse easily discernible in the incidental music for Vladislav Ozerov's play Oedipus in Athens, on which he worked between the ages of 19 and 22 (and then abandoned unfinished), or in the Intermezzo in modo classico for piano solo (revised and orchestrated in 1867). The latter was the only important piece he composed between December 1860 and August 1863: the reasons for this probably lie in the painful re-emergence of his subjective crisis in 1860 and the purely objective difficulties which resulted from the emancipation of the serfs the following year – as a result of which the family was deprived of half its estate, and Mussorgsky had to spend a good deal of time in Karevo unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their looming impoverishment.

Gustave Flaubert. Mussorgsky started an opera based on his Salammbô but did not finish it.

By this time, Mussorgsky had freed himself from the influence of Balakirev and was largely teaching himself. In 1863 he began an opera –Salammbô – on which he worked between 1863 and 1866 before losing interest in the project. During this period he had returned to Saint Petersburg and was ing himself as a low-grade civil-servant while living in a six-man "commune". In a heady artistic and intellectual atmosphere, he read and discussed a wide range of modern artistic and scientific ideas – including those of the provocative writer Chernyshevsky, known for the bold assertion that, in art, "form and content are opposites". Under such influences he came more and more to embrace the ideal of artistic realism and all that it entailed, whether this concerned the responsibility to depict life "as it is truly lived"; the preoccupation with the lower strata of society; or the rejection of repeating, symmetrical musical forms as insufficiently true to the unrepeating, unpredictable course of "real life". Night on Bald Mountain

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Rimsky-Korsakov's edited version of the piece, performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra. Courtesy of Musopen

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"Real life" affected Mussorgsky painfully in 1865, when his mother died; it was at this point that the composer had his first serious bout of alcoholic dipsomania. The 26-year-old was, however, on the point of writing his first realistic songs (including "Hopak" and "Darling Savishna", both of them composed in 1866 and among his first "real" publications the following year). The year 1867 was also the one in which he finished the original orchestral version of his Night on Bald Mountain (which, however, Balakirev criticised and refused to conduct, with the result that it was never performed during Mussorgsky's lifetime).

Peak[edit]

Mussorgsky's career as a civil servant was by no means stable or secure: though he was assigned to various posts and even received a promotion in these early years, in 1867 he was declared 'supernumerary' – remaining 'in service', but receiving no wages. Decisive developments were occurring in his artistic life, however. Although it was in 1867 that Stasov first referred to the 'kuchka' ('The Five') of Russian composers loosely grouped around Balakirev, Mussorgsky was by then ceasing to seek Balakirev's approval and was moving closer to the older Alexander Dargomyzhsky.

Ivan Melnikov as the title character in Boris Godunov, 1874

Since 1866 Dargomïzhsky had been working on his opera The Stone Guest, a version of the Don Juan story with a Pushkin text that he declared would be set "just as it stands, so that the inner truth of the text should not be distorted", and in a manner that abolished the 'unrealistic' division between aria and recitative in favour of a continuous mode of syllabic but lyrically heightened declamation somewhere between the two. Under the influence of this work (and the ideas of Georg Gottfried Gervinus, according to whom "the highest natural object of musical imitation is emotion, and the method of imitating emotion is to mimic speech"), Mussorgsky in 1868 rapidly set the first eleven scenes of Nikolai Gogol's The Marriage (Zhenitba), with his priority being to render into music the natural accents and patterns of the play's naturalistic and deliberately humdrum dialogue. This work marked an extreme position in Mussorgsky's pursuit of naturalistic word-setting: he abandoned it unorchestrated after reaching the end of his 'Act 1', and though its characteristically 'Mussorgskyian' declamation is to be heard in all his later vocal music, the naturalistic mode of vocal writing more and more became merely one expressive element among many.

Fyodor Komissarzhevsky as The Pretender in Boris Godunov

A few months after abandoning Zhenitba, the 29-year-old Mussorgsky was encouraged to write an opera on the story of Boris Godunov. This he did, assembling and shaping a text from Pushkin's play and Karamzin's history. He completed the large-scale score the following year while living with friends and working for the Forestry Department. In 1871, however, the finished opera was rejected for theatrical performance, apparently because of its lack of any 'prima donna' role. Mussorgsky set to work producing a revised and enlarged 'second version'. During the next year, which he spent sharing rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov, he made changes that went beyond those requested by the theatre. In this version the opera was accepted, probably in May 1872, and three excerpts were staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1873. It is often asserted that in 1872 the opera was rejected a second time, but no specific evidence for this exists. By the time of the first production of Boris Godunov in February 1874, Mussorgsky had taken part in the ill-fated Mlada project (in the course of which he had made a choral version of his Night on Bald Mountain) and had begun Khovanshchina. Though far from being a critical success – and in spite of receiving only a dozen or so performances – the popular reaction in favour of Boris made this the peak of Mussorgsky's career.

Decline[edit] From this peak a pattern of decline becomes increasingly apparent. Already the Balakirev circle was disintegrating. Mussorgsky was especially bitter about this. He wrote to Vladimir Stasov, "[T]he Mighty Handful has degenerated into soulless traitors." [22] In drifting away from his old friends, Mussorgsky had been seen to fall victim to 'fits of madness' that could well have been alcoholism-related. His friend Viktor Hartmann had died, and his relative and recent roommate Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (who furnished the poems for the songcycle Sunless and would go on to provide those for the Songs and Dances of Death) had moved away to get married. Ilya Repin's celebrated portrait of Mussorgsky, painted 2–5 March 1881, only a few days before the composer's death.

While alcoholism was Mussorgsky's personal weakness, it was also a behavior pattern considered typical for those of Mussorgsky's generation who wanted to oppose the establishment and protest through extreme forms of behavior.[23] One contemporary notes, "an intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a 'pose,' for the best people of the [eighteen-]sixties." Another writes, "Talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink."[24] Mussorgsky spent day and night in a Saint Petersburg tavern of low repute, the Maly Yaroslavets, accompanied by other bohemian dropouts. He and his fellow drinkers idealized their alcoholism, perhaps seeing it as ethical and aesthetic opposition. This bravado, however, led to little more than isolation and eventual self-destruction.[23] Pictures at an Exhibition (first part of three)

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Pictures at an Exhibition (second part of three)

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Pictures at an Exhibition (third part of three)

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Arrangement for two pianos

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For a time Mussorgsky was able to maintain his creative output: his compositions from 1874 includeSunless, the Khovanshchina Prelude, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (in memory of Hartmann); he also began work on another opera based on Gogol, The Fair at Sorochyntsi (for which he produced another choral version of Night on Bald Mountain).

Grave of Modest Mussorgsky in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg

In the years that followed, Mussorgsky's decline became increasingly steep. Although now part of a new circle of eminent personages that included singers, medical men and actors, he was increasingly unable to resist drinking, and a succession of deaths among his closest associates caused him great pain. At times, however, his alcoholism would seem to be in check, and among the most powerful works composed during his last six years are the four Songs and Dances of Death. His civil service career was made more precarious by his frequent 'illnesses' and absences, and he was fortunate to obtain a transfer to a post (in the Office of Government Control) where his music-loving superior treated him with great leniency – in 1879 even allowing him to spend three months touring twelve cities as a singer's accompanist. The decline could not be halted, however. In 1880 he was finally dismissed from government service. Aware of his destitution, one group of friends organised a stipend designed to the completion of Khovanshchina; another group organised a similar fund to pay him to completeThe Fair at Sorochyntsi. However, neither work was completed

(although Khovanshchina, in piano score with only two numbers uncomposed, came close to being finished). In early 1881 a desperate Mussorgsky declared to a friend that there was 'nothing left but begging', and suffered four seizures in rapid succession. Though he found a comfortable room in a good hospital – and for several weeks even appeared to be rallying – the situation was hopeless. Repin painted the famous red-nosed portrait in what were to be the last days of the composer's life: a week after his 42nd birthday, he was dead. He was interred at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. During 1935 to 1937, in connection with the reconstruction and redevelopment of the so-called Necropolis of Masters of Arts, the square in front of the Lavra was substantially extended and the border line of the Tikhvin cemetery was accordingly moved. The Soviet government, however, moved only gravestones to a new location, and the tombs were covered with asphalt, including Mussorgsky's grave. The burial place of Mussorgsky is now a bus stop. [citation needed] Mussorgsky, like others of 'The Five', was perceived as extremist by the Emperor and much of his court. This may have been the reason TsarAlexander III personally crossed off Boris Godunov from the list of proposed pieces for the Imperial Opera in 1888.[25]

Works[edit] Main article: List of compositions by Modest Mussorgsky Il Vecchio Castello

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Mussorgsky's works, while strikingly novel, are stylistically Romantic and draw heavily on Russian musical themes. He has been the inspiration for many Russian composers, including most notably Dmitri Shostakovich (in his late symphonies) and Sergei Prokofiev (in his operas). In 1868/1869 he composed the opera Boris Godunov, about the life of the Russian tsar, but it was rejected by the Mariinsky Opera. Mussorgsky thus edited the work, making a final version in 1874. The early version is considered darker and more concise than the later version, but also more crude. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestrated the opera in 1896 and revised it in 1908. The opera has also been revised by other composers, notably Shostakovich, who made two versions, one for film and one for stage. The opera Khovanshchina was unfinished and unperformed when Mussorgsky died, but it was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and received its premiere in 1886 in Saint Petersburg. This opera, too, was revised by Shostakovich. The Fair at Sorochyntsi, another opera, was left incomplete at his death but a dance excerpt, the Gopak, is frequently performed. Mussorgsky's most imaginative and frequently performed work is the cycle of piano pieces describing paintings in sound called Pictures at an Exhibition. This composition, best known through an orchestral arrangement by Maurice Ravel, was written in commemoration of his friend, the architect Viktor Hartmann.

Mussorgsky's single-movement orchestral work Night on Bald Mountain enjoyed broad popular recognition in the 1940s when it was featured, in tandem with Schubert's 'Ave Maria', in the Disney film Fantasia. Among the composer's other works are a number of songs, including three song cycles: The Nursery (1872), Sunless (1874) and Songs and Dances of Death (1877); plusMephistopheles' Song of the Flea and many others. Important early recordings of songs by Mussorgsky were made by tenor Vladimir Rosing in the 1920s and 1930s.[26] Other recordings have been made by Boris Christoff between 1951 and 1957 and by Sergei Leiferkus in 1993.[27]

Criticism[edit] Contemporary opinions of Mussorgsky as a composer and person varied from positive to ambiguous to negative. Mussorgsky's eventual ers, Stasov and Balakirev, initially ed strongly negative impressions of the composer. Stasov wrote Balakirev, in an 1863 letter, "I have no use for Mussorgsky. His views may tally with mine, but I have never heard him express an intelligent idea. All in him is flabby, dull. He is, it seems to me, a thorough idiot", and Balakirev agreed: "Yes, Mussorgsky is little short of an idiot." [28] Mixed impressions are recorded by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, colleagues of Mussorgsky who, unlike him, made their living as composers. Both praised his talent while expressing disappointment with his technique. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that Mussorgsky's scores included "absurd, disconnected harmony, ugly part-writing, sometimes strikingly illogical modulation, sometimes a depressing lack of it, unsuccessful scoring of orchestral things... what was needed at the moment was an edition for performance, for practical artistic aims, for familiarization with his enormous talent, not for the study of his personality and artistic transgressions.[29] While preparing an edition of Sorochintsï Fair, Anatoly Lyadov remarked: "It is easy enough to correct Mussorgsky's irregularities. The only trouble is that when this is done, the character and originality of the music are done away with, and the composer's individuality vanishes." [30] Tchaikovsky, in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck was also critical of Mussorgsky: "Mussorgsky you very rightly call a hopeless case. In talent he is perhaps superior to all the [other of The Five], but his nature is narrow-minded, devoid of any urge towards selfperfection, blindly believing in the ridiculous theories of his circle and in his own genius. In addition, he has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, roughness. He flaunts his illiteracy, takes pride in his ignorance, mucks along anyhow, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent which are, moreover, not devoid of originality."[31] Western perceptions of Mussorgsky changed with the European premiere of Boris Godunov in 1908. Before the premiere, he was regarded as an eccentric in the west. CriticEdward Dannreuther, wrote, in the 1905 edition of The Oxford History of Music, "Mussorgsky, in his vocal efforts, appears wilfully eccentric. His style impresses the Western ear as barbarously ugly."[32] However, after the premiere, views on Mussorgsky's music changed drastically. Gerald Abraham, a musicologist, and an authority on Mussorgsky: "As a musical translator of words and all that can be expressed in words, of psychological states, and even physical movement, he is unsured; as an absolute musician he was hopelessly limited, with remarkably little ability to construct pure music or even a purely musical texture." [33]

Mily Balakirev From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Portrait of Balakirev

Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev (Russian: Миилий Алексеиевич Балаикирев, IPA: [ˈmʲilʲɪj ɐlʲɪkˈsʲeɪvʲɪtɕ bɐ ˈlakʲɪrʲɪf]; 2 January 1837 [O.S. 21 December 1836] – 29 May [O.S. 16 May] 1910)[a 1] was a Russian pianist, conductor and composer known today primarily for his work promoting musical nationalism and his encouragement of more famous Russian composers, notably Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He began his career as a pivotal figure, extending the fusion of traditional folk music and experimental classical music practices begun by composer Mikhail Glinka. In the process, Balakirev developed musical patterns that could express overt nationalistic feeling. After a nervous breakdown and consequential sabbatical, he returned to classical music but did not wield the same level of influence as before. In conjunction with critic and fellow nationalist Vladimir Stasov, in the late-1850s and early 1860s Balakirev brought together the composers now known as The Five—the others were Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. For several years, Balakirev was the only professional musician of the group; the others were amateurs limited in musical education. He imparted to them his musical beliefs, which continued to underlie their thinking long after he left the group in 1871, and encouraged their compositional efforts. While his methods could be dictatorial, the results of his influence were several works which established these composers' reputations individually and as a group. He performed a similar function for Tchaikovsky at two points in the latter's career—in 1868–9 with the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet and in 1882–5 with the Manfred Symphony. As a composer, Balakirev finished major works many years after he had started them; he began his First Symphony in 1864 but completed it in 1897. The exception to this was his oriental fantasy Islamey for solo piano, which he composed quickly and remains popular among virtuosos. Often, the musical ideas normally associated with Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin originated in Balakirev's compositions, which Balakirev played at informal gatherings of The Five. However, his slow pace in completing works for the public deprived him of credit for his inventiveness, and pieces that would have enjoyed success had they been completed in the 1860s and 1870s made a much smaller impact.

Contents [hide]

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1Life o

1.1Early years

o

1.2The Five

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1.3Saint Petersburg Conservatory and Free School of Music

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1.4Mature works and Prague visit

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1.5Waning influence and friendship with Tchaikovsky

o

1.6Breakdown and return to music

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2Personal life

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3Music o

3.1Influences

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3.2Russian style: The Overtures

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3.3Progressive development: First Symphony

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3.4Orientalism: Tamara

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4Media

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5Notes

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6References

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7Sources

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8External links

Life[edit] Early years[edit]

Portrait of (left to right) Balakirev,Vladimir Odoevsky and Mikhail Glinkaby Ilya Repin. The painting is somewhat anachronistic – Balakirev is depicted as a man approaching middle age, with a full beard; however, Glinka died in 1857, when Balakirev was only 20 years old.

Balakirev was born at Nizhny Novgorod, into a poor clerk's family. He received his first lessons in music from his mother and at the age of four was able to reproduce tunes on the piano. His nonmusical education began at the Nizhny Novgorod Gymnasium. When he was ten his mother took him to Moscow during the summer holidays for a course of ten piano lessons with Alexander Dubuque, a pupil of the Irish pianist and composer John Field. After his mother's death, Balakirev was transferred from the Gymnasium to the Alexandrovsky Institute, where he boarded. Balakirev's musical talents did not remain unnoticed, as he soon found a patron in Alexander Ulybyshev (Oulibicheff). Ulybyshev was considered the leading musical figure and patron in Nizhny Novgorod; he owned a vast musical library and was the author of a biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.[1][2] Balakirev's musical education was placed in the hands of the pianist Karl Eisrach, who also arranged the regular musical evenings at the Ulybyshev estate. Through Eisrach, Balakirev was given opportunities to read, play and listen to music and was exposed to the music ofFrédéric Chopin and Mikhail Glinka. Eisrach and Ulybyshev also allowed Balakirev to rehearse the count's private orchestra in rehearsals of orchestral and choral works. Eventually, Balakirev, still aged only 14, led a performance of Mozart's Requiem. At 15 he was allowed to lead rehearsals of Ludwig van Beethoven's First and Eighth Symphonies. His earliest surviving compositions date from the same year—the first movement of a septet for flute, clarinet, piano and strings and a Grande Fantasie on Russian Folksongs for piano and orchestra.[1][2] Balakirev left the Alexandrovsky Institute in 1853 and entered the University of Kazan as a mathematics student, along with his friend P.D. Boborikin, who later became a novelist. He was soon noted in local society as a pianist and was able to supplement his limited finances by taking pupils. His holidays were spent either at Nizhny Novgorod or on the Ulybyshev country estate at Lukino, where he played numerous Beethoven sonatas to help his patron with his book on the composer. Works from this period include a piano fantasy based on themes from Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar, an attempt at a string quartet, three songs which would eventually be published in 1908 and the opening movement (the only one completed) of his First Piano Concerto.[3]

After Balakirev completed his courses in the late autumn of 1855, Ulybyshev took him to Saint Petersburg, where he met Glinka. While Glinka considered Balakirev's compositional technique defective (there were as yet no music textbooks in Russian and Balakirev's German was barely adequate), he thought highly of his talent, encouraging him to take up music as a career.[4] Their acquaintance was marked by discussions, by Glinka ing several Spanish musical themes to Balakirev, and with Glinka entrusting the young man with the musical education of his four-year-old niece. Balakirev made his debut in a university concert in February 1856, playing the completed movement from his First Piano Concerto. This was followed a month later with a concert of his piano and chamber compositions. In 1858 he played the solo part in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto before the Tsar. In 1859 he had 12 songs published.[1] Nevertheless, he was still in extreme poverty, ing himself mainly by giving piano lessons (sometimes nine a day) and by playing at soirees given by the aristocracy.[4]

The Five[edit]

Rimsky-Korsakov as a naval cadet, at the time he met Balakirev

The deaths of Glinka in 1857 and Ulybyshev the following year left Balakirev without influential ers. Nevertheless, his time with Glinka had sparked a ion for Russian nationalism within Balakirev, leading him to adopt the stance that Russia should have its own distinct school of music, free from Southern and Western European influences. He had also started meeting other important figures who would abet him in this goal in 1856, including César Cui, Alexander Serov, the Stasov brothers and Alexander Dargomyzhsky.[1] He now gathered around him composers with similar ideals, whom he promised to train according to his own principles.[5] These included Modest Mussorgsky in 1858; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in November 1861 and Alexander Borodin in November or December 1862.[1] Together with Cui, these men were described by noted critic Vladimir Stasov as "a mighty handful" (Russian: Могучая кучка, Moguchaya kuchka), but they eventually became better known in English simply as The Five. As an instructor and influence of magnetic personality, Balakirev inspired his comrades to improbable heights of musical creativity.[1] However, he vehemently opposed academic training, considering it a threat to the musical imagination.[6] It was better in his view to begin composing right away and learn through that act of creation.[7] This line of reasoning could be argued as a rationalization to his own lack of technical training. [6] He had been trained as a pianist and had to discover his own way to becoming a composer.[8] Rimsky-Korsakov eventually realized as much, but nevertheless wrote: Balakirev, who had never had any systematic course in harmony and counterpoint and had not even superficially applied himself to them, evidently thought such studies quite unnecessary.... An excellent pianist, a superior sight reader of music, a splendid improviser, endowed by nature with a sense of correct harmony and part-writing, he possessed a technique partly native and partly acquired through a vast musical erudition, with the help of an extraordinary memory, keen and retentive, which means so much in steering a critical course in musical literature. Then, too, he was

a marvelous critic, especially a technical critic. He instantly felt every technical imperfection or error, he grasped a defect in form at once.[9]

Alexander Dargomyzhsky eventually replaced Balakirev as a mentor to The Five

Balakirev had the musical experience that the others in The Five lacked, [5] and he instructed them much as he instructed himself—by anempirical approach, learning how other composers solved various problems by sifting through their scores and seeing how they addressed those challenges. [6] While this approach may have been helpful for Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov writes, it was not so helpful for individuals completely different in nature from Balakirev or who matured as composers "at different intervals and in a different manner".[10] Balakirev's eventual undoing was his demand that his students' musical tastes coincide exactly with his own, with the slightest deviation prohibited.[10] Whenever one of them played one of his own compositions for Balakirev, Balakirev would seat himself at the piano and show, through improvisation, how he felt the composition should be changed. ages in other people's works came out sounding like his music, not their own.[9] By the late 1860s, Mussorgsky and RimskyKorsakov stopped accepting what they now considered his high-handed meddling with their work, [11] and Stasov began to distance himself from Balakirev.[11] The other of The Five also became interested in writing opera, a genre Balakirev did not consider highly, after the success of Alexander Serov's opera Judith in 1863, and gravitated toward Alexander Dargomyzhsky as a mentor in this field.[12]

Saint Petersburg Conservatory and Free School of Music [edit] The formation of The Five paralleled the early years of Tsar Alexander II, a time of innovation and reform in the political and social climate in Russia. The Russian Musical Society (RMS) and the musical conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow were all established at this time. While these institutions had powerful champions in Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein, others feared the influence of German instructors and musical precepts into Russian classical music. Balakirev's sympathies and closest s were in the latter camp, and he frequently made derogatory comments about the German "routine" which, he believed, came at the expense of the composer's originality.[13]

Anton Rubinstein on the podium as portrayed by Ilya Repin.

Balakirev was outspoken in his opposition to Anton Rubinstein's efforts. This opposition was partly ideological and partly personal. Anton Rubinstein was at that time the only Russian able to live on his art, while Balakirev had to live on income from piano lessons and recitals played in the salons of the aristocracy.[13] At stake was a viable career in music as artistic director of the Russian Musical Society.[13]Balakirev attacked Rubinstein for his conservative musical tastes, especially for his leaning on German masters such as Mendelssohn andBeethoven, and for his insistence on professional musical training.[13] Balakirev's followers were similarly outspoken. Mussorgsky, for instance, called the Saint Petersburg Conservatory a place where Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba, who taught music theory there, dressed "in professional, antimusical togas, first pollute their students' minds, then seal them with various abominations."[14] There was also a petty, personal side to Balakirev's attacks. Rubinstein had written an article in 1855 that was critical of Glinka. Glinka had taken the article badly, and Balakirev likewise took Rubinstein's criticism personally.[13] Moreover, Rubinstein was of German and Jewish descent, and Balakirev's comments were at times antiSemitic and xenophobic.[13] The pro-Conservatory followers publicly called The Five "amateurs"—a justified charge, as Balakirev was the only professional musician of the group. To counteract these criticisms and to aid in the creation of a distinctly "Russian" school of music, Balakirev and Gavriil Lomakin, a local choirmaster, founded the Free School of Music in 1862.[1] Like the RMS, the Free School offered concerts as well as education. Unlike the RMS, the Free School offered music education at no charge to students. The school also emphasized singing, especially choral singing, to meet the demands of the Russian Orthodox Church. Lomakin was appointed director, with Balakirev serving as his assistant. [15]To raise funds for the school, Balakirev conducted orchestral concerts between 1862 and 1867, while Lomakin conducted choral ones. These concerts offered less conservative programming musically than the RMS concerts. They included the music of Hector Berlioz,Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Glinka and Alexander Dargomyzhsky, and the first works of The Five.[16]

Mature works and Prague visit[edit] Balakirev spent the summer of 1862 in the Caucasus, mainly in Essentuki, and was impressed enough by the region to return there the following year and in 1868. He noted down folk tunes from that region and from Georgia and Iran; these tunes would play an important part in his musical development. One of the first compositions to show this influence was his setting of Alexander Pushkin's "Georgian song", while a quasi-oriental style appeared in other songs. In 1864, Balakirev

considered writing an opera based on the folk legend of the Firebird (a subject upon which Igor Stravinsky would later base his ballet The Firebird), but abandoned the project due to the lack of a suitable libretto. He completed his Second Overture on Russian Themes that same year (1864), which was performed that April at a Free School concert and published in 1869 as a "musical picture" with the title 1000 Years.[4]

Bedřich Smetana, with whom Balakirev quarreled over the Prague production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar

In 1866, Balakirev's Collection of Russian Folksongs were published. These arrangements showed great insight into the rhythm, harmony and types of song, although the key signatures and elaborate textures of the piano accompaniments were not as idiomatic.[17] He also started a Symphony in C major, of which he completed much of the first movement, scherzo and finale by 1866. [18] Even at this point, however, Balakirev had trouble finishing large works; the symphony would not be finished until decades later. He began a second piano concerto in the summer of 1861, with a slow movement thematically connected with a requiem that occupied him at the same time. He did not finish the opening movement until the following year, then set aside the work for 50 years. He suffered from periods of acute depression, longed for death and thought about destroying all his manuscripts. [4] He was still able to complete some works quickly. He began the original version of Islamey in August 1869, finishing it a month later. Nikolai Rubinstein premiered the "oriental fantasy," which Balakirev considered a sketch for his symphonic poem Tamara, that December.[19] Balakirev also intermittently spent time editing Glinka's works for publication, on behalf of the composer's sister, Lyudmilla Shestakova. At her behest, he travelled to Prague in 1866 to arrange the production of Glinka's operas there. This project was delayed due to the Austro-Prussian War until the following year.[18] The Prague production of A Life for the Tsar under the direction of Bedřich Smetana reportedly horrified Balakirev, with Balakirev taking issue with the musical tempos, the casting of various roles, and the costumes—"[i]t was as though Smetana was trying to turn the whole piece into a farce."[20] "[F]ive weeks of quarrels, intrigues by Smetana and his party, and intensive rehearsals" followed,[18] with Balakirev attending every rehearsal.[21] Balakirev suspected Smetana and others were influenced by pro-Polish elements of the Czech press, which labeled the production a "Tsarist intrigue" paid for by the Russian government. [21] He had difficulties with the production of Ruslan and Lyudmila under his direction, with the Czechs initially refusing to pay for the cost of copying the orchestral parts, and the piano reduction of the score, from which Balakirev was conducting rehearsals, mysteriously disappearing. [22] Biographer Mikhail Zetlin writes, "It is hard to say, nowadays, whether Balakirev's suspicions were fully justified or whether they were partly due to his own high-strung disposition."[23] Regardless, though A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and

Lyudmila were successes, Balakirev's lack of tact and despotic nature created considerable ill feelings between him and others involved,[17] with he and Smetana no longer speaking to each other. [23]

During this visit, Balakirev sketched and partly orchestrated an Overture on Czech Themes; this work would be performed at a May 1867 Free School concert given in honor of Slav visitors to the All-Russian Ethnographical Exhibition in Moscow. This was the concert for which, in his review, Vladimir Stasov coined the phrase Moguchaya kuchka ("Mighty Handful") to describe The Five.[18] Balakirev encouraged Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin to complete their first symphonies, whose premieres he conducted in December 1865 and January 1869 respectively. He also conducted the first performance of Mussorgsky's The Destruction of Sennacherib in March 1867 and the Polonaise from Boris Godunov in April 1872.[17]

Waning influence and friendship with Tchaikovsky[edit] See also: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and The Five When Anton Rubinstein relinquished directorship of the RMS concerts in 1867, Balakirev was suggested to replace him. The conservative patron for the RMS, Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, agreed—provided Nikolai Zaremba, who had taken over for Rubinstein at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory was also appointed, along with a distinguished foreign composer.[24] The choice of Berlioz as foreign conductor was widely lauded, but Balakirev's appointment was seen less enthusiastically.[11] Balakirev's uncompromising nature caused tension at the RMS,[24] and his preference for modern repertoire earned him the enmity of Elena Pavlovna. [25] In 1869, she informed him that his services were no longer required.[11]

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the time he wrote Romeo and Juliet with Balakirev's

The week after Balakirev's dismissal, an imioned article in his defense appeared in The Contemporary Chronicle. The author wasPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Balakirev had conducted Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem Fatum and the "Characteristic Dances" from his operaThe Voyevoda at the RMS, and Fatum had been dedicated to Balakirev.[26] The appearance of Tchaikovsky's article may have been calculated, as he knew Elena Pavlovna was due in Moscow, where he lived, the day the article was to appear. He sent two notes to Balakirev; the first alerted him to Elena Pavlovna's planned presence in Moscow, and the second thanked Balakirev for criticisms

he had made about Fatum just after conducting it. Balakirev's immediate response was positive and enthusiastic.[27] This exchange of letters grew into a friendship and a creative collaboration over the next two years, with Balakirev helping Tchaikovsky produce his first masterpiece, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet.[28] After Romeo and Juliet, the two men drifted apart as Balakirev took a sabbatical from the music world.[29] In 1880, Balakirev received a copy of the final version of the score of Romeo from Tchaikovsky, care of the music publisher Besel. Delighted Tchaikovsky had not forgotten him, he replied with an invitation for Tchaikovsky to visit him in Saint Petersburg. [29] In the same letter, he forwarded the programme for a symphony, based on Lord Byron's poem Manfred, which Balakirev was convinced Tchaikovsky "would handle wonderfully well." This programme had originally been penned by Stasov for Hector Berlioz. Tchaikovsky initially refused, but two years later changed his mind, partly due to Balakirev's continued prodding over the project. [30] The Manfred Symphony, finished in 1885, became the largest, most complex work Tchaikovsky had written to that point. [31] As with Romeo and Juliet and Fatum, Tchaikovsky dedicated the Manfred Symphony to Balakirev.[32] When Lomakin resigned as director of the Free Music School in February 1868, Balakirev took his place there.[33] Once he had left the RMS, he concentrated on building attendance for concerts of the Free Music School. He decided to recruit popular soloists and found Nikolai Rubinstein ready to help.[34] Elena Pavlovna was furious. She decided to raise the social level of the RMS concerts by attending them personally with her court. This rivalry caused financial difficulties for both concert societies as RMS hip declined and the Free Music School continued to suffer from chronic money troubles. Soon the Free Music School could not pay Balakirev and had to cut its 1870–71 series short.[34] The RMS then scored the coup de grâce of asg its programming to Mikhaíl Azanchevsky, who also took over as director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871. Azanchevsky was more progressively-minded musically than his predecessors, a staunch believer in contemporary music on the whole and Russian contemporary music in particular.[34] For the opening concert of the RMS 1871–72 season, he had conductor Eduard Nápravník present the first public performances of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and the polonaise from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.[34] This implicit recognition of Balakirev's ideas made his own concerts seem unnecessary and redundant.[34] Balakirev then hoped that a solo recital in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod in September 1870 would restore his reputation and prove profitable. Neither happened—he played to an empty house, and the profits of the recital amounted to 11 rubles.[18] Added to these professional troubles were the death of his father in June 1869, and the financial responsibility for his younger sisters resulting from it.[35]

Breakdown and return to music[edit] In the spring of 1871, rumors circulated that Balakirev had suffered a nervous breakdown. [17] Friends who visited him found no trace of his former self; in place of his former vivacity, energy and drive, they found him silent, withdrawn and lethargic.[36] Borodin wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov that he wondered whether Balakirev's condition was little better than insanity. He was especially concerned about Balakirev's coolness toward musical matters, and hoped he would not follow the example of author Nikolai Gogol and destroy his manuscripts.[37] He took a five-year break from music,[34] and withdrew from his musical friends,[17] but did not destroy his manuscripts; instead he stacked them neatly in one corner of his house.[38] In his mental state, he neglected to give up his post as director of the Free Music School, and the directors of the school were at a loss as to what to do. [39] He finally resigned in 1874 and was replaced by Rimsky-Korsakov.[39] Nikolai Rubinstein offered him a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory but he refused, stating that his musical knowledge was basically empirical and that he did not have enough knowledge of music theory to take on such a position.[40] Financial distress forced Balakirev to become a railway clerk on the Warsaw railroad line in July 1872.[17]

Balakirev's grave at Tikhvin Cemetery

In 1876, Balakirev slowly began reemerging into the music world, but without the intensity of his former years.[17] Stasov wrote Rimsky-Korsakov in July that Balakirev was busy composing his symphonic poem Tamara but still did not wish to see any of his old musical circle, "for there would be talks about music, which he would not have under any circumstances. Nevertheless he inquires about everything with interest..."[41] Balakirev also began sending individuals to Rimsky-Korsakov for private lessons in music theory.[42] This paved the way for Rimsky-Korsakov to make occasional visits to Balakirev.[42] By the autumn these visits had become frequent. [43] Also, Lyudmilla Shestarova asked him to edit Glinka's works for publication, in consort with Anatoly Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov.[17] In 1881, Balakirev was offered the directorship of the Moscow Conservatory, along with the conductorship of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society. Perhaps keeping in mind his experience with the Saint Petersburg branch of the Russian Musical Society years earlier, he declined the position. Instead, he resumed the directorship of the Free School of Music. [44] In 1882 he finished Tamara and revised his "symphonic picture" 1,000 Years two years later, retitling it Rus.[45] In 1883, he was appointed director of the Imperial Chapel; Rimsky-Korsakov eventually became his assistant. He held this post until 1895, when he took his final retirement and composed in earnest. Between 1895 and 1910 he completed two symphonies, a piano sonata and two movements of his Second Piano Concerto, along with republishing his collection of folk-song arrangements.[46] While Balakirev resumed musical Tuesday gatherings at his home by the 1880s, it was music patron Mitrofan Belyayev who became a fixture of the Russian classical music scene at this time. Some composers, including Alexander Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, initially attended these meetings. However, Balakirev's modest gatherings eventually proved no match for Belyayev's lavish Friday gatherings, nor could he compete with the commissions, prizes and performances that Belyayev offered.[44] Balakirev did not take advantage of Belyayev's services in these areas, as he felt that they promoted inferior music, and lowered the quality of Russian music. [47]Musicologist Richard Taruskin asserts that another reason Balakirev did not participate with the Belyayev circle was that he was not comfortable participating in a group at which he was not at its center.[48] The exception to this was Balakirev's collection of folk songs, to which Belyayev bought the rights after the death of the songs' initial publisher.[47]Otherwise, Balakirev remained without a publisher until 1899, when he met the Saint Petersburg music publisher J.H. Zimmermann. It was through Zimmermann's efforts that Balakirev prepared several works for publication, including his two symphonies. [49] Unlike his earlier days, when he played works in progress at gatherings of The Five, Balakirev composed in isolation. He was aware that younger composers now considered his compositional style old-fashioned.[46] Except initially for Glazunov, whom he brought to Rimsky-Korsakov as a

prodigy, and his later acolyte Sergei Lyapunov, Balakirev was ignored by the younger generation of Russian composers.[49] Balakirev died on 29 May 1910 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg.

Personal life[edit] Balakirev apparently never married nor had any children since none is mentioned in biographical sources. In his earlier days he was politically liberal, a freethinker and an atheist; for a while, he considered writing an opera based on Chernishevsky's nihilistic novel What is to Be Done?.[50] For a while in the late 1860s he frequented a soothsayer to learn his fate with the Russian Musical Society. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote of these sessions, "Balakirev, who did not believe in God, became a believer in the Devil. The Devil brought it about that subsequently he came to believe in God too ... [T]he soothsaying ... cast a terror upon him".[51] Following his breakdown, Balakirev sought solace in the strictest sect of Russian Orthodoxy, [34] dating his conversion to the anniversary of his mother's death in March 1871. [17]The exact circumstances of that conversion are unknown, as no letters or diaries of his from this period have survived. Rimsky-Korsakov relates some of Balakirev's extremes in behavior at this point—how he had "given up eating meat, and ate fish, but ... only those which had died, never the killed variety"; how he would remove his hat and quickly cross himself whenever he ed by a church; and how his comion for animals reached the point that whenever an insect was found in a room, he would carefully catch it and release it from a window, saying, "Go thee, deary, in the Lord, go!"[52] Balakirev lived as a recluse in a house filled with dogs, cats and religious icons. [40] The exception to this reclusiveness was the musical Tuesday evenings he held after his return to music in the 1870s and 80s. He also became a political reactionary and "xenophobic Slavophile who wrote hymns in honor of the dowager empress and other of the royal family." [53] Rimsky-Korsakov mentions that some of Balakirev's character traits were present before his conversion but became intensified afterward.[54] This was true of his general intolerance of viewpoints other than his own, but especially so with his anti-Semitism.[54] His attacks on Anton Rubinstein in the 1860s became petty and anti-Semitic,[13] and Jews were not itted to the Free School during his earlier directorship.[55] However, it was after his conversion that he suspected everyone he disliked to be of Jewish origin, and that he hated the Jews in general because they had crucified Christ. [54] He became belligerent in his religious conversations with friends, insistent that they cross themselves and attend church with him.[56] "All this medley of Christian meekness, backbiting, fondness for beasts, misanthropy, artistic interests, and a triviality worthy of an old maid from a hospice, all these struck everyone who saw him in those days", Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, adding that these traits intensified further in subsequent years.[57]

Music[edit] See also: List of compositions by Mily Balakirev

Mily Balakirev at the time he taught "The Five."

Balakirev became important in the history of Russian music through both his works and his leadership. More so than Glinka, he helped set the course for Russian orchestral music and Russian lyrical song during the second half of the 19th century. While he learned from Glinka certain methods of treating Russian folk song instrumentally, a bright, transparent orchestral technique (something he also learned from the works of Hector Berlioz) and many elements of his basic style, he developed and expanded upon what he had learned, fusing it satisfactorily with then-advanced Romantic compositional techniques.[58] Unfortunately, the protracted composition of several works robbed Balakirev of the credit for their inventiveness. Pieces which could have won success had they been completed in the 1860s and 70s made a much smaller impact when they were introduced much later in the composer's life. This was because they had been overtaken stylistically by the accomplishments of younger composers, and because some of their compositional devices were appropriated by other of The Five —the most notable example of the latter is Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, which was influenced by Balakirev's symphonic poem Tamara.[49] Another consequence was a tendency to overwork details, which robbed these pieces of freshness of inspiration and made then seem "overdone". [59] Despite the protracted composition period, there was no discernible difference, especially in the two symphonies, between the sections completed in the 1860s and those written much later. Zetlin asserts that while there was no diminution of Balakirev's creative talent, the reason for this lack of disparity was because Balakirev "had ceased to evolve" as an artist; he remained creatively at the point he had reached in the 1860s, "and his newest works seemed thus merely an echo of the past."[60]

Influences[edit] Perhaps because Balakirev's initial musical experience was as a pianist, composers for his own instrument influenced the repertory and style of his compositions. He wrote in all the genres cultivated by Frédéric Chopin except the Ballade, cultivating a comparable charm. The other keyboard composer who influenced Balakirev was Franz Liszt, apparent in Islamey as well as in his transcriptions of works by other composers and the symphonic poemTamara.[49]

Balakirev's affinity with Glinka's music becomes most apparent in his handling of folk material. However, Balakirev advances on Glinka's technique of using "variations with changing backgrounds," reconciling the compositional practices of classical music with the idiomatic treatment of folk song, employing motivic fragmentation, counterpoint and a structure exploiting key relationships.[61] Between his two Overtures on Russian Themes, Balakirev became involved with folk song collecting and arranging. This work alerted him to the frequency of the Dorian mode, the tendency for many melodies to swing between the major key and its relative minor on its flat seventh key, and the tendency to accentuate notes not consistent with dominant harmony. These characteristics were reflected in Balakirev's handling of Russian folk song.[62] Since the musical views of The Five tended to be anti-German, it is easy to forget that Balakirev was actually well-grounded in German symphonic style—all the more impressive when it is ed that Balakirev was essentially self-taught as a composer. His King Lear overture, written when he was 22, is not a symphonic poem in the vein of Liszt but actually more along the lines of Beethoven's concert overtures, relying more on the dramatic qualities of sonata form than on extramusical content.[63]

Russian style: The Overtures[edit] With his First Overture on Russian Themes, Balakirev focused on writing symphonic works with Russian character. He chose his themes from folk song collections available at the time he composed the piece, taking Glinka's Kamarinskaya as a model in taking a slow song for the introduction, then for the fast section choosing two songs compatible in structure with the ostinato pattern of the Kamarinskaya dance song. Balakirev's use of two songs in this section was an important departure from the model, as it allowed him to link the symphonic process of symphonic form with Glinka's variations on an ostinato pattern, and in contrasting them treat the songs symphonically instead of merely decoratively.[64] The Second Overture on Russian Themes shows an increased sophistication as Balakirev utilizes Beethoven's technique of deriving short motifs from longer themes so that those motifs can be combined into a convincing contrapuntal fabric. As such it can stand on its own as an example of abstract motivic-thematic composition, yet since it uses folk songs in doing so, it can also be looked upon as making a statement about nationality.[62] In this overture he shows how folk songs could be given symphonic dimensions while paying particular attention to the element of protyazhnaya or melismatically elaborated lyric song. This type of song is characterized by extreme rhythmic flexibility, asymmetrical phrase structure and tonal ambiguity. Incorporating these elements meant employing the tonal instability of folk song in larger structures by relying on tonal indeterminacy. The structure of this overture departs from the classic tonal relationships of tonic and dominant, coming close to the tonal experiments of Liszt and Robert Schumann.[65] Like his contemporaries in The Five, Balakirev believed in the importance of program music—music written to fulfill a program inspired by a portrait, poem, story or other non-musical source. Unlike his compatriots, the musical form always came first for Balakirev, not the extramusical source, and his technique continued to reflect the Germanic symphonic approach. Nevertheless, Balakirev's overtures played a crucial role in the emergence of Russian symphonic music in that they introduced the musical style now considered "Russian." His style was adapted by his compatriots and others to the point of becoming a national characteristic. The opening of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov bears a close resemblance to the first theme of Balakirev's Second Overture, while Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia begins with a dominant pedal extending over 90 bars in the upper of the violins, a device Balakirev used in his First Overture. The opening of Tchaikovsky's Little Russian Symphony in its original form also shows Balakirev's influence. [66]

Progressive development: First Symphony[edit]

Balakirev began his First Symphony after completing the Second Overture but cut work short to concentrate on the Overture on Czech Themes, recommencing on the symphony only 30 years later and not finishing it until 1897. Letters from Balakirev to Stasov and Cui indicate that the first movement was two-thirds completed and the final movement sketched out, though he would supply a new theme for the finale many years later. While he was waiting until the finale to incorporate folk material, he was anxious to incorporate a new Russian element, somewhat religious in nature, into the opening movement.[67] The symphonic design for this movement is highly unusual. The slow introduction announces the motif on which the allegro vivo is based. While the allegro vivo is a three part structure, it differs from sonata form in having an exposition, a second exposition and a development instead of the usual order of exposition-development-recapitulation. This means that after the actual exposition, the thematic material is developed in two places, with the second exposition actually being an elaboration of the first. Formally, the process is one of progressive development, divided into three stages of increasing complexity. If this was how Balakirev had actually planned the movement in 1864, it would predate the late symphonies of Jean Sibelius in utilizing this compositional principle.[68]

Orientalism: Tamara[edit] Balakirev also further cultivated the orientalism of Glinka's opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, making it a more consistent style. It appears in the Georgian Song of 1861, Islamey andTamara. This style comprises two parts: a languorous vein of slow, sinuous melody with ornamentation and slowmoving harmonic progressions, contrasted with a more ecstatic vein marked by a perpetuum mobile at a fast tempo and rapid melodic contours over a slower-moving harmonic changes. This style on one hand evoked the mystery of the distant, exotic east with which Russia did not have direct , and on the other hand could also be used to refer to recently colonized areas of the Russian Empire.[62] Tamara is considered by some to be Balakirev's greatest work as well as a touchstone of orientalism. Originally he intended to write a lezginka modeled after Glinka. However, he was inspired by the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov about the seductress Tamara, who waylays travelers in her tower at the gorge of Daryal and allows them to savor a night of sensual delights before killing them and flinging their bodies into the River Terek. [69] Balakirev evokes both the poem's setting of the mountains and gorges of the Caucasus and the angelic and demonically seductive power of the title character. The narrative employs a wide musical range, with the composer supplying great subtlety within a satisfying structure.[62]

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Mily BALAKIREV 2 Jan 1837 - 29 May 1910 (age 73) Mily Balakirev, 19th century Russian conductor, composer, educator. He was the leader of the group known as the 'Mighty Five' made up of Borodin, Mussorgsky, Cui and Rimsky Korsakov. Family Works Bio/career Links Portrait by Paul Helm

Family Born: Mili Alekseyevich Balakirev, 2 Jan 1837, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia Father: Alexei Konstantinovich, civil servant Mother: Elizavetta Ivanova Yasherova Siblings: none Partners: none Children: none Died: 29 May 1910, St Petersburg Grave: Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. see findagrave

Balakirev the man A difficult man. By all s he was despotic, rude, tactless and obstinate. Nevertheless through his enormous talent and strong personality he managed to inspire his followers and instill an enthusiasm for his ion for Russian music. When he was 21 he had an attack of 'brain fever' and for the rest of his life suffered from severe headaches and acute depression. He also became a bigoted Orthodox Christian.

Works Period/Style: Romantic. Russian nationalist Output: considerable Influenced by Glinka, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Russian folk music Influenced: Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky Orchestral: - 2 symphonies - 2 piano concertos - Tamara, symphonic poem - 2 overtures on Russian themes Drama: - King Lear, incidental music Choral: - anthems, hymns, cantatas - over 40 songs Piano: - many solos and duets including Islamey (oriental fantasy)

Career - Age 4: First piano lessons from his mother and local musicians. - Age 10: His mother took him to Moscow for a course of 10 piano lessons with Alexander Duburque. After the death of his mother he boarded at the Alexandrovsky Institute. Here his talents came to the attention of Alexander Ulybyshev, a local landlord, music lover and patron who entrusted the young Malakirev's musical education to the pianist Karl Eisrich. - Age 16: Studied mathematics at Kazan University (his father opposed a musical career) Won a reputation as a pianist and earned money by giving piano lessons. - Age 18: Ulybyshev took him to St Peterburg to meet Glinka who was impressed with his talent and encouraged him to take up a career in music. Glinka also inspired in him a ion for Russian nationalism. - Age 19: played his first Piano Concerto at a university concert. - Age 20: Glinka died. The following year Ulybyshev also died leaving him without and patronage.

He published some songs and made a living by giving piano lessons and evening recitals for the local aristocracy. - Age 21: 'Brain fever' attack followed by a long period of severe depression. - Age 25: Established the Free School of Music together with Gabriel Lomakin and the help of Tzar Nicolas. Among the students were Cesar Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin who under the leadership of Balakirev became known as 'The Five' or 'The Mighty Handful'. - Age 35 - 39: following various personal and artistic problems he gave up music and worked as a railway clerk. - Age 40: Gradually returned to music and resumed his work at the Free School of Music. - Age 46 - 57: Director of the Imperial Chapel. - Age 63 onwards: spent his last 10 years in retirement. - Age 73: died on May 29, 1910 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg.

Some Videos:

Islamey Fantasy on 'A Life for the Tzar' King Lear overture

Symphony No2