Russian Culture Lexicon

Samizdat began to flourish again in the mid-1980s because of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (“openness”). KGB harassment virtually ceased, and as a result a variety of independent journals proliferated, though their readership remained tiny. By the late 1980s, the Soviet government had unofficially accepted samizdat, although it retained its monopoly on printing presses and other media outlets. Samizdat had almost disappeared by the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of media outlets that were largely independent of government control.

fellow traveller

▪ Soviet literature

Russian Poputchik,

originally, a writer in the Soviet Union who was not against the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but did not actively support it as a propagandist. The term was used in this sense by Leon Trotsky in Literature and the Revolution (1925) and was not meant to be pejorative. Implicit in the designation was the recognition of the artist's need for intellectual freedom and his dependence on links with the cultural traditions of the past. Fellow travellers were given official sanction in the early Soviet regime; they were regarded somewhat like experts who were filling the literary gap until a true proletarian art emerged. In the 1920s some of the most gifted and popular Soviet writers, such as Osip Mandelshtam, Leonid Leonov, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, and members of the Serapion Brothers were fellow travellers. The period during which they dominated the literary scene is now regarded as the brilliant flowering of Soviet literature. They were opposed bitterly, however, by champions of a new proletarian art, and by the end of the decade the term came to be practically synonymous with counter-revolutionary.

Outside the Soviet Union the term was widely used in the Cold War era of the 1950s, especially in the U.S., as a political label to refer to any person who, while not thought to be an actual “card-carrying” member of the Communist Party, was in sympathy with its aims and supported its doctrines.

Slavophile

▪ Russian history

in Russian history, member of a 19th-century intellectual movement that wanted Russia's future development to be based on values and institutions derived from the country's early history. Developing in the 1830s from study circles concerned with German philosophy, the Slavophiles were influenced greatly by Friedrich Schelling. The movement was centred in Moscow and attracted wealthy, well-educated, well-traveled members of the old aristocracy. Among its leaders were Aleksey S. Khomyakov, the brothers Konstantin S. and Ivan S. Aksakov, the brothers Ivan V. and Pyotr V. Kireyevsky, and Yury F. Samarin. Their individual interests covered a broad range of topics, including philosophy, history, theology, philology, and folklore; but they all concluded that Russia should not use western Europe as a model for its development and modernization but should follow a course determined by its own character and history.

They considered western Europe, which had adopted the Roman Catholic and Protestant religions, as morally bankrupt and regarded Western political and economic institutions (e.g., constitutional government and capitalism) as outgrowths of a deficient society. The Russian people, by contrast, adhered to the Russian Orthodox faith; thus, according to the Slavophiles, through their common faith and church, the Russian people were united in a “Christian community,” which defined natural, harmonious, human relationships.

The Slavophiles considered the Russian peasant commune an uncorrupted representation of the “Christian community.” They also believed that the autocratic form of government was well suited to a people spiritually bound together. Viewing Russia as potentially able to develop according to the “Christian community” model, the Slavophiles also thought that once such a society was established, Russia's duty would be to revitalize the West by reintroducing spiritual values there to replace rationalism, materialism, and individualism.

But the Slavophiles also realized that their contemporary society did not represent their ideal. They believed that Peter I the Great (reigned 1682–1725), by introducing reforms imitating the West, had corrupted Russia, driven a wedge between the nobility and the peasantry, and upset the natural social relationships. They despised the state bureaucracy organized under Peter and his church reforms that had undermined spiritual authority.

In order to perfect Russian society and to restore the autocracy and the church in their ideal forms, the Slavophiles urged extensive reforms, including the emancipation of serfs, curtailment of the bureaucracy, the granting of civil liberties (i.e., freedom of speech, press, and conscience), and the establishment of an institution representing the whole people (similar to the veche or the zemsky sobor of pre-Petrine Russia).

Although they enthusiastically approved some facets of Russian society and held views resembling the government's official doctrine of narodnost (“nationality”), which emphasized the superior character of the Russian people, Nicholas I objected to their criticism of his regime (which, of course, was based on Peter's reforms). His government censored their journals and generally tried to suppress the movement. The Slavophiles were also opposed intellectually by the Westernizers (Westernizer), a group that developed simultaneously with them but insisted that Russia imitate the Western pattern of modernization and introduce constitutional government into the tsarist autocracy.

The Slavophiles were most active during the 1840s and '50s. After the Crimean War (1853–56), the death of its foremost leaders (1856 and 1860), and the promulgation of the reforms of Alexander II (1860s), the movement declined. Its principles were adapted and simplified by extreme nationalists, Pan-Slavists, and revolutionary Populists (Narodniki). In addition to their influence on those movements, the Slavophiles individually made significant contributions to their various fields of study, particularly theology (with Khomyakov's (Khomyakov, Aleksey Stepanovich) theory of sobornost, a spiritual unity and religious community based on a free commitment to Orthodoxy), Russian history, and folklore.

Sinyavsky, Andrey Donatovich

▪ Russian writer

Sinyavsky also spelled Siniavski, pseudonym Abram Terts, or Tertz

born Oct. 8, 1925, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

died Feb. 25, 1997, Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, France

Russian critic and author of novels and short stories who was convicted of subversion by the Soviet government in 1966.

Sinyavsky graduated from Moscow University in 1952 and later joined the faculty of the Gorky Institute of World Literature. He contributed to the literary journal Novy Mir and produced an incisive introduction to a volume of poems by Boris Pasternak. His works of fiction, none of which were published in the Soviet Union, were smuggled to the West and published under the name of Abram Tertz.

The English translations of Sinyavsky's fiction began with that of the novel Sud idyot (1960; The Trial Begins), which deals with the Doctors' Plot of 1953, during which nine Soviet doctors were unjustly accused of treason. An anthology of short stories, Fantastic Stories (1963), explores the themes of tyranny, dissipation, and spiritual loneliness. In the novel The Makepeace Experiment (1965), a village boss hoodwinks his constituents with myths and magic. Also smuggled to the West was the essay On Socialist Realism (1960), which called for a new inventiveness in Soviet literature.

Sinyavsky and another writer, Yuly Daniel (Daniel, Yuli Markovich), were arrested on September 13, 1965, and the following February were convicted of producing anti-Soviet propaganda through their writings. Daniel was sentenced to five years of hard labour and Sinyavsky to seven. The trial, a record of which was published in On Trial (1966), prompted domestic and international protest. Sinyavsky was released from prison in 1971 and two years later moved to Paris, where he taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne. His later works include Mysli vrasplokh (1966; Unguarded Thoughts), Golos iz khora (1973; A Voice from the Chorus), and Spokoynoy nochi (1984; Goodnight!).

Shalamov, Varlam

▪ Russian author

in full Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

born June 18 [July 1, New Style], 1907, Vologda, Russia

died Jan. 17, 1982, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Russian writer best known for a series of short stories about imprisonment in Soviet labour camps.

In 1922 Shalamov went to Moscow and worked in a factory. Accused of counterrevolutionary activities while a law student at Moscow State University, Shalamov served two years at hard labour in the Urals. He returned to Moscow in 1932 and became a published writer, journalist, and critic. Rearrested in 1937, supposedly in part because of his public approval of Soviet émigré writer and 1933 Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin (Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich), Shalamov spent the next 17 years in the extremely harsh labour camps of the Kolyma River basin in the Soviet Far East. He was released in the 1950s and was allowed to publish some of his poetry, including the collections Ognivo (1961; “Flint”), Doroga i sudba (1967; “Journey and Destiny”), and Moskovskiye oblaka (1972; “Moscow Clouds”). In the early 1970s Shalamov, by then broken, ill, and dependent on the Soviet Writers' Union (Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R.) for publication and money, was forced to write a public letter denouncing publication of his work abroad.

In 1978 a Russian edition of Shalamov's Kolymskiye rasskazy (1978; “Kolyma Stories”) was published in England. This collection of 103 brief sketches, vignettes, and short stories chronicles the degradation and dehumanization of prison-camp life. Written in understated and straightforward documentary style, the tales contain almost no philosophical or political nuances. Publication was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Among the collections of his poetry that were posthumously published are Stikhotvoreniya (1988; “Poems”) and Kolymskiye tetradi (1994; “The Kolyma Notebooks”). Complete editions of Shalamov's works were released in Moscow in 1992. Selected tales from the collection were published in English in two volumes, Kolyma Tales (1980) and Graphite (1981).

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich

▪ Russian author

born Dec. 11, 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia

died Aug. 3, 2008, Troitse-Lykovo, near Moscow

Russian novelist and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up primarily by his mother (his father was killed in an accident before his birth). He attended the University of Rostov-na-Donu, graduating in mathematics, and took correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University. He fought in World War II, achieving the rank of captain of artillery; in 1945, however, he was arrested for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write.

Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life that was a hallmark of the de-Stalinizing policies of the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn submitted his short novel Odin den iz zhizni Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) to the leading Soviet literary periodical Novy Mir (“New World”). The novel quickly appeared in that journal's pages and met with immediate popularity, Solzhenitsyn becoming an instant celebrity. Ivan Denisovich, based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, described a typical day in the life of an inmate of a forced-labour camp during the Stalin era. The impression made on the public by the book's simple, direct language and by the obvious authority with which it treated the daily struggles and material hardships of camp life was magnified by its being one of the first Soviet literary works of the post-Stalin era to directly describe such a life. The book produced a political sensation both abroad and in the Soviet Union, where it inspired a number of other writers to produce accounts of their imprisonment under Stalin's regime.

Solzhenitsyn's period of official favour proved to be short-lived, however. Ideological strictures on cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened with Nikita Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964, and Solzhenitsyn met first with increasing criticism and then with overt harassment from the authorities when he emerged as an eloquent opponent of repressive government policies. After the publication of a collection of his short stories in 1963, he was denied further official publication of his work, and he resorted to circulating them in the form of samizdat (“self-published”) literature—i.e., as illegal literature circulated clandestinely—as well as publishing them abroad.

The following years were marked by the foreign publication of several ambitious novels that secured Solzhenitsyn's international literary reputation. V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle) was indirectly based on his years spent working in a prison research institute as a mathematician. The book traces the varying responses of scientists at work on research for the secret police as they must decide whether to cooperate with the authorities and thus remain within the research prison or to refuse their services and be thrust back into the brutal conditions of the labour camps. Rakovy korpus (1968; Cancer Ward) was based on Solzhenitsyn's hospitalization and successful treatment for terminally diagnosed cancer during his forced exile in Kazakhstan during the mid-1950s. The main character, like Solzhenitsyn himself, was a recently released inmate of the camps.

In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined to go to Stockholm to receive the prize for fear he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union by the government upon his return. His next novel to be published outside the Soviet Union was Avgust 1914 (1971; August 1914), a historical novel treating Germany's crushing victory over Russia in their initial military engagement of World War I, the Battle of Tannenburg. The novel centred on several characters in the doomed 1st Army of the Russian general A.V. Samsonov and indirectly explored the weaknesses of the tsarist regime that eventually led to its downfall by revolution in 1917.

In December 1973 the first parts of Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago) were published in Paris after a copy of the manuscript had been seized in the Soviet Union by the KGB. (Gulag is an acronym formed from the official Soviet designation of its system of prisons and labour camps.) The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia (1917) and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin (1924–53). Various sections of the work describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag's victims as practiced by Soviet authorities over four decades. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn's own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment.

Upon publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on Feb. 12, 1974. Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union on the following day, and in December he took possession of his Nobel Prize.

In 1975 a documentary novel, Lenin v Tsyurikhe: glavy (Lenin in Zurich: Chapters), appeared, as did Bodalsya telyonok s dubom (The Oak and the Calf), an autobiographical account of literary life in the Soviet Union. The second and third volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were published in 1974–75. Solzhenitsyn traveled to the United States, where he eventually settled on a secluded estate in Cavendish, Vt. The brief The Mortal Danger (1980), translated from an essay Solzhenitsyn wrote for the journal Foreign Affairs, analyzes what he perceived to be the perils of American misconceptions about Russia. In 1983 an extensively expanded and revised version of August 1914 appeared in Russian as the first part of a projected series, Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel); other volumes (or uzly [“knots”]) in the series were Oktyabr 1916 (“October 1916”), Mart 1917 (“March 1917”), and Aprel 1917 (“April 1917”).

In presenting alternatives to the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn tended to reject Western emphases on democracy and individual freedom and instead favoured the formation of a benevolent authoritarian regime that would draw upon the resources of Russia's traditional Christian values. The introduction of glasnost (“openness”) in the late 1980s brought renewed access to Solzhenitsyn's work in the Soviet Union. In 1989 the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir published the first officially approved excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was officially restored in 1990.

Solzhenitsyn ended his exile and returned to Russia in 1994. He subsequently made several public appearances and even met privately with Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin. In 1997 Solzhenitsyn established an annual prize for writers contributing to the Russian literary tradition. Installments of his autobiography, Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: ocherki izgnaniia (“The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile”), were published from 1998 to 2003, and his history of Russian Jews, Dvesti let vmeste, 1795–1995 (“Two Hundred Years Together”), was published in 2001–02. In 2007 Solzhenitsyn was awarded Russia's prestigious State Prize for his contribution to humanitarian causes.

Additional Reading

Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn (1984), is an extensive biography. Critical studies include John B. Dunlop, Richard S. Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff (eds.), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973); Stephen Carter, The Politics of Solzhenitsyn (1977); James M. Curtis, Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination (1984); John B. Dunlop, Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson (eds.), Solzhenitsyn in Exile (1985); and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (1993).

Brodsky, Joseph

▪ American poet

original Russian name Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky

born May 24, 1940, Leningrad [now Saint Petersburg], Russia, U.S.S.R.

died Jan. 28, 1996, New York, N.Y., U.S.

Russian-born American poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems.

Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation in the Leningrad literary scene, but his independent spirit and his irregular work record led to his being charged with “social parasitism” by the Soviet authorities, who sentenced him in 1964 to five years of hard labour. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet literary figures protested it. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky lived thereafter in the United States, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977. He was a poet-in-residence intermittently at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1972 to 1980 and was a visiting professor at other schools. He served as poet laureate of the United States in 1991–92.

Brodsky's poetry addresses personal themes and treats in a powerful, meditative fashion the universal concerns of life, death, and the meaning of existence. His earlier works, written in Russian, include Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (1965; “Verses and Poems”) and Ostanovka v pustyne (1970; “A Halt in the Wasteland”); these and other works were translated by George L. Kline in Selected Poems (1973), which includes the notable “Elegy for John Donne.” His major works, in Russian and English, include the poetry collections A Part of Speech (1980), History of the Twentieth Century (1986), and To Urania (1988) and the essays in Less Than One (1986).

Additional Reading

Critical studies on Brodsky include Valentina Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (1989); Lev Loseff (Lev Losev) and Valentina Polukhina (eds.), Brodsky's Poetics and Aesthetics (1990), which includes a translation of his Nobel Prize speech; and David M. Bethea, Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (1994).

Glinka, Mikhail

▪ Russian composer

in full Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka

born May 21 [June 1, New Style], 1804, Novospasskoye, Russia

died February 3 [February 15], 1857, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]

the first Russian composer to win international recognition, and the acknowledged founder of the Russian nationalist school.

Glinka first became interested in music at age 10 or 11, when he heard his uncle's private orchestra. He studied at the Chief Pedagogic Institute at St. Petersburg (1818–22) and took piano lessons with the Irish pianist and composer John Field (Field, John). He worked for four years in the Ministry of Communications but was uninterested in an official career. As a dilettante he composed songs and a certain amount of chamber music. Three years in Italy brought him under the spell of the composers Vincenzo Bellini (Bellini, Vincenzo) and Gaetano Donizetti (Donizetti, Gaetano), though ultimately homesickness led him to the idea of writing music “in Russian.”

He studied composition seriously for six months in Berlin, where he began his Sinfonia per l'orchestra sopra due motive russe (1834; “Symphony for Orchestra on Two Russian Motifs”). Recalled to Russia by his father's death, he married and began to compose the opera that first won him fame, A Life for the Tsar (later renamed Ivan Susanin), produced in 1836. During this period, Glinka composed some of his best songs, and in 1842 his second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila, was produced. The exotic subject and boldly original music of Ruslan won neither favour nor popular acclaim, although Franz Liszt (Liszt, Franz) was struck by the novelty of the music.

Disgruntled, and with his marriage broken, Glinka left Russia in 1844. He had the satisfaction of hearing excerpts from both his operas performed in Paris under Hector Berlioz (Berlioz, Hector) (1845, as the first performance of Russian music in the West) and other conductors. From Paris he went to Spain, where he stayed until May 1847, collecting the materials used in his two “Spanish overtures,” the capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa (1845; “Aragonese Jota”) and Summer Night in Madrid (1848). Between 1852 and 1854 he was again abroad, mostly in Paris, until the outbreak of the Crimean War drove him home again. He then wrote his highly entertaining Zapiski (Memoirs; first published in St. Petersburg, 1887), which give a remarkable self-portrait of his indolent, amiable, hypochondriacal character. His last notable composition was Festival Polonaise for Tsar Alexander II's coronation ball (1855).

Glinka has been described as a dilettante of genius. His slender output is considered the foundation of most later Russian music of value. Ruslan and Lyudmila provided models of lyrical melody and colourful orchestration on which Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), Aleksandr Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay) formed their styles. Glinka's orchestral composition Kamarinskaya (1848) was said by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich

▪ Russian composer

Introduction

Tchaikovsky also spelled Chaikovsky, Chaikovskii , or Tschaikowsky name in full Anglicized as Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky

born April 25 [May 7, New Style], 1840, Votkinsk, Russia

died October 25 [November 6], 1893, St. Petersburg

the most popular Russian composer of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response. His oeuvre includes 7 symphonies, 11 operas, 3 ballets, 5 suites, 3 piano concertos, a violin concerto, 11 overtures (strictly speaking, 3 overtures and 8 single movement programmatic orchestral works), 4 cantatas, 20 choral works, 3 string quartets, a string sextet, and more than 100 songs and piano pieces.

Early years

Tchaikovsky was the second of six surviving children of Ilya Tchaikovsky, a manager of the Kamsko-Votkinsk metal works, and Alexandra Assier, a descendant of French émigrés. He manifested a clear interest in music from childhood, and his earliest musical impressions came from an orchestrina (orchestrina di camera) in the family home. At age four he made his first recorded attempt at composition, a song written with his younger sister Alexandra. In 1845 he began taking piano lessons with a local tutor, through which he became familiar with Frédéric Chopin (Chopin, Frédéric)'s mazurkas and the piano pieces of Friedrich Kalkbrenner (Kalkbrenner, Friedrich). Since music education was not available in Russian institutions at that time, Tchaikovsky's parents had not considered that their son might pursue a musical career. Instead, they chose to prepare the high-strung and sensitive boy for a career in the civil service.

In 1850 Tchaikovsky entered the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, a boarding institution for young boys, where he spent nine years. He proved a diligent and successful student who was popular among his peers. At the same time Tchaikovsky formed in this all-male environment intense emotional ties with several of his schoolmates.

In 1854 his mother fell victim to cholera and died. During the boy's last years at the school, Tchaikovsky's father finally came to realize his son's vocation and invited the professional teacher Rudolph Kündinger to give him piano lessons. At age 17 Tchaikovsky came under the influence of the Italian singing instructor Luigi Piccioli, the first person to appreciate his musical talents, and thereafter Tchaikovsky developed a lifelong passion for Italian music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus)'s Don Giovanni proved another revelation that deeply affected his musical taste. In the summer of 1861 he traveled outside Russia for the first time, visiting Germany, France, and England, and in October of that year he began attending music classes offered by the recently founded Russian Musical Society. When St. Petersburg Conservatory opened the following fall, Tchaikovsky was among its first students. After making the decision to dedicate his life to music, he resigned from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as a clerk.

Tchaikovsky spent nearly three years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with Nikolay Zaremba and composition and instrumentation with Anton Rubinstein (Rubinstein, Anton). Among his earliest orchestral works was an overture entitled The Storm (composed 1864), a mature attempt at dramatic program music. The first public performance of any of his works took place in August 1865, when Johann Strauss the Younger (Strauss, Johann, The Younger) conducted Tchaikovsky's Characteristic Dances at a concert in Pavlovsk, near St. Petersburg.

Middle years

After graduating in December 1865, Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow to teach music theory at the Russian Musical Society, soon thereafter renamed the Moscow Conservatory. He found teaching difficult, but his friendship with the director, Nikolay Rubinstein, who had offered him the position in the first place, helped make it bearable. Within five years Tchaikovsky had produced his first symphony, Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (composed 1866; Winter Daydreams), and his first opera, The Voyevoda (1868).

In 1868 Tchaikovsky met a Belgian mezzo-soprano named Désirée Artôt, with whom he fleetingly contemplated a marriage, but their engagement ended in failure. The opera The Voyevoda was well received, even by the The Five (Five, The), an influential group of nationalistic Russian composers who never appreciated the cosmopolitanism of Tchaikovsky's music. In 1869 Tchaikovsky completed Romeo and Juliet, an overture in which he subtly adapted sonata form (sonata) to mirror the dramatic structure of Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)'s play. Nikolay Rubinstein conducted a successful performance of this work the following year, and it became the first of Tchaikovsky's compositions eventually to enter the standard international classical repertoire.

In March 1871 the audience at Moscow's Hall of Nobility witnessed the successful performance of Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1, and in April 1872 he finished another opera, The Oprichnik. While spending the summer at his sister's estate in Ukraine, he began to work on his Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, later dubbed The Little Russian, which he completed later that year. The Oprichnik was first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in April 1874. Despite its initial success, the opera did not convince the critics, with whom Tchaikovsky ultimately agreed. His next opera, Vakula the Smith (1874), later revised as Cherevichki (1885; The Little Shoes), was similarly judged. In his early operas the young composer experienced difficulty in striking a balance between creative fervour and his ability to assess critically the work in progress. However, his instrumental works began to earn him his reputation, and, at the end of 1874, Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, a work destined for fame despite its initial rejection by Rubinstein. The concerto premiered successfully in Boston in October 1875, with Hans von Bülow (Bülow, Hans von) as the soloist. During the summer of 1875, Tchaikovsky composed Symphony No. 3 in D Major, which gained almost immediate acclaim in Russia.

Years of fame

At the very end of 1875, Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel in Europe. He was powerfully impressed by a performance of Georges Bizet's Carmen at the Opéra-Comique in Paris; in contrast, the production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, which he attended in Bayreuth, Germany, during the summer of 1876, left him cold. In November 1876 he put the final touches on his symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, a work with which he felt particularly pleased. Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky had completed the composition of Swan Lake, which was the first in his famed trilogy of ballets. The ballet's premiere took place on February 20, 1877, but it was not a success owing to poor staging and choreography, and it was soon dropped from the repertoire.

The growing popularity of Tchaikovsky's music both within and outside of Russia inevitably resulted in public interest in him and his personal life. Although homosexuality was officially illegal in Russia, the authorities tolerated it among the upper classes. But social and familial pressures, as well as his discomfort with the fact that his younger brother Modest was exhibiting the same sexual tendencies, led to Tchaikovsky's hasty decision in the summer of 1877 to marry Antonina Milyukova, a young and naive music student who had declared her love for him. Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, combined with an almost complete lack of compatibility between the couple, resulted in matrimonial disaster—within weeks he fled abroad, never again to live with his wife. This experience forced Tchaikovsky to recognize that he could not find respectability through social conventions and that his sexual orientation could not be changed. On February 13, 1878, he wrote his brother Anatoly from Florence: “Only now, especially after the tale of my marriage, have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.”

The year 1876 saw the beginning of the extraordinary relationship that developed between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon; it became an important component of their lives for the next 14 years. A great admirer of his work, she chose to become his patroness and eventually arranged for him a regular monthly allowance; this enabled him in 1878 to resign from the conservatory and devote his efforts to writing music. Thereafter he could afford to spend the winters in Europe and return to Russia each summer. Although he and his benefactor agreed never to meet, they engaged in a voluminous correspondence that constitutes a remarkable historical and literary record. In the course of it they frankly exchanged their views on a broad spectrum of issues, starting with politics or ideology and ending with such topics as the psychology of creativity, religious faith, and the nature of love.

The period after Tchaikovsky's departure from Moscow proved creatively very productive. Early in 1878 he finished several of his most famous compositions—the opera Eugene Onegin, the Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, and the Violin Concerto in D Major. From December 1878 to August 1879 he worked on the opera The Maid of Orleans, which was not particularly well received. Over the next 10 years Tchaikovsky produced his operas Mazepa (1883; based on Aleksandr Pushkin's Poltava) and The Enchantress (1887), as well as the masterly symphonies Manfred (1885) and Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (1888). His other major achievements of this period include Serenade for Strings in C Major, Opus 48 (1880), Capriccio italien (1880), and the 1812 Overture (1880).

Final years

At the beginning of 1885, tired of his peregrinations, Tchaikovsky settled down in a rented country house near Klin, outside of Moscow. There he adopted a regular daily routine that included reading, walking in the forest, composing in the mornings and the afternoons, and playing piano duets with friends in the evenings. At the January 1887 premiere of his opera Cherevichki, he finally overcame his longstanding fear of conducting. Moreover, at the end of December he embarked upon his first European concert tour as a conductor, which included Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and London. He met with great success and made a second tour in 1889. Between October 1888 and August 1889 he composed his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. During the winter of 1890, while staying in Florence, he concentrated on his third Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich) opera, The Queen of Spades, which was written in just 44 days and is considered one of his finest. Later that year Tchaikovsky was informed by Nadezhda von Meck that she was close to ruin and could not continue his allowance. This was followed by the cessation of their correspondence, a circumstance that caused Tchaikovsky considerable anguish.

In the spring of 1891 Tchaikovsky was invited to visit the United States on the occasion of the inauguration of Carnegie Hall in New York City. He conducted before enthusiastic audiences in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Upon his return to Russia, he completed his last two compositions for the stage—the one-act opera Iolanta (1891) and a two-act ballet Nutcracker (1892). In February 1893 he began working on his Symphony No. 6 in B Minor (Pathétique), which was destined to become his most celebrated masterpiece. He dedicated it to his nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davydov, who in Tchaikovsky's late years became increasingly an object of his passionate love. His world stature was confirmed by his triumphant European and American tours and his acceptance in June 1893 of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.

On October 16 Tchaikovsky conducted his new symphony's premiere in St. Petersburg. The mixed reaction of the audience, however, did not affect the composer's belief that the symphony belonged among his best work. On October 21 he suddenly became ill and was diagnosed with cholera, an epidemic that was sweeping through St. Petersburg. Despite all medical efforts to save him, he died four days later from complications arising from the disease. Wild rumours circulated among his contemporaries concerning his possible suicide, which were revived in the late 20th century by some of his biographers, but these allegations cannot be supported by documentary evidence.

Assessment

For most of the 20th century, critics were profoundly unjust in their severe pronouncements regarding Tchaikovsky's life and music. During his lifetime, Russian musicians attacked his style as insufficiently nationalistic. In the Soviet Union, however, he became an official icon, of whom no adverse criticism was tolerated; by the same token, no in-depth studies were made of his personality. But in Europe and North America, Tchaikovsky often was judged on the basis of his sexuality, and his music was interpreted as the manifestation of his deviance. His life was portrayed as an incessant emotional turmoil, his character as morbid, hysterical, or guilt-ridden, and his works were proclaimed vulgar, sentimental, and even pathological. This interpretation was the result of a fallacy that over the course of decades projected the current perception of homosexuality onto the past. At the turn of the 21st century, a close scrutiny of Tchaikovsky's correspondence and diaries, which finally became available to scholars in their uncensored form, led to the realization that this traditional portrayal was fundamentally wrong. As the archival material makes clear, Tchaikovsky eventually succeeded in his adjustment to the social realities of his time, and there is no reason to believe that he was particularly neurotic or that his music possesses any coded messages, as some theorists have claimed.

His artistic philosophy gave priority to what may be called “emotional progression”—i.e., the establishment of an immediate rapport with the audience through the anticipation and eventual achievement of catharsis. His music does not claim intellectual depth but conveys the joys, loves, and sorrows of the human heart with striking and poignant sincerity. In his attempt to synthesize the sublime with the introspective, and also in the symbolism of his later music, Tchaikovsky anticipated certain sensibilities that later became prominent in the culture of Russian modernism.

Tchaikovsky was the leading exponent of Romanticism in its characteristically Russian mold, which owes as much to the French and Italian musical traditions as it does to the German. Although not as ostentatiously as the nationalist composers, such as Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest) and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay), Tchaikovsky was clearly inspired by Russian folk music. In the words of the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky, “Tchaikovsky drew unconsciously from the true, popular sources of our race.”

The first great Russian symphonist, he exhibited a particular gift for melody and orchestration. In his best work, the powerful tunes underlining musical themes are harmonized into magnificent, formally innovative compositions. His resourceful use of instruments allows easy identification of most of his works by their characteristic sonority. Tchaikovsky excelled primarily as a master of instrumental music; his operas, often eclectic in subject matter and style, do not find much appreciation in the West, with the exception of Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. Whereas most of his operas met with limited success, Tchaikovsky nonetheless proved eminently successful in transforming ballet, then a grand decorative gesture, into a staged musical drama, and thus he revolutionized the genre.

Moreover, Tchaikovsky brought an integrity of design that elevated ballet to the level of symphonic music. To this end, he employed a symphonist's sense of large-scale structure, organizing successive dances through the use of keys to create a cumulative feeling of purpose, in distinction to the more random or decorative layout in the ballets of his predecessors. His special sense of how melody can engender the dance gave his ballets a unique place in the world's theatres. The influence of his experimentation is evident in the ballets of Sergey Prokofiev (Prokofiev, Sergey) and Aram Khachaturian (Khachaturian, Aram).

Tchaikovsky's symphonic poems (symphonic poem) are part of the line of development in single-movement programmatic works initiated by Franz Liszt (Liszt, Franz), and they run the gamut of expressive and stylistic features that typify the genre. At one extreme the early Fatum (1868) shows a freedom of form and modernist expression. At the other extreme is the classical poise of the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, in which passionate Romanticism is counterbalanced by the rigours of the sonata form. Furthermore, Tchaikovsky loosened the strictures of chamber music by introducing unorthodox meter in the scherzo of the Second String Quartet in F Major, Opus 22 (1874), and undermining the sense of key in the finale. His innovation is also evident in the second movement of the string sextet Souvenir de Florence (1890), for which he wrote music that revels in almost pure sound-effect—something more familiar in the orchestral sphere. His skill in counterpoint, the traditional bedrock of chamber music, can also be seen throughout his chamber works.

Tchaikovsky's approach to solo piano music, on the other hand, remained mostly traditional, that is, it more or less satisfied the 19th-century taste for short salon pieces with descriptive titles, usually arranged in groups, as in the famous The Seasons (1875–76). In several of his piano pieces, Tchaikovsky's melodic flair surfaces, but on the whole he was far less committed when composing these works than he was when writing his orchestral music, concertos, operas, and chamber compositions.

Tchaikovsky steered an unlikely path between the Russian nationalist tendencies so prominent in the work of his rivals in The Five and the cosmopolitan stance encouraged by his conservatory training. He was both a Russian nationalist and a Westernizer of polished technical skill. He put his personal stamp on the late-19th-century symphony with his last three symphonies; they demonstrate a heightened subjectivity that would influence Gustav Mahler (Mahler, Gustav), Sergey Rachmaninoff (Rachmaninoff, Sergey), and Dmitry Shostakovich (Shostakovich, Dmitry) and encourage the genre to pass with renewed vigour into the 20th century.

It cannot be denied that the quality of Tchaikovsky's oeuvre remains uneven. Some of his music is undistinguished—hastily written, repetitious, or self-indulgent. But in such symphonies as his No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, and Manfred and in many of his overtures, suites, and songs, he achieved the unity of melodic inspiration, dramatic content, and mastery of form that elevates him to the premiere rank of the world's composers.

Alexander Poznansky

Additional Reading

Basic source material on Tchaikovsky may be found in Modeste Tchaikovsky (Modest Ilich Chaikovskii), The Life & Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, trans. from Russian and ed. by Rosa Newmarch (1906, reprinted in 2 vol., 1973); Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky), The Diaries of Tchaikovsky, trans. from Russian with notes by Wladmir Lakond (pseudonym of Walter Lake) (1945, reprinted 1973), Letters to His Family: An Autobiography, trans. from Russian (1973, reissued 1982), and To My Best Friend: Correspondence Between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, 1876–1878, trans. from Russian, ed. by Edward Garden and Nigel Gotteri (1993); also David Brown, Tchaikovsky Remembered (1993); Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky's Last Days (1996); and Alexander Poznansky (compiler and ed.), Tchaikovsky Through Others' Eyes, trans. from Russian (1999). The most recent biographies are John Warrack, Tchaikovsky (1973, reprinted 1989); Vladimir Volkoff, Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait (1975); David Brown, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, 4 vol. (1978–91); Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (1991, reissued 1993). Specialized discussions of his music may be found in Eric Blom, Tchaikovsky: Orchestral Works (1927, reprinted 1970); John Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 2nd ed. (1974); Roland John Wiley, Tchaikovsky's Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker (1985, reissued 1991); and Henry Zajaczkowski, Tchaikovsky's Musical Style (1987). Works that consider the cultural context of his time include Leslie Kearney (ed.), Tchaikovsky and His World (1998); and Alexandar Mihailovic (ed.), Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centennial Symposium (1999).

Mussorgsky, Modest

▪ Russian composer

Introduction

in full Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky , Mussorgsky also spelled Musorgsky or Moussorgsky

born March 9 [March 21, New Style], 1839, Karevo, Russia

died March 16 [March 28], 1881, St. Petersburg

Russian composer noted particularly for his opera Boris Godunov (final version first performed 1874), his songs, and his piano piece Pictures from an Exhibition (1874). Mussorgsky, along with Aleksandr Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui, was a member of The Five (Five, The), a group of Russian composers bound together in the common goal of creating a nationalist school of Russian music.

Life and career

Mussorgsky was the son of a landowner but had peasant blood, his father's grandmother having been a serf. According to his autobiographical sketch, written in 1881, Mussorgsky learned about Russian fairy tales from his nurse. “This early familiarity with the spirit of the people, with the way they lived, lent the first and greatest impetus to my musical improvisations.” His mother, herself an excellent pianist, gave Modest his first piano lessons, and at seven he could play some of Franz Liszt's simpler pieces.

In August 1849 his father took Modest and his other son, Filaret, to St. Petersburg, where Modest attended the Peter-Paul School in preparation for a military career. At the same time, mindful of Modest's musical bent, their father entrusted the boys to Anton Gerke, future professor of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

In 1852 Mussorgsky entered the School for Cadets of the Guard. There, in his first year he composed his Podpraporshchik (Porte-Enseigne Polka), published at his father's expense. Although not the most industrious of students, he gave proof of tremendous curiosity and wide-ranging intellectual interests.

In 1856, by now a lieutenant, Mussorgsky joined the Preobrazhensky Guards, one of Russia's most aristocratic regiments, where he made the acquaintance of several music-loving officers who were habitués of the Italian theatre. During this same period he came to know Aleksandr Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr), a fellow officer who was to become another important Russian composer. Borodin has provided a very vivid picture of the musician:

There was something absolutely boyish about Mussorgsky; he looked like a real second-lieutenant of the picture books … a touch of foppery, unmistakable but kept well within bounds. His courtesy and good breeding were exemplary. All the women fell in love with him. … That same evening we were invited to dine with the head surgeon of the hospital. … Mussorgsky sat down to the piano and played … very gently and graciously, with occasional affected movements of the hands, while his listeners murmured, “charming! delicious!”

During the winter of 1856 a regimental comrade introduced Mussorgsky into the home of the Russian composer Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (Dargomyzhsky, Aleksandr). At one of the musicales there, Mussorgsky discovered the music of the seminal Russian composer Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail), and this quickened his own Russophile inclinations. Three years later, in June 1859, he saw the Moscow Kremlin for the first time, an important experience that represented his first “physical” communion with Russian history. Through Dargomyzhsky, Mussorgsky met another composer, Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), who became his teacher. Since the death of their father (in 1853), the Mussorgsky brothers had seen their poorly administered patrimony decrease substantially. With the freeing of the serfs in 1861, it vanished. Having decided to devote himself to music, Modest Mussorgsky had quit the army three years earlier and since 1863 had been working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communications. His distressing financial troubles date from that time, and he had to seek the help of moneylenders.

Mussorgsky achieved artistic maturity in 1866 with a series of remarkable songs about ordinary people such as “Darling Savishna,” “Hopak,” and “The Seminarist,” and an even larger series appeared the following year. Another work dating from this time is the symphonic poem Ivanova noch na Lysoy gore (1867; Night on Bald Mountain). In 1868 he reached the height of his conceptual powers in composition with the first song of his incomparable cycle Detskaya (The Nursery) and a setting of the first few scenes of Nikolay Gogol's Zhenitba (The Marriage).

In 1869 he began his great work Boris Godunov to his own libretto based on the drama by Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich). The first version, completed in December 1869, was rejected by the advisory committee of the imperial theatres because it lacked a prima donna role. In response, the composer subjected the opera to a thorough revision and in 1872 put the finishing touches to the second version, adding the roles of Marina and Rangoni as well as several new episodes. The first production of Boris took place on February 8, 1874, at St. Petersburg and was a success.

In 1865, after the death of his mother, he lived with his brother, then shared a small flat with the Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay) until 1872, when his colleague married. Left very much alone, Mussorgsky began to drink to excess, although the composition of the opera Khovanshchina perhaps offered some distraction (left unfinished at his death, this opera was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov). Mussorgsky then found a companion in the person of a distant relative, Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov. This impoverished 25-year-old poet inspired Mussorgsky's two cycles of melancholy melodies, Bez solntsa (Sunless) and Pesni i plyaski smerti (Songs and Dances of Death). At that time Mussorgsky was haunted by the spectre of death—he himself had only seven more years to live. The death of another friend, the painter Victor Hartmann, inspired Mussorgsky to write the piano suite Kartinki s vystavki (Pictures from an Exhibition; orchestrated in 1922 by the French composer Maurice Ravel (Ravel, Maurice)).

The last few years of Mussorgsky's life were dominated by his alcoholism and by a solitude made all the more painful by Golenishchev-Kutuzov's marriage. Nonetheless, the composer began his opera Sorochinskaya yarmarka (unfinished; Sorochintsy Fair), inspired by Gogol's tale. As the accompanist of an aging singer, Darya Leonova, Mussorgsky departed on a lengthy concert tour of southern Russia and the Crimea. On his return he tried teaching at a small school of music in St. Petersburg.

On February 24, 1881, three successive attacks of alcoholic epilepsy laid him low. His friends took him to a hospital where for a time his health improved sufficiently for one of the leading Russian artists of the day, Ilya Repin (Repin, Ilya Yefimovich), to paint a famous portrait of him. Mussorgsky's health was irreparably damaged, however, and he died within a month, shortly after his 42nd birthday.

Music

Mussorgsky's importance to and influence on later composers are quite out of proportion to his relatively small output. Few composers were less derivative, or evolved so original and bold a style. The 65 songs he composed, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian (Russia) life with great vividness and insight and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language. Mussorgsky's operas Boris Godunov and to a lesser extent Khovanshchina display his dramatic technique of setting sharply characterized individuals against the background of country and people. His power of musical portrayal, his strong characterizations, and the importance he assigned to the role of the chorus establish Boris Godunov as a masterpiece. From a technical standpoint, Mussorgsky's unorthodox use of tonality and harmony and his method of fusing arioso and recitative provide Boris Godunov with great dramatic intensity.

Shortly after Mussorgsky's death, Rimsky-Korsakov prepared Mussorgsky's works for publication, in the process purging them of what he considered to be their harmonic eccentricities and instrumental weaknesses. Rimsky-Korsakov's widely performed edition of Boris Godunov is the best known of these works. From roughly 1908, however, after the production of Rimsky-Korsakov's version of Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera, there was a growing demand for the original versions of Mussorgsky's works, which were made available beginning in 1928 in a collected edition edited by Paul Lamm. This edition displayed Mussorgsky's original orchestration for Boris Godunov, which is as stark and economical as his unorthodox harmony.

Additional Reading

Biographies and critical studies include Oskar von Riesemann, Moussorgsky, trans. from German by Paul England (1929, reissued 1971); M.D. Calvocoressi, Mussorgsky, rev. ed. completed by Gerald Abraham (1974, reissued 1977); Malcolm Hamrick Brown (ed.), Musorgsky, in Memoriam, 1881–1981 (1982), a collection of scholarly papers on very specific aspects of his music; Alexandra Orlova (compiler and ed.), Musorgsky Remembered, trans. from Russian by Véronique Zaytzeff and Frederick Morrison (1991), reminiscences by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries; and Richard Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993, reissued 1997).

Borodin, Aleksandr

▪ Russian composer and scientist

in full Aleksandr Porfiryevich Borodin

born Oct. 31 [Nov. 12, New Style], 1833, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Feb. 15 [Feb. 27], 1887, St. Petersburg

major Russian nationalist composer of the 19th century. He was also a scientist notable for his research on aldehydes.

Borodin's father was a Georgian prince and his mother an army doctor's wife, and he was reared in comfortable circumstances. His gift for languages and music was evident early on, and as a schoolboy he learned to play the piano, flute, and cello and to compose music. From 1850 to 1856 he studied at the Medico-Surgical Academy, specializing in chemistry, and received a doctorate in 1858. From 1859 to 1862 he studied in western Europe. On his return to Russia he became adjunct professor of chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy and full professor in 1864. From this period dates his first major work, the Symphony No. 1 in E-flat Major (1862–67), written as a result of his acquaintance with Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), of whose circle (The Five (Five, The)) he was a member, along with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, and César Cui. Borodin began his Symphony No. 2 in B Minor in 1869, when he also began work on his operatic masterpiece, Prince Igor (completed posthumously by Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Glazunov (Glazunov, Aleksandr)). Act II of Prince Igor contains the often-played “Polovtsian Dances.” He also found time to write two string quartets, a dozen remarkable songs, the unfinished Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, and his tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia.

Borodin's musical work was never more than relaxation from his scientific work. In addition to his research and teaching, he helped found medical courses for women in 1872. In the 1880s pressures of work and ill health left him little time for composition. He died suddenly while at a ball.

Borodin's compositions place him in the front rank of Russian composers. He had a strong lyric vein but also was noted for his handling of heroic subjects. He had an unusually fine rhythmic sense and excelled in the use of orchestral colour and in the evocation of distant places. In his symphonies and string quartets—among the finest of the Romantic era—he developed a formal structure in which the musical material of a movement was derived from a single initial motif. His melodies reflect the character of Russian folk melodies, and like other composers of the Russian national school he used striking harmonies unconventional in western European music.

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay

▪ Russian composer

Introduction

in full Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov

born March 6 [March 18, New Style], 1844, Tikhvin, near Novgorod, Russia

died June 8 [June 21], 1908, Lyubensk

Russian composer, teacher, and editor who was at his best in descriptive orchestrations suggesting a mood or a place.

Early life and naval career

Rimsky-Korsakov was the product of many influences. His father was a government official of liberal views, and his mother was well educated and could play the piano. His uncle was an admiral in the Russian navy, and his elder brother was a marine officer. From them Rimsky-Korsakov acquired his interest in music and his abiding love for the sea. When he was 12 years old the family moved to St. Petersburg, where he entered the naval academy. At age 15 he began taking piano lessons and learned the rudiments of composition. In 1861 he met the composer Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), a man of great musical culture, and under the older man's guidance he began to compose a symphony.

In 1862 he graduated from the naval academy. Soon afterward he sailed on the clipper ship Almaz on a long voyage, the vessel anchoring in New York City; Baltimore, Maryland; and Washington, D.C., at the height of the American Civil War. Since Russia was politically sympathetic toward the North, the sailors were cordially welcomed there. Subsequent ports of call were Brazil (where he was promoted to the rank of midshipman), Spain, Italy, France, England, and Norway. The ship returned to its home port of Kronstadt (Kronshtadt) in May 1865. For young Rimsky-Korsakov the voyage confirmed a fascination with the sea. Aquatic scenes abound in his operas and symphonic works: the ocean in Scheherazade (1888), Sadko (1898), and The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900), and the lake in The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (1907).

On his return to St. Petersburg, Rimsky-Korsakov completed the symphony begun before his voyage, and it was performed with gratifying success in St. Petersburg on December 31, 1865, when the composer was only 21 years old. His next important work was Fantasy on Serbian Themes for orchestra, first performed at a concert of Slavonic music conducted by Balakirev in St. Petersburg, on May 24, 1867. The occasion was of historic significance, for, in reviewing the concert, the critic Vladimir Stasov proudly proclaimed that henceforth Russia, too, had its own “mighty little heap” (moguchaya kuchka) of native composers. The name caught on quickly and found its way into music history books, with specific reference to Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, César Cui, and Modest Mussorgsky. The composers became known collectively as The Five (Five, The), and their purpose was seen to be to assert the musical independence of Russia from the West. Of the five, Rimsky-Korsakov was the most learned and the most productive; he composed works in all genres, but he most excelled in the field of opera.

Teacher, conductor, and editor

So high was Rimsky-Korsakov's reputation that in 1871, when he was still a very young man, he was engaged to teach composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In his autobiographical Chronicle of My Musical Life (1972, originally published in Russian, 1909) he frankly admitted his lack of qualifications for this important position; he himself had never taken a systematic academic course in musical theory, even though he had profited from Balakirev's desultory instruction and by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich)'s professional advice. Eager to complete his own musical education, he undertook in 1873 an ambitious program of study, concentrating mainly on counterpoint and the fugue. He ended his studies in 1875 by sending 10 fugues to Tchaikovsky, who declared them impeccable.

In 1873 he left the naval service and assumed charge of military bands as inspector and conductor. Although he lacked brilliance as an orchestral leader, he attained excellent results in training inexperienced instrumentalists. His first professional appearance on the podium took place in St. Petersburg on March 2, 1874, when he conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 3. In the same year he was appointed director of the Free Music School in St. Petersburg, a post that he held until 1881. He served as conductor of concerts at the court chapel from 1883 to 1894 and was chief conductor of the Russian symphony concerts between 1886 and 1900. In 1889 he led concerts of Russian music at the Paris World Exposition, and in the spring of 1907 he conducted in Paris two Russian historic concerts in connection with Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich)'s Ballets Russes.

Rimsky-Korsakov rendered an inestimable service to Russian music as the de facto editor and head of a unique publishing enterprise financed by the Russian industrialist M.P. Belyayev and dedicated exclusively to the publication of music by Russian composers. After Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest)'s death, Rimsky-Korsakov edited his scores for publication, making radical changes in what he considered Mussorgsky's awkward melodic and harmonic progressions, and he practically rewrote Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina. His edited and altered version of Boris Godunov evoked sharp criticism from modernists who venerated Mussorgsky's originality; but Rimsky-Korsakov's intervention vouchsafed the opera's survival. Mussorgsky's score was later published in 1928 and had several performances in Russia and abroad, but ultimately the more effective Rimsky-Korsakov version prevailed in opera houses. Rimsky-Korsakov also edited (with the composer Aleksandr Glazunov (Glazunov, Aleksandr)) the posthumous works of Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr).

Assessment

A strict disciplinarian in artistic matters, Rimsky-Korsakov was also a severe critic of his own music. He made constant revisions of his early compositions, in which he found technical imperfections. As a result, double dates, indicating early and revised versions, frequently occur in his catalog of works. He was at his best and most typical in his descriptive works. With two exceptions (Servilia [1902] and Mozart and Salieri [1898]), the subjects of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas are taken from Russian or other Slavic fairy tales, literature, and history. These include Snow Maiden (1882), Sadko, The Tsar's Bride (1899), The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia, and Le Coq d'or (1909). Although these operas are part of the regular repertory in Russian opera houses, they are rarely heard abroad; only Le Coq d'or enjoys occasional production in western Europe and the United States.

Of the composer's orchestral works, the best known are Capriccio espagnol (1887), the symphonic suite Scheherazade, and Russian Easter Festival (1888) overture. “The Flight of the Bumble Bee” from The Tale of Tsar Saltan and the “Song of India” from Sadko are perennial favourites in a variety of arrangements.

Rimsky-Korsakov's songs are distinguished by simple elegance and fine Russian prosody; his chamber music is of less importance. He also wrote a piano concerto. As a professor of composition and orchestration at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1871 until the end of his life (with the exception of a brief period in 1905 when he was dismissed by the reactionary directorate for his defense of students on strike), he taught two generations of Russian composers, and his influence, therefore, was pervasive. Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor) studied privately with him for several years. His Practical Manual of Harmony (1884) and Fundamentals of Orchestration (posthumous, 1913) are still used as basic musical textbooks in Russia.

Nicolas Slonimsky Richard Taruskin

Additional Reading

The primary biographical source is Rimsky-Korsakov's autobiography. Another biography is Gerald Abraham, Rimsky-Korsakov: A Short Biography (1945, reprinted 1976). The most important documentary study was compiled by A.N. Rimskiĭ-Korsakov, N.A. Rimskiĭ-Korsakov: zhizn'i tvorchestvo, 5 vol. (1933–46). A useful compendium is Anatoliĭ Aleksandrovich Solovtsov, Zhizn'i tvorchestvo N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova, 2nd ed. (1969).Nicolas Slonimsky

Scriabin, Aleksandr

▪ Russian composer

in full Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin , Scriabin also spelled Skriabin , or Skryabin

born Dec. 25, 1871 [Jan. 6, 1872, New Style], Moscow, Russia

died April 14 [April 27], 1915, Moscow

Russian composer of piano and orchestral music noted for its unusual harmonies through which the composer sought to explore musical symbolism.

Scriabin was trained as a soldier at the Moscow Cadet School from 1882 to 1889 but studied music at the same time and took piano lessons. In 1888 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied the piano with V.I. Safonov and composition with Sergey Taneyev (Taneyev, Sergey) and Anton Arensky (Arensky, Anton). By 1892, when he graduated from the conservatory, he had composed the piano pieces that constitute his opuses 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7. In 1897 he married the pianist Vera Isakovich and from 1898 until 1903 taught at the Moscow Conservatory. He then devoted himself entirely to composition and in 1904 settled in Switzerland. After 1900 he was much preoccupied with mystical philosophy, and his Symphony No. 1, composed in that year, has a choral finale, to his own words, glorifying art as a form of religion. In Switzerland he completed his Symphony No. 3, first performed under Arthur Nikisch in Paris in 1905. The literary “program” of this work, devised by Tatiana Schloezer, with whom he had formed a relationship after abandoning his wife, was said to represent “the evolution of the human spirit from pantheism to unity with the universe.” Theosophical ideas similarly provided the basis of the orchestral Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1911), which called for the projection of colours onto a screen during the performance.

From 1906 to 1907 Scriabin toured the United States, where he gave concerts with Safonov and the conductor Modest Altschuler, and in 1908 he frequented theosophical circles in Brussels. In 1909 he was encouraged by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky (Koussevitzky, Serge), who both performed and published his works, to return to Russia. By then he was no longer thinking in terms of music alone; he was looking forward to an all-embracing “Mystery.” This work was planned to open with a “liturgical act” in which music, poetry, dancing, colours, and scents were to unite to induce in the worshipers a “supreme, final ecstasy.” He wrote the poem of the “Preliminary Action” of the “Mystery” but left only sketches for the music.

Scriabin's reputation stems from his grandiose symphonies and his sensitive, exquisitely polished piano music. His piano works include 10 sonatas (1892–1913), an early concerto, and many preludes and other short pieces. Although Scriabin was an idolater of Frédéric Chopin (Chopin, Frédéric) in his youth, he early developed a personal style. As his thought became more and more mystical, egocentric, and ingrown, his harmonic style became ever less generally intelligible. Meaningful analysis of his work only began appearing in the 1960s, and yet his music had always attracted a devoted following among modernists.

Additional Reading

James M. Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin (1986). Faubion Bowers, Scriabin, 2nd rev. ed. (1996). Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic

Rachmaninoff, Sergey

▪ Russian musician

Introduction

in full Sergey Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff , Rachmaninoff also spelled Rakhmaninov , or Rachmaninov

born March 20 [April 1, New Style], 1873, Oneg, near Semyonovo, Russia

died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, California, U.S.

composer who was the last great figure of the tradition of Russian Romanticism and a leading piano virtuoso of his time. He is especially known for his piano concerti and the piece for piano and orchestra entitled Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1954). (Click here for an audio clip of another of Rachmaninoff's compositions, Étude-tableau No. 5, op. 39 [1916–17]).

Early life

Rachmaninoff was born on an estate belonging to his grandparents, situated near Lake Ilmen in the Novgorod district. His father was a retired army officer and his mother the daughter of a general. The boy was destined to become an army officer until his father lost the entire family fortune through risky financial ventures and then deserted the family. Young Sergey's cousin Aleksandr Siloti, a well-known concert pianist and conductor, sensed the boy's abilities and suggested sending him to the noted teacher and pianist Nikolay Zverev in Moscow for his piano studies. It is to Zverev's strict disciplinarian treatment of the boy that musical history owes one of the great piano virtuosos of the 20th century. For his general education and theoretical subjects in music, Sergey became a pupil at the Moscow Conservatory.

At age 19 he graduated from the conservatory, winning a gold medal for his one-act opera Aleko (after Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich)'s poem Tsygany [“The Gypsies”]). His fame and popularity, both as composer and concert pianist, were launched by two compositions: the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, played for the first time in public on September 26, 1892, and his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, which had its first performance in Moscow on October 27, 1901. The former piece, although it first brought Rachmaninoff to public attention, was to haunt him throughout his life—the prelude was constantly requested by his concert audiences. The concerto, his first major success, revived his hopes after a trying period of inactivity.

In his youth, Rachmaninoff was subject to emotional crises over the success or failure of his works as well as his personal relationships. Self-doubt and uncertainty carried him into deep depressions, one of the most severe of which followed the failure, on its first performance in March 1897, of his Symphony No. 1 in D Minor. The symphony was poorly performed, and the critics condemned it. During this period, while brooding over an unhappy love affair, he was taken to a psychiatrist, Nikolay Dahl, who is often credited with having restored the young composer's self-confidence, thus enabling him to write the Piano Concerto No. 2 (which is dedicated to Dahl).

Major creative activity

At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Rachmaninoff was a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre. Although more of an observer than a person politically involved in the revolution, he went with his family, in November 1906, to live in Dresden. There he wrote three of his major scores: the Symphony No. 2 in E Minor (1907), the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead (1909), and the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor (1909). The last was composed especially for his first concert tour of the United States, highlighting his much-acclaimed pianistic debut on November 28, 1909, with the New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch (Damrosch, Walter). Piano Concerto No. 3 requires great virtuosity from the pianist; its last movement is a bravura section as dazzling as any ever composed. In Philadelphia and Chicago he appeared with equal success in the role of conductor, interpreting his own symphonic compositions. Of these, the Symphony No. 2 is the most significant: it is a work of deep emotion and haunting thematic material. While touring, he was invited to become permanent conductor of the Boston Symphony, but he declined the offer and returned to Russia in February 1910.

The one notable composition of Rachmaninoff's second period of residence in Moscow was his choral symphony The Bells (1913), based on Konstantin Balmont's Russian translation of the poem by Edgar Allan Poe (Poe, Edgar Allan). This work displays considerable ingenuity in the coupling of choral and orchestral resources to produce striking imitative and textural effects.

Later years

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rachmaninoff went into his second self-imposed exile, dividing his time between residences in Switzerland and the United States. Although for the next 25 years he spent most of his time in an English-speaking country, he never mastered its language or thoroughly acclimatized himself. With his family and a small circle of friends, he lived a rather isolated life. He missed Russia and the Russian people—the sounding board for his music, as he said. And this alienation had a devastating effect on his formerly prolific creative ability. He produced little of real originality but rewrote some of his earlier work. Indeed, he devoted himself almost entirely to concertizing in the United States and Europe, a field in which he had few peers. His only substantial works from this period are the Symphony No. 3 in A Minor (1936), another expression of sombre, Slavic melancholy, and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra, a set of variations on a violin caprice by Niccolò Paganini (Paganini, Niccolò). Rachmaninoff's last major work, the Symphonic Dances for orchestra, was composed in 1940, about two years before his death.

Assessment

Rachmaninoff's music, although written mostly in the 20th century, remains firmly entrenched in the 19th-century musical idiom. He was, in effect, the final expression of the tradition embodied by Tchaikovsky—a melodist of Romantic dimensions still writing in an era of explosive change and experimentation.

Victor Ilyich Seroff Richard Taruskin

Additional Reading

Rachmaninoff's letters have been collected and published in Russian in Pisma, ed. by Z.A. Apetian (1955), which includes all previously published letters and some newly published ones. Rachmaninoff's Recollections, Told to Oskar von Riesemann, trans. from German by Dolly Rutherford (1934, reissued 1979), are reminiscences by the composer about his life and work; the last chapter is Riesemann's analysis of Rachmaninoff's qualities as a composer. Sergei Bertensson, Jay Leyda, and Sophia Satin, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (1956, reissued 1965), is a comprehensive biography whose preparation was assisted by the composer's cousin and sister-in-law; it is especially useful for its description of the composer's years in the United States. Other biographical studies are Patrick Piggott, Rachmaninov (1978), including detailed musical commentary and critique; Barrie Martyn, Rachmaninoff: Composer, Pianist, Conductor (1990), drawing extensively on archival and Russian-language sources, with a discography; and Geoffrey Norris, Rachmaninoff, rev. and updated ed. (1994).Richard Taruskin

Stravinsky, Igor

▪ Russian composer

Introduction

in full Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky

born June 5 [June 17, New Style], 1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, Russia

died April 6, 1971, New York, New York, U.S.

Russian-born composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long working life.(Click here for an audio excerpt from Stravinsky's Three Pieces for Clarinet.)

Life and career

Stravinsky's father was one of the leading Russian operatic basses of his day, and the mixture of the musical, theatrical, and literary spheres in the Stravinsky family household exerted a lasting influence on the composer. Nevertheless his own musical aptitude emerged quite slowly. As a boy he was given lessons in piano and music theory. But then he studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University (graduating in 1905), and only gradually did he become aware of his vocation for musical composition. In 1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay) (whose son Vladimir was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to take Stravinsky as a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional academic training.

Rimsky-Korsakov tutored Stravinsky mainly in orchestration and acted as the budding composer's mentor, discussing each new work and offering suggestions. He also used his influence to get his pupil's music performed. Several of Stravinsky's student works were performed in the weekly gatherings of Rimsky-Korsakov's class, and two of his works for orchestra—the Symphony in E-flat Major and The Faun and the Shepherdess, a song cycle with words by Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich)—were played by the Court Orchestra in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died. In February 1909 a short but brilliant orchestral piece, the Scherzo fantastique was performed in St. Petersburg at a concert attended by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich), who was so impressed by Stravinsky's promise as a composer that he quickly commissioned some orchestral arrangements for the summer season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. For the 1910 ballet season Diaghilev approached Stravinsky again, this time commissioning the musical score for a new full-length ballet on the subject of the Firebird.

The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made Stravinsky known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work showed how fully he had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master. The Firebird was the first of a series of spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev's company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes's premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka, with Vaslav Nijinsky (Nijinsky, Vaslav) dancing the title role to Stravinsky's musical score. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great Sacrifice. The result was The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years (1911–13). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky's unusual and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky's creative and daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued among themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as “the composer of The Rite of Spring” and the destructive modernist par excellence. But he himself was already moving away from such post-Romantic extravagances, and world events of the next few years only hastened that process.

Stravinsky's successes in Paris with the Ballets Russes effectively uprooted him from St. Petersburg. He had married his cousin Catherine Nossenko in 1906, and, after the premiere of The Firebird in 1910, he brought her and their two children to France. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 seriously disrupted the Ballets Russes's activities in western Europe, however, and Stravinsky found he could no longer rely on that company as a regular outlet for his new compositions. The war also effectively marooned him in Switzerland, where he and his family had regularly spent their winters, and it was there that they spent most of the war. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 finally extinguished any hope Stravinsky may have had of returning to his native land.

By 1914 Stravinsky was exploring a more restrained and austere, though no less vibrantly rhythmic kind of musical composition. His musical production in the following years is dominated by sets of short instrumental and vocal pieces that are based variously on Russian folk texts and idioms and on ragtime and other style models from Western popular or dance music. He expanded some of these experiments into large-scale theatre pieces. The Wedding, a ballet cantata begun by Stravinsky in 1914 but completed only in 1923 after years of uncertainty over its instrumentation, is based on the texts of Russian village wedding songs. The “farmyard burlesque” Renard (1916) is similarly based on Russian folk idioms, while The Soldier's Tale (1918), a mixed-media piece using speech, mime, and dance accompanied by a seven-piece band, eclectically incorporates ragtime, tango, and other modern musical idioms in a series of highly infectious instrumental movements. After World War I the Russian style in Stravinsky's music began to fade, but not before it had produced another masterpiece in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920).

The compositions of Stravinsky's first maturity—from The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1920—make use of a modal idiom based on Russian sources and are characterized by a highly sophisticated feeling for irregular metres and syncopation and by brilliant orchestral mastery. But his voluntary exile from Russia prompted him to reconsider his aesthetic stance, and the result was an important change in his music—he abandoned the Russian features of his early style and instead adopted a Neoclassical idiom. Stravinsky's Neoclassical works of the next 30 years usually take some point of reference in past European music—a particular composer's work or the Baroque or some other historical style—as a starting point for a highly personal and unorthodox treatment that nevertheless seems to depend for its full effect on the listener's experience of the historical model from which Stravinsky borrowed.

The Stravinskys left Switzerland in 1920 and lived in France until 1939, and Stravinsky spent much of this time in Paris. (He took French citizenship in 1934.) Having lost his property in Russia during the revolution, Stravinsky was compelled to earn his living as a performer, and many of the works he composed during the 1920s and '30s were written for his own use as a concert pianist and conductor. His instrumental works of the early 1920s include the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923), Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1924), Piano Sonata (1924), and the Serenade in A for piano (1925). These pieces combine a Neoclassical approach to style with what seems a self-conscious severity of line and texture. Though the dry urbanity of this approach is softened in such later instrumental pieces as the Violin Concerto in D Major (1931), Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1932–35), and the Concerto in E-flat (or Dumbarton Oaks concerto) for 16 wind instruments (1938), a certain cool detachment persists.

In 1926 Stravinsky experienced a religious conversion that had a notable effect on his stage and vocal music. A religious strain can be detected in such major works as the operatic oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), which uses a libretto in Latin, and the cantata Symphony of Psalms (1930), an overtly sacred work that is based on biblical texts. Religious feeling is also evident in the ballets Apollon musagète (1928) and in Persephone (1934). The Russian element in Stravinsky's music occasionally reemerged during this period: the ballet The Fairy's Kiss (1928) is based on music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich), and the Symphony of Psalms has some of the antique austerity of Russian Orthodox chant (Russian chant), despite its Latin text.

In the years following World War I, Stravinsky's ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes had been renewed, but on a much looser basis, and the only new ballet Diaghilev commissioned from Stravinsky was Pulcinella (1920). Apollon musagète, Stravinsky's last ballet to be mounted by Diaghilev, premiered in 1928, a year before Diaghilev's own death and the dissolution of his ballet company.

In 1936 Stravinsky wrote his autobiography. Like his six later collaborations with Robert Craft, a young American conductor and scholar who worked with him after 1948, this work is factually unreliable. In 1938 Stravinsky's oldest daughter died of tuberculosis, and the deaths of his wife and mother followed in 1939, just months before World War II broke out. Early in 1940 he married Vera de Bosset, whom he had known for many years. In autumn 1939 Stravinsky had visited the United States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (later published as the The Poetics of Music, 1942), and in 1940 he and his new wife settled permanently in Hollywood, California. They became U.S. citizens in 1945.

During the years of World War II, Stravinsky composed two important symphonic works, the Symphony in C (1938–40) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1942–45). The Symphony in C represents a summation of Neoclassical principles in symphonic form, while the Symphony in Three Movements successfully combines the essential features of the concerto with the symphony. From 1948 to 1951 Stravinsky worked on his only full-length opera, The Rake's Progress, a Neoclassical work (with a libretto by W.H. Auden (Auden, W H) and the American writer Chester Kallman) based on a series of moralistic engravings by the 18th-century English artist William Hogarth (Hogarth, William). The Rake's Progress is a mock-serious pastiche of late 18th-century grand opera but is nevertheless typically Stravinskyan in its brilliance, wit, and refinement.

The success of these late works masked a creative crisis in Stravinsky's music, and his resolution of this crisis was to produce a remarkable body of late compositions. After World War II a new musical avant-garde had emerged in Europe that rejected Neoclassicism and instead claimed allegiance to the serial (serialism), or 12-tone (12-tone music), compositional techniques of the Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg (Schoenberg, Arnold), Alban Berg (Berg, Alban), and especially Anton von Webern (Webern, Anton). (Serial music is based on the repetition of a series of tones in an arbitrary but fixed pattern without regard for traditional tonality.) According to Craft, who entered Stravinsky's household in 1948 and remained his intimate associate until the composer's death, the realization that he was regarded as a spent force threw Stravinsky into a major creative depression, from which he emerged, with Craft's help, into a phase of serial composition in his own intensely personal manner. A series of cautiously experimental works (the Cantata, the Septet, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas) was followed by a pair of hybrid masterpieces, the ballet Agon (completed 1957) and the choral work Canticum Sacrum (1955), that are only intermittently serial. These in turn led to the choral work Threni (1958), a setting of the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah in which a strict 12-tone method of composition is applied to chantlike material whose underlying character recalls that of such earlier choral works as The Wedding and the Symphony of Psalms. In his Movements for piano and orchestra (1959) and his orchestral Variations (1964), Stravinsky refined his manner still further, pursuing a variety of arcane serial techniques to support a music of increasing density and economy and possessing a brittle, diamantine brilliance. Stravinsky's serial works are generally much briefer than his tonal works but have a denser musical content.

Though always in mediocre health (he suffered a stroke in 1956), Stravinsky continued full-scale creative work until 1966. His last major work, Requiem Canticles (1966), is a profoundly moving adaptation of modern serial techniques to a personal imaginative vision that was deeply rooted in his Russian past. This piece is an amazing tribute to the creative vitality of a composer then in his middle 80s.

Assessment

Like that of so many masters, Stravinsky's fame rests on only a few works and one or two of his more important achievements. In The Rite of Spring he presented a new concept of music involving constantly changing rhythms and metric imbalances, a brilliantly original orchestration, and drastically dissonant harmonies that have resonated throughout the 20th century. Later Stravinsky was regarded as the typical rootless exile, a creative chameleon who could dart from style to style but who never recaptured the creative depth of his first masterpieces. Yet the more spectacular modernisms of The Rite of Spring belong to the evolution of Russian nationalist music from Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest) to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, while that work's feeling of “primitive dynamism” is a period feature that is found in much music of the early 20th century. Nor were the discordant harmonies of The Rite of Spring entirely new in 1913, though Stravinsky was the first to pursue Claude Debussy (Debussy, Claude)'s purely sensual approach to chords into a harmony that was not itself obviously beautiful.

The percussive violence and barbaric tone colours of The Rite of Spring did, however, conceal a new kind of rhythmic sensibility and an empirical attitude to sonority that can be traced through all of Stravinsky's later music, whatever its apparent stylistic allegiance. Stravinsky's approach was empirical in that he was not prepared to accept established musical practice about development but instead preferred to subject his musical material to a personal system of tests. Working always at the piano, he experimented endlessly with different chord combinations and spacings, explored asymmetrical metrical patterns, and used devices of prolongation and elision to break down the tradition of symmetrical phrasing. Given such sonorities as basic sound objects, rhythm is then regarded as a cumulative process, an adding together of such objects into varied groups, as opposed to the varied subdivision of regular groups that forms the basic method of classical music. Not surprisingly, this procedure tended to work against the past musical styles that Stravinsky used as models in his Neoclassical works, which probably accounts for their intriguing rhythmic obliquity, just as his experimental attitude to chords produced curious distortions of classical harmony. Stravinsky worked in the same way, in fact, throughout his life, and the same basic principles of construction and dynamics inform Threni and the Requiem Canticles as Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. He had immense influence on the way later composers have felt pulse, rhythm, and form.

Stravinsky rejected the Germanic idea that thematic development is the only basis of serious writing. From early on, he preferred a sculptural approach in which the sound object is all-important and large musical structures are achieved cumulatively, with much repetition allied to subtle variations in interior detailing. In his longer works, especially the sacred and theatrical ones, this tends toward an effect of ritual. The power of Oedipus Rex and the Symphony of Psalms, as of The Rite of Spring, is the power of a solemn reenactment, and it was in his sense of the motion and specific gravity of such solemnities that Stravinsky was at his most forceful and inspired.

Eric Walter White Richard Taruskin

Additional Reading

Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1936) and Stravinsky's six memoirs with Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959), Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), Dialogues and a Diary (1963), Themes and Episodes (1966), and Retrospectives and Conclusion (1969), are highly opinionated and factually unreliable. Clifford Cæsar (compiler), Igor Stravinsky: A Complete Catalogue (1982), is handily presented, though imprecise in a number of details. A fuller and more informative listing is Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works, 2nd ed. (1979, reissued 1984). Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (1978), is indispensable for biographical information. More general studies include Mikhail Druskin, Igor Stravinsky: His Life, Works, and Views (1983; trans. by Martin Cooper from Russian 2nd rev. ed., 1979); and André Boucourechliev, Stravinsky (1987; originally published in French, 1968). On the music Boris Asaf'ev, A Book About Stravinsky (1982; originally published in Russian, 1929), is brilliantly perceptive on the ethnic sources of Stravinsky's technique and material, but only treats the early works through The Fairy's Kiss. Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, 3rd ed. (1978, reissued 1985; originally published in Italian, 1958), is comprehensive, sensible, and dependable. Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (1988, reissued 1993), is the most up-to-date comprehensive study and has the most fully researched work-list and bibliography. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2 vol. (1996), is a detailed critical study of the composer's output through 1922. Some of the best writing on Stravinsky has been in symposia, such as Edwin Corle (ed.), Igor Stravinsky (1949, reissued 1969); Minna Lederman (ed.), Stravinsky in the Theatre (1949, reprinted 1975); Paul Henry Lang, Stravinsky: A New Appraisal of His Work (1963); and Jann Pasler (ed.), Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist (1986).Richard Taruskin

Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich

▪ Russian ballet impresario

born March 31 [March 19, Old Style], 1872, Novgorod province, Russia

died Aug. 19, 1929, Venice, Italy

Russian promoter of the arts who revitalized ballet by integrating the ideals of other art forms—music, painting, and drama—with those of the dance. From 1906 he lived in Paris, where, in 1909, he founded the Ballets Russes. Thereafter he toured Europe and the Americas with his ballet company, and he produced three ballet masterpieces by Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).

Diaghilev was the son of a major general and a noblewoman, who died in childbirth. As a youth his artistic sensibilities were encouraged by his stepmother, Helen Valerianovna Panayeva. He took piano lessons while at school and also showed a gift for composition.

In 1890, while studying law at the University of St. Petersburg, Diaghilev became associated with a group of friends interested in the social sciences, music, and painting—the first of a series of intellectual gatherings over which he presided throughout his life. Among his companions during this period were the painters Alexander Benois and Léon Bakst, both of whom were later to contribute brilliantly to his productions. In 1893 he made his first journey abroad, visiting Germany, France, and Italy, where he met the distinguished French novelist Émile Zola and the opera composers Charles Gounod and Giuseppe Verdi.

In 1896 Diaghilev graduated in law, but he was determined to follow a musical career. The composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay), however, discouraged him from developing his talents as a composer, wisely no doubt, since a vocal work of Diaghilev that had been performed in public had left a poor impression. In Moscow he met the patron of the famed bass Fyodor Chaliapin (Chaliapin, Feodor) and proposed revolutionary scenic ideas for productions of operas in which Chaliapin appeared. Although he was uncertain of his own artistic gifts, Diaghilev was convinced of his vocation: that of a patron of the arts like the Roman Gaius Maecenas. His theatrical ventures in the sphere of opera and ballet and his literary projects, demanding huge investments, were hampered by the fact that he embarked on this career with no private income. Moreover, in 19th-century Russia, his homosexuality was a serious handicap in the development of his career. He had personal charm and audacity, however, and he used them to advantage.

In 1899 he realized the first of these international ventures when he founded, as editor in chief, the review Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”), which continued to appear until 1904. This was a counterpart of the London Yellow Book, reflecting the ideas of the graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley and the writer Oscar Wilde. In 1905 Diaghilev organized a historic portrait exhibition of Russian art treasures at the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg.

The great turning point in his life came when he left Russia for Paris in 1906. It was there that he helped to found what was later referred to as the Franco-Russian artistic alliance. He organized an exhibition of Russian art and then, in 1907, a series of historic concerts devoted to the work of the Russian nationalist composers. In 1908 Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov was produced in Russian by Diaghilev at the Paris Opéra with Fyodor Chaliapin in the title role.

The time had arrived for him to launch the venture that was to fulfill his ideal of a combination of the arts. Appointed in 1899 as assistant to Prince Sergey Volkonsky, director of the Imperial Theatre, Diaghilev had met the dancer Michel Fokine (Fokine, Michel), who was powerfully influenced by the American dancer Isadora Duncan. Diaghilev, also influenced by the dance innovations of Duncan, as well as by the ideas of composer Richard Wagner and the theories of the poet Charles Baudelaire, opened his season of Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 1909. The dancers Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Michel Fokine were in his company.

Before long it became clear that conventional choreography was to have no place in Diaghilev's novel spectacles. Mime or action dances were the aim of the choreographers who, largely under the influence of Fokine and Léonide Massine, were creating an entirely new tradition. The composers chosen to transform the old art forms were themselves inspired by the fantasies of painters and choreographers. This was Diaghilev's lofty creation: an ideal of artistic synthesis, based on an innate sense of taste. Diaghilev's art reached its height in the three early ballets of the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor): The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). In Petrushka, perhaps the greatest of the Diaghilev ballets, Stravinsky, at Diaghilev's insistence, transformed a conventionally conceived piano concerto (on which he had been working) into a mimed ballet, bringing into real life the fantasy dramas of puppets at a showman's fair. The incident is indicative of the extraordinary psychological influence Diaghilev was able to exert over his collaborators. In The Rite of Spring Stravinsky produced one of the most explosive orchestral scores of the 20th century, and the production created an uproar in the Paris theatre at its first performance. The scandalous dissonances and rhythmic brutality of the music provoked among the fashionable audience such protestations that the dancers were unable to hear the orchestra in the nearby pit. They carried on, nevertheless, encouraged by the choreographer Nijinsky, who stood on a chair in the wings shouting out and miming the rhythm.

Diaghilev left his native Russia and never returned. In Paris he collaborated with the French poet Jean Cocteau, among others. He toured with his ballet throughout Europe, in the United States, and in South America. Seasons of the Diaghilev ballet were given uninterruptedly from 1909 to 1929. During his later seasons he introduced the works of forward-looking composers and painters from France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Among the composers represented in his repertory were Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Sergey Prokofiev.

Despite his influence, however, Diaghilev was a lonely and dissatisfied man, impecunious and personally unhappy. He was an idealist, never realizing perfection and yet sowing the seed of an exploratory spirit. Diaghilev had long suffered from diabetes, and by the end of his brilliant 1929 season at Covent Garden, London, his health had gravely deteriorated. He nevertheless left for a holiday in Venice, where he sank into a coma from which he did not recover. He was buried in the island cemetery of San Michele.

Edward Lockspeiser

Additional Reading

S. Lifar, Serge Diaghilev (1940); and Arnold L. Haskell and W. Nouvel, Diaghileff: His Artistic and Private Life (1955), are authoritative biographies. S.L. Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929 (1953, reprinted 1974), is a standard work on the Russian ballet. Other studies are John Percival, The World of Diaghilev (1971), a succinct, popular study; and Charles Spencer, The World of Serge Diaghilev (1974).

Nijinsky, Vaslav

▪ Russian dancer

Russian in full Vatslav Fomich Nizhinsky

born March 12 [Feb. 28, old style], 1890, Kiev

died April 8, 1950, London

Russian-born ballet dancer of almost legendary fame, celebrated for his spectacular leaps and sensitive interpretations. After a brilliant school career, Nijinsky became a soloist at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in 1907, appearing in such classical ballets as Giselle, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty. In 1909 he joined Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and the company's choreographer Michel Fokine created Le Spectre de la rose, Petrushka, Schéhérazade, and other ballets expressly for him. Nijinsky's own works as a choreographer include L'Après-midi d'un faune and Le Sacre du printemps.

Vaslav was the second son of Thomas Laurentiyevich Nijinsky and Eleonora Bereda; both his parents were celebrated dancers, and his father in particular was famous for his virtuosity and enormous leaps. The Nijinskys had their own dance company and performed throughout the Russian Empire. Nijinsky's childhood was mostly spent in the Caucasus, where he danced as a small child with his brother Stanislav and his little sister Bronisława. His father, noticing the child's great disposition for dancing, gave him his first lessons.

At the age of nine, at the end of August 1898, Nijinsky entered the Imperial School of Dancing in St. Petersburg, where his teachers, the foremost of the time, soon discovered his extraordinary talent. When he was 16 years old, they urged him to graduate and enter the Mariinsky Theatre. Nijinsky declined, preferring to fulfill the customary period of study. At the time he already had been heralded as the “eighth wonder of the world” and the “Vestris of the North” (in reference to Auguste Vestris, a famous French dancer of the 18th century). During his school years he appeared at the Mariinsky Theatre, first as a member of the corps de ballet, later in small parts. He danced in St. Petersburg before the Tsar at the Chinese Theatre of Tsarskoe Selo and the Hermitage Theatre of the Winter Palace.

Nijinsky was graduated in the spring of 1907 and on July 14, 1907, joined the Mariinsky Theatre as a soloist. His first appearance was in the ballet La Source with the Russian ballerina Julia Sedova as his partner; the public and the ballet critics burst out immediately in wild enthusiasm. Among his Mariinsky partners were three great ballerinas, Mathilde (Kschessinska, Mathilde) Kschessinskaya, Anna Pavlovna Pavlova (Pavlova, Anna), and Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (Karsavina, Tamara Platonovna). As danseur noble, he danced the leading parts in many ballets, including Ivanotschka, Giselle, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and Chopiniana. From 1907 to 1911 Nijinsky danced all of the leading parts at the Mariinsky Theatre and at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, where he was a guest performer. His success was phenomenal.

In 1909 Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich), former assistant to the administrator of the Imperial Theatres, was commissioned by the grand duke Vladimir to organize a ballet company of the members of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theatres. Diaghilev decided to take the company to Paris in the spring and asked Nijinsky to join as principal dancer. Its first performance was on May 17, 1909, at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Nijinsky took Paris by storm. The expression and beauty of his body, his featherweight lightness and steel-like strength, his great elevation and incredible gift of rising and seeming to remain in the air, and his extraordinary virtuosity and dramatic acting made him a genius of the ballet. From 1907 to 1912 he worked with the company's choreographer, Michel Fokine (Fokine, Michel). With his phenomenal talent for characterization, he created some of his most renowned roles in Fokine's Le Carnaval, Les Sylphides (a revision of Chopiniana), Le Spectre de la rose, Schéhérazade, Petrushka, Le Dieu bleu, Daphnis et Chloé, and Narcisse. His later ballets were Mephisto Valse, Variations on the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Les Papillons de nuit, and The Minstrel. Until 1917 Nijinsky appeared all over Europe, in the United States, and in South America. He was called le dieu de la danse.

In 1912 he began his career as a choreographer. He created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes the ballets L'Après-midi d'un faune, Jeux, and Le Sacre du printemps. Till Eulenspiegel was produced in the United States without Diaghilev's personal supervision. His work in the field of choreography was generally considered daringly original.

Nijinsky married Romola, countess de Pulszky-Lubocy-Cselfalva, in Buenos Aires on Sept. 10, 1913. During part of World War I and again in World War II, he was interned in Hungary as a Russian subject. In 1919, at the age of 29, he retired from the stage, owing to a nervous breakdown, which was diagnosed as schizophrenia. He lived from 1919 until 1950 in Switzerland, France, and England, and died in London in 1950. Nijinsky is buried next to Auguste Vestris in the cemetery of Montmartre in Paris.

Romola Nijinsky

Additional Reading

The standard biographies, both by his wife, Romola Nijinsky, are Nijinsky (1933), and The Last Years of Nijinsky (1952), both reprinted in 1980. Bronisława Nijinska, Early Memoirs (Eng. trans. 1981), the first volume of his sister's life, is an invaluable source containing previously unpublished material about Nijinsky's childhood. Other important studies are Geoffrey Withworth, Nijinsky (1911); Cyril W. Beaumont, Nijinsky (1932); Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956); and Lincoln Kirstein, Nijinsky Dancing (1975). Nijinsky's diary was published as The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (1936). Nijinsky As We Knew Him (1972), is a collection of reminiscences of the dancer by such prominent writers, artists, musicians, and dancers as Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Auguste Rodin, Marcel Proust, Sergei Prokofiev, and Tamara Karsavina.

Chaliapin, Feodor

▪ Russian musician

in full Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin , also spelled Fyodor Shalyapin

born Feb. 1 [Feb. 13, New Style], 1873, near Kazan, Russia

died April 12, 1938, Paris, France

Russian operatic basso profundo whose vivid declamation, great resonance, and dynamic acting made him the best-known singer-actor of his time.

Chaliapin was born to a poor family. He worked as an apprentice to a shoemaker, a sales clerk, a carpenter, and a lowly clerk in a district court before joining, at age 17, a local operetta company. Two years later he went to study in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), and in 1896 he became a member of the private Mamontov opera company, where he mastered the Russian, French, and Italian roles that made him famous. In 1895 he debuted at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre as Mephistopheles in Charles Gounod's Faust. In 1901 he sang at La Scala under Arturo Toscanini, alongside Enrico Caruso.

Chaliapin's interpretation of the title role in Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov was his most famous. His other major dramatic parts included Philip II in Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlos, Ivan the Terrible in Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov, and the title (and, for him, the signature) role in Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele. His great comic characterizations were Don Basilio in Gioacchino Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Chaliapin appeared at the major opera houses in Milan (1901, 1904), New York City (1907), and London (1913). A man of lower-class origins, Chaliapin was not unsympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution. He left Russia in 1922 as part of an extended tour of western Europe. Although he would never return, he remained a tax-paying citizen of Soviet Russia for several years. His first open break with the regime occurred in 1927 when the Soviet government, as part of its campaign to pressure him into returning to Russia, stripped him of his title of “The First People's Artist of the Soviet Republic” and threatened to deprive him of Soviet citizenship. Prodded by Stalin, Maksim Gorky, Chaliapin's longtime friend, tried to persuade him to return to Russia but broke with him after Chaliapin published his memoirs, Man and Mask: Forty Years in the Life of a Singer (trans. from French 1932, reissued 1973; originally published in Russian, Maska i dusha, 1932), in which he denounced the lack of freedom under the Bolsheviks. After leaving the Soviet Union, Chaliapin performed frequently with the Metropolitan and Chicago opera companies in the United States and with Covent Garden in London. He also toured every continent, frequently with his own opera company. Although occasionally considered unorthodox, he was admired as a versatile and expressive recitalist, remembered for his repertoire of Russian songs. He made some 200 recordings from 1898 to 1936, starred in the movie Don Quixote (1933), and published the autobiographical Pages from My Life (1926). In 1984 his remains were disinterred from Batignolles Cemetery in Paris and reburied in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, alongside Russia's most revered cultural figures.

Additional Reading

Nina Froud and James Hanley (compilers and eds.), Chaliapin: An Autobiography as Told to Maxim Gorky; with Supplementary Correspondence and Notes, trans. from Russian (1967), is a tribute of Chaliapin's longtime friendship with the great Russian writer. Chaliapin's recital career is vividly captured in the memoirs of his accompanist, Gerald Moore, Am I Too Loud (1962, reissued 1979). Victor Borovsky, Chaliapin: A Critical Biography

Fokine, Michel

▪ Russian dancer and choreographer

original name Mikhail Mikhaylovich Fokine

born April 23 [April 11, old style], 1880, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Aug. 22, 1942, New York City

dancer and choreographer who profoundly influenced the 20th-century classical ballet repertoire. In 1905 he composed the solo The Dying Swan for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. As chief choreographer for the impresario Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1914, he created L'Oiseau de feu (1910; The Firebird) and Petrushka (1911).

Fokine was born of a prosperous middle-class family and entered the Imperial Ballet School at the Mariinsky (Mariinsky Ballet) Theatre in 1889, where he distinguished himself for the breadth of his interests and studies. Fokine was talented not only as a dancer but also as a student of music and painting. He had a fresh and inquiring attitude toward everything connected with the ballet and began quite early to plan choreography, to seek appropriate music in the school library, and to sketch designs. His development as a dancer—he made his debut with the Imperial Russian Ballet on his 18th birthday—was paralleled by his development as a choreographer and designer.

In 1904 he wrote the scenario for his first ballet, which was based on the ancient Greco-Roman legend of Daphnis and Chloe. He sent it to the director of the Imperial Theatre with a note about reforms he wanted to see adopted by choreographers and producers. His crusade for artistic unity in ballet had already begun, but at this stage it made little impact. He was not encouraged to produce Daphnis et Chloé (he created it later, in 1912, for Diaghilev).

All the same, although at St. Petersburg he had no power to implement his beliefs, he began to work as a choreographer. His first ballet, created in 1905 for performance by his pupils, was Acis et Galatée, based on an ancient Sicilian legend. Fokine's enthusiasm for antiquity owed nothing in origin to the “free dance” ideas of the American dancer Isadora Duncan (Duncan, Isadora), although her appearance in Russia in 1905 greatly consolidated his own views. In 1905 he also composed the brief solo The Dying Swan for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (Pavlova, Anna). He continued to create ballets and three of his Mariinsky works were included in revised versions in the momentous season of the Ballets Russes that the impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich) arranged in Paris in 1909: Le Pavillon d'Armide, Une Nuit d'Égypte (Cléopâtre), and Chopiniana (Les Sylphides).

Fokine was an integral part of the Ballets Russes's Paris triumph. Diaghilev's genius for bringing artists together in successful collaboration made Fokine, as his chief choreographer, the link between the dancers Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky (Nijinsky, Vaslav), and Adolph Bolm; the designers Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst; and the composer Igor Stravinsky, in such superbly unified creations as L'Oiseau de feu and Petrushka.

Fokine's relationship with the Diaghilev ballet deteriorated when Diaghilev launched Nijinsky as choreographer; but he remained with the company until 1914, when he returned to Russia. Also in that year, he set down his manifesto on ballet in a letter to The Times (London), advocating the creation in each ballet of a new form of movement corresponding to the subject, period, and character of the music; that dancing and mime have no meaning unless they express dramatic action; that conventional mime should be used only when the style of the ballet requires it; otherwise, meaning should be expressed by the movement of the whole body; that this expressiveness should extend from the individual to the group, to ensembles as much as to solos; and that there should be complete equality in the alliance of the component arts that make up a ballet—dance, music, and scenic and costume design.

Fokine left Russia in 1918 and made his home in New York City from 1923. He worked with various companies in the U.S. and Europe, creating new ballets, such as L'Épreuve d'amour (1936) and Don Juan (1936). None of these later ballets, however, had the impact of his earlier work. He began his last ballet, a comedy, Helen of Troy, for the American Ballet Theatre shortly before his death. It was completed by David Lichine and was premiered at Mexico City on Sept. 10, 1942. His wife, the dancer Vera Fokina, who had performed in many of his ballets, survived him until 1958.

One of the few choreographers to come to a first rehearsal with clear and complete ideas for a ballet, Fokine had great facility and speed in choreographic invention, intense musicality, and the ability to memorize an orchestral score. He was by no means equable at work. Tamara Karsavina (Karsavina, Tamara Platonovna) wrote in her autobiography Theatre Street that “he was extremely irritable and had no control of his temper,” but she emphasized that dancers became devoted to him.

The vocabulary of classical ballet has been enormously extended since Fokine's day, and subsequent audiences sometimes feel that his choreography is dated. Those of his ballets remaining in production have inevitably suffered distortion. He himself was conscious that this would happen. “The longer a ballet exists in the repertoire,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “the further it departs from its original version. . . . After my death the public, watching my ballets, will think ‘What nonsense Fokine staged! ”

Kathrine Sorley Walker

Additional Reading

Memoirs of a Ballet Master, ed. by Anatole Chujoy, trans. by Vitale Fokine (1961), is a valuable but condensed version of Fokine's own memoirs. Cyril W. Beaumont, Michel Fokine and His Ballets (1935), is an account by an English ballet historian and critic.

Ballets Russes

▪ ballet company

ballet company founded in Paris in 1909 by the Russian impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich). The original company included the choreographer Michel Fokine and the dancers Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky; the choreographer George Balanchine joined in 1925. Music was commissioned of Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky and designs of Picasso, Rouault, Matisse, and Derain. The company was dissolved after Diaghilev's death in 1929. See also Diaghilev, Sergey (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich).

Pavlova, Anna

▪ Russian ballerina

in full Anna Pavlovna Pavlova

born Jan. 31 [Feb. 12, New Style], 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Jan. 23, 1931, The Hague, Neth.

Russian ballerina, the most celebrated dancer of her time.

Pavlova studied at the Imperial School of Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre from 1891, joined the Imperial Ballet in 1899, and became a prima ballerina in 1906. In 1909 she went to Paris on the historic tour of the Ballets Russes. After 1913 she danced independently with her own company throughout the world.

The place and time of Pavlova's birth could hardly have been better for a child with an innate talent for dancing. Tsarist Russia maintained magnificent imperial schools for the performing arts. Entry was by examination, and, although Pavlova's mother was poor—Anna's father had died when she was two years old—the child was accepted for training at the Imperial School of Ballet at the Mariinsky (Mariinsky Ballet) Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1891.

Following ballet tradition, Pavlova learned her art from teachers who were themselves great dancers. She graduated to the Imperial Ballet in 1899 and rose steadily through the grades to become prima ballerina in 1906. By this time she had already danced Giselle with considerable success.

Almost immediately, in 1907, the pattern of her life began to emerge. That year, with a few other dancers, she went on a European tour to Riga, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Prague. She was acclaimed, and another tour took place in 1908. In 1909 the impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich) staged a historic season of Russian ballet in Paris, and Pavlova appeared briefly with the company there and later in London. But her experience of touring with a small group had given her a taste for independence, and she never became part of Diaghilev's closely knit Ballets Russes. Her destiny was not, as was theirs, to innovate but simply to show the beauties of classical ballet throughout the world. While she was still taking leave from the Mariinsky Theatre, she danced in New York City and London in 1910 with Mikhail Mordkin.

Once she left the Imperial Ballet in 1913, her frontiers were extended. For the rest of her life, with various partners (including Laurent Novikov and Pierre Vladimirov) and companies, she was a wandering missionary for her art, giving a vast number of people their introduction to ballet. Whatever the limitations of the rest of the company, which inevitably was largely a well-trained, dedicated band of young disciples, Pavlova's own performances left those who watched them with a lasting memory of disciplined grace, poetic movement, and incarnate magic. Her quality was, above all, the powerful and elusive one of true glamour.

Pavlova's independent tours, which began in 1914, took her to remote parts of the world. These tours were managed by her husband, Victor Dandré. The repertoire of Anna Pavlova's company was in large part conventional. They danced excerpts or adaptations of Mariinsky successes such as Don Quixote, La Fille mal gardée (“The Girl Poorly Managed”), The Fairy Doll, or Giselle, of which she was an outstanding interpreter. The most famous numbers, however, were the succession of ephemeral solos, which were endowed by her with an inimitable enchantment: The Dragonfly, Californian Poppy, Gavotte, and Christmas are names that lingered in the thoughts of her audiences, together with her single choreographic endeavour, Autumn Leaves (1918).

Pavlova's enthusiasm for ethnic dances was reflected in her programs. Polish, Russian, and Mexican dances were performed. Her visits to India and Japan led her to a serious study of their dance techniques. She compiled these studies into Oriental Impressions, collaborating on the Indian scenes with Uday Shankar (Shankar, Uday), later to become one of the greatest performers of Indian dance, and in this way playing an important part in the renaissance of the dance in India.

Because she was the company's raison d'être, the source of its public appeal, and, therefore, its financial stability, Pavlova's burden was extreme. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that, by the end of her life, her technique was faltering, and she was relying increasingly on her unique qualities of personality.

Pavlova's personal life was undramatic apart from occasional professional headlines, as when, in 1911, she quarreled with Mordkin. For some time she kept secret her marriage to her manager, Victor Dandré, and there were no children; her maternal instincts spent themselves on her company and on a home for Russian refugee orphans, which she founded in Paris in 1920. She loved birds and animals, and her home in London, Ivy House, Hampstead, became famous for the ornamental lake with swans, beside which she was photographed and filmed, recalling her most famous solo, The Dying Swan, which the choreographer Michel Fokine (Fokine, Michel) had created for her in 1905. These film sequences are among the few extant of her and are included in a compilation called The Immortal Swan, together with some extracts from her solos filmed one afternoon in Hollywood, in 1924, by the actor Douglas Fairbanks (Fairbanks, Douglas), Sr.

Kathrine Sorley Walker

Additional Reading

Works discussing Pavlova's life and career include Victor Dandré, Anna Pavlova (1932, reprinted as Anna Pavlova in Art & Life, 1979), a tribute from her husband written immediately after her death; Theodore Stier, With Pavlova Round the World (1927); and Walford Hyden, Pavlova (1931), two accounts of touring with Pavlova written by her musical directors; Harcourt Algeranoff, My Years with Pavlova (1957), one of Pavlova's leading dancers writing of his time with her company; A.H. Franks (ed.), Pavlova (1956, reprinted 1981), a symposium contributed by people who knew Pavlova, compiled for the 25th anniversary of her death; Oleg Kerensky, Anna Pavlova (1973); André Olivéroff, Flight of the Swan (1932, reprinted 1979); John Lazzarini and Roberta Lazzarini, Pavlova: Repertoire of a Legend (1980), a photographic catalog of her career; and Keith Money, Anna Pavlova, Her Life and Art

Kschessinska, Mathilde

▪ Russian ballerina

Kschessinska also spelled Kshessinska, Russian in full Mathilda-maria Feliksovna Kshesinskaya

born Aug. 19 [Aug. 31, New Style], 1872, Ligovo, near Peterhof [now Petrodvorets], Russia

died Dec. 7, 1971, Paris, France

prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Russian Ballet (Mariinsky Ballet) and the first Russian dancer to master 32 consecutive fouettés en tournant (“whipped turns” done in place and on one leg), a feat previously performed only by Italian dancers and considered in that era the supreme achievement in dance technique.

Kschessinska studied under Christian Johansson and Enrico Cecchetti at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, graduated in 1890, and joined the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1895 she became prima ballerina assoluta, a title awarded by the Imperial Ballet to only one other dancer, the Italian Pierina Legnani. Kschessinska interpreted major roles in Cinderella, La Sylphide, Esmeralda, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty. In 1911 she danced in London with Vaslav Nijinsky in Swan Lake for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

Kschessinska was a close friend of both Nicholas II, who was executed in 1918, and his cousin the grand duke André, whom she married in 1921. She left Russia in 1920 and, for 30 years, taught in Paris; her pupils included Tatiana Riabouchinska and Margot Fonteyn. Her autobiography is Souvenirs de la Kschessinska (1960; Dancing in Petersburg: The Memoirs of Kschessinska).

Mariinsky Ballet

▪ Russian ballet company

also spelled Maryinsky , Russian Mariinsky Balet , formerly (1935–91) Kirov Ballet

prominent Russian ballet company, part of the Mariinsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet in St. Petersburg. Its traditions, deriving from its predecessor, the Imperial Russian Ballet, are based on the work of such leading 19th-century choreographers as Jules Perrot, Arthur Saint-Léon, and Marius Petipa and such dancers as Marie Taglioni, Olga Preobrajenska, Mathilde Kschessinskaya, Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Michel Fokine, George Balanchine, and Maria Danilova.

The company began as a dancing academy founded in St. Petersburg in 1738. Its early performances were before the royal court, and, after 1780, in the Petrovsky (now Bolshoi) Theatre. The Imperial Russian Ballet was established as a professional company and became the centre of Russian ballet. In the late 19th century the company moved to the Mariinsky Theatre, where it became the resident ballet company, acquiring the Mariinsky name. With the October Revolution of 1917, the company lost 40 percent of its personnel but was able to maintain its repertoire and its technical proficiency under the teacher Agrippina Vaganova (Vaganova, Agrippina) and artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev (Sergeyev, Konstantin Mikhailovich). During the Soviet period the theatre was renamed the S.M. Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, and the company became known as the Kirov Ballet. New works on heroic themes were produced, as well as such experimental works as Igor Belsky's The Coast of Hope (1959). After 1961 the company toured western Europe, the United States, and Canada. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the theatre and company reclaimed their Mariinsky name.

Russian chant

▪ music

monophonic, or unison, chant of the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox church. Musical manuscripts from the 11th to the 13th century suggest that, at first, chanting in Russia almost certainly followed Byzantine melodies, which were adapted to the accentual patterns of the Old Church Slavonic language. Russian manuscripts of this period are the only surviving sources of a highly ornate type of Byzantine chant called kontakion and contain a complex Byzantine musical notation that by then had disappeared in Byzantium. Russian sources may thus be crucial documents for the reconstruction of one branch of Byzantine music and notation.

In the 14th century, musical notation in Russian manuscripts began to change its meaning and form. Scholars usually presume—but this has not been fully proved—that native Russian elements began to enter Russian church music at this time. The first lists of kryuki (“hooks”), or signs, used as musical notation in Russia, were compiled in the late 15th century. The lists show that by then most technical terms were Russian and that Greek terms had begun to disappear. By the 16th century, Russian chant apparently had lost its links with its Byzantine prototypes, and melodies became different in their outlines. An indigenous polyphonic repertoire known as troyestrochnoye peniye (“three-line singing”) arose about this time. It consisted of a traditional chant in the middle voice, accompanied by a newly composed descant and bass. By Western standards, these harmonizations are very dissonant.

In the 17th century, Russian musicians began to emulate music of Western origin, at first through contacts with Ukrainian and Polish models. German influence became prominent in the 19th century, when various composers emulated the Protestant chorale in Russian church music. As a reaction to this trend, early scholars studying the history of Russian church music began to investigate the nearly forgotten traditional melodies that were still used in some monasteries resisting the introduction of polyphonic music. The restoration of Russian chant gained momentum in the early years of the 20th century and is best exemplified in the works of Aleksandr Kastalsky and Pavel Chesnokov, who, although writing for multi-voiced choirs, utilized supposedly traditional melodies and the style Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily

Dargomyzhsky, Aleksandr

▪ Russian composer

in full Aleksandr Sergeyevich Dargomyzhsky

born Feb. 2 [Feb. 14, New Style], 1813, near Tula, Russia

died Jan. 5 [Jan. 17], 1869, St. Petersburg

Russian composer of songs and operas whose works are now seldom performed.

Dargomyzhsky grew up in St. Petersburg as a talented amateur musician, playing the violin and piano and dabbling in composition. His acquaintance with the composer Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail) (1833) turned his thoughts more seriously toward composition, and in 1839 he completed his first opera, Esmeralda (after Victor Hugo (Hugo, Victor); performed 1847). Two other operas followed: The Triumph of Bacchus (1845; performed 1867) and Rusalka (after Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich); produced 1856). In his songs Dargomyzhsky developed an individual vein of humour and satire. His orchestral pieces (e.g., Finnish Fantasia, Cossack Dance, and Baba-Yaga) were notable for their harmonic experiments.

After 1866 he became interested in developing a Russian national music of great dramatic realism and began to set Pushkin's play Kamennygost (The Stone Guest) to a species of melodically heightened recitative, with entire passages composed in the whole-tone (whole-tone scale) mode. This work aroused the interest of Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily) and his circle, particularly Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest); when Dargomyzhsky died, the score was completed by César Cui (Cui, César) and orchestrated by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay).

Five, The

▪ Russian composers

also called The Russian Five or The Mighty Five , Russian Moguchaya Kuchka (“The Mighty Little Heap”)

group of five Russian (Russia) composers—César Cui (Cui, César), Aleksandr Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr), Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay)—who in the 1860s banded together in an attempt to create a truly national school of Russian music, free of the stifling influence of Italian opera, German lieder, and other western European forms. The original name of the group, Moguchaya Kuchka, was coined in a newspaper article in 1867. Centred in St. Petersburg, the members of The Five are often considered to have been a rival faction to the more cosmopolitan, Moscow-centred composers such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich), although Tchaikovsky often used actual folk songs in his music and Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov emphasized traditional European training in their work. Precursors of The Five were Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail) and Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (Dargomyzhsky, Aleksandr). They were succeeded by a less energetic generation including Anatoly Lyadov (Lyadov, Anatoly), Sergey Taneyev (Taneyev, Sergey), and Aleksandr Glazunov (Glazunov, Aleksandr).

Rubinstein, Anton

▪ Russian composer and musician

in full Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein

born , Nov. 16 [Nov. 28, New Style], 1829, Vykhvatinets, Podolia province, Russia

died Nov. 8 [Nov. 20], 1894, Peterhof [now Petrodvorets]

Russian composer and one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century.

In 1835 Rubinstein's father opened a small factory in Moscow, and there in the same year his brother Nikolay was born. Both boys were taught piano, first by their mother and then by Aleksandr Villoing. Anton gave his first public recital in Moscow in 1839, and the following year Villoing took him abroad for a three-year concert tour. He appeared in Paris, London, The Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, attracting the attention of Chopin and Liszt. From 1844 to 1846 he and his brother studied music theory in Berlin. Anton spent two more years abroad alone, mainly in Vienna, studying the piano and composition. On his return to Russia in 1848 he settled in St. Petersburg, where in 1852 his first opera, Dmitry Donskoy, was produced; Fomka durachok (Fomka the Fool) and Sibirskiye okhotniki (The Siberian Hunters) were introduced in St. Petersburg in 1853. The years 1854 to 1958 he spent abroad.

Under the patronage of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, Rubinstein in 1859 founded the Russian Music Society and later became conductor of its orchestral concerts. In 1862 he founded and became the director of the Imperial (or St. Petersburg) Conservatory, and in 1866 his brother founded the Moscow Conservatory, where Nikolay remained as director until his death in 1881. Anton Rubinstein resigned his directorship of the Imperial Conservatory in 1867 but resumed it in 1887 and continued to hold the post until 1891. From 1871 to 1872 he directed the Vienna Philharmonic concerts, and in 1872 he toured the United States.

Rubenstein's operas include Demon (first performed 1875; The Demon), Der Makkabäer (first performed 1875; The Maccabees), and Kupets Kalashnikov (first performed 1880; The Merchant Kalashnikov). He wrote six symphonies, the biblical opera Der Turm zu Babel (first performed 1870; The Tower of Babel), five piano concerti, songs, piano pieces, and numerous chamber works.

In 1889 Rubinstein published an autobiography, translated by Aline Delano as Autobiography of Anton Rubinstein (1890; reprinted 1988).

Balakirev, Mily

▪ Russian composer

in full Mily Alekseyevich Balakirev

born December 21, 1836 [January 2, 1837, New Style], Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

died May 16 [May 29], 1910, St. Petersburg

Russian composer of orchestral music, piano music, and songs. He was a dynamic leader of the Russian nationalist group of composers of his era.

Balakirev received his early musical education from his mother. He also studied with Alexander Dubuque and with Karl Eisrich, music director to A.D. Ulibishev, a wealthy landowner who published well-known books on Mozart and Beethoven. Balakirev had the use of Ulibishev's music library and at age 15 began to compose and was allowed to rehearse the local theatre orchestra. From 1853 to 1855 he studied mathematics at the University of Kazan, where he wrote, among other things, a piano concerto (completed 1856). He made his first appearance as a concert pianist in Kronshtadt in December 1855. Thereafter Balakirev performed often, composed an Overture on Russian Themes and music to King Lear (1858–61), and became the mentor of two young composers, César Cui and Modest Mussorgsky. In 1861 and 1862 his circle of disciples was joined by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Borodin, forming the group known as The Five (Five, The). In 1862 he joined the Free School of Music, which had been opened in opposition to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and soon became principal concert conductor.

During the 1860s Balakirev was at the height of his influence. He collected folk songs up and down the Volga and introduced them in his Second Overture on Russian Themes, which ultimately became the symphonic poem Russia; he spent summer holidays in the Caucasus, gathering themes and inspiration for his brilliant piano fantasy Islamey (1869) and his symphonic poem Tamara (1867–82); he published the works of composer Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail) and visited Prague to produce them; and for a time (1867–69) he conducted the symphony concerts of the Russian Music Society.

Balakirev's despotic nature and his tactlessness made him innumerable enemies, so that even his friends and young disciples came to resent his tutelage; and a series of personal and artistic misfortunes led to his almost complete withdrawal from the world of music during 1872–76 and his taking a post as a railway clerk. Balakirev had passed through a period of acute depression 10 years earlier; now he underwent a more severe crisis from which he emerged a totally changed man, a bigoted and superstitious Orthodox Christian. He gradually returned to the music world, resumed directorship of the Free School, and from 1883 to 1894 was director of the imperial chapel. He also resumed musical composition, completing several works, including a symphony he had abandoned many years before, and writing several new pieces, among these his Piano Sonata (1905), Symphony No. 2 (1908), and a number of piano pieces and songs. The last decade of his life was spent in almost complete retirement.

It has been said that it was Balakirev, even more than Glinka, who set the course for Russian orchestral music and lyrical song during the second half of the 19th century. He developed an idiom and technique that he imposed on his disciples (above all on Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay) and Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr), and to some extent on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich)) not only by example but by constant autocratic supervision of their own earlier works. His music is superbly colourful and imaginative, but his creative personality was arrested in its development after 1871, and his later work is couched in the idiom of his youth.

Shostakovich, Dmitry

▪ Russian composer

Introduction

in full Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich

born Sept. 12 [Sept. 25, New Style], 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Aug. 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Russian composer, renowned particularly for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art.

Early life and works

Shostakovich was the son of an engineer. He entered the Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, subsequently Leningrad) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev until 1923 and composition until 1925 with Aleksandr Glazunov (Glazunov, Aleksandr) and Maksimilian Steinberg. He participated in the Chopin International Competition for Pianists in Warsaw in 1927 and received an honourable mention but made no subsequent attempt to pursue the career of a virtuoso, confining his public appearances as a pianist to performances of his own works.

Even before his keyboard success in Warsaw, he had had a far greater success as a composer with the Symphony No. 1 (1924–25), which quickly achieved worldwide currency. The symphony's stylistic roots were numerous; the influence of composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky and Paul Hindemith (and, avowedly, Shostakovich's contemporary Sergey Prokofiev) is clearly discernible. In the music Shostakovich wrote in the next few years he submitted to an even wider range of influences. The cultural climate in the Soviet Union was remarkably free at that time; even the music of Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, then in the avant-garde, was played. Béla Bartók and Hindemith visited Russia to perform their own works, and Shostakovich openly experimented with avant-garde trends. His satiric opera The Nose (composed 1927–28), based on Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay)'s story "Nos," displayed a comprehensive awareness of what was new in Western music, although already it seems as if the satire is extended to the styles themselves, for the avant-garde sounds are contorted with wry humour. Not surprisingly, Shostakovich's incomparably finer second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (composed 1930–32; revised and retitled Katerina Izmaylova), marked a stylistic retreat. Yet even this more accessible musical language was too radical for the Soviet authorities.

From 1928, when Joseph Stalin inaugurated his First Five-Year Plan, an iron hand fastened on Soviet culture, and in music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were officially banned in 1932, and for a while even the stylistically unproblematic Tchaikovsky was out of favour, owing to his quasi-official status in tsarist Russia. Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came it was devastating. It has been said that Stalin's anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator.

Shostakovich was bitterly attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the still unperformed Symphony No. 4 (1935–36) were withdrawn. The composer's next major work was his Symphony No. 5 (1937), which was described in the press as “a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism.” A trivial, dutifully “optimistic” work might have been expected; what emerged was compounded largely of serious, even sombre and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness that scored an immediate success with both the public and the authorities.

With his Symphony No. 5, Shostakovich forged the style that he used in his subsequent compositions. Gustav Mahler was a clear progenitor of both Symphony No. 4 and Symphony No. 5, but the latter represented a drastic shift in technique. Whereas the earlier symphony had been a sprawling work, founded upon a free proliferation of melodic ideas, the first movement of Symphony No. 5 was marked by melodic concentration and classical form. This singlemindedness is reflected elsewhere in Shostakovich's work in his liking for the monolithic Baroque structures of the fugue and chaconne, each of which grows from, or is founded upon, the constant repetition of a single melodic idea. This almost obsessive concern with the working out of a single expressive character can also be seen in the recurrence in his mature music of certain thematic ideas, notably various permutations founded upon the juxtaposition of the major and minor third (already clear in Symphony No. 5), and the four-note cell D-E♭-C-B derived from the composer's initials in their German equivalent (D. Sch.), interpreted according to the labels of German musical notation (in which “S,” spoken as “Es,” equals E♭ and “h” equals B).

In 1937 Shostakovich became a teacher of composition in the Leningrad Conservatory, and the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 found him still in that city. He composed his Symphony No. 7 (1941) in beleaguered Leningrad during the latter part of that year and finished it in Kuybyshev (now Samara), to which he and his family had been evacuated. The work achieved a quick fame, as much because of the quasi-romantic circumstances of its composition as because of its musical quality. In 1943 Shostakovich settled in Moscow as a teacher of composition at the conservatory, and from 1945 he taught also at the Leningrad Conservatory.

Later life and works

Shostakovich's works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music, especially the Symphony No. 8 (1943), the Piano Trio (1944), and the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947–48). Their prevailing seriousness, even grimness, was to contribute to Shostakovich's second fall from official grace. When the Cold War began, the Soviet authorities sought to impose a firmer ideological control, demanding a more accessible musical language than some composers were currently using. In Moscow in 1948, at a now notorious conference presided over by Andrey Zhdanov (Zhdanov, Andrey Aleksandrovich), a prominent Soviet theoretician, the leading figures of Soviet music—including Shostakovich—were attacked and disgraced. As a result, the quality of Soviet composition slumped in the next few years. His personal influence was reduced by the termination of his teaching activities at both the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. Yet he was not completely intimidated, and, in his String Quartet No. 4 (1949) and especially his Quartet No. 5 (1951), he offered a splendid rejoinder to those who would have had him renounce completely his style and musical integrity. His Symphony No. 10, composed in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, flew in the face of Zhdanovism, yet, like his Symphony No. 5 of 16 years earlier, compelled acceptance by sheer quality and directness.

From that time on, Shostakovich's biography is essentially a catalog of his works. He was left to pursue his creative career largely unhampered by official interference. He did, however, experience some difficulty over the texts (Baby Yar) by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Yevtushenko, Yevgeny) on which he based his Symphony No. 13 (1962), and the work was suppressed after its first performance. Yet he was undeterred by this, and his deeply impressive Symphony No. 14 (1969), cast as a cycle of 11 songs on the subject of death, was not the sort of work to appeal to official circles. The composer had visited the United States in 1949, and in 1958 he made an extended tour of western Europe, including Italy (where already he had been elected an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) and Great Britain, where he received an honorary doctorate of music at the University of Oxford. In 1966 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal.

Despite the brooding typical of so much of his music, which might suggest an introverted personality, Shostakovich was noted for his gregariousness. After Prokofiev's death in 1953, he was the undisputed head of Russian music. Since his own death his music has been the subject of furious contention between those upholding the Soviet view of the composer as a sincere Communist, and those who view him as a closet dissident.

David Brown Richard Taruskin

Additional Reading

Dmitriĭ Shostakovich, Testimony, trans. from Russian, ed. by Solomon Volkov (1979, reissued 1999), is the memoirs of Shostakovich, of uncertain authenticity. A useful study of the music is contained in Norman Kay, Shostakovich (1971). Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (1949, reprinted 1973), is an account of the upheaval surrounding the Zhdanov conference of 1948 and yields valuable insight into the pressures under which Shostakovich had to work. Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994), is an invaluable compilation of interviews. The most factually reliable short biography in any language is Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2000). Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (1990), and Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov (eds.), Shostakovich Reconsidered (1998), are tendentious political interpretations.Richard Taruskin

Eisenstein, Sergey Mikhaylovich

▪ Soviet film director

Introduction

born Jan. 23, 1898, Riga, Latvia, Russian Empire

died Feb. 11, 1948, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Russian film director and theorist whose work includes the three film classics Potemkin (1925), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (released in two parts, 1944 and 1958). In his concept of film montage, images, perhaps independent of the “main” action, are presented for maximum psychological impact.

Eisenstein, who was of Jewish descent through his paternal grandparents, lived in Riga, where his father, Mikhail, a civil engineer, worked in shipbuilding until 1910, when the family moved to St. Petersburg. After studying in 1916–18 at the Institute of Civil Engineering, Eisenstein decided on a career in the plastic arts and entered the School of Fine Arts.

With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917, he enlisted in the Red Army and helped to organize and construct defenses and to produce entertainment for the troops. Having now found his vocation, he entered, in 1920, the Proletkult Theatre (Theatre of the People) in Moscow as an assistant decorator. He rapidly became the principal decorator and then the codirector. As such, he designed the costumes and the scenery for several notable productions. At the same time, he developed a strong interest in the Kabuki theatre of Japan, which was to influence his ideas on film. For his production of The Wise Man, an adaptation of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's play, he made a short film, “Glumov's Diary,” which was shown as part of the performance in 1923. Soon afterward the cinema engaged his full attention, and he produced his first film, Strike, in 1924, after having published his first article on theories of editing in the review Lef, edited by the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. He said there that in place of the static reflection of an event, expressed by a logical unfolding of the action, he proposed a new form: the “montage of attractions”—in which arbitrarily chosen images, independent of the action, would be presented not in chronological sequence but in whatever way would create the maximum psychological impact. Thus, the filmmaker should aim to establish in the consciousness of the spectators the elements that would lead them to the idea he wants to communicate; he should attempt to place them in the spiritual state or the psychological situation that would give birth to that idea.

These principles guided Eisenstein's entire career. In the realistic films that he undertook, however, such a technique is effective only when it utilizes the concrete elements implicit in the action; it loses validity when its symbols are imposed upon reality instead of being implied by it. Thus, in Strike (1924), which recounts the repression of a strike by the soldiers of the tsar, Eisenstein juxtaposed shots of workers being mowed down by machine guns with shots of cattle being butchered in a slaughterhouse. The effect was striking, but the objective reality was falsified.

Possessed by his theory, Eisenstein was bound to succumb often to this failing. Potemkin, also called The Battleship Potemkin, happily escaped it. Ordered by the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. to commemorate the Revolution of 1905, the film, made in the port and the city of Odessa in 1925, had a momentous impact and still remains among the masterpieces of the world cinema. (In 1958 it was voted the best film ever made, by an international poll of critics.) Its greatness lies not merely in the depth of humanity with which the subject is treated, nor in its social significance, nor in the formal perfection of its rhythm and editing; but rather, it is each of these magnified and multiplied by the others.

Having by this accomplishment earned recognition as the epic poet of the Soviet cinema, Eisenstein next made a film entitled October, or Ten Days That Shook the World, which in the space of two hours dealt with the shifts of power in the government after the 1917 Revolution, the entrance on the scene of Lenin, and the struggle between the Bolsheviks and their political and military foes. If the film was sometimes inspired, it was also disparate, chaotic, and often confused.

Also uneven, but better balanced, was Old and New (originally titled The General Line), filmed in 1929 to illustrate the collectivization of the rural countryside. Eisenstein made of it a lyric poem, as calm and as expansive as Potemkin had been violent and compact.

In 1929, putting to profit a visit to Paris, he filmed Romance sentimentale (Sentimental Melody), an essay in counterpoint of images and music. Engaged by Paramount studios in 1930, he left for Hollywood, where he worked on adaptations of the novels L'Or (“Sutter's Gold”), by Blaise Cendrars, and An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. Refusing to modify his scripts to meet studio demands, however, he broke the contract and went to Mexico in 1932 to direct Que viva Mexico!, with capital collected by the novelist Upton Sinclair.

The film never was completed. After disagreements between Eisenstein and Sinclair, some of the negatives were sold and released as the films Thunder over Mexico, Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day (1933–34). In 1939 a fourth film, entitled Time in the Sun, was made from the footage. None of these films bears more than a distant resemblance to the original conception.

After his return to Moscow in 1933, Eisenstein undertook Bezhin Meadow. Several weeks before its completion, however, he was ordered to suspend its production. The scenes already shot were put together by Eisenstein, but the film, which was never released, was attacked as “formalistic” because of its poetic interpretation of reality. Eisenstein thus suffered from the same governmental policies toward art that had embroiled the composer Sergey Prokofiev, the writer Isaac Babel, and many other artists in difficulties with Soviet officialdom.

Having expressed contrition for the errors of his past works, Eisenstein was able to make a film recounting the medieval epic of Alexander Nevsky, in accordance with Stalin's policy of glorifying Russian heroes. Made in 1938, this film transfigured the actual historical events, majestically leading to a final resolution that represented the triumph of collectivism. As in medieval epics, the characters were the strongly stylized heroes or demigods of legend. Produced in close collaboration with Prokofiev, who wrote the score, the film represented a blend of images and music into a single rhythmic unity, an indissoluble whole.

During World War II Eisenstein achieved a work of the same style as Alexander Nevsky and even more ambitious—Ivan the Terrible—about the 16th-century tsar Ivan IV, whom Stalin admired. Begun in 1943 in the Ural Mountains, the first part was finished in 1944, the second at the beginning of 1946. A third part was envisaged, but Eisenstein, suffering from angina pectoris, had to take to his bed for several months. He was about to return to work when he died, only a few days after his 50th birthday.

Most critics would agree that though Eisenstein's three greatest films stand far above the others, all of his work is significant; their flaws are those common to artists probing the limits of their craft. It may be that in the entire history of motion pictures, no other filmmaker has surpassed him in his understanding of his art.

Jean Mitry

Major Works

Films.

Strike (1924); Potemkin (1925); October (Ten Days That Shook the World; 1928); Old and New (The General Line; 1929); Alexander Nevsky (1938); Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1944); Ivan the Terrible, Part Two (1958).

Collections of writings.

The Film Sense (1942); Film Form (1949); Notes of a Film Director (1958); Film Essays (1968).

Additional Reading

Marie Seton, Eisenstein (1952; Eng. trans. 1952); Jean Mitry, S.M. Eisenstein (1955), in French; Léon Moussinac, Serge Eisenstein (1964; Eng. trans. 1970); Yon Barna, Eisenstein (1973).

Schnittke, Alfred

▪ Russian composer

born Nov. 24, 1934, Engels, Volga German Autonomous S.S.R. [now in Saratov oblast, Russia]

died Aug. 3, 1998, Hamburg, Germany

postmodernist Russian composer who created serious, dark-toned musical works characterized by abrupt juxtapositions of radically different, often contradictory, styles, an approach that came to be known as “polystylism.”

Schnittke's father was a Jewish journalist who had been born in Germany but was of Latvian descent, and his mother was a Volga-born German Catholic; he found inspiration for his music in his German origins and in his homeland. From 1946 to 1948 the family lived in Vienna, where Schnittke learned to play piano and studied music theory. His studies were completed at the Moscow Conservatory, where he later taught composition. Like most Soviet composers, Schnittke was required to produce many works in easily digestible Socialist Realist style, particularly film scores, of which he wrote more than 60 between 1961 and 1984.

Schnittke's works embraced a wide range of genres and include seven symphonies, numerous string concerti, a piano concerto, the oratorio Nagasaki (1958), six ballets, much choral and vocal music, as well as arrangements of works by Dmitry Shostakovich, Alban Berg, and Scott Joplin. His best-known works include the Concerto Grosso No. 1 and the Violin Concerto No. 4, for which the violinist was instructed to mime the cadenza rather than actually play it.

Like his great predecessor Dmitry Shostakovich, Schnittke intermingled disjointed elements within a single work, but his combinations were far more jarring—an offhand Beethoven quotation, a distorted folk song, fragments of a medieval chant, and passages of ferociously dense, dissonant serialism might appear within the space of a few minutes.

Schnittke's more demanding experimental works were viewed with official disfavour. Virtually unknown outside the Soviet bloc until the mid-1980s, Schnittke rather suddenly acquired a large following in the West through the efforts of a number of prominent Russian musicians, including Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Gidon Kremer, Yury Bashmet, and Mstislav Rostropovich (Rostropovich, Mstislav). In 1985 Schnittke suffered the first of two severe strokes. Upon recovery, he continued to compose. In 1992 he was a winner of the Praemium Imperiale, awarded by the Japan Art Association for lifetime achievement in the arts. In 1994, in New York City, he attended the National Symphony Orchestra's world premiere of his spectral Symphony No. 6 (1993), dedicated to and conducted by Rostropovich.

Prokofiev, Sergey

▪ Russian composer

Introduction

in full Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev

born April 23 [April 11, Old Style], 1891, Sontsovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

20th-century Russian (and Soviet) composer who wrote in a wide range of musical genres, including symphonies, concerti, film music, operas, ballets, and program pieces.

Pre-Revolutionary period

Prokofiev (Prokofjev in the transliteration system of the Russian Academy of Sciences) was born into a family of agriculturalists. Village life, with its peasant songs, left a permanent imprint on him. His mother, a good pianist, became the highly gifted child's first mentor in music and arranged trips to the opera in Moscow. A high evaluation was put upon the boy's talent by a Moscow composer and teacher, Sergey Taneyev (Taneyev, Sergey), on whose recommendation the Russian composer Reinhold Glière (Glière, Reinhold) twice went to Sontsovka in the summer months to become young Sergey's first teacher in theory and composition and to prepare him for entrance into the conservatory at St. Petersburg. The years Prokofiev spent at that institution—1904 to 1914—were a period of swift creative growth. His teachers were struck by his originality, and when he graduated he was awarded the Anton Rubinstein Prize in piano for a brilliant performance of his own first large-scale work—the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat Major.

The conservatory gave Prokofiev a firm foundation in the academic fundamentals of music, but he avidly sought musical innovation. His enthusiasms were supported by progressive circles advocating musical renewal. Prokofiev's first public appearance as a pianist took place in 1908 at a concert series, Evenings of Contemporary Music, sponsored by such a group in St. Petersburg. A little later he met with friendly sympathy in a similar circle in Moscow, which helped him make his first appearances as a composer, at the Moscow summer symphony seasons of 1911 and 1912.

Prokofiev's musical talent developed rapidly. He studied the compositions of Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor), particularly the early ballets, but maintained a critical attitude toward his countryman's brilliant innovations. Contacts with the then-new currents in theatre, poetry, and painting also played an important role in Prokofiev's development. He was attracted by the work of modernist Russian poets; by the paintings of the Russian followers of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso; and by the theatrical ideas of Vsevolod Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich), whose experimental productions were directed against an obsolescent naturalism. In 1914 Prokofiev became acquainted with the great ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich), who became one of his most influential advisers for the next decade and a half.

After the death of his father in 1910, Prokofiev lived under more straitened material conditions, though his mother provided for his continuing studies. On the eve of World War I, he visited London and Paris to acquaint himself with the newest in art. The tense pre-storm atmosphere that pervaded Russia sharpened in him a feeling of skepticism, of disbelief in romantic ideals, but did not shake his essentially healthy outlook on life. Exempt from war mobilization as the only son of a widow, Prokofiev continued to perfect his musicianship on the organ and appeared in concerts in the capital and elsewhere. The pre-Revolutionary period of Prokofiev's work was marked by intense exploration. The harmonic thought and design of his work grew more and more complicated. Prokofiev wrote the ballet Ala and Lolli (1914), on themes of ancient Slav mythology, for Diaghilev, who rejected it. Thereupon, Prokofiev reworked the music into the Scythian Suite for orchestra. Its premiere, in 1916, caused a scandal but was the culmination of his career in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). The ballet The Tale of the Buffoon Who Outjested Seven Buffoons (1915; reworked as The Buffoon, 1915–20), also commissioned by Diaghilev, was based on a folktale; it served as a stimulus for Prokofiev's searching experiments in the renewal of Russian music. Despite Diaghilev's assertion of the priority of ballet over opera, which he considered a dying genre, Prokofiev was active in the field of opera. Following the immature Maddalena, which he wrote in 1911–13, he composed in 1915–16 The Gambler, a brilliant and dynamic adaptation of the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor). Continuing the operatic tradition of Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest), Prokofiev skillfully combined subtle lyricism, satiric malice, narrative precision, and dramatic impact. During this period, Prokofiev achieved great recognition for his first two piano concerti—the first the one-movement Concerto in D-flat Major (1911) and the second the dramatic four-movement Concerto in G Minor (1913).

The year 1917—the year of two Russian revolutions—was astonishingly productive for Prokofiev. When Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in February 1917, Prokofiev was in the streets of Petrograd, expressing the joy of victory. As if inspired by feelings of social and national renewal, he wrote within one year an immense quantity of new music: he composed two sonatas, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, the Classical Symphony, and the choral work Seven, They Are Seven; he began the magnificent Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major; and he planned a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges, after a comedy tale by the 18th-century Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi (Gozzi, Carlo, Conte), as translated and adapted by Meyerhold. In the summer of 1917 Prokofiev was included in the Council of Workers in the Arts, which led Russia's left wing of artistic activity; but for almost nine months he was stranded in the Caucasus, cut off from Petrograd by the civil war. Only in the spring of 1918 did he succeed in returning there. In the difficult circumstances of these years, however, he concluded that music had no place in the council's activities, and he decided to leave Russia temporarily to undertake a concert tour abroad. With official sanction, Prokofiev traveled over the difficult route through Siberia, where civil strife was raging.

Foreign period

The next decade and a half are commonly called the “foreign period” of Prokofiev's work. For a number of reasons, chiefly the continued blockade of the Soviet Union, he could not return at once to his homeland. Nevertheless, he did not lose touch with Russia. The first five years of Prokofiev's life abroad are usually characterized as the “years of wandering.” On the way from Vladivostok to San Francisco, in the summer of 1918, he gave several concerts in Tokyo and Yokohama. In New York City the sensational piano recitals of the “Bolshevik Pianist” evoked both delight and denunciation. The composer had entrée to the Chicago Opera Association, where he was given a commission for a comic opera. The conductor and the producer of the opera, both Italian, gladly backed the idea of an opera on the Gozzi plot. Accordingly, The Love for Three Oranges was completed in 1919, though it was not produced until 1921. Within a few years the opera was also produced with immense success on the stages of the Soviet Union as well as in western Europe.

In America, Prokofiev met a young singer of Spanish extraction, Lina Llubera, who eventually became his wife and the mother of two of his sons, Svyatoslav and Oleg. Not finding continuing support in the United States, the composer set out in the spring of 1920 for Paris for meetings with Diaghilev and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky (Koussevitzky, Serge). They soon secured for him wide recognition in the most important western European musical centres. The production of The Buffoon by Diaghilev's ballet troupe in Paris and London in 1921 and the Paris premiere of the Scythian Suite in 1921 and that of Seven, They Are Seven in 1924 evoked enormous interest, consolidating his reputation as a brilliant innovator. The successful performance of his Piano Concerto No. 3 (1921), completed in France, also marked one of the peaks of Prokofiev's dynamic national style.

During 1922–23 Prokofiev spent more than a year and a half in southern Germany, in the Bavarian town of Ettal. Resting after fatiguing premieres and reviewing the course of his creative path, he prepared many of his compositions for the printer. He also continued work on the opera The Flaming Angel, after a story by the contemporary Russian author Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich). The opera, which required many years of work (1919–27), did not find a producer within Prokofiev's lifetime.

Meanwhile, Prokofiev, uninterested in the musical activity in Germany, settled in Paris in the autumn of 1923. There he was in close touch with progressive French musical figures, such as the composers Francis Poulenc (Poulenc, Francis) and Arthur Honegger (Honegger, Arthur), while continuing his own intensive creative activity. Vexed by criticisms of his melodically lucid Violin Concerto No. 1, which had its premiere in Paris in 1923, he addressed himself to a search for a more avant-garde style. These tendencies appeared in several compositions of the early 1920s, including the epic Symphony No. 2 in D Minor, commissioned by Koussevitzky. Its intense dramatic quality and its striking sense of proportion are also found in the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (1928), based on thematic material from the opera The Flaming Angel. In close collaboration with Diaghilev, Prokofiev created new one-act ballets, Le Pas d'acier (performed in 1927) and The Prodigal Son (performed in 1929). Le Pas d'acier had a sensational success in Paris and London, thanks to its original staging and bold evocation of images of Soviet Russia at the beginning of the 1920s—with its economic dislocation and the beginnings of industrialization. The Prodigal Son had a lofty biblical theme and music that was exquisitely lyrical. It reflects an emotional relaxation and a clarification of style that are also seen in the String Quartet No. 1 in B Minor (1930), in the Sonata for Two Violins in C Major (1932), and in the ballet On the Dnieper (1932).

In 1927 Prokofiev toured the Soviet Union and was rapturously received by the Soviet public as a world-renowned Russian musician-revolutionary. While there, he strengthened his old associations with the innovative theatrical producer Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich), who helped him in a basic revision of the opera The Gambler, produced in 1929 in Brussels.

During the 1920s and early '30s, Prokofiev toured with immense success as a pianist in the great musical centres of western Europe and the United States. His U.S. tours in 1925, 1930, and 1933 were attended with tumultuous success and brought him new commissions, such as the Symphony No. 4 in C Major (1930; incorporating musical material of The Prodigal Son), for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony, and the String Quartet No. 1, commissioned by the Library of Congress. His new piano concerti—No. 4 (1931), for the left hand, and No. 5 in G Major (1932)—demonstrated anew his bent for impulsiveness and virtuoso brilliance.

Soviet period

Although he enjoyed material well-being, success with the public, and contact with outstanding figures of Western culture, Prokofiev increasingly missed his homeland. Visits to the Soviet Union in 1927, 1929, and 1932 led him to conclude his foreign obligations and return to Moscow once and for all. From 1933 to 1935 the composer gradually accustomed himself to the new conditions and became one of the leading figures of Soviet culture. He finally closed his Paris apartment in 1936 and made his last Western tour in 1938. In the two decades constituting the Soviet period of Prokofiev's work—1933 to 1953—the realistic and epical traits of his art became more clearly defined. The synthesis of traditional tonal and melodic means with the stylistic innovations of 20th-century music was more fully realized.

In the years preceding World War II, Prokofiev created a number of classical masterpieces. These included his Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor (1935) and the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935–36). His work in theatre and the cinema gave rise to a number of charming programmatic suites, such as the Lieutenant Kije suite (1934), the Egyptian Nights suite (1934), and the symphonic children's tale Peter and the Wolf (1936). Turning to opera, he cast in the form of a contemporary drama of folk life his Semyon Kotko, depicting events of the civil war in the Ukraine (1939). The basis of the brilliantly modernized opéra bouffe Betrothal in a Monastery (composed in 1940, produced in 1946) was the play The Duenna, by the 18th-century British dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Sheridan, Richard Brinsley). Testing his powers in other genres, he composed the monumental Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution (1937), on texts by Karl Marx (Marx, Karl), V.I. Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), and Joseph Stalin (Stalin, Joseph), and the cantata The Toast (1939), composed for Stalin's 60th birthday.

On his last trip abroad, Prokofiev visited Hollywood, where he studied the technical problems of the sound film; what he learned was applied brilliantly in the striking national music for Sergey Eisenstein (Eisenstein, Sergey Mikhaylovich)'s film Alexander Nevsky, depicting the heroic Russian struggle against the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. The cantata Alexander Nevsky was based on the music of the film. One of the summits of Prokofiev's art was the production of his ballet Romeo and Juliet in Leningrad, with Galina Ulanova (Ulanova, Galina) in the leading role. Throughout the 1930s Prokofiev took part in the organizational work of the Composers' Union, made appearances as conductor and as pianist, and traveled much throughout the country.

On the eve of World War II, he left his wife and sons for poet Mira Mendelssohn, who became his second (common-law) wife. The war sharpened Prokofiev's national and patriotic feelings. Regardless of the difficulties of the war years, he composed with remarkable assiduity, even when the evacuation of Moscow in 1941 made it necessary for him to move from one place to another until he was able to return in 1944.

From the first days of the war, the composer's attention was centred on a very large-scale operatic project: an opera based on Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo)'s novel War and Peace. He was fascinated by the parallels between 1812, when Russia crushed Napoleon's invasion, and the then-current situation. The first version of the opera was completed by the summer of 1942, but subsequently the work was fundamentally revised, a task that occupied more than 10 years of intensive work. Those who heard it were struck both by the immense scale of the opera (13 scenes, more than 60 characters) and by its unique blend of epic narrative with lyrical scenes depicting the personal destinies of the major characters. His increasing predilection for national-epical imagery is manifested in the heroic majesty of the Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major (1944) and in the music (composed 1942–45) for Eisenstein's two-part film Ivan the Terrible (Part I, 1944; Part II, 1948). Living in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, and in the Urals, the composer was everywhere interested in folklore, an interest that was reflected in the String Quartet No. 2 in F Major (1941), on Kabardian and Balkar themes, and in the projected comic opera Khan Buzai (never completed), on themes of Kazakh folktales. Documents of those troubled days are three piano sonatas, No. 6 (1940), No. 7 (1942), and No. 8 (1944), which are striking in the dramatic conflict of their images and in their irrepressible dynamism. (Click here for an excerpt from Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7.)

Overwork was fatal to the composer's health, as was the stress he suffered in 1948, when, along with other Soviet composers, he was censured by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party for “formalism.” During the last years of his life, Prokofiev seldom left his villa in a suburb of Moscow. His propensity for innovation, however, is still evident in such important works as the Symphony No. 6 in E-flat Minor (1945–47), which is laden with reminiscence of the tragedies of the war just past; the Sinfonia Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E Minor (1950–52), composed with consultation from the conductor and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (Rostropovich, Mstislav); and the Violin Sonata in F Minor (1938–46), dedicated to the violinist David Oistrakh (Oistrakh, David), which is laden with Russian folk imagery. Just as in earlier years, the composer devoted the greatest part of his energy to musical theatre, as in the opera The Story of a Real Man (1947–48), the ballet The Stone Flower (1948–50), and the oratorio On Guard for Peace (1950). The lyrical Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp Minor (1951–52) was the composer's swan song.

In 1953 Prokofiev died suddenly of cerebral hemorrhage. On his worktable there remained a pile of unfinished compositions, including sketches for a 6th concerto for two pianos, a 10th and an 11th piano sonata, and a solo violoncello sonata. The subsequent years saw a rapid growth of his popularity in the Soviet Union and abroad. In 1957 he was posthumously awarded the Soviet Union's highest honour, the Lenin Prize, for his Symphony No. 7.

Israel Vladimirovich Nestyev Richard Taruskin

Additional Reading

Israel V. Nestyev, Prokofiev (1960, reprinted 1971; originally published in Russian, 1957), was the first serious, systematic study of the man and his music. Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (1987), is a more recent work that focuses on the man, rather than his music.Richard Taruskin

Richter, Sviatoslav

▪ Russian musician

in full Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter , also spelled Svyatoslav Teofilovich Rikhter

born March 7 [March 20, New Style], 1915, Zhitomir, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Zhytomyr, Ukraine]

died Aug. 1, 1997, Moscow, Russia

Soviet pianist whose technical virtuosity combined with subtle introspection, made him one of the preeminent pianists of the 20th century. Though his repertoire was enormous, he was especially praised for his interpretations of J.S. Bach, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Sergey Prokofiev, and Modest Mussorgsky.

Richter's father, an organist and composer, taught his son musical rudiments at an early age—the young Richter largely taught himself piano on the side. As a teenager he became a coach at the Odessa (Ukraine) Opera, where he astounded others with his sight-reading ability. Though initially a composer, by age 20 Richter had devoted himself to the piano. He made his concert debut in 1935 in Odessa, and in 1937 he became a pupil at the Moscow Conservatory. Having met Prokofiev in 1937, Richter went on to premiere the composer's Sonata No. 6 in 1940, as well as Sonata No. 7 and Sonata No. 9 in later years. In 1945 Richter won the U.S.S.R. Music Competition. During the 1950s he toured eastern Europe and China. Meanwhile, the West eagerly awaited Richter's appearance. “Every musician in town was present,” reported the New York Times, for his 1960 debut at Carnegie Hall. To great acclaim, he subsequently toured western Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. Richter made his last appearance in 1970. He favoured intimate venues, such as the Aldeburgh festival in England, where he played Schubert duets with his friend Benjamin Britten (Britten, Benjamin). In 1964 Richter started a lifelong association with the French Fêtes Musicales near Tours. Because he detested the artificiality of the studio, more than half of his recordings were of live performances. Among Richter's distinguished recorded works are his superb performances of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, as well as his controversial interpretation of Schubert's Sonata in B-flat Major, which exhibits an unusually slow, hypnotic first movement.

Rostropovich, Mstislav

▪ Russian musician

in full Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich

born March 27, 1927, Baku, Azerbaijan S.S.R., U.S.S.R. [now Azerbaijan]

died April 27, 2007, Moscow, Russia

Russian conductor and pianist and one of the best-known cellists of the 20th century.

Trained by his parents (a cellist and a pianist) and at the Moscow Conservatory (1943–48), Rostropovich became professor of cello at the conservatory in 1956. He began touring abroad in the 1950s. He also performed as a pianist in recitals with his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and in 1968 he made his debut as a conductor. When in 1970 Rostropovich made clear his support of the dissident Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich), the government sharply curtailed his ability to travel. In 1974, however, he and his wife were permitted to leave the country, and in 1975 they announced their decision not to return to the Soviet Union. In 1977 Rostropovich became music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., a post he held until 1994. The Soviet government deprived the couple of their citizenship in 1978 but reversed that decision in 1990.

Although sometimes criticized for occasional over-romanticism, Rostropovich was admired for his keen musicianship, both in contemporary works and in the established concert repertoire. His exploitation of the tonal resources of the cello was considered exceptional. Composers who wrote works for him include Aram Khachaturian (Khachaturian, Aram), Sergey Prokofiev (Prokofiev, Sergey), Dmitry Shostakovich (Shostakovich, Dmitry), Benjamin Britten (Britten, Benjamin), and Witold Lutosławski (Lutosławski, Witold). The recipient of numerous awards, Rostropovich was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987.

Gilels, Emil

▪ Soviet pianist

in full Emil Grigoryevich Gilels

born Oct. 6 [Oct. 19, New Style], 1916, Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died Oct. 14, 1985, Moscow

Soviet concert pianist admired for his superb technique, tonal control, and disciplined approach.

Gilels began piano studies at age 6 and gave his first public concert in 1929 at age 13. In 1933 he gained top honours in the first All-Union Musicians Contest. After graduating from the Odessa Conservatory in 1935, he moved to Moscow for further study with Heinrich Neuhaus. In 1938 he won first prize at the Ysaÿe International Festival in Brussels and was appointed professor at the Moscow Conservatory. After World War II he toured outside the Soviet Union, and his debuts in New York City (1955) and London (1959) were greatly acclaimed. Although the works of Robert Schumann (Schumann, Robert), Johannes Brahms (Brahms, Johannes), and especially Ludwig van Beethoven (Beethoven, Ludwig van) came to form the core of his repertoire, Gilels also played those of Johann Sebastian Bach (Bach, Johann Sebastian), Béla Bartók (Bartók, Béla), and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich).

Horowitz, Vladimir

▪ Russian pianist

born Oct. 1 [Sept. 18, Old Style], 1903, Berdichev, Russia [now in Ukraine]

died Nov. 5, 1989, New York, N.Y., U.S.

Russian-born American virtuoso pianist in the Romantic tradition. He was celebrated for his flawless technique and an almost orchestral quality of tone. Horowitz's performances of works by Franz Liszt, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Frédéric Chopin, Aleksandr Scriabin, Domenico Scarlatti, and Sergey Prokofiev were admired for their technical precision and dynamic range. His interpretations of keyboard miniatures, such as Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes of Childhood), were noted for their delicacy.

Horowitz entered the Kiev conservatory at age 12. While a student, he preferred composing to giving concerts, and only after his family had been left destitute by World War I and the Russian Revolution did he make his concert debut (1922, Kharkov). His reputation was assured in the Soviet Union when, at age 20, he played a series of 23 recitals in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with no duplications, performing a total of more than 200 works. Spectacular successes followed in European and American tours. In 1933 he married Arturo Toscanini's daughter, Wanda. He settled in the United States in 1940, becoming a citizen in 1944. From 1953 to 1965 he withdrew completely from the concert stage, although he continued to make recordings. His return to the American concert stage after 12 years' absence and again briefly in 1974 and 1981 were musical events of great moment. Then, in 1982, after 31 years' absence he capped his career by touring Europe once again. In 1986 he returned to the Soviet Union to perform two concerts. His final tour was a series of recitals in Europe in 1987. He was buried in the Toscanini family plot in Milan, Italy.

Ulanova, Galina

▪ Russian ballerina

in full Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova

born December 26, 1909 [January 8, 1910, New Style], St. Petersburg, Russia

died March 21, 1998, Moscow

first prima ballerina assoluta of the Soviet Union and one of the greatest ballet dancers of the 20th century.

The daughter of dancers Sergey Ulanov and Marie Romanova of the Mariinsky Ballet (called the Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet during the Soviet period), Ulanova was trained in the Leningrad State School of Choreography, where she studied under Agrippina Vaganova (Vaganova, Agrippina). After graduating in 1928 she joined the Kirov Theatre, where her first major creation was the role of Maria in R.V. Zakharov's Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1934). Another important creation in L.M. Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet (1940) displayed her skill as a dramatic dancer. She also excelled in such classical ballets as Giselle and Swan Lake.

In 1944 Ulanova was transferred to the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. Her first appearance outside the Soviet Union was in Florence in 1951. She gained instant popular acclaim when she danced with the Bolshoi company at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1956. She traveled with the Bolshoi to several other countries, making her American debut in 1959 and winning accolades for Giselle and Romeo and Juliet. Her performances in films of the Bolshoi Ballet did much to increase world interest in ballet.

A lyrical dancer in the tradition of Anna Pavlova (Pavlova, Anna), Ulanova was considered the embodiment of the Soviet school of ballet. After retiring from dancing in 1960, she coached young dancers (notably the ballerina Yekaterina Maksimova in Giselle), served as ballet mistress of the Bolshoi Theatre, and occasionally wrote dance articles for Soviet journals.

Pavlova, Anna

▪ Russian ballerina

in full Anna Pavlovna Pavlova

born Jan. 31 [Feb. 12, New Style], 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Jan. 23, 1931, The Hague, Neth.

Russian ballerina, the most celebrated dancer of her time.

Pavlova studied at the Imperial School of Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre from 1891, joined the Imperial Ballet in 1899, and became a prima ballerina in 1906. In 1909 she went to Paris on the historic tour of the Ballets Russes. After 1913 she danced independently with her own company throughout the world.

The place and time of Pavlova's birth could hardly have been better for a child with an innate talent for dancing. Tsarist Russia maintained magnificent imperial schools for the performing arts. Entry was by examination, and, although Pavlova's mother was poor—Anna's father had died when she was two years old—the child was accepted for training at the Imperial School of Ballet at the Mariinsky (Mariinsky Ballet) Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1891.

Following ballet tradition, Pavlova learned her art from teachers who were themselves great dancers. She graduated to the Imperial Ballet in 1899 and rose steadily through the grades to become prima ballerina in 1906. By this time she had already danced Giselle with considerable success.

Almost immediately, in 1907, the pattern of her life began to emerge. That year, with a few other dancers, she went on a European tour to Riga, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Prague. She was acclaimed, and another tour took place in 1908. In 1909 the impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich) staged a historic season of Russian ballet in Paris, and Pavlova appeared briefly with the company there and later in London. But her experience of touring with a small group had given her a taste for independence, and she never became part of Diaghilev's closely knit Ballets Russes. Her destiny was not, as was theirs, to innovate but simply to show the beauties of classical ballet throughout the world. While she was still taking leave from the Mariinsky Theatre, she danced in New York City and London in 1910 with Mikhail Mordkin.

Once she left the Imperial Ballet in 1913, her frontiers were extended. For the rest of her life, with various partners (including Laurent Novikov and Pierre Vladimirov) and companies, she was a wandering missionary for her art, giving a vast number of people their introduction to ballet. Whatever the limitations of the rest of the company, which inevitably was largely a well-trained, dedicated band of young disciples, Pavlova's own performances left those who watched them with a lasting memory of disciplined grace, poetic movement, and incarnate magic. Her quality was, above all, the powerful and elusive one of true glamour.

Pavlova's independent tours, which began in 1914, took her to remote parts of the world. These tours were managed by her husband, Victor Dandré. The repertoire of Anna Pavlova's company was in large part conventional. They danced excerpts or adaptations of Mariinsky successes such as Don Quixote, La Fille mal gardée (“The Girl Poorly Managed”), The Fairy Doll, or Giselle, of which she was an outstanding interpreter. The most famous numbers, however, were the succession of ephemeral solos, which were endowed by her with an inimitable enchantment: The Dragonfly, Californian Poppy, Gavotte, and Christmas are names that lingered in the thoughts of her audiences, together with her single choreographic endeavour, Autumn Leaves (1918).

Pavlova's enthusiasm for ethnic dances was reflected in her programs. Polish, Russian, and Mexican dances were performed. Her visits to India and Japan led her to a serious study of their dance techniques. She compiled these studies into Oriental Impressions, collaborating on the Indian scenes with Uday Shankar (Shankar, Uday), later to become one of the greatest performers of Indian dance, and in this way playing an important part in the renaissance of the dance in India.

Because she was the company's raison d'être, the source of its public appeal, and, therefore, its financial stability, Pavlova's burden was extreme. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that, by the end of her life, her technique was faltering, and she was relying increasingly on her unique qualities of personality.

Pavlova's personal life was undramatic apart from occasional professional headlines, as when, in 1911, she quarreled with Mordkin. For some time she kept secret her marriage to her manager, Victor Dandré, and there were no children; her maternal instincts spent themselves on her company and on a home for Russian refugee orphans, which she founded in Paris in 1920. She loved birds and animals, and her home in London, Ivy House, Hampstead, became famous for the ornamental lake with swans, beside which she was photographed and filmed, recalling her most famous solo, The Dying Swan, which the choreographer Michel Fokine (Fokine, Michel) had created for her in 1905. These film sequences are among the few extant of her and are included in a compilation called The Immortal Swan, together with some extracts from her solos filmed one afternoon in Hollywood, in 1924, by the actor Douglas Fairbanks (Fairbanks, Douglas), Sr.

Kathrine Sorley Walker

Additional Reading

Works discussing Pavlova's life and career include Victor Dandré, Anna Pavlova (1932, reprinted as Anna Pavlova in Art & Life, 1979), a tribute from her husband written immediately after her death; Theodore Stier, With Pavlova Round the World (1927); and Walford Hyden, Pavlova (1931), two accounts of touring with Pavlova written by her musical directors; Harcourt Algeranoff, My Years with Pavlova (1957), one of Pavlova's leading dancers writing of his time with her company; A.H. Franks (ed.), Pavlova (1956, reprinted 1981), a symposium contributed by people who knew Pavlova, compiled for the 25th anniversary of her death; Oleg Kerensky, Anna Pavlova (1973); André Olivéroff, Flight of the Swan (1932, reprinted 1979); John Lazzarini and Roberta Lazzarini, Pavlova: Repertoire of a Legend (1980), a photographic catalog of her career; and Keith Money, Anna Pavlova, Her Life and Art

Bolshoi Ballet

▪ Russian ballet company

also spelled Bolshoy Ballet

(Russian: “Great Ballet”), leading ballet company of Russia (and the Soviet Union), famous for elaborately staged productions of the classics and children's ballets that preserve the traditions of 19th-century classical dance. The Bolshoi Ballet took that name in 1825, when the new Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow took over the ballet company of its predecessor, the Petrovsky Theatre, which had been established in 1776. The company's style, later called “the Moscow style,” gradually emerged, more spontaneous and influenced by Russian folklore than the traditional style that was the hallmark of the St. Petersburg companies.

Throughout the 19th century, such prominent choreographers as Marius Petipa, Carlo Blasis, and Arthur Saint-Léon staged productions at the Bolshoi Theatre. After a period of decline at the end of the 19th century, Aleksandr Gorsky was appointed maître de ballet in 1900. He once again shaped a first-rate company and introduced the realism in scenery and costume that has since characterized the group's productions. By the 1960s the Bolshoi Ballet was one of the world's foremost ballet companies. Yuri Grigorovich was the company's artistic director from 1964 to 1995. The Bolshoi ballet school has officially been known since 1961 as the Moscow Academic Choreographic School.

Vysotsky, Vladimir

▪ Soviet actor, singer, and author

in full Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky

born January 25, 1938, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

died July 24, 1980, Moscow

Russian actor, poet, songwriter, and performer who was considered “the voice of the heart of a nation.” His wide-ranging and forthright poems were considered subversive by the Soviet authorities and were barred from publication, but they were the cultural lifeblood for many Russians. Vysotsky was an immensely popular figure who continued to be revered, read, and listened to long after his death.

Vysotsky's parents were divorced soon after his birth, and he lived mostly with his mother (a technical translator), first in Buzuluk and then (from 1945) in Moscow. He attended the Institute of Civil Engineering for a year (1955–56) but quit to join the Nemirovich-Danchenko Studio School of the Moscow Art Theatre. He graduated in 1960 and became a professional actor, first at the Moscow Pushkin Dramatic Theatre and then at the Theatre of Miniatures (i.e., “Playlets”). From 1964 he was a member of the Moscow Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka, where he starred notably as Hamlet. He also was featured in several films and on television.

His great popularity as an actor was perhaps even exceeded by his popularity as a poet and songwriter; he wrote several hundred songs and poems, as well as incidental music for plays and films. Soviet officialdom permitted few of his songs to be sung on television or in films or to be recorded. His reputation spread by means of his appearances in clubs, factories, and universities and through the mass distribution of homemade (and illegal) tape recordings (magnitizdat) and typescripts and mechanical copies (samizdat). His lyrical themes ranged from Soviet prison life and internal exile (“Only the final judgment could be worse”) and Soviet official hypocrisy (“I grieve that honour has been put to rout, that backbiting has been deified”) to the exigencies of Russian daily life (crowded living quarters, long food lines, unfair privileges of the elite). More than simply reflecting a difficult reality, he gave many of his fellow citizens the strength to go on.

He died at age 42 of a heart attack brought on, it was said, by his hard-drinking lifestyle. In the late 1980s the Soviet government began allowing the publication of his poetry and song lyrics.