His songs were praised for their homely sensibility and ruminative harmonic language, albeit encased in simple yet effect forms that appealed to the at-home Amateurs and seasons musicians alike.
Titov also had a younger brother named Mikhail Alekseyevich, who was likewise a notable and technically proficient composer of romances, salon plays, and other small genres during the 19th century.
In 1830 he retired for domestic reasons to Pavlovsk, but in 1833, at the suggestion of the sovereign himself, he again entered military service - in the Life Guards of His Imperial Highness, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich's Ulan Regiment.
More colloquially known as the Enlightened Amateur status, this class of non-specialist yet highly passionate individuals had been the vital cornerstone of cultural development in Russia during the 19th century, as due to salons, balls, and other artistically-minded groups had sprung up everywhere, giving members of the Russian aristocracy and well-off individuals the chance to create and contribute, despite their varying degrees of formalistic training.
Additionally, his Uncle Sergei Titov and cousin Nikolai Sergeyevich were also involved in the compositional atmosphere in Russia, although their presences and works have all but been forgotten.
Although Titov's notoriety as an evocative and well-developed Amateur composer, Benefactor and highly venerated Salon host, his compositional career had no straight path nor prediction for future success.
Beginning around 1819, his love of music started to grow and he then began dabbling in composition, producing rudimentary works as exercises before finally creating one of his first pieces, that being a romance around the anonymous poem[6] "Rendez la moi cette femme chérie."
However, due to his late-blooming and fairly self-taught stature, using the theoretical teachings and works of Italian composers like Giovanni Zamboni and Carlo Evasio Soliva to improve his technical capabilities and create his aesthetic pallet, he was never able to progress farther than Amateur status and enter in the grosser historical record.
Despite his social success as a Romance composer, alongside contemporaries like Alyabyev, Verstovsky, and Varlamov, he never developed further than salon repertoire and other more elementary forms and was noted as being harmonically and structurally simple in comparison with his father's practiced aptitude.
Additionally, in 1824 he began publishing his military marches which became instantly popular and were used thoroughly within the Courts, so much so that he had regular, commission work from Grand Dukes Nikolai and Mikhail Pavlovich themselves.
Because of his taste for dance provocations, albeit within the context of simpler overall designs, his works tend to use upbeat rhythms in the guise of more conventional forms.
His works were imbued with an authentic air through utilizing simple and more comprehensible forms, coupled with an unfettered harmonic framework creating in-turn a profoundly inviting and pleasurable effect.
Titov's public appeal came from his expert command of melody, which adhered to typical song form (ABA), resulting in a cyclical aesthetic which was easily recognizable and catchy.
Additionally, Titov's piano works, while less dramatic and more miniature in size, were popular among Amateur, home audiences for their simplistic beauty and attainable, yet emotionally effective, language.
Despite the haughty nickname, the genre of Russian romance had prematurely existed well before Titov's popularizing, about 10–15 years earlier with the experimental creations by long forgotten composers like K. Shalikov, one of the first to use the word "virtuoso" in published musical critique,[7] and Prince Pavel Ivanovich Dolgorukov.
The changing tastes and proclivity for balls and cotillions, formal social events, and more intimate gatherings of the Russian aristocracy and well-to-do gentry, along with a greater proliferation of musical access in all other classes, meant that there was a requirement not only for dance-like repertoire, but easy-to-understand and melody-driven songs which could touch the listener via emotional appeals and earnest passion.