Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and The Five
Along with critic Vladimir Stasov, who supported The Five, Balakirev attacked relentlessly both the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which Tchaikovsky had graduated, and its founder Anton Rubinstein, orally and in print.
[1] As Tchaikovsky had become Rubinstein's best-known student, he was initially considered by association as a natural target for attack, especially as fodder for Cui's printed critical reviews.
[3] When Tchaikovsky wrote a positive review of Rimsky-Korsakov's Fantasy on Serbian Themes he was welcomed into the circle, despite concerns about the academic nature of his musical background.
[6] He took pains to ensure his musical independence from them as well as from the conservative faction at the Conservatory—an outcome facilitated by his acceptance of a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory offered to him by Nikolai Rubinstein, Anton's brother.
[17] Looking forward instead of backward, they saw Russia as a youthful and inexperienced but with the potential of becoming the most advanced European civilization by borrowing from Europe and turning its liabilities into assets.
[23] Nevertheless, despite a few derogatory comments about Glinka's use of "coachman's music," A Life became popular enough to earn obtain permanent repertory status, the first Russian opera to do so in that country.
[29] Nobles spent enormous sums on musical performances for their exclusive enjoyment and hosted visiting artists such as Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt but there were no ongoing concert societies, no critical press and no public eagerly anticipating new works.
[30] Composer and pianist Anton Rubinstein's founding of the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the Saint Petersburg Conservatory three years later were giant steps toward remedying this situation but also proved highly controversial ones.
Around Christmas 1855, Glinka was visited by Alexander Ulybyshev, a rich Russian amateur critic, and his 18-year-old protégé Mily Balakirev, who was reportedly on his way to becoming a great pianist.
[40] In 1856, Balakirev and critic Vladimir Stasov, who publicly espoused a nationalist agenda for Russian arts, started gathering young composers through whom to spread ideas and gain a following.
Stasov wrote, "May God grant that [the audience retains] for ever a memory of how much poetry, feeling, talent and ability is possessed by the small but already mighty handful [moguchaya kuchka] of Russian musicians".
Subtitled the Little Russian (Little Russia was the term at that time for what is now called Ukraine) for its use of Ukrainian folk songs, the symphony in its initial version also used several compositional devices similar to those used by the Five in their work.
In submitting the manuscript (and perhaps mindful of Cui's review of the cantata), Tchaikovsky included a note to Balakirev that ended with a request for a word of encouragement should the Dances not be performed.
[70] Balakirev discarded many of the early drafts Tchaikovsky sent him and, with the flurry of suggestions between the two men, the piece was constantly in the mail between Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
[78] Moreover, he had come to a creative dead-end upon completing his opera The Maid of Pskov and realized that developing a solid musical technique was the only way he could continue composing.
[8] When Rimsky-Korsakov underwent a change in attitude on music education and began his own intensive studies privately, his fellow nationalists accused him of throwing away his Russian heritage to compose fugues and sonatas.
[83] Tchaikovsky was ready for the nourishment of new attitudes and styles so he could continue growing as a composer, and his brother Modest writes that he was impressed by the "force and vitality" in some of the Five's work.
In his brother Modest's opinion, Tchaikovsky's relations with the Saint Petersburg group resembled "those between two friendly neighboring states ... cautiously prepared to meet on common ground, but jealously guarding their separate interests".
[84] Tchaikovsky played the finale of his Second Symphony, subtitled the Little Russian, at a gathering at Rimsky-Korsakov's house in Saint Petersburg on 7 January 1873, before the official premiere of the entire work.
[88] Balakirev had withdrawn completely from the musical scene, Mussorgsky was sinking ever deeper into alcoholism, and Borodin's creative activities increasingly took a back seat to his official duties as a professor of chemistry.
Like Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov had found that, for his own artistic growth to continue unabated, he had to study and master Western classical forms and techniques.
Borodin called it "apostasy", adding, "Many are grieved at present by the fact that Korsakov has turned back, has thrown himself into a study of musical antiquity.
[89] Tchaikovsky wrote to Nadezhda von Meck that all of the kuchka were talented but also "infected to the core" with conceit and "a purely dilettantish confidence in their superiority.
[95] Tchaikovsky's mind was changed two years later, in the Swiss Alps, while tending to his friend Iosif Kotek and after he had re-read Manfred in the milieu in which the poem is set.
It also became the longest, most complex work he had written up to that point, and though it owes an obvious debt to Berlioz due to its program, Tchaikovsky was still able to make the theme of Manfred his own.
This group was named after timber merchant Mitrofan Belyayev, an amateur musician who became an influential music patron and publisher after he had taken an interest in Glazunov's work.
[104] A side benefit of Tchaikovsky's friendship with Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov was an increased confidence in his own abilities as a composer, along with a willingness to let his musical works stand alongside those of his contemporaries.
This group, while writing in a nationalistic style pioneered by Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev,[107] was much more accommodating of Western compositional practices as personified by the music of Tchaikovsky.
[112]Rimsky-Korsakov wrote about the changes in the Belyayev group: At this time [approximately 1892] there begins to be noticeable a considerable cooling off and even somewhat inimical attitude toward the memory of the "mighty kuchka" of Balakirev's period.
[113]As a result of this influence plus their academic training from Rimsky-Korsakov, especially in the cases of Anton Arensky and Glazunov, these composers combined the best compositional techniques of The Five and Tchaikovsky in their music.
