Russian classical music

The 19th-century romantic period saw the largest development of this genre, with the emergence in particular of The Five, a group of composers associated with Mily Balakirev, and of the more German style of Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Diletsky's followers included Vasily Titov, whose most enduring composition was the prayer Mnogaya leta (Многая лета), or Bol'shoe mnogoletie (Большое многолетие), which was sung well beyond his time possibly because its relatively simple polyphony was more in line with the ideals of Classical music era.

A group that called itself "The Mighty Five", headed by Mily Balakirev (1837–1910) and including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), Alexander Borodin (1833–1887) and César Cui (1835–1918), proclaimed its purpose to compose and popularize Russian national traditions in classical music.

Among the Mighty Five's most notable compositions were the operas The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka), Sadko, Boris Godunov, Prince Igor, Khovanshchina, and symphonic suite Scheherazade.

Many of the works by Glinka and the Mighty Five were based on Russian history, folk tales and literature, and are regarded as masterpieces of romantic nationalism in music.

However the RMS founded Russia's first Conservatories in St Petersburg and in Moscow: the former trained the great Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93), best known for ballets like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw the third wave of Russian classics: Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975).

[5] (A notable example: Shostakovich's veristic opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was denounced in Pravda newspaper as "formalism" and soon removed from theatres for years).