It was also influenced by Schumann's Rhenish Symphony, a work which was highly regarded in the Balakirev circle.
[1] While the symphony itself was a resounding success, the audience was even more astonished to see a teenage boy come to the stage to take his bows in his school uniform.
He displayed his musical talent early, was discovered by Mily Balakirev (former leader of The Mighty Handful) and further encouraged by his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who gave him a thorough grounding in counterpoint, form, harmony and orchestration between 1879 and 1881,[2] during which Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in his memoirs that it seemed Glazunov did not progress so much from day to day as from hour to hour.
After two years, as Glazunov remembered, Rimsky-Korsakov told his pupil "that henceforth he regarded it as unnecessary to instruct me systematically, in return for payment, as I had already more or less become a mature musician.
In addition I played that passage to Balakirev, who approved of it in general but advised me to add something after the presentation of the two themes, before the repetition of the beginning.