Vladimir Stasov’s Mighty Five: The Orientalizing Quest and the Counter-Semitic Struggle for the Musical Soul of the Russian People

Following the death of Glinka, whose contributions had been so seminal, the Russian nationalist spirit in music would be developed and expanded by the critic and historian Vladimir Stasov and composer Mily Balakirev’s circle, known collectively as “The Five” or “The Mighty Handful”. Stasov “was a very formidable critic of the day, a great supporter of, and a champion of, Russian artists and Russian composers and writers,” relates Michael Parloff.

He was an influence on whole generations of Russian nationalist artists […] and it really was he who established the precepts upon which he thought that Russian music should be composed for the remaining years of the nineteenth century. To give you a sense of it, he felt that Russian art, Russian literature, Russian music, it needed to be freed from the grip of the Europeans. He thought that if you continued to write European-influenced music or literature or art, that the best that you could create was second-rate European art. And he felt that, in order to do that, one thing you had to do was to give up on European models and institutionalized forms of learning and technique and write from your instinct, from your deep Russian soul. He also felt that, since […] the Russian Empire encompassed Asian nationalities as well, that exoticism and orientalism were to be encouraged, and so you have pieces like Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov coming out of this movement, or Tamara by Mily Balakirev, which is about a sorceress from the Caucasus mountains. He also thought that anytime you can write a piece with programmatic elements incorporating images from fairytales and Russian legends, that was good, and of course this overlay of Russian folk music, this was all very much what he was trying to accomplish. We remember him particularly because he’s the one who codified and began to recruit around him this myth of “The Mighty Five” or “The Mighty Handful”, these young men who included Mily Balakirev and Alexander Borodin and Modest Mussorgsky and Cesar Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov. They all would gather together on Saturday evenings at his home and they would read for him piano music and they would discuss literature and poetry and mostly the direction that music should go [for] the remainder of the nineteenth century.1

The most influential of the Five was Balakirev, whom Glinka had deemed a “second Glinka”. “What we mostly remember him for is that he had this Svengali-like control over the other members of what were to become the Mighty Five in the 1860s,” Parloff recounts. “They were, like Glinka, all from the upper classes.” Balakirev “impressed them, he dazzled them, he gathered them into his orbit, he was the central sun around […] which the others orbited.” “We don’t hear a great deal of his music anymore,” Parloff observes of Balakirev’s current standing2 – although his Islamey and Tamara, both examples of the exotic and pagan themes favored by Stasov – as well his First and boisterous Second Symphonies – are readily accessible online.

Alexander Borodin may have had the most versatile mind of the Five. A notable chemist and an advocate of women’s education in addition to being a great composer, he is responsible for the unforgettable “Polovtsian Dances” from the unfinished opera Prince Igor. Much of his music was too western in style, however, to meet with the full approval of his more nationalistic peers. “In 1875 Borodin reported to a friend that he was working on his First String Quartet in A ‘to the horror of Stasov and Modest [Mussorgsky]’,” writes David Lloyd-Jones. “The horror expressed by his friends was occasioned by the fear that Borodin was surrendering himself to the charms of teutonically academic ‘pure’ music in a way that was inconsistent with the tenets of the St. Petersburg nationalist composers.”3

Mussorgsky, most famous for his Pictures at an Exhibition, possessed perhaps the greatest musical talent in the group. He was, unfortunately, “a severe alcoholic, and the last six years of his life were just one prolonged alcoholic debauch,” laments Parloff.

He had a very difficult life. Enormously talented […] and, perhaps, of all the Five, he’s the one who took Stasov and Balakirev most seriously when they said, don’t study European models; write out of the depths of your deep, dark, Russian soul. And he did it, and so his music is the least derivative and the most original and he paid a high price for that because people had a lot of difficulty understanding quite what he was after, and some of his music struck even his closest friends and colleagues as a little crude and maybe full of mistakes […] and it really was during the twentieth century that Russian composers began to look back on him and say he was the true voice of the Russian soul in the nineteenth-century music-making and Shostakovich himself kept a portrait of Mussorgsky on his writing table as inspiration.4

“A visit to Moscow in the summer of 1859 fired his patriotic imagination and provided him with one of the deepest experiences of his youth,” Gerald Abraham writes of Mussorgsky. “He wrote to Balakirev, ‘You know I have been a cosmopolitan, but now I have undergone a sort of rebirth: I have been brought near to everything Russian’.”5 Mussorgsky shared with the realist painter Ilya Repin “a disdain for formal beauty and technical polish and every other manifestation of ‘art for art’s sake’; the desire to relate his art as closely as possible to life, especially to that of the Russian masses; to nourish his art on events and in turn to employ it as a medium for communicating human experience; and a somewhat self-conscious and aggressive Russianness and an intense sympathy with the Russian peasant, newly freed from serfdom.”6

“Of the Five, the one who was the most prolific as a composer and probably the least talented as a composer was César Cui,” remarks Parloff, who goes on to characterize Cui unflatteringly:

He wrote, I think, about fifteen or sixteen operas, most of which have been forgotten […] I know, it’s not really very nice of me to make fun of him this way, but I think he deserved it because […] he was, perhaps, the least inspired composer but he had by far the biggest mouth. He became the leading critic for the St. Petersburg press and in that guise he wrote reams of amazingly opinionated and gratuitously nasty reviews and probably the most nasty of all, the one we remember, is the one that he wrote in 1897 at the time of the review of the First Symphony of Sergei Rachmaninoff […] Cui wrote, “If there were a conservatory in Hell, and one of its talented students were to compose a program symphony based on the ten plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly. It would delight the inhabitants of Hell.”7

Ideologically and racially, the Mighty Handful found themselves in conflict with the academicism of Anton Rubinstein, who in 1862 founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, “which was very much and very consciously a western-European-style musical institution, and of course this flew in the face of what Stasov and Balakirev were trying to accomplish; and, angrily they opened up their own rival conservatory called the Free School of Music there in St. Petersburg, and it didn’t do very well,” relates Parloff. Rimsky-Korsakov, renowned for his mastery of orchestration, was invited to take a teaching post at Rubinstein’s St. Petersburg Conservatory, “and, of course, this was the other side of the musical fence, but he said okay, which made him into a kind of a turncoat in the minds of the Balakirevs of the world.” The necessity to stay a step ahead of his students drove Rimsky-Korsakov to intensify his own studies and thereby refine his technique, “and he became enormously effective as a teacher and was a huge influence on many composers in the course of the twentieth century – Stravinsky, particularly,” Parloff notes – in addition to the legacy Rimsky-Korsakov left with such pieces as the Capriccio Espagnol, Russian Easter Festival Overture, and Scheherazade8.

On the other hand, “Balakirev opposed academicism with tremendous vigor,” writes Francis Maes, who condescendingly characterizes the Mighty Five leader’s distaste for Rubinstein as partially motivated by envious spite – and anti-Semitism, of course:

He considered academic training to be of no help, indeed to be a threat, to the musical imagination. This attitude, a mere rationalization of his own lack of technical training, sufficed to make him Rubinstein’s sworn opponent. The fervor with which he fought Rubinstein reflected his anger at the enviable niche Rubinstein, as the only Russian musician able to live on his art, had carved out for himself. The conflict between these two men, then, was above all one of personal rivalry. Their ideological quarrels disguised the real stakes: a viable music career. […] Balakirev had no other source of income than his music lessons and his piano recitals in the salons of the aristocracy. He was therefore determined to take the wind out of Rubinstein’s sails, for in St. Petersburg a conductor or composer had no other alternative professionally than to become artistic director of the Russian Musical Society. Balakirev attacked Rubinstein on two flanks: for his conservative taste and for his advocacy of professional training. Balakirev had many followers who were not afraid to speak out bluntly. Mussorgsky, for example, called the conservatory a place where Rubinstein and [Nikolai] Zaremba, dressed “in professional, antimusical togas, first pollute their students’ minds, then seal them with various abominations.” Balakirev’s dislike of Rubinstein also had a petty personal side. He had not forgotten how hurt Glinka had been by Rubinstein’s critical article of 1855. Glinka had expressed his anger in a style that was unreservedly anti-Semitic – an attitude that Balakirev and Mussorgsky both ardently shared. As his personal situation became more difficult, Balakirev’s nationalism turned into undisguised xenophobia. As far as he was concerned, Rubinstein, of German and Jewish descent, was an alien, and the Russian Musical Society was little more than a German club, founded, according to the rumor that he helped to spread, for the express purpose of benefiting Germans.9

Balakirev’s “tactless and despotic character and his fiery advocacy of musical nationalism had gained for him many enemies […] and sometimes strained his relations with his own group,” Gerald Abraham relates. He “put all his energy into the work of the Free School, giving five subscription concerts in the winter of 1869-70 in open rivalry with the Russian Musical Society,” Abraham continues:

But he drew no salary from the school, which received no official subsidy, and he now had to support his two sisters. A concert at [his birthplace] Nizhny-Novgorod in September 1870, from which he hoped much, brought him a profit of only 11 rubles: a double blow to his finances and his self-esteem. Early in 1871 he passed through a mental and spiritual crisis; his friends found in him “no trace of his former self”, and he appeared inwardly lifeless. He came under the influence of a soothsayer and, from a freethinker, became – and remained for the rest of his life – a bigoted and eccentrically superstitious Orthodox Christian. In August of that year it was even rumoured among his friends that he had gone out of his mind; he avoided them and seemed quite indifferent to music.10

After another series of unprofitable subscription concerts, Balakirev “took a post as overseer in the goods department of the Warsaw Railway, which brought him a salary of 80 rubles a month; in his spare time he gave music lessons,” Abraham continues:

But he soon lost his railway post and was obliged to support himself entirely by teaching, though after a time he was appointed supervisor of the musical classes in two schools. Balakirev remained nominally director of the Free School until the spring of 1874 when – as he never appeared there – he was asked to resign in favor of Rimsky-Korsakov. For four years, until the summer of 1876, he kept away from his old friends and took no part in musical life. Then, under the influence of Lyudmila Shestakova, he began to revive: working a little at the symphonic poem Tamara […] interfering in Rimsky-Korsakov’s management of the Free School, resuming […] his editorial work on Glinka’s scores. In October 1881 he agreed to resume the direction of the Free School, which Rimsky-Korsakov had resigned. He also took over the conducting of the concerts once more, completed Tamara during July-September 1882, and performed it at a Free School concert on 19 March 1883. In the meantime (on 15 February 1883), after 16 months of string-pulling by influential Orthodox friends, notably the folksong enthusiast T.I. Filippov, Balakirev was appointed director of the Imperial Court Chapel with Rimsky-Korsakov as his assistant. […] He appeared from time to time as an orchestral conductor, notably at concerts to collect funds for the Glinka memorial at Smolensk and at the unveiling of the memorial on 6 June 1885, but his compositions during this period were few […] he created a scandal by his public refusal to participate in the celebration of […] Anton Rubinstein’s [jubilee] – on the ground that Rubinstein had done nothing but harm to Russian music. In 1890 his relations with Rimsky-Korsakov, long strained, came to an almost complete breach, but in compensation for the loss of old friends through death or estrangement, he had gathered about him a new group of younger men of whom the most distinguished was the composer [Sergei] Lyapunov, his devoted disciple from 1884 onward11.

As Rimsky-Korsakov relates, Balakirev was a less-than-amicable companion after converting to Orthodoxy, at which point he allegedly began to suspect all of those he detested of being Jewish. “All this medley of Christian meekness, backbiting, fondness for beasts, misanthropy, artistic interests, and a triviality worthy of an old maid from a hospice, all these struck everyone who saw him in those days,” recollected Rimsky-Korsakov in his autobiography12. Balakirev retired from the Imperial Chapel on a pension and enjoyed a late burst of musical productivity during the 1890s. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the composer was “living in complete retirement, ignored and forgotten by almost everyone outside his immediate circle,” finally dying in 191013. Whatever their differences and personal and professional estrangements, however, the Mighty Five are at least reunited in death, all buried in St. Petersburg’s Tikhvin Cemetery, together with fellow Russian nationalists Mikhail Glinka, Vladimir Stasov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Piotr Tchaikovsky.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

[Read more about the classical tradition at Aryan Skynet: “Prelude to the Afternoon of a French Edgelord: Claude Debussy as Identitarian Artist and Innovator of Impressionism – and Jazz?”; “Prokofiev and the Revival of Nationalism in Soviet Music”; “More Polish Than Poland: Chopin and Nationalism”; “Mikhail Glinka Hails the Dawn of Russian Nationalism in the Classical Tradition”]

Endnotes

Parloff, Michael. “Encounter 1: Searching for the Musical Soul of Russia, Part 1” (July 15, 2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqU_77oz7zg Ibid. Brown, David, et al. The New Grove Russian Masters 1. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986, p. 65. Parloff, Michael. “Encounter 1: Searching for the Musical Soul of Russia, Part 1” (July 15, 2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqU_77oz7zg Brown, David, et al. The New Grove Russian Masters 1. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986, pp. 110-111. Ibid., p. 131-132. Parloff, Michael. “Encounter 1: Searching for the Musical Soul of Russia, Part 1” (July 15, 2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqU_77oz7zg Ibid. Maes, Francis. A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006, p. 39. Brown, David, et al. The New Grove Russian Masters 1. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986, pp. 84-85. Ibid., pp. 85-87. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mily_Balakirev#Personal_life Brown, David, et al. The New Grove Russian Masters 1. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986, pp. 88-90.

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