Russia

The 19th century

Before the 18th century, Russian music was dominated by folk and church music. Secular music on a Western model began to be cultivated in the 1730s, when the Empress Anna Ivanovna imported an Italian opera troupe to entertain her court. By the end of the 18th century, there was a small body of comic operas based on Russian librettos, some by native composers and others by foreign maestri di cappella (Italian: “choirmasters”). The first Russian composer to gain international renown was Mikhail Glinka, a leisured aristocrat who mastered his craft in Milan and Berlin. His patriotic A Life for the Tsar (1836) and his Pushkin-inspired Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842) are the oldest Russian operas that remain in the standard repertoire.

By the second half of the 19th century, an active musical life was in place, thanks mainly to the efforts of the composer and piano virtuoso Anton Rubinstein, who with royal patronage founded in St. Petersburg Russia’s first regular professional orchestra (1859) and conservatory of music (1862). Both became models that were quickly imitated in other urban centres. The first major full-time professional composer in Russia was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a member of the initial graduating class of Rubinstein’s conservatory. Tchaikovsky’s powerful compositions (e.g., Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty) are still performed widely today. Other composers of Tchaikovsky’s generation were self-taught and usually earned their living in nonmusical occupations. They include Modest Mussorgsky, who worked in the civil service, Aleksandr Borodin, equally famous in his day as a chemist, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, who eventually gave up a naval career to become a professor at the St. Petersburg conservatory. The self-taught composers tended to effect a more self-consciously nationalistic style than the conservatory-bred Tchaikovsky, and among their most important works were operas such as Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (final version first performed 1874) and Borodin’s Prince Igor (first perf. 1890), along with Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphony Scheherazade (first perf. 1888).