Mily Balakirev
Although the Russian composer is best known for his influence on others, his own music displays flashes of real genius, says David Nice
The case of Mily Alekseyevich Balakirev is a strange one. As a composer he created only a handful of minor masterpieces and, of those, two took years to complete: the symphonic poem Tamara appeared a decade and a half after its inception, and the Symphony No. 1, begun in 1866, was finished in 1897. As an influencer, he undeniably moulded and helped bring to fruition the early works of the composers he gathered around him. But the group that has gone down in history as The Mighty Handful (moguchaya kuchka – literally ‘the mighty little heap’) or The Five only existed as a tightly knit group for a decade or so before the others went on to greater things.
We have My Musical Life, the fairminded and lively autobiography of Rimsky-korsakov, to thank for the fullest picture of Balakirev the mentor, and for an appraisal of his virtues and drawbacks – chief of which was his own lack of a full, systematic musical education. Undoubtedly he had genius and, as a protégé of Alexander Ulybyshev in his native Nizhny Novgorod, he was lucky to have it nurtured. Ulybyshev, author of a three-volume study of Mozart, was the wealthy owner of the nearby estate of Lukino, and Balakirev appeared at his soirées as pianist and conductor of Ulybyshev’s serf orchestra.
In St Petersburg the adolescent Balakirev made his name performing his own first works. Among his earliest compositions, which took a different direction from Ulybyshev’s Western orientation, were the Fantasy on Russian Themes for piano and orchestra and a solo work based on a trio from the first true Russian opera, Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar of 1836. Balakirev was fortunate to meet the so-called ‘father of Russian music’ in St Petersburg just before Glinka made his final journey abroad. ‘Glinka was not mistaken in seeing in this youth his heir and successor,’ wrote critic Vladimir Stasov, who would become an important advisor to The Five.
Balakirev’s disciples came to him in pairs: César Cui and Musorgsky at the end of the 1850s; Rimsky-korsakov and
Balakirev became leader of The Mighty Handful by virtue of talent and charisma
Borodin in the early 1860s. Although
Cui was 18 months older and Borodin his senior by three years, Balakirev, a young man in his early twenties and more or less a self-taught composer, became their leader by virtue of talent and charisma.
Rimsky-korsakov, who came to Balakirev as a 17-year-old naval cadet, hero-worshipped the leader, but with hindsight could trace his own growing disenchantment back to his less than solid musical roots. The younger composer felt that he should have been given a few lessons in harmony and counterpoint, including writing fugues, and that he should have been given an idea of musical forms. He also thought that Balakirev should have made him sit down at the piano, learn to play well and acquire a good technique. ‘That was so easy for him, as I idolised him and followed his advice in
everything,’ Rimsky-korsakov wrote, ‘but he did not do it; declaring from the start that I was no pianist, he abandoned the whole thing as totally unnecessary.
‘He could not do it, as he had not studied systematically himself and considered it unnecessary; also he did not tell me to study with someone else… And I, who did not know the names of all intervals and chords, to whom harmony meant but the far-famed prohibition of parallel octaves and fifths, who had no idea as to what double counterpoint was, or the meaning of cadence, thesis and antithesis, and period, I set out to compose a symphony.’
So, weirdly, it was Rimsky-korsakov who produced what the circle regarded as ‘the first Russian symphony’, premiered in 1865 – the earlier examples of Anton Rubinstein were discounted because
The Five felt that, as the founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory, the first conservatoire in Russia, he was tainted by academic precepts from the West. Balakirev took decades to complete his own First Symphony, in part because he was devoted to the efforts of his colleagues in their crucial formative years. Yet his influence was immeasurable in two spheres: the treatment of native folk music, and the creation of what became know as ‘the Balakirevan east’. In truth, this was no more than a continuation of the musical idioms of the cultures on Russia’s borders or the outposts of empire which, in 1842, Glinka had mined in his second opera Ruslan and Lyudmila. There, Glinka had taken, for instance, a Persian song played to him by the secretary of the Persian Prince Khozrev Mirza in Moscow. Balakirev’s experiences were limited to his travels in the Caucasus, though those were to offer rich pickings.
Rimsky-korsakov praised the ‘incomparable’ harmonisations Balakirev applied in his compilation of 40 Russian folksongs, a treasury for generations of composers to come. In Balakirev’s own music, we can hear his skill at arranging these songs at work in his Overture on Three Russian Themes (1858) and in the charming symphonic poem Russia (1864), with its delectable first dance theme of the main Allegro. In the earlier work, the
Allegro’s themes will be familiar to lovers of better-known scores: one, ‘In the field stood a birch tree’, dominates the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony; the other, ‘At the feast’, crops up alongside rather more urban popular songs in the ‘Shrovetide Fair’ divertissement of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. Both these Balakirev works make rather better concert openers than two perfectly good earlier overtures, one to Shakespeare’s
King Lear, for which the young Balakirev also wrote incidental music, and the Overture on a Spanish March Theme, inspired by Glinka’s penchant for Iberiana.
As for the lure of the orient, Rimskykorsakov revealed the extent of Balakirev’s inf luence to his amanuensis Vasily Yastrebtsev: ‘What an enormous and important role he played in the education of all of us – this energetic young Balakirev, who had just returned from the Caucasus and played for us the Georgian folksongs he had heard there… we had never heard anything like that. We were all literally reborn.’ The repercussions of this awakening to folksong were felt in Rimskykorsakov’s inspired Second Symphony, Antar and his early tone poem Sadko, plus oriental dances in Musorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina and Borodin’s Prince Igor.
Balakirev’s own masterpieces in the same vein are, in miniature, the elaborately jewelled Song of the Golden Fish and Georgian Song, among a fine array for voice and piano, and on a larger scale the technically formidable piano work Islamey – with one theme drawn from his Caucasian sojourn and the other picked up from a Georgian singer in Moscow. Then there’s the orchestral fantasy Tamara. The waves into which the enchantress of the title throws the bodies of her unsuspecting lovers are conjured in an Impressionistic opening that moved Debussy, and her seductive dances offered a template reflected in the works of younger Russian composers. Tamara was a favourite of Thomas Beecham, who also championed the First Symphony, begun in the 1860s heyday of The Five but not ready for performance until the end of the century.
In the intervening time, Balakirev seems to have slipped his moorings more than once. As Rimsky-korsakov put
Balakirev’s influence was immeasurable in his treatment of native folk music
it, between 1868 and 1874 ‘he completely disappeared, vanished into thin air’. During that time, he had nothing to do with the musical scene on which he had been so active, not least as administrator and conductor of the pioneering Free Music School concerts, where he had invited Wagner and the aged Berlioz to conduct. Both were firm favourites of the otherwise nationalist Five.
When Balakirev reappeared, what Rimsky-korsakov had seen as his earlier perversities of character, such as his irascible temperament and fickleness, had been channelled into occultism and Russian orthodoxy – Balakirev was always a mass of contradictions – though his musical talents had a second flourishing in the 1880s. For instance, under Balakirev’s guidance, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture took its final shape, including the move to the key of D flat for its famous love theme. He also suggested the programme for Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. Balakirev found another disciple in Sergei Lyapunov, and he directed the Court Cappella Choir, one of musical Russia’s oldest institutions, from 1883-94, though curiously he wrote no choral music of note. In the meantime, his acolytes had taken up forms which he had largely rejected, chiefly opera and chamber music, and a new circle of composers, including Rimsky-korsakov, Glazunov and Lyadov, became the circle of the music publisher and impresario Mitrofan Belyayev.
Even so, Balakirev outlived most of his disciples, Rimsky-korsakov included, and even completed a Second Symphony which occupied him, on and off, for most of the first decade of the 20th century. Curiously, the second theme of its first movement sounds like a paraphrase of the gorgeous clarinet melody which touches rare depths in the Andante of the First Symphony, though it is no tired reworking, and the work’s dance-suite feel is consistently attractive. That it could actually have been composed in the 1860s does not diminish its worth. Balakirev was the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russian music in the second half of the 19th century sprang; the charm of his genius and the wholesome spread of his inf luence are more than enough to guarantee him immortality.