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Balakirev's Personality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Edward Garden
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Extract

Mily Balakirev, the leader of the small group of Russian nationalist composers nicknamed by Vladimir Stassov the ‘moguchaya kuchka’ (the 'mighty handful'), was a controversial figure in his lifetime, and has remained so ever since. What was it that led him to take such seemingly odd actions as his retirement from music at the age of 35 ? What induced him to quarrel with nearly all his former friends and sympathisers? Was he, as Gerald Abraham put it, a flawed genius ? Why did the great works which were expected from him never materialise in anything like the numbers that all his friends hoped for? Why were they nearly all profoundly disappointed that one whom they knew to be an outstanding composer failed (in their opinion) to achieve in the works he did produce that greatness which he exuded in their presence, 'bewitching' them, as Rimsky-Korsakov put it, with his magnetism and hypnotising them with the ‘incomparable beauty’, as Stassov wrote, of his extemporisations at the piano?

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 96 , 1969 , pp. 43 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Studies in Russian Music, London, [1935], p. 311.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Edward Garden, Balakirev. A Critical Study of His Life and Music, London, 1967, pp. 120–21.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., pp. 165–6.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 92.Google Scholar

5 i.e. according to the ‘Old Style’ Russian reckoning and the Western calendar respectively.Google Scholar

6 Garden, Balakirev, p. 148.Google Scholar

7 Garden, Balakirev, p. 83.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 126.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 57.Google Scholar

10 Garden, Balakirev, p.24.Google Scholar

11 He and Lyapunov finished the mammoth task of editing Glinka's complete works for publication in the same year as the piano sonata was completed, in 1905.Google Scholar

12 Referring to the period 1892–3—after his quarrel with Balakirev—Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in his autobiography of headaches, extreme lassitude, sinking into despondency and of a ‘humble reconciliation with Balakirev’.Google Scholar

13 Cf. Garden, ‘Classic and Romantic in Russian Music’, Music & Letters, 1 (1969), 153–7.Google Scholar