Russian Culture · the achievement
From a musical backwater to a world power in a single century — and, under Stalin, the most dangerous art of all.
In 1830, Russia had almost no art-music tradition to call its own — the court listened to Italians. Within a hundred years it had built a national school and then come to dominate twentieth-century music. Running through the whole story is the same tension that runs through the whole culture: the nationalists, mining folk song and Orthodox chant for a distinctly Russian sound, against the Westernizers, working in European forms. And in the Soviet century, music became something no other art quite was — a place where dissent could hide inside notes the censors couldn't quite read.
the 1830s · a Russian sound begins
The first composer to build large works on Russian material. A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila gave every composer after him a starting point — and a choice: follow the folk, or follow the West.
the 1860s–80s · the nationalist school (Moguchaya Kuchka)
The boldest and least "trained" of the group. Boris Godunov (the great Russian opera), Pictures at an Exhibition, Night on Bald Mountain — earthy, modern, unmistakably Russian.
The supreme orchestrator — Scheherazade, Flight of the Bumblebee — and the teacher who trained the next generation, Stravinsky and Prokofiev among them.
A distinguished chemist who wrote music in his spare time — Prince Igor and its Polovtsian Dances, and the string quartets.
Mily Balakirev led and drilled the circle; César Cui was its polemicist. Together the Five insisted Russian music should sound Russian.
the 1870s–90s · Russia's most beloved composer
The great fusion of Russian feeling and European form. The three immortal ballets — Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker — plus the Sixth Symphony (Pathétique), the First Piano Concerto, the 1812 Overture, and the opera Eugene Onegin. Probably the most performed of all Russian composers.
c. 1900–1917 · the last Romantics
Sweeping late-Romantic melody and one of history's great pianists — the Second and Third Piano Concertos, the Preludes, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Emigrated after 1917 and never lived in Russia again.
Began in Chopin's shadow and ended writing music meant to bring on the end of the world, complete with a "colour organ." The strangest and most visionary of them all.
the 1910s–40s · Russia detonates modern music
Three ballets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes changed music forever — The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, whose 1913 Paris premiere touched off an actual riot. He then reinvented himself twice more.
Peter and the Wolf, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, the "Classical" Symphony, and the scores for Eisenstein's films. He came home to the USSR in 1936 — and died on the very same day as Stalin, his passing all but unnoticed.
the 1930s–70s · the most dangerous art
Fifteen symphonies and a lifetime of walking the knife-edge. In 1936 Pravda attacked his opera under the headline "Muddle Instead of Music" — a public warning that could have meant arrest. His answer, the Fifth Symphony, was billed as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism," its triumphant finale audible either as loyalty or as forced applause. The Seventh (Leningrad) was written in the besieged city and became a symbol of resistance.
Khachaturian gave the world the Sabre Dance and was, with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, denounced in the 1948 "anti-formalism" campaign. Later came Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, carrying the tradition past the Soviet era.
Why it endures: Russian composers gave the world three of its four best-loved ballets, the piece that detonated modernism, and a body of symphonic music that carries the whole century's weight. Read alongside The Arts (the Ballets Russes that premiered Stravinsky), The Literature, and the ideology and terror pages that shadowed Shostakovich's life. Part of the Russian History guide.