Anton Rubinstein: A Life in Music

Foreword

Foreword The subject of this revelatory book is the Russian composer and pianist Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein (in no way to be confused with the late Polish master Artur Rubinstein, who was no relation). Born in Balta Podolia (Ukraine) on 28 November 1829 (he died in Peterhof on 20 November 1894), he was Russian of German extraction and Christian by virtue of his progenitors’ forced conversion from Judaism. This admixture served his critics well, but it was also the reason for his versatility and solid Western European cultural standards. Anton Rubinstein has suffered the unhappy fate of having his name and fame as composer , pianist, and pedagogue perpetuated while nearly all his enormous catalogue of compositions has disappeared from the general repertoire. Rubinstein’s reputation rests on his having been, by general consensus, the greatest pianist since Liszt, and the many accounts of his performances range from deeply sensitive to electrifying, although, unfortunately, he died just a little too early to leave us any recordings. His repertoire was enormous and allembracing , and his most famous series of concerts was the cycle of seven Historical Recitals with which he toured Europe in 1885. These programs began with early keyboard music of the English, French, Italian, and German schools, moving through all the important classical and early romantic composers and ending with a selection of Russian piano music. Schumannand Chopin featured in his music above all others. Only early music of Liszt appeared—Rubinstein felt that Liszt’s later forays into modern harmony were unacceptable—and Brahms was not featured at all. (Rubinstein’s antipathy to Brahms may be easily accounted for: Brahms borrowed a great many ideas from Rubinstein’s music without acknowledgment but, aided and abetted by Clara Schumann, then caustically criticized Rubinstein’s output, root and branch.) Cutting himself off from both the conservative school of European music as exempli¤ed by Brahms, and the modern school as exempli¤ed by Liszt, left Rubinstein somewhat isolated as a composer, all the more so as he regarded all his Russian forerunners as distinctly amateur, he mistrusted the growing school of nationalism, and he took a very long time to appreciate that a relative cosmopolitan Russian like Tchaikovsky had any worth. He thought all along that real music had died with Schumann and Chopin. Not surprisingly, then, he was a very conservative composer indeed. But this had its virtues: while the Russian school was emerging in something of a hit-or-miss fashion, Rubinstein, with his thorough German background, brought a great deal of order to chaos. He is revered in all books about Russian music for his abiding interest in rich, broad, and highly competent music education, and, of course, he will always be remembered for having founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory. (His brother Nikolay was the director of the Moscow Conservatory and an equally old-fashioned academic, if unfairly remembered for his criticisms of the early works of Tchaikovsky.) Anton Rubinstein believed that all potential Russian composers ought to be given better grounding in the essentials of musical language—up to this point the great classical forms of European music, opera excluded, were almost nonexistent in Russia. It was Rubinstein who wrote the ¤rst signi¤cant body of Russian Sonatas (ten), Concertos (eight), Symphonies (six), and String Quartets (ten), and whose very industry and competence were an inspiration to his compatriot brothers in composition. What sort of a composer was Rubinstein? The only piece of his music that could be said to have survived, at least in every domestic library, is a pretty but relatively insigni¤cant piano piece written in his seventeenth year. The instant fame of the Melody in F would nearly eclipse the rest of Rubinstein’s production in the same way that Paderewski’s Minuet in G and Rakhmaninov’s C
minor Prelude were to do some years later. But in this little piece of Rubinstein’s we can sense his interest in Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, and he was to produce some hundreds of similar tri®es for piano, a good many of which are of more than passing interest. He also composed operas (thirteen of them!) ranging from Russian legends to Jewish and Christian stories—only one of which has survived in the theater, and then only in Eastern Europe: The Demon. But it is certainly interesting that Gustav Mahler once turned down Hugo Wolf’s opera Der Corregidor in order to prepare The Demon for the Vienna Opera, and even a cursory...