aleksandr (konstaninovich) glazunov

1865-1936
Russian composer, the last important composer of the Russian national school

Glazunov was born in St. Petersburg on August 10, 1865. He began studying piano at the age of 9, and began composing at 13. His gifts were readily recognized by Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), one of the founders of the Russian nationalist school of composers known as "The Five'" or "The Mighty Handful". Balakirev urged him to study with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), whose star pupil he became. His first symphony (Op. 5, 1881) was composed at the age of 16, under Rimsky's guidance, and premiered, with Balakirev conducting, at a Free School concert where it was received with great enthusiasm. "An amazing work, frightening in its precocious maturity" was the verdict of yet another of the Mighty Handful, Cesar Cui (1835-1918).

This symphony was followed by a series of similarly fine works, his Overture on Greek Folk Themes Op. 6, String Quartet in F Major, Op. 10 and the symphonic poem Stenka Razin. By the age of 21, he had established himself as one of Russia's foremost composers, as well as a composer of international repute. Lizst had introduced the First Symphony in Weimar. Stenka Razin was a great hit at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889, and Glazunov had even received a commission to write a triumphal march for the Chicago Exhibition.

In addition to composing, he had a long and distinguished career as a teacher, starting with his appointment as professor of instrumentation at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1899. He became Director of the Conservatory in 1909 and held the post until 1922. During his tenure he selflessly taught, administrated, and went on solitary champagne binges, as Stravinsky reported with gleeful malice in one of his memoirs. Glazunov was drunk at the premiere of Rachmaninoff's First Symphony, for example, and conducted atrociously - a debacle that the press blamed on the young composer, who became an alcoholic in turn, unable to compose until cured by a hypnotherapist.

By all accounts, Glazunov was endowed with remarkable musical gifts, among them the ability to commit large works to memory in one hearing. He put this facility to use in his work with Rimsky, in completing Borodin's magnum opus Prince Igor. His mastery of the technical aspects was no less amazing. In 1900, the Imperial Ballet introduced a new Glazunov ballet, The Seasons - an instant hit, but the last major ballet score in the Tchaikovsky tradition. By 1910, Stravinsky's Firebird had changed everything, although it and subsequent works were composed for Paris, not St. Petersburg audiences. Prokofiev followed in the new, anti-traditional style after he too left Bolshevik Russia, in the wake of Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff.

Glazunov's most illustrious student was Dmitri Shostakovich. In his controversial memoirs, Testimony, Shostakovich gives us a portrait of a man with an astonishing musical mind, who was both kind and generous. In Shostakovich's case, he provided both encouragement and material assistance to young Dmitri and his family in the years of privation following the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet, it is also a portrait of a man enslaved by the consumption of alcohol.

Despite Glazunov's considerable gifts, the creative spirit departed from him in about 1914 and the remaining twenty years of his life were almost without musical issue. Though not in sympathy with the Revolution, he remained in Russia until 1928, when he eventually defected; he never came home from a Parisian trip to judge an international contest. Except for a visit to the United States, Glazunov lived in Paris until his death in 1936.

The move was not a fortuitous one, as Paris, the stronghold of the avant-garde, had little use for his music or views on it. Of his death, one newspaper wrote, "Glazunov died in Paris on March 21, 1936.  The announcement of his death came as a shock to many, who, so long associating him with the music of the past rather than the present, thought he had been dead for many years."

Glazunov was a conservative composer in the post-romantic idiom influenced, as he said, by the music of Brahms, poles apart from Rimsky's other most famous pupil, Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, it is said that when Prokofiev's Scythian Suite was introduced in St. Petersburg in 1916, Glazunov rushed from the hall, with his hands over his ears, to protect himself from the onslaught of the music, and perhaps the century as well.

Apart from the influence of his early teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov's work also shows the influence of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the German composer Richard Wagner. His compositions include eight symphonies (his first at age 16), with a ninth left uncompleted; the symphonic poems Stenka Razin and The Kremlin (1892); the ballets Raymonda (1898) and The Seasons; the Violin Concerto op. 82 (1904), which remains a standard work in the repertory; chamber music, and music for piano and for voice. Of these, The Seasons, if seldom danced anymore, became his best-known concert-hall piece.

Main picture: Ilya Repin. Portrait of the Composer Aleksandr Glazunov. 1887. Oil on canvas. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.