Mily Balakirev: biography, interesting facts, creativity

Mily Alekseevich Balakirev

The name of Milia Alekseevich Balakirev is familiar to many, it immediately evokes associations with the "Mighty Handful." However, there is hardly a person who is far from musicology and can even name one or two of his compositions without thinking. It so happened that Balakirev is known as a public figure, a teacher, but not as a composer. Why did his creative fate remain in the shadow of great contemporaries and what is the true meaning of his personality in Russian culture?

A brief biography of Milia Balakirev and many interesting facts about the composer can be found on our page.

Short biography of Balakirev

Mily Balakirev was born on December 21, 1836, the heir to an old noble family, the first mention of which dates back to the 14th century. Balakirevs had been in military service for several centuries, but the father of the future composer, Alexey Konstantinovich, was a civilian civil servant. The house where Mily Alekseevich was born is a family mansion in Nizhniy Novgorod on Velyazha Street. The boy received such an unusual name from his mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna, in whose family it was quite common.

In the biography of Balakirev, like in many other Russian composers, one can find references to the fact that the first acquaintance with music in general and the piano in particular was due to the mother. Balakirev is no exception - Elizaveta Ivanovna played very well herself and taught her son the basics of using an instrument, and in 10 years she took him to Moscow to a famous teacher A. Dyubyuk. Soon after returning home, she passed away, but Mily began to study with conductor C. Eyserich.

At 16, a young man graduates from the walls of the Nizhny Novgorod Noble Institute and enters as a volunteer at the mathematics department of Kazan University. He made his living by teaching music. Without having studied in Kazan for two years, he returns home, where he begins to conduct the orchestra of C. Ayserich, speaking at a fair, in a theater and the Nobility meeting.

HELL. Ulybyshev, the first Russian musicologist, was also a Nizhny Novgorod citizen, in whose house symphonic evenings with Balakirev were often held, praised the talent of the young man. He was in the musical circles of the capital and in 1855 brought 19-year-old Milia to St. Petersburg. Balakirev immediately began performing as a pianist and met MI. Glinka. This acquaintance, as well as a rapprochement with critic V. Stasov, became crucial in his life. Thanks to Glinka, he actively took up the composition of the music, and together with Stasov they became the ideologists of the “Mighty Handful”, which was later joined by Ts.A. Cui, M.P. Mussorgsky, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov and A.P. Borodin.

The main task of his life Balakirev considered the formation of Russian music and music school. He actively participated in the work of not only the “Kruchkists”, but also other composers, Tchaikovsky, for example, prompting them new themes and subjects for creativity. Thus, own writing faded into the background. In 1862, Balakirev founded the Free Music School, and several years later refused the invitation to become a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, considering himself insufficiently educated to teach in academic walls. Since 1867 he is the conductor of the concerts of the Imperial Russian Musical Society. His removal from this position in 1869 is the result of court intrigues and his own irreconcilable radicalism in his views on music.

By the beginning of the 1870s, the roads of the Kruchkistan composers had diverged, Balakirev was seriously worried about the loss of influence on his former like-minded people. He gave up music lessons, entered the routine service on the Warsaw railway, hit religion and in moments of spiritual devastation he was even thinking about leaving for the monastery. Only in the next decade did the composer return to full-fledged musical activity, re-heading his school and accepting in 1883 an offer to become the head of the court choir. For 11 years in this position, he demonstrated his best organizational skills - starting with the restructuring of the chapel building and ending with his concern for the fate of singers who have lost their voice. From that moment, the institution has its own full-fledged orchestra, which still exists today.

After being dismissed from the chapel, Mily Alekseevich gets the opportunity and time to do his own work. He writes new works, recycles those that were written in his youth. Becoming increasingly despotic and intolerable, he supported the Slavophil views and condemned the revolution of 1905, which repels many people from his inner circle from himself. May 10, 1910 the composer was gone. Despite the fact that he no longer participated in public musical life, he was buried as a great figure of Russian culture.

Interesting facts about Balakirev

• The symphonic poem "Tamara" did not ignore the "Russian Seasons" S.P. Dyagileva, who was personally acquainted with the composer. In 1912, M. Fokin staged the ballet of the same name with Tamara Karsavina in the title role.

• It was Balakirev who became interested in the young pianist N.A. Purgold Not meeting reciprocity, the girl turned her attention to Rimsky-Korsakov, whom she later married. And Mily Alekseevich never married.
• Balakirev was the ardent opponents of conservatories, believing that talent was cultivated only at home.
• The composer spent the summer months in Gatchina, a remote suburb of St. Petersburg.
• After the death of Emperor Alexander III in 1894, Balakirev resigned as head of the Court Chapel, including because he did not complain about the heir to the throne, Nicholas II, and it was mutual. However, he was left with an indifferent patron at the court - the widowed empress Maria Feodorovna. She took part in the fate of the composer, responded to his requests. So, she allocated money for sending Balakirev's nieces to be treated in Europe for tuberculosis patients.
• The biography of Balakirev says that the composer studied folk art a lot, collecting unknown songs while traveling around the Volga villages and villages of the Caucasian ethnic groups - Georgians, Armenians, Chechens.
• Balakirev all his life was a very poor man. He was able to correct his financial situation only during his service in the chapel. Nevertheless, others noted his generosity and responsiveness, he always came to the aid of those who addressed him.

• Through the efforts of Balakirev in Berlin, on the house where Glinka died, in 1895 a memorial plaque was installed. This historic building was demolished, in its place a new one was built, but the memory of the Russian composer is immortalized to this day. A new commemorative plaque includes an original image, Balakirev, with an inscription in Russian.

Creativity Milia Balakirev

His first works Balakirev wrote while still a student at Kazan University. Among them is Fantasia on the themes of the opera "Ivan Susanin", which he played when he first met Glinka, making a huge impression on the latter. Dargomyzhsky also liked the young musician, and Mily, with great enthusiasm, left for Kazan to work in the summer as a private teacher, hoping to create and compose. His plans included both a symphony and a piano concerto ... But, remaining one on one with a sheet of musical paper, he experienced anxiety, which grew into a depression. He was not confident, he wanted to be the best, to be on the same level with Glinka or Beethoven, but he was afraid of disappointment and failure. He was much better able to play the role of a music consultant and editor, the mastermind of his colleagues in the "Mighty Handful," just not to write himself. Ideas for himself were quickly disappointed and, as a result, were rejected. Perhaps because the most winning scenes he gave to his students, the Pile.

According to the biography of Balakirev in 1857, he began to work on the theme of the Overture on the Spanish march presented to him by Glinka. Written in the same year, Overture after 30 years has been completely reworked. It is symbolic, but the first work, which in 1859 introduced the Petersburg public to a young composer, was the Overture on the themes of three Russian songs. In 1861, Shakespeare's King Lear was staged at the Alexandrinsky Theater, and Balakirev was commissioned to play the music. As a result, the composer obtained an independent symphonic work, the plot of which in some scenes did not correspond to the plot of the tragedy. But this music in Alexandrinka never sounded - Balakirev did not have time to finish it by the day of the premiere.

In 1862, the symphonic poem "1000 Years" was released from the pen of the composer, which was later renamed Rus. The reason for its writing was the opening in Veliky Novgorod of the monument to the millennium of Russia. This music became a reflection of the views of the emerging "Mighty Handful", its ideas are traced in the later works of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

In 1862-63, the composer visited the Caucasus and, under the impression of his travels, began to write the symphonic poem "Tamara" based on the poems by M. Yu. Lermontov, his favorite poet. The work dragged on for nearly 20 years. The premiere of the work took place only in 1882. On the Eastern theme in 1869, after the third visit to the Caucasus, the composer's most technically complex piano work, Islamey, was written.

In 1867, after a trip to Prague to conduct concerts from works of Glinka, Balakirev wrote the overture "In the Czech Republic", in which he gave his interpretation of Moravian folk songs. The creation of the First Symphony took a lot of time: the first sketches date from the 1860s, and the completion - in 1887. This symphony, of course, hails from the times of the “Mighty Handful,” since the construction of its main themes is reflected both in Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. The work is based on the melody of folk Russian and oriental music. The second symphony was born on the slope of the composer’s life in 1908. In his symphonic works Balakirev focuses primarily on Berlioz and SheetHowever, the lack of academic education does not allow him to fully use all the achievements of the style of these composers.

In 1906 in St. Petersburg a monument to M.I. Glinka. For this ceremony, Balakirev wrote a Cantata for choir and orchestra - one of his four choral works. Another piece written for the opening of the monument, this time Chopin, in 1910 - Suite for orchestra, composed of 4 works by a Polish composer. The Es-dur concerto for piano and orchestra is the last major work by Balakirev, which was already completed by his associate S.M. Lyapunov. It, as well as many compositions for a piano, differs in executive complexity. Balakirev, being an excellent pianist, tried in his works to emphasize the skill of the musician, sometimes to the detriment of the melodic value of the piece. Balakirev’s legacy in the genre of romance and song remains the most extensive in terms of more than 40 works on poems by the leading poets of the epoch: Pushkin, Lermontov, Fet, Koltsov. The composer created romances throughout his life, beginning in the 1850s.

Music Balakirev in the cinema

Sad as it may seem, the works of Balakirev almost do not go beyond the limits of the narrow philharmonic circle of lovers of Russian classical music. Even the world cinema experts turned to the composer's work only once - in the 2006 Swiss film “Vitus” about a young pianist and virtuoso, who sounded the eastern fantasy “Islamey”.

Domestic cinema used the image of Balakirev in the 1950 film “Mussorgsky”, his role was played by Vladimir Balashov.

Balakirev shared with the members of the “Mighty Handful” not only time, but also what he was striving for — their distinctive composer development on the base he had given them. In the end, he was not only a brilliant composer or an outstanding performer. He was someone great - a great Russian musician. A person who felt like music. The man whom the universe has endowed with the gift of discovering talents. He did not write the opera, but without him the successful chemist Borodin would have created his only, but infinitely ingenious, Prince Igor? He could not establish his own school of composition, but wasn’t it under his influence that naval officer Rimsky-Korsakov found the strength to quit his service and become not only a composer, but the greatest teacher? Mily Alekseevich Balakirev - one of the main passionaries of Russian music. And as much is better seen at a distance, so today his services to the national culture are becoming more and more valuable.