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Last week I mentioned the “Big Five” of Russian classical music in the Romantic era: the five composers who dominated musical culture in Russia in the latter half of the 19th century, with their influence and their desire to shape a Russian nationalistic school of composition not indebted to the Western European musical traditions. Four of those composers are well-known to this day, but the fifth, Cesar Cui, is not nearly so well known. Part of this is because he didn’t write much in the large orchestral forms of the day. He was not a symphonist, nor did he write concertos or large-scale orchestral works. Just to find a “tone poem” by him we have to turn to his operas, for one of the overtures. Cui’s output was more strongly oriented to works for smaller ensembles, and to art songs and other vocal works.

Cui’s influence was more as a critic and a writer, and as such he was able to position himself to wield considerable influence in shaping Russian musical life. His biggest impact on Sergei Rachmaninoff would come via a review he penned of the young composer’s Symphony No. 1…but we’ll get to that next month.

Cui left behind a very large body of work, and even though we don’t much hear Cui these days, that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to be heard. Here is the overture to The Mandarin’s Son, one of his operas. The opera is a comic opera, so the overture is likewise jaunty and cheerful–hardly what one might expect from a Russian Romantic.

Our focus on Rachmaninoff himself begins Saturday.

As Rachmaninoff was a young man studying music in a rigorous environment (we’ll get to that in April), he–and just about every other young Russian musician of the day–was influenced heavily by a group of composers called collectively “The Five”. These composers, all giants of Russian music in their day and four of them still giants to this day, dominated Russian music and how it was taught and encouraged amongst the younger generations. Their focus was on a nationalistic school of Russian music that was to be wholly separate from the more dominant traditions from the Germanic nations and France to the west. How successful they were can be debated; certainly they turned out some wondrous music, but their forms are still wholly dependent on the Germanic traditions. As Leonard Bernstein would later write in one of his essays, “All the Russian symphonies are really German ones with vodka substituted for beer.”

The Five consisted of the spiritual leader Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui (more on him next week), Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin (so near to my heart!), and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Each of these composers had strong influence on Rachmaninoff, in some ways and in others, and in negative light and in positive. From Rimsky-Korsakov Rachmaninoff likely learned about drama in music, and an appreciation for the sounds and modes of the Russian church liturgies. Rimsky-Korsakov was not himself a directly religious man, but that particular antipathy of his did not extend to the music, which he embodied in today’s work, the Russian Easter Festival Overture. The melodies of this work are taken directly from Russian Orthodox chants, and Rachmaninoff would later draw from some of this same material himself in several spiritual works of his own, as well as his lifelong fascination with one specific chant, the Dies irae.

We’re coming closer and closer to Rachmaninoff himself. Meantime, here is another of his influences: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture.