Classical Music of Russian in the 18th and 19th Century

Russia later began in establishing an indigenous custom of classical music due to the prohibition by the Orthodox Church against secular music. It begins in the rule of Ivan IV; the Imperial Court imported Western composers and artists to fill this invalid. In the period of Peter I, these musicians were constantly featured at Court. While not personally motivated toward music, Peter saw European music as a sign of freedom and a way of westernizing the country; his creation of the western-pattern city of Saint Petersburg aided stand-in its extent to the rest of the upper levels. A craze for Italian opera at Court during the rules of Empresses Elisabeth and Catherine also aided extent interest in the western music among the aristocracy. This craze became so persistent that many were not even aware that some of the Russian composers were existence.

source of picture: www.russia-ic.com

The point on the European music meant that Russian composers had to write in the western pattern if they want their arrangements to be performed. Their achievement at that time was flexible due to lack of difference with the European reigns of composition.  Some of the composers were able to travel oversea for training, frequently to Italy, to learn how to compose choral and instrumental works in the Italian Classical custom renowned in the day. These comprise ethnic Ukrainian composers such as Maksim Berezovsky, Dmitri Borthniansky and Artem Vedel.

The initially Great Russian composer to achieve indigenous Russian music customs into the realm of secular music was Mikhail Glinka from (1804 to 1857), who composed the early Russian language opera Ivan Susanin and Ruslan and Lyudmila. They were neither the initial operas in the Russian dialect nor the initially by a Russian, but they attained popularity for relying on uniquely Russian tunes and themes and being in the dialect.

Russian traditional music became the main source for the younger generation composers. An orchestra that called themselves the Mighty Five led by Balakirev from 1873 to 1910 and including Rimsky Korsakov from 1844 to 1908, Mussorgsky from 1839 to 81, Borodin from 1833 to 87 and Cesar Cui from 1835 to 1918, declared its purpose to compose and promote the Russian national customs in the classical music. Among the Mighty Five’s very popular compositions were the operas known as The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka), Sadko, Prince Igor, Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina, and funny suite Scheherazade. Many of the researches by Glinja and the Mighty Five were based on Russian history, traditional tales and literature which regarded as the masterpieces of romantic nationalism in music.

This era also saw the basis of the Russian Musical society (RMS) in the year 1859 which was led by composer pianists Anton from 1829 to 94 and Nikolay Rubinstein from 1835 to 1881. The Mighty Five was frequently presented as the Russian Music Society renewal, with the Five embracing their Russian national uniqueness and the RMS being musically more traditional. Though the Russian Musical Society initiated Russia’s fist traditional in St Petersburg and in Moscow: the initial trained the Great Russian composer Peter llyich Tchaikovsky from 1840 to 93, best known for ballets like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. He became the Russia’s best-known composer outside Russian. Easily the very popular successor in his pattern is Sergey Rakhmaninov from 1873 to 1943, who studied at the Moscow traditional (where Tchaikovsky himself taught).

The late 19^th and the early 20^th centuries saw the third wave of the Russian classics: Igor Stravinsky from the year 1882 to 1971, Alexander Scriabin from year 1872 to 1915, Sergei Prokofiev from year 1891 to 1953 and Dmitri Shostakovich from year 1906 to 1975.

They were experimental in pattern and musical language. Stravinsky was especially powerful on his current and subsequent generations of composers, both in Russian and beyond Europe and the United States. Stravinsky permanently migrated after the Russian revolt. Though Prokofiev also left Russian in the year 1918, he finally came back and contributed to soviet music.

Later in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the so-known romance songs became most renowned. The extremely and very renowned singers if the romances frequently sang in the operas at the era. The very well-known was Fyodor Shalyapin. Singers frequently composed music and wrote the words, as did Alexander Vertinsky, Pyotr Leshchenkop and Konstantin Sokolsky.