1856–1926 · Russia
Aleksandr Kastalsky (1856-1926) was a Russian and Soviet composer, choral conductor and researcher of folk music, a student of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev. He spent most of his life at the Moscow Synodal School and its choir, where he shaped a new melodic style of church singing rooted in ancient chant, one that later fed into large-scale choral works by Rachmaninoff. After the revolution he turned to folk song and Soviet themes.
Aleksandr Kastalsky was born in Moscow on 28 November 1856. His father, protoiereus Dmitri Ivanovich Kastalsky (1820-1891), belonged to the Orthodox clergy.
Kastalsky graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in music theory and composition in 1893. His teachers included Pyotr Tchaikovsky, N. A. Gubert and S. I. Taneyev.
From 1887 Kastalsky taught at the Moscow Synodal School of church singing. In 1891 he became assistant precentor of the Synodal Choir, and from 1901 to 1910 he himself led the choir as precentor. In 1910 he became director of the school.
In 1911 Kastalsky, together with F. P. Stepanov, went on a concert tour of Europe. After the 1917 revolution he carried out active musical and educational work, and from 1922 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory as a professor.
In 1918 the Synodal School was dissolved and merged with the Conservatory's choral department, and the choir itself was forced to move from a sacred to a folk repertoire.
The core and most valuable part of Kastalsky's creative legacy is sacred music. The composer sought his own path for the development of Orthodox church singing and tried not to carry the methods of secular music into it. His choral writing was vocal rather than instrumental in character and relied on the tradition of ancient church chants: he turned the znamenny chant into a theme for development and made it the foundation of his own musical language.
In his scores the voices moved melodically, horizontally, rather than filling out the harmony with mechanically inserted middle voices — vocal rather than harmonic logic governed them. Some of his contemporaries, raised on the rules of German chorale voice leading, at first considered this approach the whim of an under-cultured composer, but the living sound of his choirs proved more convincing than any scheme. It was on this basis that Sergei Rachmaninoff himself later built his own large-scale cyclical choral works.
Almost every one of Kastalsky's sacred works survives in several editions — a result of living performance practice. Among those who first brought out his choral works were the Synodal Choir precentors V. S. Orlov, N. M. Danilin and N. Golovanov.
Kastalsky's sacred works also include Songs to the Motherland (1901-1903) for mixed choir, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom (1905) for women's choir, The Furnace Play (1909) for bass and mixed choir, and From Patriarchal and Episcopal Service (1918) for mixed choir.
In 1916 Kastalsky's opera Klara Milich, based on Turgenev's work of the same name, was staged at the Zimin Opera Theatre. Yet his legacy is made up mostly not of operas but of sacred music, which, as already noted, is the largest and most valuable part of what he left behind.
The exact number of Kastalsky's works has never been established. In the early 20th century, 73 published sacred choruses were listed in P. I. Jurgenson's catalogue, while by the late 20th century researchers had counted 136 sacred musical works and arrangements.
Kastalsky wrote his first choral works in 1896, and by 1917 their number had passed 130, and he became a notable figure of the neo-Russian style in Russian choral music, influencing the work of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Viktor Kalinnikov, Alexander Grechaninov and Pavel Chesnokov.
After the October Revolution, Kastalsky turned to music on the themes of the new Soviet reality and at the same time immersed himself in the study of folk song. Works from these years include The Village Symphony for choir and orchestra (1923) and Rural Work in Folk Songs for choir and folk-instrument orchestra (1924), as well as the choruses Hymn to Labour (1923) and At the Coffin, in memory of V. I. Lenin, for reciter, choir and symphony orchestra (1924).
As a music theorist, in the last, Soviet years of his life Kastalsky studied the harmony of Russian folk song. He argued that its pitch system was independent and rested on its own foundations — in the structure of modes and scales, in the arrangement of cadences, in rhythmic freedom, in the disposition of voices and consonances. At the same time, to describe this same system he used the concepts of Western European harmony — for instance, calling one of the modes a major with a raised fourth degree. He tried to introduce his understanding of the folk musical system into teaching through a special course on Russian harmony on a folk-national basis.
Aleksandr Kastalsky died in Moscow on 17 December 1926.
As a musicologist, Kastalsky published articles on folk customs and his contemporaries: in 1914 the journal Muzyka carried his article Folk Festivities in Old Rus, in 1915 the newspaper Russkoye Slovo published his article on the All-Night Vigil by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and that same year the journal Muzykalny Sovremennik carried his own account of his musical career and his views on church music.
The results of his theoretical work are collected in the book Properties of the Russian Folk Music System (1923, reissued in 1961), and in Principles of Folk Polyphony (1948, edited by V. M. Belyaev), published after his death. In 2006 a separate collection of his articles, materials and correspondence appeared.
Kastalsky's legacy is, above all, choral and church music: sacred choruses and liturgical cycles in which he developed a melodic, songful style rooted in ancient church chant. Besides his choral works, he also wrote piano cycles on folk and historical material — for instance, Along Georgia on Georgian folk melodies, and From Bygone Centuries, whose four notebooks are devoted to the music of China, India, Egypt, Judea, Greece, the birthplace of Islam, the Christian world and Rus.
Kastalsky built his choruses on melodic voice leading rather than harmonic verticality: each voice carried its own songful line instead of filling out a chord. Contemporaries raised on the rules of German choral writing at first considered this manner the whim of an under-educated composer, but the living sound of his choirs proved more convincing than any rule. Later, working in the same direction, on melodic, songful writing, Sergei Rachmaninoff and composers of the neo-Russian school — Viktor Kalinnikov, Alexander Grechaninov and Pavel Chesnokov — wrote their own choral cycles.
Kastalsky's sacred works include liturgical cycles such as the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, The Furnace Play for bass and mixed choir, cantatas and memorial chants, while his secular works include piano cycles on oriental and Georgian material and the opera Klara Milich. Despite this range of genres, almost everything he wrote remains, by nature, a choral, vocal art.
The site currently offers the sheet music for Klara Milich for voice and piano — a work connected to Kastalsky's opera of the same name (1916), based on Turgenev's work. This medium-plus level piece is a good place to start getting to know Kastalsky's work. Anyone wanting to go further and explore his choral music should keep in mind that almost every one of Kastalsky's sacred works survives in several editions shaped by living performance practice.