1787–1851 · Russia · Romantic
Alexander Alyabyev (1787–1851) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who wrote about 200 songs and several operas, including "The Nightingale". A veteran of the war of 1812, he was exiled to Siberia after being accused of murder, yet never stopped composing. Players know him above all for his songs and choral works.
Alexander Alexandrovich Alyabyev was born on 15 August (4 August, Old Style) 1787 in Tobolsk, into a noble family. His father, Alexander Vasilyevich Alyabyev (1746–1822), served as civil governor and later moved the family to St Petersburg, where he took up a post in the empire's mining department. There the boy began studying music, taking lessons from Johann Heinrich Miller.
Alyabyev's youth was spent in the service of the same department: in 1801 he entered the St Petersburg mining collegium as an under-shikhtmeister of the third class, and from 1803 served as a shikhtmeister of the fourteenth class in Moscow. He never gave up music, and in 1810 his first published works appeared — a song and several waltzes.
The Napoleonic War of 1812 found Alyabyev serving in the 3rd Ukrainian Cossack regiment, and during the foreign campaigns of 1813–1814 he served in the Irkutsk and then the Akhtyrsky Hussar regiment. He took part in the storming of Dresden — an operation organised by the partisan and poet Denis Davydov — and was wounded there.
He pressed on: he fought at Leipzig, campaigned on the Rhine and reached the storming of Paris. For these campaigns Alyabyev received the Order of St Anna, 3rd class, the Order of St Vladimir, 4th class, and a medal for taking part in the war of 1812; he ended that war with the rank of rotmistr. Remaining in military service in St Petersburg, in 1815 Alyabyev wrote the hussar song "One More Day" — one of his earliest compositions.
In 1823 Alyabyev retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, keeping his uniform and full pension, and settled by turns in Moscow and St Petersburg. Among his close acquaintances in these years were the writer Mikhail Zagoskin and the composer Alexey Verstovsky.
It was precisely in these Moscow and St Petersburg years that Alyabyev wrote a great deal for the stage: his vaudeville operas appeared one after another — "Moonlit Night, or The House Spirits" (1822, staged in 1823 at the Bolshoi Theatre in St Petersburg), "A New Prank, or The Theatrical Battle" (1822), "The Village Philosopher" (1823), "The Busybody, or A Master's Job is Never Hard" and "The Petitioner" (both 1824), as well as the prologue "Celebration of the Muses" (written in 1824, performed in 1825), composed for the opening of the Bolshoi Theatre.
In early 1825 Alyabyev was taken into custody: he was suspected of killing the landowner Timofei Vremev, in an incident that had happened at a post station in the Moscow-province village of Chertanovo. The charge was never proven, yet the court still stripped Alyabyev of his noble title and all his rights and sent him into exile in Siberia. The severity of the sentence was apparently due above all to his closeness to Decembrist circles, and Emperor Nicholas I repeatedly rejected pleas for clemency.
After three years' imprisonment in a fortress, Alyabyev was sent to Tobolsk in 1828. There he organised a symphony orchestra of "Cossack music" and directed symphonic and choral concerts, himself performing as conductor and pianist. To his Tobolsk years belong many of his best-known songs, published in the collection "The Northern Singer" (1828, 1831), as well as a number of his orchestral works.
In 1832–1833 Alyabyev lived in the Caucasus, where he served as choirmaster of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Stavropol, and in 1833–1834 he moved to Orenburg. Keenly interested in the music of the peoples of Russia, he recorded Caucasian, Bashkir, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Tatar folk songs.
Together with the historian and folklorist M. A. Maksimovich, Alyabyev compiled the collection "Voices of Ukrainian Songs": the material was gathered in 1832 and the edition published in 1834.
Still in exile, in 1834 Alyabyev wrote the vocal cycle "Songs of the Asian Peoples", based on Kazakh, Bashkir, Tatar and Turkmen tunes. The manuscript of his unfinished opera "Ammalat-Bek" also preserves two versions of a Kazakh song.
From Orenburg Alyabyev moved to Moscow province, but permission to return to Moscow itself — under police supervision — he received only in 1843. There he again found himself among theatre people and wrote music for stage plays.
Among the works of this period is music for vaudeville operas: one was "The Travelling Dancer-Actress, or Three Sisters-Brides" (text by P. N. Arapov), the other "The Caliph's Amusements, or Jests in a Single Day" (text by A. I. Pisarev). In 1847 he struck up a friendship with A. S. Dargomyzhsky.
Alyabyev married in 1840 to Ekaterina Alexandrovna Ofrosimova (née Rimskaya-Korsakova) — a woman for whom he had felt affection for many years already. No children were born of this marriage, but the couple raised a foster daughter, Leonila Passek, whose brother Vadim Passek wrote about the history of the Simonov Monastery. The girl had been taken into the family, before the wedding, around 1831, by the composer's future wife.
Alyabyev died in Moscow on 6 March (22 February, Old Style) 1851 and was buried in the Simonov Monastery, in the Alyabyev family vault. Later, in the 1920s–1930s, the monastery's necropolis was almost entirely destroyed, and on 24 February 2009 a memorial cross was unveiled on the composer's symbolic grave by the walls of a Moscow church of the Nativity of the Virgin, in Old Simonovo.
Alyabyev worked in music for almost his entire adult life and turned his hand to a very wide range of genres. In total he wrote about 200 songs, six operas, twenty musical comedies and a great many other works for very different forces. He wrote for the concert stage and for the home alike: his concert songs sit alongside chamber ensembles, and his vaudeville operas alongside folk-song arrangements.
The song holds the central place in this output. Among Alyabyev's best works are "The Nightingale", to words by Anton Delvig, and "Evening Bells", to words by I. Kozlov, along with Pushkin's "Winter Road" and "The Two Ravens"; "The Beggar Woman" is a song to a poem by P. de Béranger, in Dmitry Lensky's Russian rendering. He also wrote songs to words by other poets: "The Grove is Rustling", to words by Vasily Zhukovsky, and "Secret Sorrow", to verses by Alexander Veltman.
Alyabyev also wrote a great deal for the theatre: vaudeville operas — some of them with Alexey Verstovsky as co-author — the ballet "The Magic Drum, or a Sequel to The Magic Flute", and incidental music for plays based on Shakespeare and Pushkin, among them The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Mermaid, The Apostate, or the Siege of Corinth and The Madwoman. His catalogue also includes chamber music: three string quartets — among them No. 1 in E-flat major (1815) and No. 3 in G minor (1825) — two piano trios (E-flat major, around 1815, and A minor, 1834), and a quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn.
Another strand of his work is folk-song arrangement: Caucasian, Bashkir, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Tatar melodies, and, together with M. A. Maksimovich, the collection "Voices of Ukrainian Songs". His output also includes pieces and sets of variations for various instruments. Alyabyev also wrote sacred music — the sheet-music collection on this site currently offers the choral piece "Cherubic Hymn", to the Orthodox liturgical Cherubic Hymn text, of intermediate difficulty for mixed choir, a good place to start getting to know the composer in choir class.