1888–1914 · Russia · Classical
Alexei Stanchinsky (1888–1914) was a Russian composer and pianist who studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Konstantin Igumnov and Sergei Taneyev. His piano pieces already show a boldness of imagination and an independent polyphonic voice. For a player he is of interest as the author of music that stayed almost unknown for decades and only much later truly reached listeners.
Alexei Stanchinsky was born on 21 March 1888 in the small village of Obolsunovo in Vladimir province; his father, an engineer-chemist, worked at a dyeing factory and was regularly reassigned as a factory inspector, which is why Alexei's childhood passed amid moves between old towns — Vladimir, Tver, Pskov and Reval.
In the family, the first to be taught music was not Alexei but his older sister Lidia; there was also another child in the house — his brother Vladimir, later one of the founders of the Soviet school of ecology. Alexei's own gift showed itself very early: already at five or six he spent hours at the piano and tried his hand at composing, and adults noticed his heightened sensitivity from childhood on.
In 1899 his father bought the Logachyovo estate in Smolensk province, two versts from Novospasskoye — the estate where Mikhail Glinka was born and which had earlier belonged to Glinka's sister. It was at Logachyovo that Stanchinsky wrote most of his works.
While the family lived at Logachyovo, Alexei would make his way to Moscow now and then for private piano lessons with Josef Lhévinne, as well as Konstantin Eiges. Music theory and composition were first taught to him by Alexander Gretchaninov, who two years later, in 1905, took him to see Sergei Taneyev. Taneyev recognised the young man's gift and advised him to continue studying harmony and composition with his own pupil, Nikolai Zhilyayev.
Stanchinsky finished secondary school in Smolensk in the spring of 1907; that same year he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, into Konstantin Igumnov's piano class. He went on mastering composition and instrumentation under Zhilyayev's guidance, while counterpoint and musical forms he studied with Taneyev, who charged nothing for lessons with his most able pupils.
His health meant Stanchinsky could not settle in the city for good, so more often he simply popped over to Moscow for a lesson, and when that was not possible he made do with letters to Taneyev instead — a rare way of studying music at the start of the twentieth century.
In his lessons Stanchinsky could be harsh towards his own works and destroyed some of them; much of what survives to this day owes its survival to Zhilyayev and Taneyev, who more than once stopped him from burning what he had written.
The quiet life at Logachyovo broke off in January 1910, when Stanchinsky's father passed away. Not long after, Alexei found out that Elena Bai — the estate manager's daughter, with whom he was in love — was carrying his child; his mother and sister would not accept such an unequal match, and Elena had to leave Logachyovo.
Stanchinsky's health suffered badly from these blows: that same summer he fell gravely ill and spent several months in a clinic for nervous disorders, after which he parted with the conservatory for a while.
At the end of 1910 Stanchinsky returned to composing music, and then resumed his lessons with Taneyev and Zhilyayev.
Returning to work after his illness, Stanchinsky, among other things, took up his own collection of folk songs.
In March 1914 a concert of young pianists was held on the stage of the Moscow Conservatory, where he played a whole programme made up of his own pieces. Critics called him the most talented and original composer, Moscow musicians spoke of him as a new rising star, and his pieces quickly became popular. It was the only concert of his own works that Stanchinsky ever gave in his life.
After the concert Stanchinsky gave the pieces that had been performed to the composer Nikolai Medtner and planned to spend part of the summer with him discussing music, but the meeting never took place.
He devoted his last few years to developing his own, by then fully independent musical language, moving ever further away from imitating earlier composers.
In the summer of 1914 Stanchinsky saw his four-year-old son Andrei for the first time and grew attached to him; in his mind plans were taking shape for a shared life with Elena and their son, and also for returning to the conservatory and going on composing.
Alexei had arranged to visit Elena on 22 September 1914, but his mother objected and tried to keep him at home; he slipped out into the night regardless. He was found lifeless by a riverbank the next day, fifteen versts from Logachyovo, his clothes soaked through; the paramedic called to the scene, by the mother's account, attributed the death to a failure of the heart. Most likely he had waded across the river — on that cold September night his already frail heart could not cope.
Stanchinsky was laid to rest on 29 September 1914: he was buried at Novospasskoye, in the churchyard of the Church of the Transfiguration. The parish register gives 6 October 1914 (23 September Old Style) as the date of death.
In Stanchinsky's lifetime only four of his Sketches were published, with eight more appearing by 1917. Nikolai Zhilyayev took on preparing the remaining works for publication in small print runs in the 1920s. But at the end of 1937 Zhilyayev was arrested in the case against Marshal Tukhachevsky and soon shot, after which editions carrying his name on the title page could no longer be distributed. Stanchinsky's music remained little known for almost a quarter of a century, until the 1960s, and the complete collection of his piano works, prepared by Irina Lopatina, was published only in 1990. Russian music, it is held, suffered a great loss with his death.
Stanchinsky's piano music has no direct equivalent among his contemporaries. Its vividly melodic character is closely tied to the Baroque and Romantic traditions, but just as much to Russian folk material; it has a particular singing quality close to old Russian and church music.
A boldness of imagination and a command of counterpoint place Stanchinsky among the composers who felt their way toward a twentieth-century polyphonic style. In his discoveries he largely anticipated traits that would later appear in Stravinsky and Prokofiev, in Shostakovich and Bartók, in Hindemith's harmony, and in new diatonicism and neo-folk currents. He also introduced new genres into piano music — the sketch and the prelude-canon.
In his early works other voices can be heard: in the E-flat minor sonata (1906) the main theme echoes Scriabin, while the secondary theme echoes Grieg's Lyric Pieces, and in other pieces harmonies drawn from folk music recall Mussorgsky. The 1907 preludes show an ever broader harmonic palette and inventive polyphony, while works after 1908 bring complex asymmetrical metres and sparer phrasing. Having given up chromatic voice-leading, Stanchinsky built pieces without a clear tonality, combining diatonic, octatonic and whole-tone scales with Russian folk tunes — much as Igor Stravinsky himself was doing in the late 1910s; in his last few works he shows a mature command of polyphony.
Stanchinsky is known above all as a composer of solo piano pieces, but among his works there is also a trio scored for piano, violin and cello, and a cycle of settings of poems by the Scottish poet Robert Burns — ten Scottish songs in all, a rare case, for a Russian composer of his circle, of stepping outside a single instrument.
Dana-piano.kz currently has one Stanchinsky piece for solo piano — the Prelude in Lydian Mode, at an upper-intermediate level. Its choice of mode shows the composer's pull toward modal writing that is not always unambiguously tonal, and it is a good piece to start getting to know his music at the instrument.