1829–1894 · Russia
Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor ranked among the greatest pianists of all time. In 1862 he secured the opening of Russia's first conservatory, in Saint Petersburg, and became its first director; Pyotr Tchaikovsky was among his students. He wrote operas, symphonies and piano concertos, though players today mostly know him through his solo piano pieces.
Rubinstein came into the world on 16 (28) November 1829, the third son of a well-off Jewish family, in Vikhvatinets, a village of the Podolia Governorate. His father, Grigory Romanovich Rubinstein, leased land in Bessarabia together with his brothers and had risen to second-guild merchant by the time his second son was born. His mother, born Clara Löwenstein, came from Prussian Silesia and was herself a musician. In 1829 Rubinstein's grandfather and some of his children from an earlier marriage converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy, which lifted the legal restrictions that had confined the family to certain areas; the Rubinsteins soon settled in Moscow, where the father opened a small pencil-and-pin workshop.
His mother gave him his first music lessons, and from 1837, when he was seven, his teacher was Alexander Villoing, considered the best piano teacher in Moscow. He gave his first public performance on 11 July 1839, at a theatre in Petrovsky Park. A year later his mother sent him abroad with Villoing, hoping to enrol him at the Paris Conservatoire; the trip turned into a long concert tour instead. At the Salle Pleyel in Paris, where he performed in March 1841, Rubinstein met Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt; he then played in The Hague, Amsterdam, Cologne, Vienna and Budapest. In the summer of 1842 he reached England, where Queen Victoria received him, and on the way home he gave concerts in Norway, Sweden, Germany and Austria.
In 1844 Rubinstein moved to Berlin with his mother and his brother Nikolai. There he studied music theory with Siegfried Dehn — the same teacher Mikhail Glinka had studied with some years earlier — and met Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. In 1846 Rubinstein's father died; his mother and Nikolai returned to Russia, while Anton stayed on in Vienna and began earning his living by giving private lessons.
In the winter of 1849 Rubinstein returned to Russia. With the patronage of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna he settled in Saint Petersburg and took up conducting and composing, also appearing often as a pianist at court, where his playing impressed members of the imperial family, including Nicholas I himself. In the capital he met Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, the cellists Mikhail Vielgorsky and Carl Schuberth, and other leading Russian musicians of the day.
Rubinstein made his conducting debut in 1850, and in 1852 his first major opera, Dmitry Donskoy, was performed. He followed it with three one-act operas on subjects from the peoples of Russia — Revenge (Haji-Abrek), The Siberian Hunters and Foolish Fomka. These were also the years of his first plans to found a music academy in Saint Petersburg, which came to nothing.
In 1854 Rubinstein went abroad again. In Weimar he met Franz Liszt, who helped stage The Siberian Hunters; on 14 December that year he gave a solo recital at the Leipzig Gewandhaus that was a great success and opened a long European tour — Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, Nice, Paris, London, Budapest, Prague and other cities. In May 1855 one of the Vienna music journals published his article Russian Composers, which Russian musical circles received unfavourably.
Rubinstein came home in the summer of 1858. With Elena Pavlovna's support he secured the founding of the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and took the conductor's podium at its concerts himself: the first symphony concert under his direction took place on 23 September 1859. A year later the Society opened music classes, and in 1862 these became Russia's first conservatory. Rubinstein was its first director, conductor of its orchestra and choir, and professor of instrumentation — Tchaikovsky was among his students there — and of piano; outside the conservatory, he also spent long periods teaching Josef Hofmann.
Not everyone welcomed this work: many Russian musicians, including members of The Five led by Balakirev and Serov, feared that the conservatory imposed excessive academicism and doubted its value for the Russian school. Court circles were also unfriendly toward Rubinstein, and this conflict led him to resign as director in 1867. He went on giving concerts, including of his own works, and around the turn of the 1860s and '70s grew close to The Five themselves. In 1871 he completed his most significant work, the opera The Demon, which the censor nonetheless banned: it did not reach the stage until four years later.
In the 1871–1872 season Rubinstein directed the concerts of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna; among other works he conducted Liszt's oratorio Christus in the composer's own presence, with Anton Bruckner playing the organ part.
In 1872–1873 Rubinstein toured the United States together with the violinist Henryk Wieniawski, becoming the first major musician from Russia to perform there. The nine-month tour, which covered many cities in 21 states and three Canadian cities, was financed by William Steinway, owner of the famous piano firm; it was on this tour that Rubinstein's Historical Concerts cycle was heard for the first time. The fee he earned let him give up concert life on his return and devote himself fully to composing; with the money he bought a dacha in Peterhof.
Back in Russia from 1874, Rubinstein settled in Peterhof, where he composed and conducted. These years produced two symphonies, numbered Four and Five, and two operas — The Maccabees and The Merchant Kalashnikov; censorship caught up with the second one just days after its premiere. In the 1882–1883 season he again took the podium for the Russian Musical Society's symphony concerts, and in 1887 he once more headed the conservatory. In 1885–1886 he gave a series of Historical Concerts in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, Leipzig, Dresden and Brussels, playing nearly the entire solo piano repertoire that existed at the time, from Couperin to his Russian contemporaries.
Rubinstein died on 8 (20) November 1894 in Peterhof; he was buried at the Nikolskoye cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and later reinterred in the Necropolis of Masters of the Arts. Contemporaries noted his generosity: by the critic Alexander Ossovsky's rough estimate, Rubinstein gave away about 300,000 rubles to various charitable causes during his life, not counting the free concerts he gave for students under his patronage.
Contemporaries remembered Rubinstein above all as a pianist of enormous inner power: his playing created a vivid, unified image of a piece, and even the technical slips he readily admitted to never got in the way of that image. Inexhaustible energy let him perform, compose and teach all at once: he worked with both Pyotr Tchaikovsky, whom he taught instrumentation at the conservatory, and Josef Hofmann, to whom he gave private piano lessons. The Belgian composer Henri Vieuxtemps recalled that Rubinstein's playing seemed to carry the listener into another world, with nothing mechanical left in the instrument.
His output includes operas (Dmitry Donskoy, The Demon, The Maccabees, The Merchant Kalashnikov and others), symphonies and concertos for piano and orchestra, along with a good number of solo piano pieces. Rubinstein's largest-scale work was the opera The Demon, completed in 1871.
In the assessment of those who have studied his work, several of Rubinstein's compositions earned an honoured place among the recognised classics of nineteenth-century Russian music.
The site holds about thirty piano scores by Rubinstein, all at the Intermediate+ level. For piano and orchestra there are three concertos, including the Fourth, Op. 70 (available in two editions). For solo piano there are four sonatas (including Opp. 12, 41 and 100), four études from Op. 23 plus one more étude without an opus number, twelve pieces from Op. 75, the Caprice Op. 69, the Theme and Variations Op. 88, two barcarolles (one of them Op. 50 No. 3), the Gavotte Op. 38, two parts of a fantasia, a mélodie, three pieces from the Kamennoi-Ostrow cycle, and one more piece from the same Op. 10 — Reve angelique. Since all of these editions sit at the same difficulty level, a player can start with any of them — the Barcarolle Op. 50 No. 3 or the opening numbers of Op. 75 are good places to begin. The site also holds Franz Liszt's piano arrangement of Rubinstein's song The Asra. Every one of these editions is written either for solo piano or for piano and orchestra — the site does not yet have Rubinstein scored for any other ensemble.