1836–1910 · Russia
Mily Balakirev (1836–1910) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, the leader of the Mighty Handful. In Saint Petersburg he founded the Free Music School and guided younger composers. Among his piano works are Islamey, one of the most technically difficult pieces in the piano repertoire, as well as scherzos and nocturnes.
Mily Balakirev came into the world in a noble family in Nizhny Novgorod on 21 December 1836 (2 January 1837 in the New Style). His father, Alexey Konstantinovich Balakirev (1809–1869), held the rank of titular councillor. It was his mother who gave the boy his first piano lessons, starting when he was four.
At ten he was taken to Moscow for the summer holidays, and ten lessons with Alexander Dubuque taught him sound playing technique. Back in Nizhny Novgorod his teacher was Karl Eisrich (1817–1881), a local pianist and conductor.
Alexander Ulybyshev, an educated music lover, patron and author of the first Russian monograph on Mozart, took a great interest in the young man's fate. Through Eisrich, Balakirev heard, read and played a great deal of music, came to know the works of Chopin and Glinka, and was permitted to work with the count's private orchestra in rehearsal. At fourteen he directed a performance of Mozart's Requiem, and at fifteen he took rehearsals of the First and Eighth Beethoven symphonies.
Balakirev never received a systematic musical education. Two works left a particular mark on him in his early years: Chopin's piano concerto and the trio "Ne tomi, rodimy" that Glinka wrote for his opera A Life for the Tsar. He kept his admiration for both composers all his life.
In 1853 Balakirev began studying at the mathematics faculty of Kazan University together with his friend Pyotr Boborykin, later a novelist. He lived mainly on the modest income from music lessons. In Kazan he wrote a piano fantasy on themes from the opera A Life for the Tsar and his first romance, "Ty plenitelnoy negi polna" (1855).
In 1855 Ulybyshev took the young musician to Saint Petersburg, where he met Mikhail Glinka. Glinka thought Balakirev's compositional technique flawed but rated his talent highly, and urged him to write music in a national spirit. He handed the young man several Spanish themes and asked him to teach music to his niece, then aged four. Balakirev owed his serious training mainly to himself.
In Saint Petersburg he first appeared before the public as a virtuoso pianist. In February 1856, at a university concert, he played the finished movement of his First Piano Concerto, and a month later he gave a recital of his own piano and chamber pieces. In 1858, in the Tsar's presence, he performed the solo part of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, and in 1859 twelve of his songs were published. Even so, he remained poor: he gave lessons (sometimes nine a day) and played at evenings held by the aristocracy.
Glinka died in 1857 and Ulybyshev a year later, and Balakirev was left without influential patrons. Even so, his time with Glinka had kindled an interest in national music: he concluded that Russia should have its own school of composition, free of southern and western European influence. From 1856 he met people ready to support him, among them Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Alexander Serov, César Cui and the Stasov brothers. He gathered like-minded composers around him and promised to train them by his own principles: Modest Mussorgsky (1858), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (November 1861) and Alexander Borodin (late 1862).
The critic Vladimir Stasov, speaking of this circle together with Cui, called it the "mighty handful". For some years Balakirev alone among them was a trained professional; the others were amateurs. He regarded academic training as a danger to the creative imagination and advised starting to compose at once, and he taught as he himself had learned: by studying other composers' scores. He supported his friends in their work: in December 1865 and in January 1869 he conducted the first performances of the first symphonies of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin.
But he insisted that his pupils' tastes should match his own. When someone brought him a new piece, he would sit down at the piano and show by improvising how it ought to be changed. By the end of the 1860s Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov had stopped putting up with such meddling, and Stasov began to move away. In 1871 Balakirev left the circle.
On 18 March 1862, together with the choirmaster Gavriil Lomakin, Balakirev founded the Free Music School. Tuition there cost nothing, and singing, above all choral singing, had a large place. At the school's concerts Lomakin conducted the choral and vocal pieces and Balakirev the orchestral ones. The programmes were bolder than those of the Russian Musical Society: they included Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Glinka, Dargomyzhsky and early pieces by members of the group.
In the summer of 1862 Balakirev travelled to the Caucasus. He wrote down folk melodies from that region, from Georgia and from Iran, and these tunes played an important part in his music. He went back the following year and once more in 1868. In 1866 his Collection of Russian Folk Songs appeared, forty songs in all. That same year he was invited to Prague to stage Glinka's operas Ruslan and Lyudmila and A Life for the Tsar. Both productions were successful, Ruslan and Lyudmila especially, although after their quarrels Balakirev and Bedřich Smetana stopped speaking to each other.
From the autumn of 1867 to the spring of 1869 Balakirev conducted the symphony concerts of the Russian Musical Society (in 1867 together with Berlioz). They consisted chiefly of works by Berlioz and Liszt, along with orchestral pieces by Russian composers. Among those he supported was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Balakirev guided his work on the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet (1868–1869) and later, in 1882–1885, with the Manfred Symphony.
In 1868, when Lomakin gave up directing the school, Balakirev took his place and ran it until 1874. Things went badly: the school was constantly short of money, and a solo recital in Nizhny Novgorod in September 1870 was played to an empty hall and brought in just 11 roubles. To this were added his father's death in June 1869 and responsibility for his younger sisters.
In the spring of 1871 word went round that Balakirev had broken down nervously. Friends who called on him found a silent, listless man, quite unlike his former self. He gave up music for five years and withdrew from his friends, yet he did not destroy his manuscripts but stacked them neatly in a corner of his house. Nikolai Rubinstein offered him a post at the Moscow Conservatory, but Balakirev refused, feeling that his knowledge rested on experience and intuition rather than on systematic theory. In July 1872 he took a post as an ordinary clerk in the office of the Warsaw Railway. He was also preparing to enter a monastery then, but a priest, Ivan Verkhovsky, helped him stay in the world.
From 1876 Balakirev gradually came back to music, though without his former intensity. He worked on the symphonic poem Tamara, sent people to Rimsky-Korsakov for theory lessons, and also, at the request of Lyudmila Shestakova, edited Glinka's works together with Anatoly Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1881 he was invited to head the Moscow Conservatory but declined, and he again took charge of the Free Music School. In 1882 Tamara (on a text by Lermontov) was completed and first performed.
In 1883 Balakirev was appointed head of the Imperial Court Chapel and invited Rimsky-Korsakov to be his assistant. He took the whole musical side of the chapel into his own hands, worked out a programme for its academic classes and paid particular attention to the orchestra class. Under him the chapel building was rebuilt from scratch. He held this post until 1895.
Balakirev retired for good in 1895 and devoted himself seriously to composition. By 1910 he had finished two symphonies, a piano sonata and a pair of movements from the Second Piano Concerto. He held Tuesday evenings at his home from the 1880s, but now wrote alone. He knew that younger composers thought his style old-fashioned; the younger generation mostly ignored him, the exceptions being, at first, Alexander Glazunov and Sergei Lyapunov. For years he had no publisher, until in 1899 he got to know Zimmermann, a Saint Petersburg music publisher, who helped prepare several works for print, the two symphonies included.
Balakirev had no family: he never married and had no children. In youth he was a freethinker and an atheist; in his mature years he became a devout Orthodox believer. He lived as a recluse in his own house, which was full of old icons and stray cats and dogs. He gave up meat and ate only fish, and an insect discovered indoors was gently caught by him and set free through a window.
Balakirev died in Saint Petersburg on 16 May (29 May in the New Style) 1910. He was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, on the composers' path.
Balakirev's output is modest in size but notable. He wrote for orchestra, piano and voice. Among the orchestral works are the music for King Lear (1860), an overture on Czech themes, two overtures on Russian themes, an overture on a Spanish theme and the symphonic poem Tamara. Later came two symphonies (1897 and 1908) and a Suite for orchestra, which Sergei Lyapunov completed. Many of his large works took years: he began the First Symphony in 1864 and finished it only in 1897. His romances and songs are known too, for example "The Golden Fish" and "Come to Me".
Balakirev matters in the history of Russian music both as a composer and as a mentor. From Glinka he took ways of treating Russian folk song in instrumental music and a bright, transparent orchestral technique, which he also learned from Berlioz; he developed what he had learned and combined it with the methods of the Romantic music of his day. The collection of Russian folk songs published in 1866 became a valuable contribution to Russian musical ethnography. The long gestation of many works cost him part of the recognition he deserved: by the time they appeared they already seemed dated, and some of his discoveries were used by other composers of the group, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, for example, being influenced by Tamara.
Balakirev's piano works include mazurkas, scherzos, a sonata, nocturnes, waltzes and the fantasy Islamey on oriental themes (1869). He composed it very quickly: he began in August 1869 and finished a month later, and Nikolai Rubinstein played it for the first time in December. Balakirev himself regarded Islamey as a sketch for Tamara. This virtuoso piece is among the most technically difficult in piano music: Ravel said he wanted to make Scarbo even harder than Islamey. Balakirev also arranged other composers' pieces for piano, for example Glinka's "The Lark".
The site holds fourteen Balakirev editions, all marked at the "intermediate+" level. They include Islamey (Islamey and the two-part Islamey (CFP ed)), the three scherzos (Scherzo No. 1, Scherzo No. 2 Bb Minor, Scherzo No. 3), the nocturnes (Nocturne No. 1, No. 2, No. 3), Piano Sonata In B-Flat Minor and the transcription Glinka-Balakirev - The Lark (also in Godowsky's edition). Alongside them stand Lullaby and Reverie. A good way to get to know the composer is to start with Lullaby, Reverie and the nocturnes, then move on to the scherzos and leave Islamey for last as one of the most difficult pieces.