1866–1920 · Russia
Vladimir Rebikov (1866–1920) was a Russian composer and pianist at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the pioneers of whole-tone music in Russia, who worked in genres unusual for his time — the melomimic and the rhythmo-declamation. He wrote operas, ballets and a great deal of music for children. The site offers his lyrical intermediate-level piano pieces.
Vladimir Ivanovich Rebikov was born on 31 May 1866 in Krasnoyarsk, into the family of a mining engineer of noble descent with distant Tatar roots. The future composer's sisters also played the piano. Two years later, in 1868, the Rebikovs moved to Moscow and settled on Prechistenka Street. His mother was the one who first taught him to play the piano, and these lessons at home became his earliest introduction to music. That was how Rebikov's childhood began, in surroundings closely bound up with music from his earliest years.
From 1878 Rebikov studied at a commercial school, and from 1880 at K. P. Voskresensky's realschule, without giving up music. In 1885 he tried to enter the Moscow Conservatory, but the examination board headed by S. I. Taneyev turned down his 'modernist, dissonant' pieces, so instead he enrolled in the history and philology faculty of Moscow University. At the same time he took private lessons with Nikolai Klenovsky.
In 1891 Rebikov went abroad to continue his musical training: first he studied in Berlin with K. Mayrberger, and then with G. Müller. These years of study — first at Russian schools, then abroad — laid the foundation for his later musical career.
In 1893, in Moscow, Rebikov wrote a cycle of romances to poems by Semyon Nadson, which was approved and supported by P. I. Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky received the debut warmly, noting the young composer's talent, poetic quality and the freshness of his harmonic language. In 1893–1896 Rebikov lived in Odessa, where he wrote his first opera, In the Storm, based on Vladimir Korolenko's story The Forest Roars; years later it gained recognition and entered the repertoire of the Akvarium theatre in Moscow. That was how his career as an opera composer began, one that continued right up to the last years of his life.
Rebikov attended literary and artistic evenings at Valery Bryusov's house, and from 1893 taught music in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. In 1897 he moved to Kishinev and secured the opening of a branch of the Russian Musical Society there, establishing a music school alongside it. Later, toward the end of the decade, he visited Vienna and Munich, where he encountered the newest trends in contemporary art. Besides teaching, he also gave successful concerts in various cities of the Russian Empire — Moscow, Odessa, Kishinev and Yalta — as well as abroad, in Berlin, Vienna and Prague.
In 1898–1901 Rebikov initiated the founding of the Society of Russian Composers — the first official association of composers in the history of Russian music — and took part in its work. From 1901 he gave many concerts in Russia and abroad. His opera The Christmas Tree was successfully staged on Russian and foreign stages, and newspapers and magazines wrote about him, though over time his fame began to fade; the director V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko still showed interest in his last opera, A Nest of Nobles, after the novel by Ivan Turgenev.
In response to the events of the 1905 revolution, Rebikov wrote the literary poem Alpha and Omega and the musical-psychological picture «Кошмар». From 1906 he lived abroad, and from 1909 he settled again in Moscow and published articles on questions of musical art.
Rebikov often visited Crimea: as a young man he spent several summers in Feodosia, at a small dacha his parents rented. Yalta became his home from 1910 — in the town he was known as a striking eccentric: he could be seen along the streets carrying two umbrellas at once, one white against the sun and the other black against the rain. The year 1913 marked the 25th anniversary of Rebikov's creative career: on that occasion his opera The Christmas Tree was shown at the Solodovnikov Theatre in Moscow by the artists of S. I. Zimin's opera company.
In August 1914 Rebikov opened his own studio in Yalta — the Studio of Music of the Composer V. I. Rebikov. There he taught composition and music theory, as well as musicology and piano, to anyone willing to learn.
Rebikov was one of the founders of the Yalta Religious-Philosophical Society, established in October 1919. He died in Yalta on 4 August 1920 and was buried at the Autka cemetery; his remains were later moved to the Polikur memorial, where a memorial plaque was installed in his honour.
Rebikov's adopted daughter, Alexandra Rebikova, later became an actress of the theatre and silent film.
Later, interest in Rebikov's music revived: in the twenty-first century his works are being reissued on record and streamed on music services, introducing them to new listeners around the world. Researchers consider Rebikov one of the early forerunners of musical techniques that became widespread in the twentieth century, and count him among the striking representatives of early twentieth-century Russian musical modernism.
Rebikov's creative legacy includes more than ten operas and two ballets, as well as numerous piano cycles, romances and choral works.
Rebikov's creative outlook was close to Symbolism and musical Impressionism: he often chose popular literary and pictorial works of his time as subjects for his compositions. For instance, the piano cycle «Эскизы-настроения» was inspired by the painting of Arnold Böcklin. Rebikov was one of the first in Russia to turn to whole-tone music and readily used sonorities unusual for his time, in particular chords built in fourths. He set out his aesthetic views in the manifesto article «Музыкальные записи чувств» (1913), in which he called for abandoning fixed musical form and harmony, since, in his view, human feelings have no predetermined limits.
Rebikov's style showed itself most clearly in his works for the musical theatre. Rejecting the aesthetics of traditional opera, he wrote psychological musical dramas — such as Tea, Alpha and Omega and A Nest of Nobles — filled with allegory and mystical symbols. He also worked in the melomimic, a genre he himself defined this way: music and movement are joined inseparably in it, unlike ballet it has no dance, and unlike pantomime the music plays a role no smaller than movement and mime.
In instrumental music Rebikov kept to simple small forms: he wrote several dozen piano miniatures of a lyrical or genre-characteristic kind — elegant, witty and vivid, though technically undemanding — gathered into cycles. The site brings together Rebikov's piano pieces at the «Средний+» level — among them A la brune (Op. 23), Aspirer et atteindre (Op. 25), Dans la foret (Op. 46) and Les danses (Op. 51) — as well as the voice-and-piano romances Chansons blanches (Op. 48) and Chansons du coeur (Op. 24).
Besides music for the piano, Rebikov also wrote romances and choral works, among them the sacred work «Всенощная», which the conductor and composer Alexander Kastalsky judged to be bold in its manner of presentation. Rebikov's style differed noticeably from the accepted norms of composition, and his experiments in musical language often met with incomprehension from his contemporaries. He also set out his views on musical art in articles, among them «Музыка через 50 лет» and «Орфей и вакханки».