Rubinstein’s Programme Music and the Balakirev Circle

Abstract Anton Rubinstein’s music has often been portrayed as a conservative, cosmopolitan foil to the progressive, nationalist compositions of the Balakirev circle. This is also how the Balakirev circle viewed it throughout the 1860s, but their opposition suddenly gave way to public adulation in 1869. Ostensibly, the reason for this about-face was musical, since with Ivan IV (1868) and Don Quixote (1870), Rubinstein finally produced two explicitly programmatic symphonic pictures. Yet the difference between Rubinstein’s symphonic pictures and his earlier works was not as radical as the Balakirev circle made it out to be, and at least part of the circle’s motivation for suddenly praising them seems to have originated in extramusical concerns. In 1869, Balakirev was dismissed as the director of the Russian Musical Society and threw himself into organizing the Free Music School concerts, which he intended as a competitive alternative to those of the RMS. In order to attract audiences, he became determined to secure the Saint Petersburg premiere of Ivan IV as well as Rubinstein’s performances as a soloist, and it was in this context that the Balakirev circle bombarded the press with glowing reviews of Rubinstein’s music. In the short run, this rapprochement even grew beyond a marriage of convenience and developed into regular meetings at which Rubinstein and the Balakirev circle presented their compositions for criticism. These meetings were ephemeral, but in later years most of the Balakirev circle maintained a polite relationship with Rubinstein. The exception was Vladimir Stasov, who erased the rapprochement from his memory and reverted to peddling the image of Rubinstein as the archconservative enemy of Russian music that he had already constructed in the 1860s. Alas, it was Stasov who shaped twentieth-century historiography of Russian music, and this is why the events of 1869–71 have remained obscured in modern scholarship.