The Five (composers)

The Five refers to a circle of composers, also known as the Kuchka or The Mighty Handful, who met in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the years 1856-1870: Mily Balakirev (the leader), César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. The group had the aim of producing a specifically Russian kind of art music, rather than one that imitated older European music or relied on European-style conservatory training. In a sense, they were a branch of the Romantic Nationalism movement in Russia, with the Abramtsevo Colony and Russian Revival striving to achieve similar goals in the sphere of fine arts.

Name

Vladimir Stasov
(1824 – 1906)

In May, 1867 the critic Vladimir Stasov wrote an article, Mr. Balakirev's Slavic Concert, on a concert given for visiting Slav delegations to the "All-Russian Ethnographical Exhibition" in Moscow. The four Russian composers whose works were played at the concert were Glinka, Dargomïzhsky, Balakirev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. The article ended with the following statement:

"God grant that our Slav guests may never forget today's concert; God grant that they may forever preserve the memory of how much poetry, feeling, talent, and intelligence are possessed by the small but already mighty handful of Russian musicians."

— Vladimir Stasov, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti

The expression "mighty handful" (Russian: Могучая кучка, Moguchaya kuchka, "Mighty Heap" or "Group"), was mocked by enemies of Balakirev and Stasov: academic circles of the conservatory, the Russian Musical Society, and their press supporters. The group responded by defiantly adopting the name. This loose collection of composers gathered around Balakirev now included Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin—the five who have come to be associated with the name "Mighty Handful", or sometimes "The Five". Gerald Abraham states flatly in the Grove Dictionary of Music that "they never called themselves, nor were they ever called in Russia, 'The Five'." In his memoirs, Rimsky-Korsakov routinely refers to the group as "Balakirev's circle", and occasionally uses "The Mighty Handful", sometimes with a disparaging tone. He also makes the following reference to "The Five":

"If we leave out of account Lodyzhensky, who accomplished nothing, and Lyadov, who appeared later, Balakirev's circle consisted of Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and me (the French have retained the denomination of 'Les Cinq ' for us to this day)."

— Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Chronicle of My Musical Life, 1909

The Russian word "kuchka" also spawned the terms "kuchkism" and "kuchkist", which may be applied to artistic aims or works in tune with the sensibilities of The Mighty Handful.

The name of Les Six, an even looser collection of French-speaking composers, emulates that of "The Five".

History

The formation of the group began in 1856, with the first meeting of Balakirev and César Cui. Modest Mussorgsky joined them in 1857, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1861, and Alexander Borodin in 1862. All the composers in The Five were young men in 1862. Balakirev was 25, Cui 27, Mussorgsky 23, Borodin the old man at 28, and Rimsky-Korsakov just 18. They were all self-trained amateurs. Borodin combined composing with a career in chemistry. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval offficer (he wrote his First Symphony on a three-year naval voyage circumnavigating the globe). Mussorgsky had been in the Guards, then in the civil service before taking up music; even at the height of his career in the 1870's he was forced by the expense of his drinking habit to hold down a full-time job inn the State Forestry Department.

In contrast to elite status and cour connections of Conservatory composers such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Five were mainly from the minor gentry of the provinces. To some degree their ésprit de corps depended on the myth, which they themselves created, of a movement that was more "authentically Russian," in the sense tht it was closer to the native soil, tha the classic academy.

Before them, Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Dargomyzhsky had gone some way towards producing a distinctly Russian kind of music, writing operas on Russian subjects, but The Mighty Handful represented the first concentrated attempt to develop such a music, with Stasov as their artistic advisor and Dargomyzhsky as an elder statesman to the group, so to speak. The circle began to fall apart during the 1870s, no doubt partially due to the fact that Balakirev withdrew from musical life early in the decade for a period of time. All of "The Five" are buried in Tikhvin Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Musical language

The musical language The Five developed set them far apart from the Conservatoire. This self-conscious Russian styling was based on two elements:

1. They tried to incorporate in their music what they heard in village songs, in Cossack and Caucasian dances, in church chants and the tolling of church bells (to the point where the bell tolling became a cliche). The Five's music became filled with imitative sounds of Russian life. They also tried to reproduce the long-drawn, lyrical and melismatic peasant song, what Glinka had once called "the soul of Russian music." Balakirev made this possible by his study of songs from the Volga in the 1860's. More than any previous anthology, his transcriptions artfully preserved the distinctive aspects of Russian folk music:

   Tonal mutability: A tune seems to shift naturally from one tonal center to another, often ending up in a different key than the one in which the song began. This can proiduce a feeling of elusiveness, a lack of definition or of logical progression in the harmony. Even when stylized by The Five, this quality can make Russian music sound very different from the tonal structures of the West.

   Heterophony: A melody divides into several dissonant voices, each with its own variation of the theme. This is improvised by the singers until the end, when the song reverts to a single melodic line.

   Parallel fifths, fourths and thirds: The effect lends Russian music a raw sonority missing entirely from the comparatively polished harmonies of Western music.

2. The Five also invented a series of harmonic devices to create a distinct "Russian" style and color different from Western music. This "exotic" styling of "Russia" was not just self-conscious but entirely invented. None of these devices was actualy used in Russian folk or church music:

   Whole tone scale: Glinka invented this scape and used it first in the march of Chernomor the sorcerer in his opera Ruslan and Ludmilla in 1842. This scale became the "Russian" sound of spookiness and evil. It was used by all the major composers from Tchaikovsky (the appearance of the Countess's ghose in The Queen of Spades) to Rimsky-Korsakov (in all his magic-story operas—Sadko, Kashchey the Immortal and The Invisible City of Kitezh. Claude Debussy also uses this scale in his music, taking this, among many things, from Mussorgsky. Later it became a standard device in horror-movie scores.

   Diminished or octatonic scale: Rimsky-Korsakov first used this in his symphonic poem Sadko in 1867. This scale bcame a sort of Russian calling card—a leitmotif of magic and menace used not just by Rimsky-Korsakov but all of his followers, above all Igor Stravinsky in The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

   Modular rotation in sequences of thirds: The Five made this device of Franz Liszt their own to base a loose symphonic-poem type of structure. This way, they could avoid the rigid Western laws of modulation in sonata form, allowing the form of a musical composition to be shaped entirely by the "content" of the music (its programatic statements and visual descriptions) rather than by formal laws of symmetry.

This loose structure became especially important for Musssorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a work that may have done more than any other to define the Russian style.

Quotes

Rimsky-Korsakov provides the following picture of "The Mighty Handful" in his memoirs, Chronicle of My Musical Life (translated by J. A. Joffe):

On their tastes

"The tastes of the circle leaned towards Glinka, Schumann, and Beethoven's last quartets ... they had little respect for Mendelssohn ... Mozart and Haydn were considered out of date and naive ... J. S. Bach was held to be petrified ... Chopin was likened by Balakirev to a nervous society lady ... Berlioz was highly esteemed ...Liszt was comparatively unknown ... Little was said of Wagner ... They respected Dargomyzhsky for the recitative portions of Rusalka ... [but] he was not credited with any considerable talent and was treated with a shade of derision. ...Rubinstein had a reputation as a pianist, but was thought to have neither talent nor taste as a composer."

On Balakirev

"Balakirev, who had never had any systematic course in harmony and counterpoint and had not even superficially applied himself to them, evidently thought such studies quite unnecessary ... An excellent pianist, a superior sight reader of music, a splendid improviser, endowed by nature with the sense of correct harmony and part-writing, he possessed a technique partly native and partly acquired through a vast musical erudition, with the help of an extraordinary memory, keen and retentive, which means so much in steering a critical course in musical literature ... He instantly felt every technical imperfection or error, he grasped a defect in form at once. Whenever I or other young men, later on, played him our essays at composition, he instantly caught all the defects of form, modulation, and so on, and forthwith seating himself at the piano, he would improvise and show how the composition in question should be changed exactly as he indicated, and frequently entire passages in other people's compositions became his and not their putative authors' at all. He was obeyed absolutely, for the spell of his personality was tremendous. ... His influence over those around him was boundless, and resembled some magnetic or mesmeric force. ... he despotically demanded that the tastes of his pupils should exactly coincide with his own. The slightest deviation from his taste was severely censured by him. By means of raillery, a parody or caricature played by him, whatever did not suit him at the moment was belittled — and the pupil blushed with shame for his expressed opinion and recanted...."

On their abilities

"Balakirev considered me a symphony specialist ... in the sixties, Balakirev and Cui, though very intimate with Mussorgsky and sincerely fond of him, treated him like a lesser light, and of little promise at that, in spite of his undoubted talent. It seemed to them that there was something missing in him and, in their eyes, he was in need of advice and criticism. Balakirev often said that Mussorgsky had "no head" or that his "brains were weak." ... Balakirev thought that Cui understood little in symphony and musical forms and nothing in orchestration, but was a past master in vocal and operatic music; Cui, in turn, thought Balakirev a master in symphony, form, and orchestration, but with little liking for operatic composition and vocal music in general. Thus they complemented each other, but each, in his own way, felt mature and grown up. Borodin, Mussorgsky, and I, however—we were immature and juvenile. Obviously, towards Balakirev and Cui we were in somewhat subordinate relations; their opinions were listened to unconditionally ..."

Influence

Except perhaps for Cui, the members of this group influenced or taught many of the great Russian composers who were to follow, including Alexander Glazunov, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Timeline

External links

• Encyclopædia Britannica article about "The Five" [1]
• The Article about The Five in "1000 years of Russian Music" [2]
• A photo of "The Five" listening to a singer [3]