Alexander Glazunov

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander Glazunov stood at the podium in Paris on the 17th of May 1907 to conduct the last of the Russian Historical Concerts, a man at the absolute peak of his fame. That same year, Oxford and Cambridge each awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree. Saint Petersburg and Moscow were holding entire concert cycles devoted to his work, marking his 25th anniversary as a composer. It was a remarkable position for someone who had entered Rimsky-Korsakov's orbit as a teenager clutching an orchestral score "written in childish fashion" -- and it raises a question the rest of this story will answer. How does a publisher's son from Saint Petersburg become the central figure of Russian classical music for nearly half a century? And what does it mean to hold that position while the world around you transforms beyond recognition?

• 2. The Fourteen-Year-Old Prodigy

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  Mily Balakirev, the former leader of the nationalist composer group known as The Five, walked into Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's life one day and casually handed him a manuscript. "Casually Balakirev once brought me the composition of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old high-school student, Alexander Glazunov," Rimsky-Korsakov later recalled. "The boy's talent was indubitably clear." Balakirev formally introduced the two in December 1879, and what followed was one of the most accelerated musical educations of the Russian Romantic era.

  Rimsky-Korsakov did not teach Glazunov through a conservatory curriculum. He took him on as a private student and watched something extraordinary unfold. "His musical development progressed not by the day, but literally by the hour," Rimsky-Korsakov wrote. By the spring of 1881 -- barely a year and a half after they met -- Rimsky-Korsakov had started thinking of the teenager less as a pupil and more as a junior colleague. The death of Modest Mussorgsky that March may have deepened this bond; Rimsky-Korsakov needed a musical heir.

  The proof of all this rapid growth arrived publicly in 1882. Rimsky-Korsakov arranged the premiere of Glazunov's First Symphony, with Glazunov only 16 years old. Borodin and the critic Vladimir Stasov were among those who lavished praise on the work and its teenage composer. The young man whose father Konstantin had only just been granted hereditary nobility status -- that same year, 1882 -- was now being celebrated by the leading figures of Russian musical life.

• 3. Belyayev and the Circle

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  Among the audience for that celebrated 1882 premiere was a wealthy timber merchant named Mitrofan Belyayev. Belyayev had been introduced to Glazunov's music by the composer Anatoly Lyadov, and what he heard changed the course of his life. He would become Glazunov's most important patron and, eventually, the organizing force behind an entire movement in Russian music.

  Belyayev wasted no time. In 1884 he took the young Glazunov on a trip through Western Europe, during which Glazunov met Franz Liszt in Weimar and heard his First Symphony performed there. That same year, back home, Belyayev rented a concert hall and hired a full orchestra simply to play Glazunov's works in rehearsal. Energized by how well that went, he decided the following season to mount a public concert featuring Glazunov alongside other composers. That single decision grew into the Russian Symphony Concerts, a full concert series inaugurated in the 1886-1887 season.

  In 1885, Belyayev founded his own music publishing house in Leipzig, Germany, funding it from his timber fortune. His initial catalogue included Glazunov, Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin, all published at his personal expense. As younger composers began seeking Belyayev's support, he turned to Glazunov -- along with Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov -- to serve on an advisory council that would evaluate new submissions. The loose gathering of composers around this patronage network eventually became known as the Belyayev circle. Glazunov, who had started as its youngest and most promising beneficiary, had become one of its gatekeepers before he was 25.

• 4. The Podium Problem

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  Glazunov made his conducting debut in 1888, and the following year he took his Second Symphony to the World Exhibition in Paris. In 1896 he was appointed conductor for the Russian Symphony Concerts. That same year he led the posthumous premiere of Tchaikovsky's student overture The Storm. His relationship with the baton was complicated from the start.

  The most consequential evening of his conducting career came in 1897, when he led the premiere of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 1. It was a disaster. The performance catalysed what became a three-year depression for Rachmaninoff. The composer's wife later said that Glazunov appeared to be drunk at the time. Shostakovich's own account of Glazunov adds a specific detail: that Glazunov kept a bottle of alcohol hidden behind his desk at the Conservatory and sipped it through a tube during lessons.

  Glazunov himself seemed to understand his limitations on the podium. He once joked, "You can criticize my compositions, but you can't deny that I am a good conductor and a remarkable conservatory Director." He kept conducting anyway -- through the hardships of World War I, in factories, clubs, and Red Army posts during the Russian Civil War, and at a centenary concert marking the 1927 anniversary of Beethoven's death, where he appeared as both speaker and conductor. After leaving Russia in 1928, he conducted engagements across Portugal, Spain, France, England, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the United States. The lack of mastery never stopped him.

• 5. The Conservatory Years

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  Glazunov joined the Saint Petersburg Conservatory as a professor in 1899. When the upheaval of the 1905 Russian Revolution led to the firing and then re-hiring of Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov stepped into the directorship. He would hold that position, through one of the most turbulent stretches of Russian history, until 1930.

  His tenure was shaped by a genuine paternalism toward students. He personally examined hundreds of students at the end of each academic year, writing brief comments on each one. For Dmitri Shostakovich, who entered the Petrograd Conservatory at just 13 as its youngest student, Glazunov's attention was decisive. Glazunov monitored Shostakovich's progress in Maximilian Steinberg's composition class and, when it came time to award his doctorate, recommended him for a higher degree that would normally have led to a professorship. Shostakovich could not take advantage of the opportunity because of his family's financial hardship. Glazunov also arranged the premiere of Shostakovich's First Symphony, which took place on the 12th of May 1926, with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Nikolai Malko -- 44 years after Glazunov's own First Symphony had been presented in the same hall.

  The post-revolution years brought escalating pressure. The Conservatory gained special status among Soviet institutions in part because of Glazunov's prestige, and he cultivated a working relationship with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the minister of education. But professors and students increasingly demanded curricula aligned with communist ideology, and Glazunov found those demands destructive. In 1928 he used the occasion of Schubert centenary celebrations in Vienna as his exit. He did not return. Maximilian Steinberg ran the Conservatory in Glazunov's absence until he finally resigned in 1930.

• 6. Stravinsky's Complicated Debt

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  At 15, Igor Stravinsky did something revealing: he transcribed one of Glazunov's string quartets for piano solo. He later wrote in his 1935 autobiography that as a young man he deeply admired Glazunov's perfection of musical form, his purity of counterpoint, and the ease of his writing. Stravinsky deliberately modeled his own Symphony in E, Op. 1, on Glazunov's symphonies. He even used Glazunov's Eighth Symphony, Op. 83 -- written in the same key -- as a template for correcting his own.

  The admiration curdled. In his memoirs, Stravinsky described Glazunov as one of the most disagreeable men he had ever met. He recalled the private premiere of his symphony, noting that his only bad omen was Glazunov approaching him afterwards and saying, "Very nice, very nice." Stravinsky later amended the memory: Glazunov had actually told him, passing him in the aisle, "Rather heavy instrumentation for such music."

  Glazunov, for his part, was publicly withering about the direction Stravinsky took. At a performance of Stravinsky's Feu d'artifice, he reportedly muttered, "Kein Talent, nur Dissonanz" -- "no talent, just dissonance." Sergei Diaghilev was in the same audience that night; it was precisely that performance that led him to seek out Stravinsky for the Ballets Russes. By 1912, Glazunov had settled into a cool dismissal. He told Vladimir Telyakovsky that year, "Petrushka is not music, but is excellently and skillfully orchestrated." It was a verdict that revealed as much about Glazunov's limits as it did about Stravinsky's genius.

• 7. Exile and Late Works

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  Paris became Glazunov's home by 1929. He maintained the fiction that his absence from Russia was due to "ill health," a polite diplomatic formulation that kept him in good standing with the Soviet authorities and allowed him to remain a respected composer there, unlike Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, who had left under different circumstances.

  His marriage also came late. In 1929, at 64, Glazunov married Olga Nikolayevna Gavrilova, who was 54. The year before, Olga's daughter Elena had been the soloist at the first Paris performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in B major, Op. 100. Glazunov subsequently adopted Elena, and she took the name Elena Glazunova. Her husband, the pianist Sergei Tarnowsky, managed Glazunov's professional affairs in Paris, including his American appearances with impresario Sol Hurok. Tarnowsky was himself a notable piano teacher; his students included Vladimir Horowitz.

  In 1929, Glazunov conducted the first complete electrical recording of The Seasons, using an orchestra of Parisian musicians. His final major composition was the Saxophone Concerto in 1934, written for the alto saxophone. Stravinsky had called him merely a skilled orchestrator; the Saxophone Concerto was Glazunov's answer of sorts, a demonstration that he could absorb Western fashions without abandoning his own voice. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, in 1936. His remains were brought back to Russia in 1972 and reinterred at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Leningrad.