Belyayev circle

• 1. Introduction

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  The Belyayev circle was born from a chance encounter between a timber merchant and a teenage prodigy. When Mitrofan Belyayev heard the First Symphony of the sixteen-year-old Alexander Glazunov, he was so struck by what he heard that he resolved to reshape Russian musical life from the ground up. Over the next two decades, the society he founded would govern nearly every aspect of musical creation, education, and performance in Saint Petersburg. Who were the figures at the center of this circle? What did they believe Russian music should sound like? And what happened when a young composer from Moscow dared to disagree?

• 2. The Patron's Vision

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  Belyayev was one of a growing number of Russian nouveau-riche industrialists who became patrons of the arts in the mid- to late-19th century. His peers in this informal cohort included railway magnate Savva Mamontov and textile manufacturer Pavel Tretyakov. Where the aristocratic patron Nadezhda von Meck insisted on anonymity in the tradition of noblesse oblige, Belyayev, Mamontov, and Tretyakov wanted, in the words of those who studied them, to contribute conspicuously to public life. This orientation made these industrialist patrons more inclined than the aristocracy to support native talent rather than cosmopolitan artists.

  As an amateur viola player and chamber music enthusiast, Belyayev hosted regular "quartet Fridays" at his home in Saint Petersburg, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a frequent visitor. After his encounter with the young Glazunov, Belyayev moved quickly. He took the composer on a tour of Western Europe, including a visit to Weimar, Germany, to present the young composer to Franz Liszt. In 1884, Belyayev established an annual Glinka prize, named after the pioneer Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, who had lived from 1804 to 1857.

  In 1885, Belyayev founded a music publishing firm based in Leipzig, Germany. Publishing from Leipzig gave him two advantages that Russia could not offer: higher quality music printing and the protection of international copyright. At Rimsky-Korsakov's suggestion, he also founded the Russian Symphony Concerts, a series open exclusively to Russian composers. Among the works written specifically for this series were three by Rimsky-Korsakov that remain his best-known pieces in the West: Scheherazade, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and Capriccio espagnol.

• 3. The Guild at the Center

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  To manage the flood of composers now seeking his help, Belyayev assembled an advisory council made up of Glazunov, Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov. These three men reviewed compositions and appeals, then recommended which composers deserved patronage and public performance. Because all three were associated with Belyayev's enterprises, any composer who wished to be published, performed, or paid had to write in a musical style that satisfied them.

  Rimsky-Korsakov's style became, by default, the preferred academic model. His years teaching at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory meant that many circle members had been shaped by him directly. The better pupils at the Conservatory received an invitation to the "quartet Fridays" as a kind of initiation. Admission to the circle, as contemporaries recognized, "guaranteed well remunerated publication by Edition Belieff, Leipzig, and performance in the Russian Symphony Concert programs". Musicologist Richard Taruskin observed that within the Belyayev circle, a safe conformism became increasingly the rule. The circle, in effect, operated as a compositional guild.

• 4. Belief in Russian Music

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  Composers in the Belyayev circle shared the conviction, inherited from the earlier group known as The Five, that Russian classical music should stand apart in style and character from Western European music. They drew on folk music, exotic melodic forms, and harmonic elements associated with Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. But they differed from The Five in one significant respect: they accepted, and indeed insisted upon, rigorous academic Western training in composition.

  Glaznov's attitude toward outside influence was representative. He studied the works of Tchaikovsky and found, in his own words, much that was new and instructive. He admired not Tchaikovsky's thematic material, he said, but "the inspired unfolding of his thoughts, his temperament and the constructural perfection". Rimsky-Korsakov noted a "tendency toward eclecticism" among the circle's composers and a fondness for the Italian and French music of the eighteenth century, a taste he associated with Tchaikovsky's operas Queen of Spades and Iolanthe.

  The circle ran directly counter in philosophy to the artistic movement and magazine known as Mir iskusstva, which translates as World of Art. Where Mir iskusstva identified with the cosmopolitan values of the Russian aristocracy and championed art as the spiritual expression of individual genius, the Belyayev composers believed in a national, realist form of Russian music. A review published in Mir iskusstva in 1899 by Alfred Nurok put the criticism plainly: Belyayev's patronage, Nurok wrote, encouraged young composers not to develop their creative abilities but to "cultivate productivity come what may". Belyayev, the reviewer argued, "encourages industry above all, and under his aegis musical composition has assumed the character of a workers' collective".

• 5. Folk, Orient, and Fantasy

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  Unlike the composers in The Five who had actively traveled to other parts of Russia to collect folk songs, as Balakirev had done, the Belyayev composers generally did not seek out primary folk material. When they produced folkloric works, they imitated Balakirev's or Rimsky-Korsakov's styles rather than returning to original sources. The harmonies of Mussorgsky's coronation scene in Boris, the octatonicism of Mlada and Sadko, Balakirev's folk-song stylizations: these served, as scholar Maes described it, as a "store of recipes for writing Russian national music".

  Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov was the circle's main practitioner of musical orientalism, continuing the Five's exploration of exotic melodic and harmonic elements drawn from the middle- and far-eastern parts of the Russian Empire. He wrote three operas set in an oriental background, Ruth, Azra, and Izmena. The last of these concerned the struggle between Christians and Muslims during the sixteenth-century occupation of Georgia by the Persians. Western audiences know him best through his two sets of Caucasian Sketches, described as an orientalist orchestral work modeled on Balakirev and Borodin.

  Anatoly Lyadov worked in what contemporaries called a "fantastic" style, writing tone poems based on Russian fairy tales, including Baba Yaga, Kikimora, and The Enchanted Lake. This approach leaned heavily on the whole tone scale and the octatonic scale to evoke supernatural characters and events. Igor Stravinsky, who would later break sharply from the Belyayev aesthetic, wrote his ballet The Firebird in a similar style before striking out in new directions.

• 6. Rachmaninoff and the Circle's Limits

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  The premiere of Sergei Rachmaninoff's First Symphony, held in Saint Petersburg on the 28th of March 1897, became one of the most catastrophic events in Russian musical history. Rachmaninoff was a Moscow composer and a protege of Tchaikovsky, which already placed him outside the Saint Petersburg circle's world. Rimsky-Korsakov, attending a rehearsal conducted by Glazunov, told Rachmaninoff directly, "Forgive me, but I do not find this music at all agreeable". Reports from those present described the rehearsal itself as a disaster and, in the words of witnesses, a horrific travesty of the score.

  The premiere fared no better. César Cui, who had himself been part of The Five alongside Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote a review so savage it became notorious. Imagining a conservatory in Hell, Cui wrote that if a talented student there were to compose a symphony based on the Ten Plagues of Egypt, it would resemble Rachmaninoff's work, and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. The symphony was not performed again during Rachmaninoff's lifetime. He suffered a psychological collapse that produced a three-year creative silence.

• 7. Legacy and Long Shadow

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  Rimsky-Korsakov retired from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1906, but the aesthetic he had championed did not leave with him. His son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg, took charge of composition classes at the Conservatory and maintained the circle's standards through the 1920s. Dmitri Shostakovich would later complain about Steinberg's conservatism, characterized by such phrases as "the inviolable foundations of the kuchka" and the "sacred traditions of Nikolai Andreyevich".

  The circle's influence spread well beyond Saint Petersburg. Well into the Soviet era, other music conservatories remained run by figures aligned with the Belyayev aesthetic, including Ippolitov-Ivanov in Moscow and Reinhold Glière in Kiev. Maes concluded that these individuals allowed the conservatories to retain a direct link with the Belyayev aesthetic long after the circle itself had dissolved.

  Scholar Maes also addressed the common assumption that composers such as Stravinsky and Prokofiev emerged from the Belyayev circle as its natural heirs. He argued this was a false reading. Modernist music in Russia represented a much more radical break from the Belyayev circle than many have claimed. Rimsky-Korsakov's harmonic experiments, including his extensive use of the octatonic scale, gave later composers raw material to work with, but the renewing force, as Maes put it, "still had to be liberated from the cliches and routines into which the Belyayev aesthetic had been pressed".