How did they change into often called The Mighty Handful?

Their distinctive title was not self-adopted however got here from a sentence in critic Vladimir Stasov’s evaluation of a live performance in Moscow on 24 Might 1867, through which music by 4 of the composers was featured: ‘Might God grant that [the audience retains] for ever a reminiscence of how a lot poetry, feeling, expertise and talent is possessed by the small however already mighty handful’.

The group is usually also referred to as ‘The 5’, a time period first utilized in a letter from Balakirev to Tchaikovsky in 1870. (Though influenced by the group, Tchaikovsky himself was all the time insistent on not being too carefully related to it.)

In that very same yr, shortly earlier than the group went their separate methods, 4 of them – Borodin, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui – started work on a collaborative opera referred to as Mlada, but it surely was by no means accomplished.

Who have been the 5 members of The Mighty Handful?

Mily Balakirev (1837-1910)

The de facto founding father of the group, Balakirev’s legacy maybe lies extra in his potential to encourage and affect others than his personal compositions. As a detailed acquaintance of Glinka (1804-57), the ‘father of Russian music’, he decided to hold on the older composer’s good work, and it was alongside Vladimir Stasov that he gathered collectively like-minded composers for that function.

An excellent pianist himself, a lot of his finest recognized music is for that instrument, together with 1869’s Islamey, broadly thought to be one of the crucial fiendishly tough works in your complete repertoire. In 1872, he suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew himself utterly from the musical world, returning solely slowly over the next years.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Like Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov was famend for his steadfast help and encouragement of fellow composers, not least as a much-loved professor on the St Petersburg Conservatory from 1871 onwards – of the 5 members of The Mighty Handful, he was the least at odds with the conservatories’ educating, and his acceptance of the put up met with none nice disapproval.

His personal works embrace the massively well-liked Scheherazade (1888) for orchestra and operas equivalent to The Story of Tsar Saltan (together with the well-known ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’) and the snappily titled The Legend of the Invisible Metropolis of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, and he additionally performed a big position in arranging, modifying and championing the music of fellow Mighty Handful member Musorgsky (see under) after the latter’s dying in 1881.

Modest Musorgsky (1839-81)

Ilya Repin’s well-known portrait of a dishevelled, red-eyed Musorgsky, painted simply days earlier than the composer’s dying, tells its personal story.

Solely years beforehand, Musorgsky had been on the peak of his powers, writing his opera Boris Godunov, primarily based on Pushkin’s story in regards to the early-Seventeenth-century Tsar, however now his descent into alcoholism had taken its toll. Musorgsky first got here to the eye of Borodin (see under) when within the military, after which had been additional guided alongside his musical path by Balakirev and fellow composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky.

It was Balakirev once more, nonetheless, who later refused to conduct Musorgsky’s Night time on The Naked Mountain, which might stay unperformed throughout his lifetime. Maybe his most well-known work, in the meantime, was 1874’s Photos at an Exhibition, composed in reminiscence his buddy, the artist Viktor Hartmann – initially written for solo piano, right this moment it’s equally well-known in Ravel’s orchestrated model of 1922.

Alexander Borodin (1833-87)

For Borodin, composing got here as a secondary occupation to his daytime job as a distinguished professor of chemistry, famend significantly for his work on aldehydes – his printed analysis on the topic would show extremely vital.

All of the extra spectacular, then, that he discovered time to compose a physique of labor that features, amongst different issues, two advantageous symphonies (a 3rd was left incomplete) and the opera Prince Igor (additionally unfinished, however later accomplished by Rimsky-Korsakov), which incorporates the well-known Polovtsian Dances.

His penchant for writing string quartets, in the meantime, incurred the displeasure of the opposite members of the Mighty Handful, who have been largely sceptical of chamber music. He died of a coronary heart assault at a celebration in February 1887.

César Cui (1835-1918)

Cui, like Borodin, was a composer in his spare time, as he served as an engineer-general within the Russian Imperial Military. A lot of his earlier efforts have been centered on writing operas, together with 1868’s William Ratcliff, however he would gravitate in the direction of chamber music following the disintegration of The 5.

He was additionally a revered critic who was not afraid to ship scathing phrases within the route of his personal colleagues – the premiere of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, for example, was given significantly harsh remedy. Of the 5 members of The Mighty Handful, he’s the least well-known right this moment.