Russia’s forgotten Romantic – the protégé of Tchaikovsky who taught Rachmaninoff and Scriabin
An oft-repeated story surrounding Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 is one of the doubt-ridden composer bringing the piano score to a close friend, who proceeded to play through the piece on the piano and offer his critiques as he went. Tchaikvosky, in characteristic fashion, took his manuscript, angrily wrote on it in red pencil and then tore it up before leaving the room in despair. The man at the piano would simply say ‘Pyotr Ilyich takes everything to heart. After all, he himself asked me to give my opinion...’
Tchaikovsky’s confidant was Sergei Taneyev, a pupil of his and one of the very few who the celebrated ballet composer and symphonist trusted to appraise his music, and of whom Tchaikovsky said that ‘I know you are absolutely sincere and I think a great deal of your judgment. But I also fear it.’
Early life
Born into a well-off family in Vladimir Oblast in 1856, Taneyev showed great aptitude for music as a child, enrolling in the Moscow Conservatory at the tender age of nine to study piano. One of his tutors was the renowned pianist and one of the founders of the Conservatory, Nikolai Rubinstein, who saw great potential in him. It was in his composition studies that Taneyev met Tchaikovsky, and a life-long friendship began.
Graduating in 1875, Taneyev was the first student of the Conservatory to win the gold medal prizes for both performance and composition. He then became a touring concert pianist around Europe and Russia, meeting the composers Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck, and the writer Émile Zola. Taneyev was chosen by Tchaikovsky to be the soloist for the Moscow premiere of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Tchaikovsky also dedicated his tone poem Francesca di Rimini to his former pupil.
It was Tchaikovsky who also recommended Taneyev to the post of director at the Moscow Conservatory in 1878, where Taneyev would teach harmony, composition and the piano to pupils who counted Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Thomas de Hartmann among their number. He remained there up until the Russian Revolution of 1905, after which he could focus more on composition.
Point and counterpoint
Violin Sonata in A Minor & Piano Quintet in G Minor
For Taneyev’s close association with Tchaikovsky, for whom he made four-hand piano arrangements of a variety of his works, and completed the sketches of Tchaikovsky’s Third Piano Concerto, he had a very different approach to composition than his teacher. While Tchaikovsky wrote music straight from the heart, dancing along flights of fancies or sinking into fits of despair, Taneyev took a more intellectual and scientific approach to achieve a depth ofRomantic expression. Often referred to as the 'Russian Bach', he was particularly fascinated with the art of counterpoint, theorising the mathematical principals of polyphony, the movement and relations between multiple melodic lines, in treaties such as Convertible counterpoint in the strict style.
One of his fellow late-Romantic composers, Rimsky-Korsakov, said of his composition style: ‘Before setting out for the real expounding of a composition, Taneyev used to precede it with a multitude of sketches and studies: he used to write fugues, canons, and various contrapuntal interlacings on the individual themes, phrases, and motives of the coming composition, and only after gaining thorough experience in its component parts, did he take up the general plan of the composition.’
Although composers such as Scriabin and Stravinsky would develop their own distinctive styles from Taneyev, he remained revered in the Russian musical tradition throughout the twentieth century, with Stravinsky writing: ‘In my youth I highly valued Taneyev's treatise on counterpoint, one of the best books of its kind. I respected him as a composer for certain passages in his opera The Oresteia, and I admired him greatly as a pianist.’
Music for a new age
Overture to the Oresteia
Rachmaninoff, like Taneyev, distanced himself from the Russian nationalist impulses of the composers known as The Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov), a group who advocated for a distinct style of music that strictly adhered to Russian musical conventions and folk traditions. Rachmaninoff, whose music was more closely modelled after Western traditions, owed a great debt to Taneyev in his creative output, describing him as ‘a master composer, the most erudite musician of his time, a person of rare individuality, originality and character – a pinnacle of musical Moscow.’
Amongst a modest output of symphonies, chamber and piano music, Taneyev wrote two cantatas during his lifetime. The first was John of Damascus in 1884, a fire-and-brimstone retelling of the life of the eight-century theologian, which was performed at the memorial service for Nikolai Rubinstein, and the epic At the Reading of a Psalm much later in 1915. Taneyev was fascinated by the form of the cantata, combining orchestral forces with chorus, for its structural, rhetorical and dramatic potential, divested from the demands of opera or liturgy. At the Reading of a Psalm, for example, was a setting of poetry by Aleksey Khomyakov that could express deeply religious themes without adhering to the Orthodox conventions of choral music, which demanded chants and psalm settings that could be performed at a church service. Composers who took to the cantata included Rachmaninoff, whose most famous was a 1913 setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry, The Bells, and Prokofiev, who wrote Alexander Nevsky and Seven, They Are Seven amongst others. The potential for the form to meet the needs Russian national myth-making were fully realised with Prokofiev’s Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution and Shostakovich’s The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland.
Listen to John of Damascus
John of Damascus
It was shortly after Scriabin’s funeral in 1915 that Taneyev met his untimely end, dying of pneumonia. He might not be as well remembered in the West as many of his contemporaries, but this fiercely intellectual composer and thinker who was deeply respected by his peers has given us many reasons to consider that a revival of his music in our concert halls may be order.
Discover the music
Hear Taneyev's John of Damascus and Scriabin's Symphony No.3 in concert
Written by Tim Lutton