Anton Rubinstein

As pianist, composer, conductor, as well as the teacher of Tchaikovsky and the Polish-American piano virtuoso Josef Hofmann, Anton Rubinstein was undoubtedly a pivotal musical figure in 19th-century Russia. Born in 1829, he studied with Glinka’s composition teacher, Siegfried Dehn, in Berlin in the 1840s while at the same time acquiring a dazzling piano technique which rivalled that of Liszt. He toured extensively throughout Europe and the US, pioneering an innovative set of recitals which charted the history of keyboard music from its origins in the 16th century to his own times. Rubinstein founded the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and then, three years later, the St Petersburg Conservatory with the objective of raising the standard of the nation’s music-making and musical training. His staunchly pro-Western musical outlook, however, put him at loggerheads with the increasingly influential nationalist group of composers led by Balakirev. An enormously prolific and technically fluent composer who wrote works in all the major genres, Rubinstein was primarily influenced by German masters such as Mendelssohn. Yet with the notable exception of the early salon piano piece Melody in F (1852), much of his music fell out of fashion following his death in 1894. Nonetheless, his Piano Concerto No. 4 (1872), much admired by Rachmaninoff, and the powerful opera The Demon (1871), championed by Mahler who conducted its Viennese premiere in 1899, rank amongst his most impressive achievements.