Life
Born to Jewish parents in Moscow, where his father had just opened a small factory, Rubinstein showed talent at the keyboard early on. He studied piano first with his mother, and while the family was in Berlin between 1844 and 1846, he studied piano with Theodor Kullak and harmony and counterpoint with Siegfried Dehn; during this time both he and his brother Anton attracted the interest and support of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. When the family returned to Moscow, Nikolai studied with Alexander Villoing, who also toured with him. He studied medicine to avoid army conscription, graduating from Moscow University in 1855.
As a result of his playing, Rubinstein was welcomed in all the fashionable artistocratic houses in Moscow. He co-founded the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the Moscow Conservatory in 1866 with Prince Nikolai Petrovitch Troubetzkoy, serving as director of the latter until his death in 1881. He hired Tchaikovsky, then newly graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, to teach harmony at Moscow Conservatory. He actively encouraged Tchaikovsky's creative effforts and performed his compositions. Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky had a well-known falling-out over the latter's First Piano Concerto, but Rubinstein later revised his position and became an ardent champion of the work. Rubinstein conducted the premiere of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin in 1879. Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Trio in A minor in Rubinstein's memory after he died from tuberculosis in Paris.
Rubinstein also conducted and performed music of the nationalistic music group "The Five" to a much greater degree than his brother. In 1869, when the group's leader, Mily Balakirev, was forced to resign as conductor of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Musical Society, Rubinstein gave Balakirev his support, playing at concerts of the Free Music School as Balakirev's guest. He also gave the first performance of Balakirev's piano work Islamey, the work for which he is best known today.
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Rubinstein
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Thou art a toilsome mole, or less,
A moving mist;
But life is what none can express,
A quickness which my God hath kissed.”
—Thomas Stanley (1625–1678)
“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week’s seasickness to experience.... To me the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)