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:
“What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“... aside from the financial aspect, [there] is more: the life of my work. I feel that is all I came into the world for, and have failed dismally if it is not a success.”
—Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930)