César Cui

César Antonovich Cui (Russian: Цезарь Антонович Кюи, Cezar' Antonovič Kjui; January 6, 1835, OS – March 13, 1918) was a Russian composer and author of French and Lithuanian descent. His profession was as an army officer and a teacher of fortifications; his avocational life has particular significance in the history of music, in that he was a composer and music critic; in this sideline he is known as a member of The Five, the group of Russian composers under the leadership of Mily Balakirev dedicated to the production of a specifically Russian brand of music.

Biography

Upbringing and career

Cesarius-Benjaminus (Цезарий-Вениамин) Cui was born in Vilnius (the capital of Lithuania), to a Roman-Catholic family, as the youngest of five children. His French father Antoine (name Russianized as Anton Leonardovich), had entered Russia as a member of Napoleon's army in 1812, settled in Vilnius upon their defeat, and married a local woman named Julia Gucewicz. Amidst this multi-ethnic environment young César grew up learning French, Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. Before finishing gymnasium, in 1850 Cui was sent to Saint Petersburg to prepare to enter the Chief Engineering School, which he did the next year at age 16. In 1855 he was graduated from the Academy, and after advanced studies at the Nikolaevsky Engineering Academy, he began his military career in 1857 as an instructor in fortifications. His students over the decades included several members of the Imperial family, most notably Nicolas II. As an expert on fortifications he eventually attained the status of professor in 1880 and the rank of general in 1906, teaching at three of the military academies in Saint Petersburg. His study of fortifications gained from frontline assignment during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 proved quite important for his career, and his writings on fortifications included textbooks that were widely used, in several successive editions.

Avocational life in music

Despite his achievements as a professional military academic, Cui is best known in the West for his "other" life in music. As a boy in Vilnius he received piano lessons, studied Chopin's works, and began composing little pieces at fourteen years of age. In the few months before he was sent to Petersburg, he managed to have some lessons in music theory with the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko, who was residing in Vilnius at the time. Cui's musical direction changed in 1856, when he met Mily Balakirev and began to be more seriously involved with music.

Even though he was composing music and writing music criticism in his spare time, Cui turned out to be an extremely prolific composer and feuilletonist. His public "debut" as a composer occurred on 14/26 December 1859 with the performance of his orchestral Scherzo, Op. 1, under the baton of Anton Rubinstein and the auspices of the Saint Petersburg branch of the Russian Musical Society. In 1869 the first public performance of an opera by Cui took place; this was his William Ratcliff (based on the tragedy by Heinrich Heine); but it did not have success after eight performances, partially because of the harshness of his own writings in the music press. All but one of his operas were composed to Russian texts; the one exception, Le Flibustier (based on a play by Jean Richepin), premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1894, but was not a success after four performances, partly because of an illness contracted by the lead tenor, the upcoming production there of Verdi's Falstaff, and the vogue for Richard Wagner. Cui's more successful stage works during his lifetime were the one-act comic opera The Mandarin's Son (publicly premiered in 1878), the three-act Prisoner of the Caucasus (1883), based on Pushkin, and the one-act Mademoiselle Fifi (1903), based on Guy de Maupassant. Besides Flibustier, the only other operas by Cui performed in his lifetime outside of the Russian Empire were Prisoner of the Caucasus (in Liège, 1886) and the children's opera Puss in Boots (in Rome, 1915). Cui's activities in musical life included also membership on the opera selection committee at the Mariinsky Theatre; this stint ended in 1883, when both he and Rimsky-Korsakov left the committee in protest of its rejection of Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina. During 1896-1904 he was director of the Petersburg branch of the Russian Musical Society.

Among the many musicians Cui knew in his life, Franz Liszt looms large. Liszt valued the music of Russian composers quite highly; for Cui's opera William Ratcliff he expressed some of the highest praise. Cui's book La musique en Russie and Suite pour piano, Op. 21, are dedicated to the elder composer. In addition, Cui's Tarantelle for orchestra, Op. 12, formed the basis for Liszt's last piano transcription.

Two personalities of direct significance for Cui were women who were specially devoted to his music. In Belgium, the Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau (1837-1890) was most influential in making possible the staging there of Prisoner of the Caucasus. In Moscow, Mariya Kerzina, with her husband Arkadiy Kerzin, formed in 1896 the Circle of Russian Music Lovers, a performance society, which began in 1898 to give special place to works by Cui, among those of other Russian composers, in its concerts.

In such a long and active musical life as Cui's there were many accolades. In the late 1880s and early 1890s several foreign musical societies honored Cui with memberships. In 1894, by the favorable proposal of Ambroise Thomas on the basis of Le Flibustier, Cui was elected as a correspondent member of the Académie française, filling the seat left vacant by the death of Tchaikovsky. Likewise in the wake of Le Flibustier he was awarded the cross of the Légion d'honneur. In 1896 the Belgian Royal Academy of Literature and Art made him a member. In 1909 and 1910 events were held in honor of Cui's 50th anniversary as a composer.

Family

Cui married Mal'vina Rafailovna Bamberg (Мальвина Рафаиловна Бамберг) in 1858. He had met her at the home of Alexander Dargomyzhsky, from whom she was taking singing lessons. Among the musical works Cui dedicated to her is the early Scherzo, Op. 1 (1857), which uses themes based on her maiden name (BAmBErG) and his own initials (C.C.), and the comic opera The Mandarin's Son. César and Mal'vina had two children, Lidiya and Aleksandr. Lidiya, an amateur singer, married a gentleman by the name of Amoretti; in the period before the October Revolution Aleksandr was a member of the Russian Senate.

Last years and death

In 1916 the composer went blind, although he was able to compose small pieces by dictation. Cui died on March 13, 1918 from cerebral apoplexy and was buried next to his wife Mal'vina (who had died in 1899) at the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. In 1939 his body was reinterred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, to lie beside the other members of The Five.

Cui as a music critic

As a writer on music, Cui contributed almost 800 articles between 1864 and 1918 to various newspapers and other publications in Russia and Europe. (He "retired" from regular music criticism in 1900.) His wide coverage included concerts, recitals, musical life, new publications of music, and personalities. A significant number of his articles (ca. 300) dealt with opera. Several of his themed sets of articles were reissued as monographs; these covered topics as varied as the original 1876 production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth, the development of the Russian romance (art song), music in Russia, and Anton Rubinstein's seminal lectures on the history of piano music of 1888-1889. Not incidentally, of course, as part of his profession, Cui also published many books and articles about military fortifications.

Because of rules related to his status in the Russian military, in the early years his musico-critical articles had to be published under a pseudonym, which consisted of three asterisks (***); in Petersburg musical circles, however, it became clear who was writing the articles. His musical reviews began in the St.Petersburg Vedomosti, expressing disdain for music before Beethoven (such as Mozart) and his advocacy of originality in music. Sarcasm was a regular feature of his feuilletons.

Cui's primary goal as a critic was to promote the music of contemporary Russian composers, especially the works of his now better-known co-members of The Five. Even they, however, were not spared negative reactions from him here and there, especially in his blistering review of the first production of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov in 1873. (Later in life Cui championed the music of this late colleague of his, to the point of making the first completion of Mussorgsky's unfinished opera The Fair at Sorochintsï.)

Russian composers outside of The Five, however, were often more likely to produce a negative reaction. This derived at least partly from distrust of the western-style conservatory system in favor of the autodidactic approach that The Five had practiced. Cui lambasted Tchaikovsky's second performed opera, The Oprichnik, for instance; and his oft-cited stinging remarks about Rachmaninoff's Symphony No.1 (which Cui described as depicting the Plagues of Egypt, written for a conservatory in Hell), combined with a bad conducting performance by Glazunov, led to Rachmaninoff tearing up the manuscript of the symphony.

Of Western composers, Cui favored Berlioz and Liszt as progressives. He admired Wagner's aspirations concerning music drama, but did not agree with that composer's methods to achieve it (such as the leitmotif system and the predominance of the orchestra).

Late in life Cui's presumed progressiveness as espoused in the 1860s and '70s turned reactionary against the new "modernists" such as Richard Strauss. Cui's very last published articles (from 1917) constituted merciless parodies, including the little song "Гимн футуризму" ("Hymn to Futurism") and "Краткая инструкция, как, не будучи музыкантом, сделаться гениальным модерн-композитором" ("Concise Directions on How to Become a Modern Composer of Genius without Being a Musician").

Cui as a composer

(Note: See the List of compositions by César Cui)

Cui composed in almost all genres of his time, with the distinct exceptions of the symphony and the symphonic poem (unlike his compatriots Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov). By far art songs constitute the greatest number of works by Cui; these include a few vocal duets and many songs for children. Several of his songs are available also in versions with orchestral accompaniment, including his Bolero, Op. 17, which was dedicated to the singer Marcella Sembrich. Some of his most famous art songs include "The Statue at Tsarskoye Selo" and "The Burnt Letter," both based on poems by Cui's most valued poet, Pushkin.

In addition, Cui wrote many works for piano and for chamber groups (including three string quartets), numerous choruses, and several orchestral works, but he seems to have put his greatest hope in his operas, of which he composed fifteen of varying proportions. Besides children's music (which includes four fairytale operas as well as the aforementioned songs), three other special categories of compositions stand out among his works: (1) pieces inspired by and dedicated to the Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau (whom the composer knew from 1885 to her death in 1890; (2) works associated with the Circle of Russian Music Lovers (the "Kerzin Circle"); and (3) pieces inspired by the Russo-Japanese War and World War I.

As to the current status of Cui the composer, in the last few decades one of his children's operas (of which he composed four) entitled Puss-in-Boots (from Perrault) has had wide appeal in Germany. Nevertheless, despite the fact that more and more of Cui's music is being made available in recent years in recordings (including his short opera Feast in Time of Plague, from Pushkin), his status today in the repertoire is considerably small, based (in the West) primarily on some of his piano and chamber music (such as the violin and piano piece called Orientale (op. 50, No. 9)) and a number of solo songs. The received wisdom that he is not a particularly talented composer, at least for large genres, has been cited as a cause for this state of affairs; his strongest talent is said to lie in the crystallization of mood at an instant as captured in his art songs and instrumental miniatures. Although his abilities as an orchestrator, too, have been noted as inferior to those of his compatriots, some recent recordings (e.g., of his one-act opera Feast in Time of Plague) suggest that Cui's dramatic music might be more interesting to pursue with regard to this feature.

Cui's works are not so nationalistic as those of the other members of The Five; with the exception of Pushkin, his operas do not display a strong attraction to Russian sources. In the area of art song, however, the vast majority of Cui's vocal music is based on Russian texts. Overt attempts at Russian "folk" musical style can be detected in passages from his first act of the collaborative Mlada (1872), The Captain's Daughter, a couple of the children's operas, and a few songs; many other passages in his music reflect the stylistic curiosities associated with Russian art music of the 19th century, such as whole tone scales and certain harmonic devices. Nevertheless, his style is more often compared to Robert Schumann and to French composers than to Mikhail Glinka or to Cui's Russian contemporaries.

Selected literary works

(Note: As yet there is no complete collected edition of Cui's writings. The vast majority of his published articles on music, in particular, have to be sought individually within the various periodicals in which they were originally printed.)

Cui's writings on music

Monographs

• История литературы фортепианной музыки. Курс А.Г. Рубинштейна. 1888-1889. 2-е изд. [History of the Literature of Piano Music. A Course by A.G. Rubinstein. 1888-1889. 2nd ed.] Спб: И. Юргенсон, 1911. (Originally published serially in 1889 in Russian: Сеансы А.Г.Рубинштейна. Курс истории литературы фортепианной музыки (Sessions by A.G. Rubinstein. A Course in the History of the Literature of Piano Music, in Nedelia; in French: Cours de litterature musicale des oeuvres pour le piano au Conservatoire de Saint Petersbourg, in L'Art, revue bimensuelle illustree.)
• Кольцо Нибелунгов, трилогия Рихарда Вагнера: Музыкально-критический очерк. 2-е изд. [The Nibelung Ring, trilogy by Richard Wagner: A Musico-Critical Sketch. 2nd ed.] Москва: П. Юргенсон, 1909. (1st monographic ed. published in 1889. Articles originally published in 1876 in Санкт-Петербургские ведомости under the collective title Байрейтское музыкальное торжество [The Bayreuth Music Festival].)
• La musique en Russie. Paris: G. Fischbacher, 1880; rpt. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1974. (Originally published in 1880 in Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris.)
• Русский романс: очерк его развития [The Russian Romance: a Sketch of Its Development]. Спб: Ф. Финдейзен, 1896. English translation in Classical Essays on the Russian Art Song: 1. The Russian Romance, by Cesar Cui; 2. The Russian Art Song, by Nikolay Findeisen. Nerstrand, Minn.: James Walker, 1993.

Collections

• Избранные статьи [Selected Articles]. Ленинград: Гос. муз. изд-во, 1952. (Includes a nearly complete bibliography of his published articles.)
• Избранные статьи об исполнителях [Selected Articles about Performers]. Москва: Гос. муз. изд-во, 1957.
• Музыкально-критические статьи. Т.1. Со портретом автора и предисловием А.Н. Римского-Корсакова. [Critical Articles on Music. Vol. 1. With a portrait of the author and a foreword by A.N. Rimsky-Korsakov. ] Петроград: Музыкальный современник, 1918. (Note: No further volumes were published.)

Miscellaneous

• "A Historical Sketch of Music in Russia," The Century Library of Music. Ed. by Ignace Jan Paderewski. Vol. 7. New York: The Century Co., 1901, pp. 197-219.

Letters

• Избранные письма [Selected Letters]. Ленинград: Гос. муз. изд-во, 1955.

Cui's writings on military fortifications

• "Атака и оборона современных крепостей (Разработка этого вопроса в Прусии)" ["Attack and Defence of Contemporary Fortresses (An Elaboration of This Matter in Prussia)"]. Спб: Тип. Деп. уделов, 1881. (From Военный сборник, 1881, No. 7)
• "Бельгия, Антверпен и Бриальмон" ["Belgium, Antwerp, and Brialmont"]. Спб: Тип Деп. уделов, 1882. (From Инженерный журнал, 1881, No. 11)
• Долговременная фортификация: исторический очерк. Курс Михайловской арт. акад. [Permanent Fortifications: A Historical Sketch. A Course of the Mikhailovsky Artillery Akademy] Спб.: 187-?.
• Записки фортификации младшего юнкерского класса Николаевского инженерного училища [Fortification Notes of the Younger Cadet Class of the Nikolaevsky Engineering School]. Спб.: 186-?
• Краткий исторический очерк долговременной фортификации. 3., доп. изд. [Concise Historical Sketch of Permanent Fortifications. Third, supplemented ed..] Спб.: Тип. Императорской Академии наук, 1897. (1st ed. published in 1877.)
• Краткий учебник полевой фортификации. 9-е просм. изд. [Concise Textbook of Field Fortification. 9th revised ed.] Спб.: В Березовский, 1903. (1st ed. titled: Записки полевой фортификации. Курс младшего класса Николаевск. инж. и Михайловск. артил. училища [Notes on Field Fortification. A Course of the Younger Class of the Nikolaevsky Engineering and Mikhailovsky Artillery Schools], 1873; 2nd ed. titled: Полевая фортификация. Курс Николаевск.-инж., Михайловск.-артил. и Николаевск.-кавалерийск. училищ [Field Fortification. A Course of the Nikolaevsky Engineering, Mikhailovsky Artillery, and Nikolaevsky Cavalry Schools], 1877.)
• Опыт рационального определения величины гарнизонов крепостей [Essay on the Efficient Determination of Data on Garrison Fortresses]. Спб: типо-лит. А.Е. Ландау, 1899.
• "Путевые заметки инженерного офицера на театре военных действий в европейской Турции" ["Travel Notes of an Engineering Officer in the Theater of Military Activities in European Turkey"], Спб.: Тип. Деп. уделов, 1878. (From Инженерный журнал, 1878, Nos. 8, 9.)
• "Рост крепостей и изменение их формы в зависимости от увеличения численности армий" ["The Size of Fortresses and the Modification of Their Form Depending on the Expansion of the Strength of Armies"]. Спб: 1901. (Общество ревнителей военных знаний, No. 37, 24 янв. 1901 г.)
• Учебник фортификации для пехотных юнкерских училищ. Изд. 2-е, просм. и доп. [Textbook of Fortification for Infantry Cadet Schools. 2nd ed., revised and supplemented]. Спб.: Воен. тип., 1899. (1st ed. published in 1892)

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