1865–1936 · Russia · Romantic
Alexander Glazunov (1865–1936) was a Saint Petersburg composer and conductor, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and for many years director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He completed Borodin's unfinished works, and his pupils included Dmitri Shostakovich. His music joins strict classical form with subtle lyricism, and the site features his piano piece Rêverie.
Alexander Glazunov was born on 29 July (10 August) 1865 in Saint Petersburg into a family of book publishers: his father Konstantin Ilyich Glazunov carried on the business begun by his grandfather Ilya Ivanovich, while his mother Elena Pavlovna Turygina was a pianist. He received his early education at the Second Saint Petersburg School, then briefly attended Saint Petersburg University as an auditing student and played in its student symphony orchestra.
Glazunov's ear and musical memory showed themselves early: he began playing the piano at nine and composing at eleven. In 1879 Mily Balakirev heard him, recognised his unusual gift and brought the teenager to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Their private lessons moved so fast that Glazunov covered the course of harmony, form and orchestration, normally spread over five to seven years at the conservatory, in a year and a half.
The result was not long in coming: in 1882 Glazunov wrote his First Symphony, which the Free Music School performed successfully under Balakirev's direction on 17 March, and his first string quartet followed soon afterwards. The composer was only sixteen.
The young work caught the attention of the timber merchant and patron Mitrofan Belyayev, whose aim was to support young Russian composers. On 27 March 1884 he arranged a private concert of Glazunov's music, conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov and Dütsch, and then took the young man on a trip abroad through Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain and Morocco.
Glazunov met Franz Liszt in Weimar: it was on Liszt's initiative that the First Symphony of the eighteen-year-old composer was performed at a large music congress in Germany on 14 May 1884. Back in Saint Petersburg, Glazunov joined the so-called Belyayev circle, together with Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, Malishevsky, Vītols, Blumenfeld and other musicians, who carried on the line of the Mighty Five while also moving closer to Western musical culture. In 1885 Belyayev opened a music publishing house in Leipzig.
Glazunov's debut as a conductor took place in 1886 at the Russian Symphony Concerts, where a number of his works received their first performances; in 1907 he appeared as both conductor and composer at the Russian Historical Concerts in Paris.
Alexander Borodin died in 1887 without finishing the opera Prince Igor and his Third Symphony. Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov took on the task of completing and orchestrating them. Glazunov's memory proved so reliable that he rebuilt the opera's entire overture after hearing it only once, when Borodin himself played it on the piano shortly before his death; he also reconstructed fragments of the third act, and orchestrated the symphony entirely on his own.
Glazunov also shared a warm relationship with Pyotr Tchaikovsky: on 25 November 1890 the elder composer invited him to a private hearing of the string sextet Souvenir de Florence, ahead of its first public performance. When Tchaikovsky died, Glazunov took on orchestrating several of his pieces, among them the violin-and-piano cycle Souvenir d'un lieu cher, and that version became widely known.
In the early 1890s Glazunov went through a creative crisis, which was followed by a new surge of work: he wrote three symphonies, chamber pieces and the ballet Raymonda, the best known of his works. By 1899 he had taken up a professorship at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and for almost thirty years afterwards barely left its walls.
After the events of 1905, when Rimsky-Korsakov was dismissed from the Conservatory for supporting revolutionary-minded students, Glazunov resigned his post in protest too. But in December of that same year, once the Conservatory had been separated from the Russian Musical Society, he returned and was soon elected its director, a post he held until 1928.
Once he became director, Glazunov took the curriculum in hand, opened an opera studio, gathered a student orchestra and raised what was expected of both students and teachers. At the end of every academic year he came to every exam himself and left a short note on each student; his best-known pupil is considered to be Dmitri Shostakovich.
After the outbreak of the First World War, in 1915, Glazunov wrote a Paraphrase on the Hymns of the Allied Nations (Op. 96), on themes from the English, Russian, Serbian, French, Montenegrin and Japanese national anthems. In 1917 he arranged the music of the Worker's Marseillaise, which served as Russia's anthem in the first months of Soviet rule.
The new authorities left Glazunov alone: he found common ground with the Bolsheviks, above all with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar for enlightenment, and thanks to this the Conservatory kept its special status. When the composer ran into trouble over housing, Lunacharsky stepped in: the Commissariat of Enlightenment issued an order protecting his apartment on Kazanskaya Street and his country house, and the commissar personally wrote out a letter of protection for the conservatory's director.
Between 1918 and 1920 Glazunov conducted in factories, clubs and Red Army units and took part in the country's musical and public life, and in 1922 he was given the title of People's Artist of the Republic. Even so, some professors and students at the Conservatory were set against him.
In 1928 the American gramophone company Columbia invited Glazunov to sit on the jury of a composers' competition in Vienna marking the centenary of Schubert's death. Lunacharsky again helped the composer obtain permission to travel. Once the competition ended, Glazunov decided not to return to the USSR: he formally remained rector of the Leningrad Conservatory until 1930, though Maximilian Steinberg carried out the duties.
Glazunov's first public concert after leaving the USSR was held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 19 December 1928: it featured the Solemn Overture, the Second Piano Concerto, the symphonic poem Stenka Razin and the Seventh Symphony, with the composer himself conducting. For a time he continued to conduct, and in 1932, as his health worsened, he settled in Paris with his wife, where he occasionally composed; among his last works was the Saxophone Concerto, dedicated to Sigurd Rascher.
At the age of seventy, Glazunov did not live to see the spring of 1936: he died on 21 March at the Villa Borghese clinic in Paris, and the funeral took place at the Neuilly-sur-Seine cemetery. Decades later, in 1972, his remains were brought home: on 14 October the composer's coffin was solemnly laid in the ground of the Tikhvin Cemetery, within the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Leningrad.
Glazunov holds a notable place in the history of Russian music: in manner he is only partly linked to the New Russian School, turning more readily to European classical forms. His orchestration is vivid, his harmonic and contrapuntal writing assured, his lyricism subtle.
Over his lifetime he wrote eight completed symphonies, leaving only one movement of a Ninth in sketches, and three ballets: the best known of them is Raymonda, and the other is the Seasons. He also wrote five concertos (two for piano, one for violin, one for cello and one for saxophone), plus a pair of piano sonatas, further solo piano pieces and seven quartets for strings. His Violin Concerto was for a long time a favourite of Jascha Heifetz, and for the choreographer Michel Fokine Glazunov orchestrated a set of pieces by Frédéric Chopin, which became the ballet Les Sylphides. Among his orchestral miniatures, two Concert Waltzes held a notable place.
Glazunov's earlier symphonies largely continue the techniques of the nationalist school of Balakirev and Borodin — this is true, for instance, of the symphonic poem Stenka Razin, which draws on the folk theme known as the Volga Boatmen's Song. Later, starting with the Third Symphony, dedicated to Tchaikovsky, and especially in the fourth, dedicated to Anton Rubinstein, his music grows more cosmopolitan in sound while remaining recognisably Russian.
Glazunov also turned to choral music: in 1935 he made two arrangements of church chants for the male student choir of the Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. This work was later included in a collection of church songs published after his death.
On the site he is represented by the piano piece Rêverie (Op. 24) — a lyrical miniature for solo piano at an advanced level. It is currently the only work by Glazunov on the site, but it shows his lyrical gift well and can serve as a first introduction to the composer for players who already handle advanced repertoire.