Biography (read more)
Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev was born on 2 January 1837 in Nizhny Novgorod into a noble family, and had piano lessons from his mother from the age of four; when he was ten she took him to Moscow for ten lessons with Alexander Dubuque, and she died of smallpox in 1847. He found a patron in Alexander Ulybyshev, the leading musical figure of the town and the author of a biography of Mozart, whose library and private orchestra were opened to him: at fourteen he directed a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, and at fifteen rehearsals of Beethoven’s First and Eighth Symphonies. He entered the University of Kazan as a mathematics student in 1853, was taken to Saint Petersburg by Ulybyshev in 1855 and there met Glinka, who thought his technique defective and his talent obvious and urged him to make music his career. He died on 29 May 1910.
Between 1856 and 1862 he gathered around him the composers Vladimir Stasov named the Mighty Handful — Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin — and for several years was the only professional musician among them, teaching by analysis at the piano and opposing academic training on principle. He performed the same office for Tchaikovsky twice, over the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet in 1868–69 and the Manfred Symphony in 1882–85. His own works came slowly: the First Symphony was begun in 1864 and finished in 1897, the Second begun in 1900 and finished in 1908, and ideas he played at the group’s gatherings surfaced in his colleagues’ scores before his own. The oriental fantasy Islamey for solo piano, written quickly in 1869, is the exception, and remains a fixture of the virtuoso repertoire.
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