The question was which interpretation of Glinka’s heritage would become the more influential, and consequently, which path would the Petersburg school follow. It would seem that Tchaikovsky, the star of the first graduating class of the Petersburg Conservatory and an audience favorite, held all the cards. The talent and aggressiveness of the Mighty Five were no substitute for a systematic professional education so necessary for the building of any musical academy—besides which, Tchaikovsky had the sympathy of the court and of the Russian musical bureaucracy.
But in fact Tchaikovsky was edged out of Petersburg, where the musical tradition began forming to a significant degree outside his influence. This took place largely because of the efforts of Rimsky-Korsakov, who possessed all the qualities needed for the methodical construction of the edifice for the Petersburg musical academy, which eventually became the “school of Rimsky-Korsakov.”
Rimsky-Korsakov spent thirty-seven of his sixty-four years as professor of the Petersburg Conservatory, bringing up several generations of composers. A list here will give some idea of his “off-spring”: Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Liadov, Anton Arensky, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Alexander Grechaninov, Mikhail Gnessin, Nikolai Tcherepnin, and Nikolai Myaskovsky, as well as musicians who became leaders of their national cultures: the Latvians Jāzeps Vītols, Emīls Dārzinš and Emilis Melngailis; the Estonians Artur Kapp and Mart Saar; the Ukrainian Nikolai Lysenko; the Armenian Alexander Spendiarov; the Georgian Meliton Balanchivadze.
Two outstanding figures of Petersburg modernism, Kuzmin and Evreinov, also studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. And for five months in 1901 Ottorino Respighi, a musician from Bologna, studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov. His brilliant orchestrations reveal the influence of the Petersburg master.
In 1921 the Opoyaz group published “Dostoyevsky and Gogol (Toward a Theory of Parody),” a brochure that explains much about artistic inheritance written by one of its members, Yuri Tynyanov, when he was twenty four years old. Tynyanov proposed that tradition in culture is not passed in a straight line, from the elder representatives of a school to the younger ones: “Succession is first of all a struggle, the destruction of the old whole and a new construction from the old elements.”14 In the course of this struggle, people do not clash as fiercely with representatives of another school or another tradition, he noted. “You simply go around them, rejecting or revering, you struggle against them by the very fact of your existence.”15 In other words, talented students often rise up against their own teachers and older friends, while they simply ignore their enemies.
Tynyanov’s analysis is an excellent illustration of the situation inside the Petersburg musical academy. One of the students described it more colorfully:
Rimsky-Korsakov’s severe rectitude as a teacher and his extraordinarily warm concern at the same time for the achievements or failures of his students, their loyalty toward their teacher and also their struggle against him, leaving him and returning with repentance—these complex relations filled with ideals and emotions between the great teacher and his students, sometimes very talented ones, were somewhat reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci and his school.16
The tall, gray-bearded Rimsky-Korsakov, with his thin, wrinkled face, round glasses, and deep voice, seemed unfriendly and aloof to many people. But Igor Stravinsky, like his other close students, saw a surrogate father figure in the master. Stravinsky first showed his compositions to Rimsky-Korsakov in the summer of 1902, when the younger man was twenty years old. By the time he began regular studies with Rimsky-Korsakov in early 1903, the young composer had recently lost his father and became extremely close to his teacher.
Stravinsky was accepted in the Rimsky-Korsakov home and was good friends with his son, Andrei. The master apparently realized that his student had an unusual gift; that is probably why he did not recommend that Stravinsky enter the Petersburg Conservatory but nevertheless taught him the fundamental technical knowledge in composition. Stravinsky’s technique is undoubtedly rooted in his private studies with Rimsky-Korsakov.
At first, the master tried to turn Stravinsky into a true professional in the Petersburg sense of the word. That meant in particular a rational approach to the process of composition, rigorous self-discipline, accuracy, and neatness, elevated to aesthetic principle. Rimsky-Korsakov urged Stravinsky to compose his first symphony, believing his student would develop these qualities more quickly working in a large form. Stravinsky dedicated that symphony, opus 1, to his teacher.
Rimsky-Korsakov left a brief formulation for a course of composition for gifted musicians like Stravinsky:
