A similar situation occurred in 1943 when Stalin selected the music of his toady—also a general, but a Soviet one—Alexander Alexandrov, rejecting the entries by Shostakovich and Khachaturian. Lvov’s melody is often heard in our day, whenever Tchaikovsky’s popular
An habitué of Lvov’s aristocratic musical salon recalled, “Every educated member of Petersburg society knew that temple of musical art, attended in its time by members of the imperial family and the high society of Petersburg; a temple in which for many years (1835-1855) mingled the authorities, the artists, wealth, taste, and beauty of the capital.”25
Lvov was a virtuoso violinist himself, but he always insisted that he was only a musical dilettante and not a professional, for a general and important bureaucrat being “merely a musician” seemed humiliating. Schumann, who heard Lvov play in Leipzig, called him a “marvelous and rare performer” and wrote, “If there are other such dilettantes in the Russian capital then many a European artist could learn there rather than teach.” Still, Rubinstein was absolutely right in suggesting that music in Petersburg would not flourish without musical training being sponsored by the state.
Rubinstein was the ideal figure to accomplish this grand design. Short and stocky with a mane of hair and strongly resembling Beethoven (Rubinstein did not deny rumors that he was Beethoven’s illegitimate son), the Russian pianist had, besides his talent as performer and composer, boundless energy and self-confidence. It helped that he had developed ties to the royal family necessary for the success of his endeavor. As a boy he had played in the Winter Palace, where Emperor Nicholas greeted him with, “Ah, your excellency.” “I was told,” Rubinstein recalled later, “that the tsar’s word was law, and that had I mentioned it I would have been an ‘excellency.’”26
Nicholas made the little boy imitate Liszt’s playing (with all of Liszt’s mannerisms) and laughed heartily; the amusing wunderkind was showered with precious gifts. And as Rubinstein insisted later, he had never seen anything more generous than the tsar’s gifts, particularly if they were handed to him right on the spot in the Winter Palace: “the gifts that were sent the following day were not as valuable.”27
Rubinstein became a kind of musical secretary to the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, wife of Emperor Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. The grand duke was a boor, while Elena Pavlovna, a beautiful and smart German princess from Württemberg, strove to create a European-oriented intellectual and artistic climate for herself in Petersburg. Gradually that German lady, described even by her enemies as “highly amusing, serious, and lovely,” became the main patroness of the arts in Russia. During long evening talks with Elena Pavlovna in her palace on Kamenny Island, where Rubinstein had moved, they finalized plans for a conservatory in Petersburg. The impressions of those conversations, life in the palace, and the landscapes around it were captured by Rubinstein in his charming piano pieces, collected in the cycles
But nothing came of the plans to “Europeanize” Russian music in Nicholas’s lifetime. Rubinstein wrote that when he returned from revolutionary Berlin to Petersburg in 1849, the trunk with his musical compositions was confiscated by customs agents who suspected the notes concealed some sort of seditious writings. In Petersburg the capital’s governor stamped his feet at Rubinstein and shouted, “I’ll have you in chains! I’ll send you to Siberia!” And the Petersburg police chief sent the artist, by then a European star, to one of his clerks with the instructions, “Play something for him, so we’ll know that you really are a musician.”28
In that atmosphere it would seem hopeless to talk about respect for musicians, but Rubinstein did not give up: in 1859, with the help of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, he organized the Russian Musical Society, which subsequently added “Imperial” to its name. Elena Pavlovna became the “most august chairwoman” of the society, which inaugurated regular symphonic and chamber concerts with frequently adventurous programming. Music classes began under the society’s auspices, and in 1861 they became the Petersburg Conservatory, the first in Russia.
