Cui, Cesar

Preface

Cui, Cesar – 2 Circassian Dances from the opera ‘The Prisoner from the Caucasus’, Dance of the women & Lezginka (Dance of the Men)

(b. Vilnius, 6/18 January 1835 — d. Petrograd, 13 March 1918)

(1857-58/rev. 1881-82)

Dance of the Women p.1
Lezginka (Dance of the Men) p.27

Preface
César Cui (pronounced Kyuy) was the youngest child of a Frenchman and a Lithuanian woman. When Napoleon’s army was defeated by the Russians in 1812 and fled home, the drum major Antoine Cui stayed in Vilnius (the city from which Napoleon had organized his attack) in Lithuania, where he married Julia Gucewicz, with whom he was to have five children. He worked his way up until he acquired Russian citizenship in 1844 and the rights of hereditary nobility in 1845 (all information according to Sigrid Neef’s full-scale biography in her book ‘The Russian Five’ [Berlin 1992]). César-Venyamin, Antoine’s youngest son, showed great musical talent at an early age and deeply admired Chopin, in whose style he composed a Mazurka in G minor at the age of 14 without any instructions. The important Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-72), who lived in Vilnius from 1840-58, was so pleased with César’s abilities that he taught him basso continuo, counterpoint and chorale composition free of charge. At the age of 15, César was sent by his father to St. Petersburg, where he studied engineering at the military academy from 1851 and graduated in 1855. (He later became a respected expert on the construction and conquest of fortifications, authoring standard textbooks on the subject and eventually being appointed general and academy professor in 1906.)

In 1856, he met the somewhat younger, already successful composer Mili Balakirev (1836/37-1910), which was to be the first step towards the formation of what was later known as the ‘Mighty Group’ (the ‘Russian Five’). Cui came completely under Balakirev’s musical influence, who introduced him to the music of Mikhail Glinka and propagated the slogan of the new national school based on the renewal of Glinka’s tradition. Balakirev taught Cui composition and instrumentation and wanted to educate him to become a symphonist, i.e. a master of large forms. However, Cui was soon to reject Balakirev’s demand to transfer symphonic formal procedures to opera. And it soon became clear that he was above all an excellent miniaturist and perhaps did his best work as a composer of songs and ballads. His flair for the operatic genre led him to Alexander Dargomyzhsky (1813-69), whose opera ’The Stone Guest’ he completed after the composer’s death. In 1857, after completing his studies at the military academy and immediately gaining security in his profession, Cui met the 18-year-old ensign Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81) as well as his future wife Malwina Bamberg (1836-99), the daughter of a German doctor. At this time, Cui also composed his first opera ‘The Prisoner from the Caucasus’, which, however, was to undergo a fundamental revision more than twenty years later. It was not premiered until 1883, whereas his second opera, ‘The Mandarin’s Son’, had already been performed in a small circle in February 1859. …

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