Glazunov, Alexander

Preface

Glazunov, Alexander – Piano Concerto No.2 Op. 100 in B Major

(b. Saint Petersburg, 10 August 1865 – d. Neuilly-sur-Seine [near Paris] 21 March 1936)

Preface
Up until recently Alexander Glazunov was considered as the ultimate exemplification of the conservative academician. His fidelity to the style of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the post-Slavophile generation of Russian composition, known as the “Belyaev Circle”, barred him from participating in the modernist 20th century, and made his contribution to Russian music both misunderstood and underappreciated. Getting his compositional bearings early in life, he met the polemicist Mily Balakirev at the age of 16 and quickly fell under the tutelage of Rimsky-Korsakov. Glazunov’s musical style became synonymized, unjustly so, with pedanticism, rigidity, antiquarian attachment to a cosmopolitan reading of the 19th century but without the Romantic Slavophilia advocated by the post-Glinka “Balakirevites.” However, much like other composers captured in the net of transitional musical epochs like Camille Saint-Sean and Ludvig van Beethoven, one finds under the surface a compositional logic rife with passion and fervor. Their internal networks and expressive modalities do not convey Dionaysian bouts of uncontrolled fire but rather a mixture of different worlds.

The musical thinking of Glazunov does not deny stability, formal cohesion, and technical precision for the sake of vivacious temperament but neither does it deny warmth, rapture, and emotion for the sake of refinement, stoic technique, and intellectual sophistication. The ‘musical worldview’ of Glazunov was not one of exceptional ebullitions and ecstasis but rather a rational, unfolding constancy which petitions the heart and mind to focus, to think, and to dwell within the pleromic world of “absolute” musical sound itself, akin in many respects to Gustav Mahler and his symphonic worlds. For Glazunov, his musical influences traversed across the wide expanse of musical history and the “long 19th century” in much the same way Glinka created his own constructed “Russianness” through strategic cosmopolitanism. But unlike Glinka, Glazunov never indulged in Slavophilia. Instead he maintained a cool, rational distance from extremes, leading to unwarranted assertions of pejorative “objectivism” by the likes of Boris Asafiev, a notorious Soviet progressive who saw composers like Schoenberg, Berg, and Lyadov as Russia’s future, eschewing Glazunov, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, and even grandfather Hadyn as unsuitable bastions of Russian musical development. Whatever one’s opinion, the musical “thinking” of Glazunov requires a love of music as music. To understand Glazunov is to understand music as music, beauty as beauty, and emotion as waves of a sea whose passionate undulations do not betray its calm. …

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