Rubinstein, Anton

Anton Rubinstein
b. Vikhvatinets, Ukraine, 16/28 November 1829 – d. Peterhof nr. St. Petersburg, 8/20 November 1894)

Don Quixote – A Musical Character Study
Humoresque for Orchestra, op. 87

Scoring: 2 fl/pic, 2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 4 hn (F), 2 tpt (C), 3 tbn, timp, str
Duration: ca. 27 mins

Preface (by

When people hear the term “Russian music,” many think primarily of such famous composers as Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, or Prokofiev. But equally inseparable from this phenomenon is the name of Rubinstein and the versatile activities of the brothers Anton and Nikolai (1835-1881), even though their works are forgotten today. Those who make the effort to glance at Anton Rubinstein’s biography quickly notice that he did just as much for Russian music through his efforts and accomplishments as those composers whose music, unlike his, is regularly performed today.

At first Rubinstein led the career of a musical prodigy. Spurned onward by the ambition of his mother, he received piano lessons and began to compose at the age of five. On a tour of Europe between 1840 and 1843 he met Franz Liszt, who recognized and promoted the boy’s talent. From 1844 to 1846 he lived in Berlin, where he and his brother Nikolai received, in addition to their piano lessons, instruction in music theory from Siegfried Dehn (1799-1858).

If Rubinstein had continued to pursue his career as it had begun, he might be regarded today as one of the most significant of all Russian composers. But with the death of his father in 1847 his career took a decisive turn, particularly as he was fully committed to composing but still lacked the desired success. Instead, he attained international fame as a pianist, causing the Grand-Duchess Elena Pavlovna to appoint him court pianist in 1852. His concert career led to a conviction that Russia’s musical life needed to be placed on a firm professional foundation and lacked the necessary support. In 1858, with funding from the Grand-Duchess, he began to organize private concerts in which both classical music and contemporary Russian works were performed. He also took part in the foundation of the St. Petersburg Singing Academy and launched the Russian Musical Society in 1859. Then in 1862 he helped to establish Russia’s first musical conservatory in St. Petersburg – an institution that raised the country’s music life to a high artistic level. Rubinstein became its first director.

Between 1876 and 1887 Rubinstein concertized throughout western Europe, and in 1872-73 he undertook a successful American tour with the violinist Henryk Wieniawski. The fruit of this concert tour was the so-called “historical concerts” that Rubinstein organized in Russia and western Europe in 1885-86. What distinguished these concerts was the challenge of covering, in only eight evenings, the whole of the keyboard repertoire in basic outline. This led, as might be expected, to extremely long concerts: one of his “mammoth programs” included all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas – a program that called for immense stamina from pianist and audience alike.

Remarkably, Rubinstein did not use his concerts exclusively to place himself in the limelight and to garner applause for his superlative virtuosity. Instead, he used the proceeds for charitable purposes to further promote the cause of Russia’s musical life. For example, the proceeds from his “Courses on the History of Piano Music” (thirty-two lecture-concerts in which he presented and explained works by fifty-seven composers) were donated to the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1890 he also established an international piano competition that took place every five years in a western European capital.

Though Rubinstein acquired a reputation less as a composer than as a pianist, conductor, founder, and organizer, he left behind an impressively voluminous oeuvre covering all the major genres: thirteen operas (including three “sacred operas”!), six symphonies, five piano concertos, two cello concertos, a violin concerto, ten string quartets, four piano sonatas, and a great many songs based on Russian, German, English, and French poetry. Among his orchestral works, besides the six symphonies, are three symphonic poems that lend musical expression to such literary themes as Ivan the Terrible, Faust, and Don Quixote.

Roughly thirty years before Richard Strauss’s famous setting of the adventures of the soi disant knight Don Quixote, Rubinstein took up this same subject from Miguel Cervantes (written from 1605 to 1615). His symphonic poem for large orchestra originated in 1870. Besides the original version, he also prepared an arrangement for two pianos.

As in an opera overture, the listener is told something of the character of the eponymous hero in the slow introduction. Three motifs can be discerned, all pointing to defining traits of his character, and all instantly recognizable owing to their straightforward musical form.

Motif I opens the composition, its sublime dotted rhythms making it sound like the slow rising of a curtain onto the ensuing events. Harmonically, it is located in the area of C major, with expansive intervallic leaps of 6ths and octaves pointing to Don Quixote’s self-possessed and grandiloquent temperament. An amusing aspect of the story already rears its head here as the initially energetic rhythm is slowed down by triplets in the second bar, thereby imparting a slightly clumsy and ponderous character to the introductory motif  and dampening the alleged magnificence of the initial musical idea.

This is immediately followed by Motif II, which moves along an ascending C-major scale. But rather than beginning with the tonic, it starts a 4th lower, as if this characteristic figure were taking a running leap. Nor does the scale end on the tonic, but rather a 3rd higher, followed by octave leap and a standard cadential figure. Like Motif I, Motif II invokes the title hero’s inexhaustible dynamism and unflagging energy, which, however, tends to overshoot the mark. In this sense the musical characterization is prophetic, for it points to Don Quixote’s defining qualities even before his adventures have begun.

Motif III presents Don Quixote as a nobleman intent on wooing his inamorata with every means at his disposal. The phrase is dominated by sigh motifs, chromatic tinges, and an ascending dominant 7th chord that vividly depicts Don Quixote’s passionate yearning.

As the piece progresses, these three motifs are manipulated without any one of them emerging as predominant. In this way Rubinstein suggests that Don Quixote’s character is marked by contrasting and sometimes conflicting moods. If Motif III might be called the Love Motif, Motif II increasingly turns into a Wandering Motif that often serves to introduce particular episodes, its ascending melodic line inviting associations with spirited forays.

If the first section of the tone-poem is primarily given over to sharp-edged motifs delineating the figure of Don Quixote, the second contains three onomatopoeic episodes that direct the listener to particular passages in the story. One section opens in a chamber-like atmosphere of drone 5ths and grace notes in the bassoons together with a quite monotonous melody of 3rds in the oboes, ceaselessly reiterating the same motif. The flaccid harmony, uniform melody, and not least the choice of instruments lends this episode a pastoral character which, when related to the story, recalls a herd of peacefully grazing sheep. The events take an abrupt turn as the orchestra suddenly erupts in wildly plunging scales that mutate, within the space of a few bars, into the first Don Quixote motif. This scene is especially vivid on the printed page: the short ascending and descending 32nd-note scales alternate as if Don Quixote were forging a path with his lance, striking down anything left and right that happened to cross his path. This passage immediately invites comparison with Strauss’s like-named tone-poem of 1897, where the episode with the herd of sheep is depicted with similar onomatopoeic devices. But where Strauss captures the noise of a bleating herd of sheep in wild disarray, Rubinstein places greater value on the proverbial calm before the storm, which is brutally dispelled by Don Quixote’s intervention. Both compositional approaches give the listener an opportunity to picture the extra-musical scene in his imagination.

The second especially forceful programmatic episode is dominated by Motif III. Not only the romantically expansive melody, but also the supporting accompaniment, offering the hero a sonic cushion of rippling triplets and parallel 3rds, suggest that Don Quixote is pulling every amorous stop at his command. That his efforts remain unrewarded is shown in a manner as abrupt as it is amusing: though Don Quixote seems to speak with the tongues of angels (supported by every instrument in the orchestra), his only reward is laughter. The sudden shift from orchestral tutti to doubled oboes and clarinets, playing repeated parallel 4ths and 5ths prefixed with grace-notes, make this interpretation perfectly plausible. The mockery that follows is enhanced by the fact that the purported maidens (in fact village charwomen) interrupt his speech at every turn and burst into laughter after one or two bars. The pinnacle of scorn is reached when the women, at his third amorous advance, pretend to fall for him, as the listener is informed by a cantabile line in the woodwinds combined with Don Quixote’s Love Motif. That their submission is purely ironic becomes clear after a few bars, when the laughter bursts in unexpectedly and all the more violently, now spread over several registers. It is as if Don Quixote were being mocked even by random passers-by.

No less onomatopoeic is the third episode, in which Don Quixote encounters a group of convicts that he wrongly considers innocent. Here Rubinstein’s procedure is marked by a moderate tempo and a plodding melody and rhythm reminiscent of a funeral march, with unusually wide leaps standing out prominently in the bass. As in the episode with the sheep, the impulsiveness with which Don Quixote shatters the prisoners’ chains is rendered in garish colors. A quiet solo passage in the bassoon, perhaps symbolizing the zealous hero’s inner satisfaction, is followed by churning figures in the low strings as the brigands creep out of the background and finally fall upon Don Quixote.

As these three examples demonstrate, Rubinstein’s setting of the literary original involves not only onomatopoeia but other features as well, such as idiosyncratic instrumental qualities to invoke extra-musical associations. A particularly fine example of this compositional style occurs at the end of the piece, when Don Quixote finally forswears chivalric novels and returns to reality. This statement is rendered in music as follows: the episode in which he is ambushed by the allegedly innocent brigands is followed by a passage scored for isolated solo instruments. They play dolorous, sigh-like motivic snippets in which we can recognize the first two Don Quixote motifs. This time, however, they are no longer self-possessed and virile, but despondent and listless. Don Quixote is audibly at the end of his tether. Precisely at this moment, as the scoring becomes increasingly thin and the motifs, now riddled with rests, seem to fade into nothingness, there is a general pause followed by a polyphonic chorale in the horns. Their brief interjections are first answered by the woodwinds and finally combined with them to create a grand hymnic tutti. This passage exudes a rhythmic and harmonic tranquility previously unknown in the piece. Rubinstein could hardly have made Don Quixote’s change of heart more palpably audible.

Given the popularity of Strauss’s tone-poem, a comparison of the two composers is seemingly unavoidable. It remains to be noted that though Rubinstein and Strauss employ the same literary original, they have contrasting points of emphasis. Strauss is primarily concerned with the story’s humorous element, which he brings out very ingeniously with much onomatopoeia and many avant-garde devices. With Rubinstein the focus falls on Don Quixote’s tortured personality, which, however, always remains serious and dignified and ultimately reaches a state of calm and inner peace. The music refuses to degrade him into a laughingstock.

In this light, a comparison of the two works, as questionable as it might be in view of their different historical contexts, is indeed interesting, provided the authors are not seen as rivals.

Uta Schmidt, Düsseldorf, 2016  (Translation: Bradford Robinson)

For performance material please contact the publisher Benjamin Musikverlage, Hamburg.
Reprint of a copy from the music departments archives of the Leipzig Municipal Libraries, Leipzig