cept Glinka.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, he had made a fateful association

between the achievements of the edgling Russian school and amateurism, and
this amounted to nothing less than a slur on national art. Rubinstein made matters worse with his ambiguous attitude toward the undisputed founder of the
Russian national school. On the one hand, he had sung the praises of Glinka
and declared him a genius, but, on the other, he had also declared that the operas
Zhizn za Tsarya [A life for the tsar] and Ruslan i Lyudmila [Ruslan and Lyudmila] had failed because the composer had been mistaken in allowing the national style to take precedence over the need to express universal emotions.
Rubinsteins critics interpreted this as an attack on the holy grail of the Russian
school. Yet, later on, when Rubinstein recanted and tried to write in a pseudonational style, the same critics despised him even more, as if he were trying to
steal the Emperors clothes.
In his role as principal conductor of the Russian Music Society concerts during the 1860s, Rubinstein was often accused of favoring second-rate German
music over works by native composers. Again this was a distortion of the truth,
for at that period there were very few works by native composers. That the Russian Music Society struggled to nd pieces by Russian composers who are now
largely forgotten, for example, Afanasyev and Fitingof-Shel, only proves that
the accusation was unfounded. Even more important, it was Rubinstein who
conducted some of the very rst orchestral works by Cui and Musorgsky as
early as the winter season of 185960. The programs of the Russian Music Society concerts consistently showed a balanced repertory and frequently included
works for which Rubinstein had little personal sympathy, patently demonstrating his impartiality. In an attempt to demolish Rubinsteins standing, his critics
trained their sights on the Conservatory and on Rubinsteins compositions. It
was an effective stratagem to associate these two targets since the argument
could be put like this: listen to this mans musicit is bad, derivative, unoriginal, and the product of dull academic training. This is what a foreign institution
like a conservatory will produce when it is transplanted onto Russian soil: all it
will turn out is mediocre talents, writing hack works. Then the same critics
could effectively contrast this supposed mediocrity with the vibrant works of
native composers whose imaginations had not been polluted by alien theories
about music, who listen to the songs of the peasants and their own inner voice
that has not been stultied by foreign pedantry, and compose works that are
meaningful to their fellow Russians.
For Stasov and his cohorts, everything associated with the Conservatory was
corrupt and repulsive. Even a talent of Tchaikovskys stature was suspect, as he
was a product of the same Conservatory and was, as they saw it, therefore irrevocably tainted with the same pernicious defects. Rubinsteins resignation
in 1867 cooled the protests, especially as Rimsky-Korsakov was invited to teach
at the Conservatory in 1871, but the opposition to Rubinstein as a composer
and as a musical educationalist remained. In his speech of the same year, commemorating the ninth anniversary of the Conservatorys founding, Rubinstein
paid tribute to the achievements of the New Russian School in an attempt to
Introduction xix