The Forgotten Russian: The Music of Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894)
“Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a
Christian, Christians a Jew. Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a
pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a
reactionary. My conclusion is that I am neither fish nor fowl—a pitiful
individual” (Anton Rubinstein)
History is like a great wave crashing down on the sandcastle of art:
for a moment, everything is obscured, but once it begins to recede, a few
details of the castle remain—a tower, perhaps, standing tall against the ruins
of time. Our moment of time is like the
wave; we can’t really tell what will survive and what will perish. Only with the passing of time can we
recognize art that continues to speak to us, with a voice that even hundreds of
years later we can understand. However,
this metaphor leaves one important detail out: the castle can be rebuilt. With art, the reconstruction is simple; discovering
the work of one ‘survivor’ often leads to curiosity about his/her
contemporaries, whose works may have been washed away into the ocean of
time. Yet most of these works remain, buried
quite shallowly in the sand. A simple plastic
shovel (and in our time, the wonders of the internet) is all that is required
to earth the treasure trove of riches lying scattered at our feet. And what riches! The ocean, it seems, is quite fickle and can’t really distinguish
between good or bad, timeless or worthless art. Quite often, a great work—say, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos,
or Aphra Benh’s Oroonoko—are uncovered after hundreds of years of
neglect. At other times, we merely find
a completely enjoyable work of art that will probably disappear with the next
wave. Such a discovery is the work of
Anton Rubinstein, a once celebrated composer/pianist whose memory lives on
solely through his association with a much more lasting composer, Tchaikovsky.
