Who Was Anton Rubinstein?
Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein (28 November 1829 – 20 November 1894) was a Russian pianist, composer, and teacher who, with his brother Nikolai, was among the most influential figures in 19th-century Russian musical life. He founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, the first institution of higher musical education in Russia, and trained the first generation of Russian composers and performers, including Tchaikovsky, who studied piano with him in the early 1860s. As a concert pianist, he toured Europe and the United States in a series of recital tours that helped to establish the modern solo recital format.
Early life
Rubinstein was born in Vikhvatinets, in the Russian Empire’s Podolia Governorate, into a Jewish family that had been converted to Russian Orthodoxy before his birth. His father was a merchant; his mother was an able amateur musician. In 1835, after a fire had destroyed the family home, the family moved to Moscow, where Anton and his younger brother Nikolai were given their first serious piano lessons.
In 1840, the two brothers travelled to Berlin to study with the composer and pianist Siegfried Dehn, who had been a teacher of Mendelssohn. They remained in Berlin for several years, supporting themselves by giving lessons and, eventually, by public performance. Anton made his first public appearance in Vienna in 1845, playing to a small but distinguished audience that included the aging Liszt, who predicted great things for the young Russian.
Concert career
On his return to Russia, Rubinstein quickly established himself as the leading Russian pianist of his generation. Between 1854 and 1878, he gave an extraordinary series of concert tours, including a major tour of the United States in 1872-1873 that involved more than 200 concerts and that, together with his later European tours, helped to establish the modern format of the solo piano recital. He was also one of the founders, in 1859, of the Russian Musical Society, an organisation that brought concert life to several Russian cities.
The St. Petersburg Conservatory
In 1862, Rubinstein founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the first institution of higher musical education in Russia. He served as its director until 1867, and again from 1887 until his death. The conservatory’s original faculty included some of the most important Russian musicians of the age, and its first students — among them Tchaikovsky — went on to define Russian music for the rest of the century. The conservatory was deliberately modelled on the German Hochschule für Musik, and its standards of teaching and performance set the pattern for the rest of the Russian musical establishment, including the Moscow Conservatory, which his brother Nikolai founded in 1866.
Composer
Rubinstein wrote a substantial body of music — six symphonies, five piano concertos, ten string quartets, ten operas, and many solo piano pieces — most of it composed in the 1850s and 1860s. His music drew on Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Liszt rather than on Russian folk material, and was largely eclipsed in the late 19th century by the nationalist school of The Five and by Tchaikovsky. The 20th-century revival of interest in his piano music has restored some of his works to the recital platform.
Legacy
Rubinstein’s place in Russian musical history rests less on his own compositions than on his work as a teacher, conductor, and institution builder. The conservatory he founded remains one of the two leading musical institutions in Russia, and his students — Tchaikovsky, the violinist Leopold Auer, the composer Alexander Glazunov, and many others — would shape Russian and international music for the next century. The Anton Rubinstein International Music Competition, established in his memory, is one of the most important international piano competitions.