César Cui: Overture to The Mandarin's Son
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- César Cui (1835-1918)
Overture to The Mandarin's Son
Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR
Alfons Rischner, conductor
César Antonovich Cui (18 January 1835 -- 26 March 1918) was a Russian composer and music critic of French and Lithuanian descent. His profession was as an army officer and a teacher of fortifications, and his avocational life has particular significance in the history of music. In this sideline he is known as a member of The Five, a group of Russian composers under the leadership of Mily Balakirev dedicated to the production of a specifically Russian type of music.
Cesarius-Benjaminus Cui was born in Vilnius, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire (now Vilnius, Lithuania), to a Roman Catholic family, the youngest of five children. His French father Antoine (name russianized as Anton Leonardovich), had entered Russia as a member of Napoleon's army in 1812, settled in Vilnius upon their defeat, and married a local woman named Julia Gucewicz. The young César grew up learning French, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian. Before finishing gymnasium, in 1850 Cui was sent to Saint Petersburg to prepare to enter the Chief Engineering School, which he did the next year at age 16. In 1855 he was graduated from the Academy, and after advanced studies at the Nikolaevsky Engineering Academy, now Military engineering-technical university, he began his military career in 1857 as an instructor in fortifications. His students over the decades included several members of the Imperial family, most notably Nicolas II. Cui eventually ended up teaching at three of the military academies in Saint Petersburg. Cui's study of fortifications gained from frontline assignment during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 proved quite important for his career. As an expert on military fortifications, Cui eventually attained the academic status of professor in 1880 and the military rank of general in 1906.[9] His writings on fortifications included textbooks that were widely used, in several successive editions.
Despite his achievements as a professional military academic, Cui is best known in the West for his "other" life in music. As a boy in Vilnius he received piano lessons, studied Chopin's works, and began composing little pieces at fourteen years of age. In the few months before he was sent to Petersburg, he managed to have some lessons in music theory with the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko, who was residing in Vilnius at the time. Cui's musical direction changed in 1856, when he met Mily Balakirev and began to be more seriously involved with music.
Even though he was composing music and writing music criticism in his spare time, Cui turned out to be an extremely prolific composer and feuilletonist. His public "debut" as a composer occurred 1859 with the performance of his orchestral Scherzo, Op. 1, under the baton of Anton Rubinstein and the auspices of the Russian Musical Society. In 1869 the first public performance of an opera by Cui took place; this was his William Ratcliff (based on the tragedy by Heinrich Heine); but it did not ultimately have success, partially because of the harshness of his own writings in the music press. All but one of his operas were composed to Russian texts; the one exception, Le flibustier (based on a play by Jean Richepin), premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1894 (twenty-five years after Ratcliff), but it did not succeed either. Cui's more successful stage works during his lifetime were the one-act comic opera The Mandarin's Son (publicly premiered in 1878), the three-act Prisoner of the Caucasus (1883), based on Pushkin, and the one-act Mademoiselle Fifi (1903), based on Guy de Maupassant. Besides Flibustier, the only other operas by Cui performed in his lifetime outside of the Russian Empire were Prisoner of the Caucasus (in Liège, 1886) and the children's opera Puss in Boots (in Rome, 1915).
In 1916 the composer went blind, although he was able to compose small pieces by dictation. Cui died on 26 March 1918 from cerebral apoplexy and was buried next to his wife Malvina (who had died in 1899) at the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. In 1939 his body was reinterred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Saint Petersburg, to lie beside the other members of The Five.
Until RUclips, very little of this composer's music was available to the general music-listening public, despite the fact that Cui was a member of the famous Russian group known as "The Five" alongside Borodin, Rimsky Korsakov, Balakirev and Mussorgsky, all well known. This upload is a new piece for me...how very Russian! A true charmer! Thanks for this upload!
First time hearing Cui!
Thank you James Levee. Absorbed as I am in reading Rosa Newmarch's 'The Russian Opera' of 1914, listening to this wonderful music by César Cui is the perfect illustration to the book.
Thank you, Mr. Levee, for enabling this recording to be heard by a newbie to Maestro Cui.
Bravo bravo bravo
Many thanks for this, I've read a couple of Col Cui's booklets on fortifications, hadn't realised it was the same person as the composer (who I thought was, like, a generation younger .. duh)
All of the composers in his Handful had day jobs. Borodin was a chemist, Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer, Mussorgsky was an Army NCO, and Balakirev had his hands full herding all these cats.
@@5610winston Years ago I read a history of chemistry, and was delighted to find an entire section on Borodin. I majored in both musical composition and chemistry in college, so Borodin was one of my favorites. Then, Cui, the famous theorist and builder of battlements, writes that lovely Prelude in Ab. Go figure. I am a big fan of Russian concert music in general. So glad to see such respect for these composers. They did more than write pretty music used in Hollywood movies.
❤💝💖
The orchestration of this overture is the work of Mily Balakirev.
César Cui - Orientale Opus 50 - Flute a bec - recorder - Jean Cassignol
Als im Radio noch nicht ausschließlich amerikanisierter Sprühstuhl rauf und runter lief
a true masterpiece
Unless I'm mistaken, the orchestration of this overture is by Mily Balakirev.
There is a staged performance of this operetta (with piano accompaniment) on RUclips at this URL: ruclips.net/video/x2HEAesvPXQ/видео.html
Wikipedia article about the opera: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandarin%27s_Son
Piano-vocal score: imslp.org/wiki/The_Mandarin%27s_Son_(Cui,_C%C3%A9sar)
suuuuuuuper gobernator,la pax,liberatooooooooooooor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How to pronounce his name - is it "kwee"?
I had a friend who was fond of his music, and he pronounced his name as say-zar kwee, as you suggest.
A delightful and tuneful overture - many thanks for posting this, James. When is a Cui opera going to appear on DVD?
Cui's opera "Feast in Time of the Plague" conducted by Polyansky was released by Chandos several years ago.
Roman Krassovsky Thanks Roman - I'll try to get hold of a copy.
Do You have the Ópera Ratcliff of Cesar Cui?
Glinka Miguel Ivanovich
OK. What about him?
This sounds more like the music from a19th century French composer than a Russian . But Cui was the son of a French father and a Lithuanian mother who lived in Russia .
The Russians were also incredible Francophiles, at least the ones in the upper crust. Even Balakirev and his circle weren't immune.
Lithuania was part of Russia in the 19th century.