(in the intervening years Leschetizky had fullled this function).

Rubinstein
described himself to Kaleriya Khristoforovna as a court jester, spending his
time now in the palace of the old empress, now at the palace of the new empress,
and, of course, at Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovnas Mikhaylovsky Palace. Even
in court circles the hapless position in which Rubinstein found himself was
noted. In her reminiscences, Anna Tyutcheva, the daughter of the celebrated
poet and a lady-in-waiting to the empress Mariya Aleksandrovna, recalled the
following incident. On 11/23 October 1858 she recorded in her diary that she
had attended a concert at the Arsenal where Rubinstein and the singer Mlle
Stubbe were performing. The dowager empress wanted the youngsters to play
race-and-catch at the other end of the Arsenal while the concert was taking
place. Their game caused a terrible noise, and Rubinstein did not attempt to
disguise his annoyance. Acclaimed throughout Europe as one of the foremost
pianists of his generation, he was forced to play for two Russian empresses to
the shouts and noise of the reveling youngsters.115 Tyutcheva also noted that
Rubinstein was obliged to play at court soires, where he accompanied charades
and played parodies of operatic scenes for which any ballroom pianist would
have been suited. It was a form of humiliation that Rubinstein found hard to
bear. At this critical moment he needed to nd a new direction for his life in
Russia: he had ruled out taking a post in the imperial theaters because he feared
that the terms of his employment would be too restrictive. Although people
were talking seriously about conservatories, no one was actually doing anything,
and he doubted that anything positive would happen for at least another ve
years. His greatest hope was to obtain the permanent ofcial position of court
pianist, but it was not offered to him and, in the end, Rubinstein received a sal-
ary of one thousand rubles for his work in assisting at court functions and con-
tinued to receive this payment for a number of years.
Having been deprived of a permanent court position, Rubinstein looked
for other ways to channel his energies. He set about trying to goad his fellow
musicians into action by organizing Saturday soires at the Bernardaki Hall.
There he joined Pikkel, Veykman, Drobish, Schuberth, Leschetizky, Lewy, San-
tis, Kross, and other musicians in playing the classical repertory and also some
of the latest pieces available from the music shops of Bernard and Bitner. I have
driven the local musicians mad, he told Kaleriya Khristoforovna, that is to say
I have made them rouse themselves and given them a taste for music; I think
that this is quite incredible for anyone who knows what life here is like.116 He
also took advantage of Yelena Pavlovnas offer of a room at the Mikhaylovsky
Palace to found a singing academy, where he assumed the unpaid role of ar-
tistic director of a mixed choir. The singing academy is to open this week, he
told his mother. It is opening without any prior claims, but I hope that sooner
or later something signicant will emerge from it.117 The existence of choral
academies in Russia was not a new phenomenon. At the beginning of Nicholas
Is reign, during the second half of the 1820s, two rather short-lived associations
had been founded: the Academy of Singing formed by Count Mikhail Wielhor-
ski and the Music Academy (1828) founded by Aleksey Lvov. Throughout the

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