alists and their sympathizers, it is a stroke of irony that it was Rubinstein who

gave the rst public performances of orchestral works by Musorgsky and Cui.
The fourth concert of the season given on 14/26 December 1859 had included
the premiere of Cuis Scherzo in F major, and the seventh concert given on 11/23
January 1860 included the rst performance of Musorgskys Scherzo in B
ma-
jor.13 From Musorgskys correspondence, it is evident that the RMS Directorate
had considered giving a chorus from his incidental music to King Oedipus later
in the 1860/61 season. Musorgsky wrote to Balakirev on 9/21 November 1860
about his meeting with Dmitry Stasov: Today I was with D. Stasov to get
the tickets for the Shilovskys. He said of my chorus that the commission had
decided:if, at the rehearsal, I nd that it could be performed before the public,
then it will be performed. Out of an intense feeling of self-preservation, I said
to Stasov that this chorus is short and marked agitato, and that to make this
agitato come out effectively it must be preceded by the Andante, even though it
is short. Therefore I asked him to return it to me. I suppose this disorderly mob
wanted to teach me something. The chorus was returned, and I am heartily glad
that I avoided colliding with Rubinstein.14 The date given on the orchestral
score of Musorgskys chorus is 1/13 March 1860, so the work was probably be-
ing considered for inclusion in one of the concerts of December 1860 or January
1861. In the end, the chorus was performed in a concert given by Konstantin
Lyadov at the Mariinsky Theater on 6/18 April 1861. Despite their animosity
toward Rubinstein, the kuchkists could not remain entirely indifferent to the in-
uential position that he held, nor to the fact that his music was being regularly
performed in Russia and Europe. Even Balakirev found himself compelled to
study it. From Nizhny-Novgorod he wrote to Vladimir Stasov on 14/26 July
1861: I would very much like to look at Grubinsteins second concerto dedi-
cated to Lewy.15 I absolutely cannot remember what form the Andante takes,
and I need this very much for my own that is shaping itself so strangely that I
cannot place it under any of the forms that I know.16 Stasov duly obtained a
copy from Johansens music shop in St. Petersburg and sent it to Balakirev with
the remark that, according to Johansen himself, the theme from the Andante
had been taken directly from the religious march that occurs in the introduction
to Meyerbeers Le Pardon de Plormel.
At the end of the St. Petersburg concert season Rubinstein gave two concerts
in Moscow to help raise money for the Moscow branch of the RMS which was
due to begin functioning in October. The programs of these concerts included
his Ocean Symphony and Piano Concerto No. 2. Then in mid-March he set out
for Riga17 and Kningsberg, and eventually arrived in Vienna, where he installed
himself at the Htel Elisabeth. At this stage very little of the opera Die Kinder
der Haide had been written, and most of the work was completed in the small
town of Dornbach near Vienna where there was no postal service and Rubin-
stein could be assured of the rest he needed. In fact, the only major commitment
he had that summer was to attend a jubilee concert in Vienna for the ftieth
anniversary of Schumanns birth, when he played the piano part in the Piano
Quintet in E
on 8 June.

86 Anton Rubinstein