César Cui: Overture to The Mandarin's Son

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.