Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov 1866 -1901

Vasily Kalinnikov is, unfortunately, the least known and least heralded of Russian composers. His Symphony #1, which you should listen to while reading this short biography (available on the internet), is one of the most beautiful symphonies ever written. Interestingly, Sergey Rachmaninov, also a personal favorite of this blogger, proved to be a great friend of Kalinnikov, and in fact saved him and his wife from penury.

Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov was born in 1866 at Voina, in the Oryol District, where Turgenev, Henry James's "beautiful genius", had been born in 1818. The son of a police official, he was allowed, through the ecclesiastical connections of the family, to study at the seminary in Oryol, where he took charge of the choir at the age of fourteen. In 1884 he went to Moscow as a scholarship student at the Philharmonic Society School, taking lessons on the bassoon and in composition with Alexander Il'yinsky and the self-taught Pavel Blaramberg, a statistician by profession. The poverty of his family which had made it impossible for him to study at the Conservatory forced him to earn a living playing the bassoon, timpani or violin in theatre orchestras and further weakened his health, already affected by childhood privations. He was able to profit, however, from the friendship and teaching of S. N. Kruglikov.

In 1892 Kalinnikov's fortunes seemed about to take a turn for the better, with his appointment, on the recommendation of Tchaikovsky, as conductor at the Malïy Theatre in Moscow and the following year by a similar appointment at the Moscow Italian Theatre, but a few months later his deteriorating health compelled him to resign in order to seek in the relative warmth of the South Crimea a cure for the tuberculosis from which he suffered. He was to remain in Yalta for the rest of his short life, completing there his two symphonies, and, among other instrumental works, incidental music for the play Tsar Boris by Alexey Tolstoy, staged at the Malïy Theatre in 1899.

Towards the end of his life Kalinnikov received some financial relief through the good offices of Sergey Rachmaninov, who had visited him in Yalta and been appalled at the conditions in which he found him living. The latter’s intervention with the publisher Jurgensen brought an immediate sum of 120 roubles for three songs and an offer to publish the score, parts and piano-duet transcription of the Second Symphony, which had its first performance in Kiev in 1898, a year after the first performance of the First Symphony, which was also heard in Moscow, Vienna and Berlin. Rachmaninov also arranged payment for a piano arrangement of the earlier symphony, but Kalinnikov did not live to benefit from his new agreement with Jurgensen. He died early in January 1901, before his 35th birthday. His death induced Jurgensen to offer Kalinnikov's widow an unexpectedly high sum for the rest of her husband's manuscripts, with the remark that he paid because the composer's death had multiplied the value of his works by ten, a sad reflection on commercial reality.
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Thanks to a series of fortuitous events, I was exposed to Kalinnikov earlier this year when his First Symphony was added to a program by the Jacksonville Symphony. The headliner of that program was Igor Stravinsky's Firebird. During the pre concert talk by Maestro Mechetti, we learned why he had included the Kalinnikov piece in the program. It seems about one year ago, as Mechetti was driving home from a trip, he heard the piece on a classical radio station. He was puzzled because he thought he detected a little of Tchaikovsky and maybe a little of Prokofiev, but was sure it was neither one. As soon as he reached his home, he called the station, and learned, for the first time, of Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov. It was his First Symphony, and Mechetti found and purchased a copy of the score, because he said he "fell in love with the piece." A year later he had it ready for a place on the program. That night, my wife and I were fortunate to be there, and we fell in love with it too.

Note: The above is just a 10 minute snippet of the First Symphony. Amazon sells a CD of both of Kalinnikov's symphonies (he wrote only two) for $7.99.