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Stasov wanted Russian art to liberate itself from Europe's hold. By copying the West, the Russians could be at best second-rate; but by borrowing from their own native traditions they might create a truly national art that matched Europe's with its high artistic standards and originality. 'Looking at these paintings', Stasov wrote of the Academy Exhibition of 1861, 'it is difficult to guess without a signature or label that they have been done by Russians in Russia. All are exact copies of foreign works.'⁶⁶ In his view, art should be 'national' in the sense that it portrayed the people's daily lives, was meaningful to them, and taught them how to live.

Stasov was a towering figure in Musorgsky's life. They first met in 1857, when Stasov was the champion of the Balakirev circle in its revolt against the Petersburg Conservatory. Founded by the pianist Anton Rubinstein in 1861, the Conservatory was dominated by the German conventions of composition developed in the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Its patron was the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, a German by origin and proselytizer of her nation's cultural cause, who secured the court's support after Rubinstein had failed to raise public finance for the Conservatory. Rubinstein was contemptuous of the amateurism of musical life in Russia (he called Glinka a dilettante) and he set about promoting music education on Germanic lines. Russian national music, Rubinstein maintained, was of only 'ethnographic interest', quaint but without artistic value in itself. Balakirev and Stasov were incensed. While they recognized that a standard had been set by the German tradition, as nationalists they worshipped what they perceived as Glinka's 'purely Russian' music (in fact it is steeped in Italian and German influences)⁶⁷ and retaliated by accusing Rubinstein of denigrating Russia from the heights of what they called his 'European conservatorial grandeur'.⁶⁸ There was an element of xenophobia, even anti-Semitism, in their battles against Rubinstein. They called him 'Tupinstein' ('dull'), 'Dubinstein' ('dumbhead') and 'Grubinstein' ('crude'). But they were afraid that German principles would stifle Russian forms and their fear gave way to foreigner-baiting. In 1862 they established the Free Music School as a direct rival to the Conservatory, setting it the task of cultivating native talent. In Stasov's phrase, it was time for the 'hoopskirts and tailcoats' of the Petersburg elites to make way for the 'long Russian coats' of the

provinces.⁶⁹ The School became the stronghold of the so-called 'Mighty Five', the kuchka, who pioneered the Russian musical style.

The kuchkist composers were all young men in 1862. Balakirev was twenty-five, Cui twenty-seven, Musorgsky twenty-three, Borodin the old man at twenty-eight, and Rimsky-Korsakov the baby of them all at just eighteen. All of them were self-trained amateurs. Borodin combined composing with a career as a chemist. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer (his First Symphony was written on a ship). Musorgsky had been in the Guards and then the civil service before taking up music, and even after that, at the height of his success in the 1870s, he was forced by the expense of his drinking habit to hold down a full-time job in the State Forestry Department. In contrast, moreover, to the elite status and court connections of Conservatory composers such as Tchaikovsky, the kuchkists, by and large, were from the minor gentry of the provinces. So to some degree their esprit de corps depended on the myth, which they themselves created, of a movement that was more 'authentically Russian', in the sense that it was closer to the native soil, than the classical academy.⁷⁰

But there was nothing mythical about the musical language they developed, which set them poles apart from the conventions of the Conservatory. This self-conscious Russian styling was based on two elements. First they tried to incorporate in their music what they heard in village songs, in Cossack and Caucasian dances, in church chants and (cliched though it soon became) the tolling of church bells.* 'Once again the sound of bells!' Rimsky once exclaimed after a performance of Boris Godunov. He too had often reproduced the sound, in The Maid of Pskov (1873),the Easter Overture (1888), and his orchestra-lions of Borodin's Prince Igor and Musorsgky's Khovanshckina.⁷¹ Kuchkist music was filled with imitative sounds of Russian life. It tried to reproduce what Glinka had once called 'the soul of Russian music'