César Cui

César Cui was born in 1835 in Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was French. He had come to Russia with Napoleon’s army in 1812. He was wounded, and he stayed when the army went home. He taught French at the school in Vilnius. Cui’s mother came from a Lithuanian noble family. Cui is known as a Russian composer, but he once wrote that he did not have “a drop of Russian blood” in him. The family had little money, and printed music was expensive. So as a boy Cui copied all of Chopin’s mazurkas by hand, on paper where he drew the lines himself. Chopin stayed his favourite composer all his life.

He began piano lessons at 10 with his sister. At 14 he wrote his first piece, a mazurka in the style of Chopin. The composer Moniuszko, the most famous musician in Vilnius, saw his music and offered to teach him for free. To the musicians of Vilnius, Moniuszko was almost like a god. Cui later remembered that he was so nervous that he stood at Moniuszko’s door for a long time before he dared to ring the bell. Moniuszko sometimes came to the Cuis’ home, sat at the piano with a cigar in his mouth, and played and sang the boy’s pieces. But in 1851, at 16, his father sent him to St Petersburg to study military engineering.

In 1856 he met the composer Balakirev. Soon Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin joined them. None of them had studied at a music school. They met almost every day, argued about music and drank glass after glass of tea. They were later called the Mighty Handful. In 1858, at 23, Cui married Malvina Bamberg, a singing pupil of the composer Dargomyzhsky. In 1859 he wrote a little comic opera for her, and it was performed in her parents’ home. Malvina sang, Cui played the piano, and his friend Mussorgsky played the main comic part.

His army pay was not enough, so he and Malvina ran a boarding school for boys who were preparing for the engineering school. He became an expert on building forts and a professor at three military academies. He even taught the future Tsar Nicholas II. In the end he became a general. So he could compose only in his free time. He joked in a letter that as a musician he was a fairly good engineer, and as an engineer he was a fairly good musician.

He also wrote almost 800 newspaper articles about music, to win support for his friends’ music. His reviews could be very harsh, even about his friends. He once wrote that his friend Mussorgsky’s great opera Boris Godunov was immature. Cui had often written harshly about Italian opera, and its fans were angry with him. At the first performance of his opera William Ratcliff in 1869, they booed him when he came onto the stage. He had expected this, and he simply bowed to them. Liszt later called this opera a masterpiece, and the two became friends. Orientale is No. 9 of Kaleidoscope (1893), 24 short pieces for violin and piano. It is his best-known work.

In his seventies he wrote operas for children. He explained that he had an 8-year-old grandson. One of them, Puss in Boots, was performed in Rome in 1915 by large puppets, with the singers hidden, and Cui was delighted. Mussorgsky had died in 1881 and had left an opera unfinished. In 1914, at 79, Cui began to complete it, and he finished it two years later, when he was almost blind. He wrote that he was glad to have done this for the memory of his friend. He was the last of the Mighty Handful still alive. He died in Petrograd, as St Petersburg was then called, in March 1918, at 83.

Cui was an army engineer all his life, and music was what he did in his free hours. He used those hours to fight for his friends’ music, and to finish the work of a friend who had died. His big operas are forgotten, but his small pieces for home players, children and violinists, like Orientale, are still played.