While walking to a café here in Bristol after finishing a rather harrowing and "difficult" project, to say the absolute least, I chose to listen to some piano music. Now, in full admittance there is a plurality of Russian composers I should be familiar with for whom I put to shame with my ignorance. Nevertheless, I happened to choose a name which many of us are only cursorily, or not at all, aware of and very much should be, as is the case frequently it seems.
Likewise myself, I had not familiarity with the triple-threat personality, although I suspect his name has found its way into past texts and situations. Of course, I'm talking about the composer Sergei Mikhail Lyapunov (Серге́й Миха́йлович Ляпуно́в), born in 1859 in Yarslavol, a historic city whose five century heritage as an industrial city is as mesmerizingly full as the amount of figures (Ivan Dmitrevsky, Mikhail Popov, Leonid Sobinov, and especially Artemy Troitsky) born from this ancient city (the oldest remaining city on the Volga river!). Infatuated with the Nationalist school as begun by The Mighty Five, subsequently being artistically mentored by Balakirev himself, Lyapunov was an avid ethnomusicologist and recorded over 300 folk songs during his time in 1893. However, despite having a sizeable 71-corpus body of work, Lyapunov is best known for his Op.11, a set of 12 rhapsodic etudes (or technical studies) in the sophisticated and challenging manner of Liszt, to whom the opus is passionately dedicated and modeled after, specifically his unfinished Transcendental Études. This was to be a 24-piece trek through the major and minor keys, but with only 12 finished, Lyaponov stepped in and finished the other 12, thus providing Liszt's work a posthumous conclusion which would be much to his liking I think.
Lyapunov's compositional mindset was born from the 19th century wave of nationalist rediscovery and Slavophile pride in a romanticized image of Russian culture, musically actualized in the folk-centric works of the Balakirev circle in the 1850s. Thus, by the end of the 19th century a new, more eccentric and experimental wave of compositional faces were becoming the beau ideal of the new century (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Stravinsky, along with the Austrian Schoenberg and Francophiles Debussy and Messiaen), however many composers (Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Glazunov) were resolute in their commitment to aesthetically traditional ideals and folklorish, orientalist, and grand evocativity, as popularized by the Mighty Five, however primevally shaped by the legacy of earlier Nationalist composers like Glinka and Dargomyzhsky. But amongst the strong taste for lush and motile soundscapes, polyphonic voice-leading, non-traditional and exotified scalar patterns, and unconfined modulations (by thirds to be exact, thanks Liszt!), they also practiced more "tonally liberated" techniques like tasteful dissonances, tri-tones, adept chromaticism, and weakened harmonic progressions. HOWEVER, it was all within reason as to avoid decadent, Western profusions into the emerging, "Russian" vocabulary.
Upon this foundation, Lyapunov gained his foundational interest in attuning himself to the sounds of the Russian homeland and the true language of her people. After graduating from the Moscow Conservatory of Music in 1883, having studied under the Western-tinged gazes of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev, he instead fell in love with the virtuosic and technically precise nature of Liszt through his teacher Karl Klindworth (former student of Liszt). In 1885, about 15 years following the dissolution of The Mighty Five in the early 1870s, Lyapunov went in search of Balakirev, the founder and forceful ideologue of that seminal group, due to his infatuation with his work in folk-song utilization, overt preference for oriental mysterium, and intensely-refined intellect and acumen in harmonic structure and technical perfection. It's important to note here that emerging at the same time was the formation of the Belyayev Circle, first begun in 1885 (the year Lyapunov set out to meet Balakirev). The circle followed in the ideological footsteps of The Mighty Five, especially since Rimsky-Korsakov was a participant and connection to the previous circle, and also strove to justify the Russian style.
However, unlike The Mighty Five and its hesitancy towards formal training lest one be infested with Western sympathies, there was a recognition for a technical training at the strong behest of Rimsky-Korsakov. This anchored the group into its connection to the Western world and its tolerance of modernist tinges and Tchaikovskian sensuality, albeit within the strict confines of artistic sophistication and technical regulations. But because of the Belyayev's circles cool and limited embrace of folk-culture and ethnographic projects, choosing to emulate rather than innovate in this regard, Lyapunov never really operated within this sphere and stayed true to The Mighty Five, more than likely because of his intimate and most likely enthralling tutelage under Balakirev, a headstrong Russian it seems.
But what about the Etudes themselves?
As written in 1993 for a NAXOS recording of Op. 11 by the contemporary Russian pianist Konstantin Scherbakov, whose recording of Liszt's 24 Preludes and Fugues was met with laurels and all, the very format of the opus followed the "etudic" tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries (I'm thinking about Scriabin especially, and his "etudic journey" from the early adolescence to his Orphic blossoming later in life). He mentions something perceptive, that being the fairly liberal usage of the word etude, meaning technically study, however meaning here a range of expressionary habits, none the least by Rachmaninoff calling it an "Etude-Tableaux," a much more resonant name. Each one of Lyapunov's etudes are mini-worlds encased in sounding substance (B. Asafiev would say an intonational vocabulary) all their own, each telling their own stories of folk origin, put through the composite gaze of the composer's manifested life experiences, influenced by both Eastern and Western lifestyles.
Like I said earlier, this work was created as the posthumous extension of Liszt's unfinished set of 24 etudes of like title, with Lyapunov even adopting the circle of fifth trajectory like Liszt was in the process of doing. What's fascinating is that, as pointed out by Bertrand Boissard for Piano Classics Records in 2017, Lyapunov was really stupefied by Liszt, to the point of creative enslavement. But this was not an inhibitor but rather a solid basis, when combined with Balakirev's paternal guidance, for which Lyapunov could jumpstart the development of his own sound, his own comprehension of a fastly-changing Russian ethos. But Scherbakov points this out marvelously, as does Olga Vladimirovna in her dissertation on his piano repertoire, that in the late 19th century/early 20th century, when Russian society was preoccupied in a fight for its future, this was when the clashing of worlds and paradigms of aesthetic and world ideology shaped Lyapunov's truest compositional identity.
It was the amalgam of the East, embodied in the teachings of Balakirev, and the sophistication of the West, epitomized through the virtuosity of Liszt, that Lyapunov came to resemble a composer thoroughly meshed in the middle of two worlds which were quickly being fazed out and fazed in, all at the same time. This left Lyapunov in an odd position, not fully belonging to the modernist world quickly coming into being, and not belonging to the Kuchkist world that was. As Vladimirovna writes, the upsetting nature of the Russian revolution and the looming presence of the first World War caused "an exacerbation of creative contradictions," where romantic invocations of natural scenery and folk bucolicism had to contend with the harsh reality of visceral humanness, lust for plenty, and a taste for the aesthetically emancipated. So inheriting Liszt's professional stature and classical cleanliness, intermixed with Balakirev's fondness for folktales, Symbolist imagery of Nature and her majestic sites, Caucaus simulacrums, and a rustic melos uncomparable with any Balyayevian derivations, the search for a "Russian" music style is certainly found here. It is in the mutual unification of the East and West that real Russianness is generated. Amazing!
Enjoy Konstantin Shcherbakov's ecstatically caressing touch in an hour that will feed the soul. It's remarkable how dexterously he handles the motile topography of Lyapunov!
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