Moguchaya Kuchka

Romanticism at its pinnacle

I'm especially partial to a musical group called The Fist or Mighty Fist. They also answered to The Five, except when their mentors and teachers are included, it is more like eight.

In their own time, the were best known as Moguchaya Kuchka, the Russian name for Mighty Handful—a group of 19th-century Russian composers: Aleksey Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, César Antonovich Cui, Modeste Moussorgsky, and Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, who drew on Russian history, literature, and folklore to write music of a distinctly national and very romantic character.

With the exception of Rimsky-Korsakov, music was not their life. The others were employed as navy officers, civil servants, doctors. Rimsky-Korsakov, a self-taught instructor of musical composition at the Imperial school, was awed by his Kuchka fellows, and felt himself inadequate but very lucky to occupy a position to which they confided their innermost musical dreams.

The Russia of the Kuchka was very much the feudal Russia of Czar Peter the Great, in whose capital city, St. Petersburg, the group lived and worked—and composed joyfully—in an atmosphere of decadence and mistrust. Life was harsh, as the story of Moussorgsky's life demonstrates. Even the middle class struggled. It is no surprise that the 1914 revolution and the 1917 Bolshevic counter-revolution both started in St. Petersburg.

Members of the Kuchka were all born in the first third of the 19th Century in a country where winter cold, lack of up-to-date medical technology, and harsh living conditions took their toll. And of that harsh life, four members of the Moguchaya Kuchka died before their greatest works were fully penned.

Peter (or Pytor) Ilyich Tchaikovsky was included in the Russian romantic school of music best exemplified by the Kuchka. Unfortunately, Tchaikovsky lived in Moscow and represented a Moscow frame of mind which The Fist resented (and from this resentment they drew their group's nickname). They corresponded extensively with him about Russia's musical continuum but refused to share ideas.

Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to finish and perfect their unfulfilled compositions. Based on a single piano performance of the then-unwritten score by its creator years earlier, he completed and orchetrated Borodin's famous opera Boris Goudnov. Moussorgsky never heard the finalized version of his opera Khovanshchina. and did not live to publish Pictures at an Exhibition. To the memory of his Moguchaya Kuchka confederates, Rimsky-Korsakov gave all the credit.

He still had time to write his own musical works, including my favorite —Capriccio Espagnol (the Spanish Dances), often called the most brilliant orchestral piece of all time. At its first performance in 1887, the performers joined the audience in applauding its author. And in the ultimate compliment, Tchaikovsky composed his own Capriccio Italiano (Italian Dances) as a tribute.