Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev, remarkable Russian composer, pianist, teacher, scientist, and public figure in the world of music, was born in the ancient city of Vladimir in 1856. He started his piano studies at the age of five. In 1866, he entered Moscow Conservatory (which was opened the same year) and graduated in 1875 in the classes of P.I. Tchaikovsky (Composition, gold medal) and N. G. Rubinstein (Piano). In 1875–1880, the young musician often went abroad, and stayed for long periods in Paris where he made the acquaintance of I. Turgenev, G. Flaubert, E. Zola, C. Gounod, C. Franck, C. Saint–Saëns, and many others.

From 1878 till 1905, Taneyev taught harmony, instrumentation, composition, counterpoint, and piano at Moscow Conservatory. He was its director from 1885 till 1889. Among Taneyev’s many students were Rachmaninoff, Skriabin, Medtner, and Gliere. He combined teaching with pianist activity. Sergey Ivanovich was one of the most outstanding pianists of his times. It was he who performed Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concert in Moscow for the first time. Taneyev as pianist had a tremendous repertoire and often appeared in ensembles.

Taneyev connected his fate as personality and musician with the musical life of Moscow and its Conservatory. Due to the amazing integrity and purity of his nature, Sergey Ivanovich was called “the conscience of musical Moscow” and its “apex”. He was absolutely respected by the musical community, mixing with representatives of both Moscow and Petersburg schools of composing with equal heartiness. He had vast knowledge in most diversified fields of human activity, and his friends were remarkable writers, painters, and scientists of his times. Taneyev was tied to Tchaikovsky in a longstanding sincere friendship, which manifested itself in several volumes of captivating correspondence. This is what Modest Tchaikovsky, brother of Piotr Tchaikovsky, says about Taneyev in his memoirs: “…Never in my long life have I met with a soul more perfectly pure than Sergey Ivanovich, and no one have I respected so deeply, so utterly and meaningfully for his harmonious combination of qualities triumphantly soaring above everything that belittles the human nature. Prominent artist, great teacher, and everyday person fused in Sergey Ivanovich into an integral and strictly balanced image clear as a flawless diamond.”

Sergey Ivanovich died in Dyud’kovo Village near Moscow in 1915, having caught cold at the funeral of A. N. Skriabin.

Taneyev’s music embodied the traditions of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, J. S. Bach, and composers of the Viennese school (primarily Beethoven). One of his greatest ideas in music was creation of a “Russian polyphony”, and the need for Russian music to live through a stage of contrapuntal development. He re–considered the meaning of several genres of Russian music (chamber compositions, lyrico–philosophical cantatas). Fugue was of a special importance for his creative work, where it may be found both as an independent opus and a part of an entire.

Taneyev probable had no peers in the composership level in Russian music. He was a perfect master of the polyphonic techniques of Bach and Renaissance composers, and of the art of large form architecture. His best compositions attract you with flawlessly finished details and the logic of the entire. One of the most important works of his life, the book titled “Invertible Counterpoint in the Strict Style” (1889 –1909), is of a colossal scientific and pedagogical value.

The composer’s heritage of Taneyev is large in volume and diversified in genres. He composed Oresteia, an operatic trilogy after Aeschylus; numerous cantatas for orchestra, choir, and soloists, among which are the famous St. John of Damascus and Reading the Psalms; four symphonies; instrumental concertos; 22 opuses for chamber ensemble; over 60 songs for voice and piano; choral compositions; pieces for piano; arrangements of traditional songs, and piano transcriptions of works of other authors.

Instrumental chamber music is arguably the most important and meaningful part of Taneyev’s heritage, a peak of Russian classical music. None of his contemporaries felt such acute interest for chamber instrumentalism, resulting in interpretations so diversified. In the nearly forty years of his composing career, Taneyev wrote 22 instrumental ensembles for different sets of instruments. In this genre, he was unrivalled in Russia.

His string–and–bow ensembles splendidly demonstrate Taneyev’s knowledge of expressive resources of string instruments. In these, his inventiveness reached real heights, enchanting beauty of sound, and subtlety of color effects, let alone the polyphonic skill. Taneyev managed the secret of the quartet style in a free and virtuoso manner, applying the art of combining four voices on the basis of their complete equality, interaction, and fusion. The art of quartet was the domain where the strongest aspects of Taneyev’s artistic individuality — noble spirituality, sincerity and purity of lyrical emotion, subtle and profound intellectual culture — showed itself with the utmost fullness and perfection.

The composer created most of his quartets in his mature years, and only three quartets were written in his younger days. The author, ever demanding to himself, did not publish those early etudes, considering them imperfect. They were printed in 1952 for the first time.

Quartet No. 5 in A major, op. 13 (1903)

The author himself called his Fifth Quartet “childish” or “Quartettino”, thus emphasizing its transient meaning. In a letter to Modest Tchaikovsky, he informed, “I have written a small and relatively easy Fifth Quartet in a somewhat archaic style”. The features of the opus are unconstrained easiness, simplicity, and transparency of manner. The development aspect of the Quartet is concise and nearly free of textural sophistications largely typical for most of the composer’s quartet scores. Being classically proportioned and flexible in its structure, it is full of freshness and spontaneity.

Unusual for Taneyev is the main part of the first movement (Allegro con spirito) — it is wave-like, sophisticated, and whimsical in its melodic pattern. On the contrary, the by-part is artless, with something dollish in it.

The lyrical tale in Adagio, with so much peace of heart added to it by the author, develops unhurriedly.

The next two movements are dashing and light. A bagpipe tune is wittily imitated in the middle of the third movement (Allegro molto). The finale’s main theme (Presto) is a modified main theme of the first movement. The finale brings to a contrapuntal unity al the themes of the preceding movements, but this time, they are transfigured.

Quartet No. 7 in E flat major, (1880)

The publisher assigned a number to the Quartet conventionally, as Taneyev only published six quartets with assigned numbers. The quartet in E flat major is the first on the list of the three quartets he did not publish in his lifetime. This is what Taneyev wrote to Tchaikovsky from France where he stayed at that time, “I am finishing my string quartet. To get it written as it is now, I have written 240 pages, a whole book of a moderate size. Let me assure you that all the time I was writing it I… did my best to make the things I was writing beautiful, understandable, and harmonious. To achieve this, I kept on rewriting the themes until I began to like them.”

The Quartet distinctly reveals the composer’s original creative manner, and evident is the influence his teacher Tchaikovsky and their common idol Mozart.

The first movement of the Quartet is distinguished by classical clarity and proportion. The lyrical apex of the entire cycle is the emotion-laden cantilena second movement, with its complex polyphonic twining of voices. A bright contrast is the daring tarantella-rhythm scherzo bordered by a slow pathetic introduction and closing. The Quartet ends in a fast lively finale as per the classical tradition.

After S.I. Taneyev, a book by G. Bernandt

 

The S. I. Taneyev Quartet

Vladimir Ovcharek, violin
Grigory Lutzky, violin
Vissarion Solovyev, viola
Josef Levinzon, cello

The S. I. Taneyev Quartet’s debut performance was at the Minor Hall of Leningrad Conservatory in 1946. Its musicians were second-year students of the Conservatory at the time. Vladimir Ovcharek, Grigory Lutzky, and Vissarion Solovyev have been playing in the ensemble since the day of its foundation (since 1946), and Josef Levinzon joined the quartet in 1967. The Quartet was named after Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev in 1963.

In the many decades of its existence, the Quartet, rightly considered to be one of the best ensembles of the Soviet Union, has performed over 6,000 concerts in dozens of cities of the USSR, in many European countries, in the United States, and in Japan. Among the partners of the legendary ensemble were D. Oystrakh, S. Richter, M. Rostropovich, B. Davidovich, N. Petrov, M. Pletnev, E. Virsaladze, and other famous musicians of our days.

The S. I. Taneyev Quartet has released numerous records that are now in the golden treasury of the world recording. Among them are collections of quartets of Beethoven, Shostakovich, Miaskowski, and Taneyev, and compositions of Salmanov, Slonimsky, and Falik. The ensemble performed many premieres of quartets of today’s authors, such as Agafonnikov, Basner, and Balakhov. Dmitry Shostakovich entrusted the premiere performance of his last quartet, the Fifteenth, to the Taneyev Quartet.