Important developments in Russian music took place at the end of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s. That was when the Russian Musical Society with its first conservatoire and the Free School of Music were founded. The Russian repertory was enlarged most significantly by Glinka's Kamarinskaya of 1848, and by his incidental music for Prince Kholmsky (1840) and several orchestral pieces on Spanish subjects from 1845 to 1851; the composer died in 1857. Dargomïzhsky emerged as the composer of a grand opera, Esmeral'da, staged in 1847, of an opera on a Russian subject, Rusalka, performed in 1856, and during the 1840s and 1850s of many songs; his most influential opera The Stone Guest lay in the future (see Chapter 5), and recognition of him as ‘the great teacher of musical truth’, as Musorgsky called him, occurred only in the 1860s. In the second half of the 1850s the dynamic Balakirev began to attract the circle of young disciples whose compositions were to transform Russian music from the 1860s. This chapter, then, may seem episodic as it illustrates the unsatisfactory pattern of concert life and marks the appearance of some new works and some new composers; its final item introduces the major critic Serov as he comments in typically forthright and detailed fashion on new songs by Balakirev.

(a) M. D. Rezvoy: Musical societies in St Petersburg. Arts Gazette, 1841, no. 10, pp. 1–4

Modest Dmitriyevich Rezvoy (1807–53) rose to the rank of colonel in the Corps of Engineers in 1849 and was a talented miniaturist in portraiture.[…]