Mily Balakirev (21 December 1836 [2 January 1837] – 16 [29] May 1910) was a Russian composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, and head of the Mighty Handful. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod in a noble family and died in Saint Petersburg.
His mother gave him his first piano lessons. At the age of ten, he studied in Moscow with Alexander Dubuque, who taught him the fundamentals of piano playing in ten lessons. He continued his musical training in Nizhny Novgorod with the pianist and conductor Karl Eisereich. The patron and writer Alexander Ulybyshev also played an important role in his early development. Balakirev never received a systematic musical education and largely trained himself.
Balakirev graduated from Nizhny Novgorod University, where he studied from 1849 to 1853, and then attended the mathematics faculty of Kazan University as an auditor from 1853 to 1855. He supported himself mainly through music lessons. In Kazan he composed a piano fantasy on themes from Glinka's A Life for the Tsar, his first romance, You Are Full of Enchanting Bliss, and a concert Allegro. Chopin's Piano Concerto and Glinka's trio Do Not Weary, Dear One made a particularly strong impression on him during his youth, and he remained devoted to both composers throughout his life.
In 1855 he moved to Saint Petersburg with Ulybyshev and met Mikhail Glinka, who encouraged him to devote himself to music rooted in national traditions. Balakirev made his first appearance before the city's public that year as a virtuoso pianist. Together with Gavriil Lomakin, he founded the Free Music School on 18 March 1862. Lomakin conducted the school's vocal and choral works, while Balakirev conducted its orchestral concerts. In 1866 Balakirev went to Prague to supervise productions of Glinka's operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila; both were conducted by him and were especially successful in the case of Ruslan and Lyudmila.
From autumn 1867 to spring 1869, Balakirev conducted the symphonic concerts of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, including concerts conducted jointly with Hector Berlioz in 1867. The programs featured music by Berlioz and Liszt as well as orchestral works by Russian composers including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Modest Mussorgsky. Balakirev directed the Free Music School from 1868 until autumn 1874 and again from 1881. After a period away from musical work, he returned to musical and public activity in the late 1870s.
In 1883 Balakirev was appointed director of the Court Singing Chapel. He reorganized its musical work, developed a curriculum for its academic classes, and invited Rimsky-Korsakov to serve as inspector of the music classes. During Balakirev's administration, the chapel building was reconstructed and its orchestral class was expanded. This gave singers who could no longer perform because of voice loss an opportunity to continue their musical training and earn a living in a related field.
Balakirev's output includes orchestral, piano, vocal, choral, and chamber music. His major orchestral works include the overture to Shakespeare's King Lear, overtures on Czech, Russian, and Spanish themes, the symphonic poem Tamara, and two symphonies, completed in 1897 and 1908. His best-known piano work is Islamey, an Oriental fantasy from 1869 regarded as one of the most technically demanding pieces in the piano repertory. It influenced Maurice Ravel, who sought to write an even more difficult work in Scarbo, from Gaspard de la nuit.
His other works include two piano concertos, a sonata, mazurkas, nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, romances, songs, and choral compositions. Balakirev also arranged works by Glinka, Berlioz, Beethoven, Chopin, and other composers. His Collection of Russian Folk Songs, published in 1866 and containing forty songs, was an important contribution to Russian musical ethnography. He died in Saint Petersburg on 16 [29] May 1910 and was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.