Alexey Verstovsky

Biography

Alexey Nikolayevich Verstovsky (Russian: Алексéй Никола́евич Верстóвский) (1 March [O.S. 18 February] 1799 – 17 November [O.S. 5 November] 1862) was a Russian composer, musical bureaucrat and rival of Mikhail Glinka.

Biography

Alexey Verstovsky was born at Seliverstovo Estate, Kozlovsky Uyezd, Tambov Governorate. The grandson of General A. Seliverstov and a captured Turkish woman, he was also a descendant of the Polish szlachta (gentry or aristocracy). A civil engineer by training, he became interested in music while he was studying at the Corps of Engineers in St Petersburg. He also studied piano, violin, musical theory and composition. John Field was among his teachers.
At the age of 20 he became famous for his 'opera-vaudeville' Grandmother's Parrots (1819). Excited by the success he continued to compose light music for this currently fashionable genre and composed more than 30 of them. He also created a series of ballads for voice and piano, which he called cantatas. The performance of them had often involved a theatrical action. One of them The Black Shawl or Moldavian Song (1823) a setting of Alexander Pushkin's poem, became immensely popular in the aristocrats' salons. In 1825 he was appointed as an 'inspector of music' in Moscow, in charge of the imperial theatres including the Maly and Bolshoi, controlling all the repertoire (from 1830) and chairing the board of directors (from 1848 until 1860).
He turned to the genre of opera in 1828 and wrote six works. The romantic opera Askold's Grave, written on a subject from Russian history, was the most successful of the six. It has been claimed that the music for Askold's Grave was polished up by Gioachino Rossini, based on Verstovsky's ideas, for a fee that covered a gambling debt. First performed in 1835 (a year before Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar) Askold's Grave received about 200 performances in St Petersburg and 400 in Moscow in its first 25 years. This was the first Russian opera performed in the United States (in 1869). In the Soviet era the opera was forgotten for decades, until it was revised in 1944 at the Moscow Theatre of Operetta under the title Украденная невеста (Ukradennaya Nevesta – The Stolen Bride), and then returned to the stage in 1959 after its performance in a new version at the Kiev State Opera Theatre.
However the "Epoch of Verstovsky" soon changed to the "Epoch of Glinka" and Verstovsky's operas fell into oblivion once more.
He was a friend and correspondent with many famous writers, among them Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Aleksander Griboyedov, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Vladimir Odoevsky, and Aleksander Pisarev. However he was not so popular among his colleagues. Glinka avoided mentioning him in his memoirs; Modest Mussorgsky nicknamed him Gemoroy (Haemorrhoid) by association with the title of his opera Gromoboy.
His wife was Russian actress and singer Nadezhda Repina. He died in Moscow in 1862, aged 63.