Russian classical music
Russian classical music is art music tied to Russia’s culture and history. In medieval times, sacred Orthodox church music and secular music for entertainment developed separately. Byzantine influence shaped bell ringing and choral singing, and early notation helped some medieval pieces survive.
In the 1600s, Nikolay Diletsky wrote Russia’s first major music theory book, and Vasily Titov wrote church prayers that were sung for generations. In the 18th century, Peter the Great opened Russia to Western music. The courts of Elisabeth and Catherine the Great invited Italian musicians who brought opera and classical styles. Composers like Dmitri Bortniansky, Maksim Berezovsky, and Artem Vedel blended Russian and Italian influences.
Mikhail Glinka is often called the first great Russian nationalist composer. His Russian-language operas, Ivan Susanin and Ruslan and Lyudmila, used distinctly Russian tunes and themes and helped spark a national school of music.
A group known as The Mighty Five—Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Cui—wanted to create a truly Russian sound in classical music, drawing on folk tales and history. Their operas and works like Scheherazade showcased a bold national style, sometimes clashing with more conservative tastes. The Russian Musical Society and Russia’s first conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow trained many later stars, including Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, famous for ballets like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Glazunov carried on the Romantic tradition.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought new voices—Igor Stravinsky, Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich—who experimented with sound and form. Some left Russia after the revolution, but Prokofiev eventually returned and made a major impact.
After the revolution, Soviet authorities promoted a more controlled style. The 1930s saw strict limits on innovation, with Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian as leading figures. The Union of Soviet Composers (1932) became the main regulator of music.
In the decades after the USSR, concert music slowly faced more competition from popular music. Still, composers continued to come through, such as Leonid Desyatnikov, who had a new opera commissioned by the Bolshoi in 2005, and Sofia Gubaidulina, whose internationally acclaimed works include In tempus praesens for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:18 (CET).