Belyayev Circle - Legacy

Legacy

Bias toward the musical aesthetics practiced by the Belyayev circle would continue at the St. Petersburg Conservatory after Rimsky-Korsakov's retirement in 1906, with his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg in charge of composition classes at the Conservatory through the 1920s. Dmitri Shostakovich would complain about Steinberg's musical conservatism, typified by such phrases as "the inviolable foundations of the kuchka" and the "sacred traditions of Nikolai Andreyevich ". Nor was this traditionalism limited to St. Petersburg. Well into the Soviet era, many other music conservatories remained run by traditionalists such as Ippolitov-Ivanov in Moscow and Reinhold Glière in Kiev. Because of these individuals, Maes writes, "the conservatories retained a direct link with the Belyayev aesthetic".