Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

Well, there was certainly much more great writers at the same time, but composers like Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin were first class by any measure... and those are two I could recall from the top of my head, with my very limited knowledge of 19th century Russian culture, I'm sure there's more...

View on HN

Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky

totally, now I feel like an idiot for forgetting Tchaikovsky :)

They are good composers, no doubt, but probably not quite in the same league in, if anything, importance (not going to argue personal preferences in music) as, say, Beethoven earlier or Stravinsky later.

Very few countries had composers comparably famous as Beethoven or say Mozart or Bach are nowadays to the general public - and none had them throughout the different periods all the time. However, considering the social situation in Russia of the 19th century, proportion of urban vs. rural living people, proportionally smaller and less educated middle class than in West, IMHO there was actually quite a lot of top-notch artists and fine craftsmen.

Germany or Italy did pretty well, though. And Russia never considered itself just some one other country. Comparisons have always been with "Europe".

Not to say that say Mussorgsky (as mentioned somewhere above) isn't a top-notch composer, but if you have, as your comparatives, Dostoyevsky vs. Dickens (for example) or Mussorgsky vs. Wagner, you'd probably pick Dostoyevsky...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com