In late 1877, at the height of his fame, Tchaikovsky was asked in a letter from his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, what he thought of a group of largely self-taught composers known as the Five, or, to give them their more Tarantino-esque title, the Mighty Handful. The Five were waning in influence by then, but they’d nonetheless moved music in Russia in a direction that Tchaikovsky hadn’t – towards a nationalist sound that cared little for the Austro-German tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. He responded in early 1878 with typical acidity.
“All the newest Petersburg composers are very gifted persons,” he began, “but they are all afflicted to the marrow with the worst sort of conceitedness and with a purely dilettantish confidence in their superiority over the rest of the musical world.” Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov got off lightest in the letter, mostly because Tchaikovsky believed he’d rid himself of the group’s “contempt for schooling, for classical music” by becoming a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory. The group’s leader, Mily Balakirev, a withdrawn figure by 1878, was called “a saintly prig”.
Alexander Borodin’s technique was “so weak he cannot write a line without outside help”. César Cui was accused of being unable to compose other “than by improvising and picking out on the piano little themelets supplied with little chords”. Modest Mussorgsky, the most radical composer in the Five, was cast off as “a spent force�.
