Biography
Serov earned a place in music history as a Russian composer and critic whose biting prose left an enduring mark on subsequent generations of composers from his native land. His reviews carried weight in their day, yet they frequently served as vehicles for personal vendettas; whenever he took exception to an artist, the composer’s works were skewered without mercy. Encounters with figures he admired, however, produced the opposite response: meetings with Liszt and Wagner prompted him to extol their achievements in the most effusive terms. Such extremes reflected a consistently narrow outlook in which critical judgment was shaped more by individual sympathies or antipathies than by impartial assessment. Although his own output remained modest in both quantity and recognized quality, two operas, “Judith” and “Rogneda,” continued to resonate. The crowd scenes of “Judith,” staged seventy times from 1865 to 1870, supplied a model for Mussorgsky’s handling of similar episodes, while the dramatic weight of the folk opera “Rogneda” likewise left its impression on Mussorgsky. Music for dance in both works foreshadowed aspects of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores, and their folk-derived melodies and textures were echoed, sometimes directly, by Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Balakirev.