César Antonovich Cui was a Russian composer and music critic, member of the Belyayev circle and The Five – a group of composers combined by the idea of creating a specifically Russian type of music. As an officer of the Imperial Russian Army, he rose to the rank of Engineer-General, taught fortifications in Russian military academies and wrote a number of monographs on the subject.
César Cui, 1910
Portrait of César Cui by Konstantin Makovsky (detail), c. 1880s
Cui among artists of the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre, 1902
Grave of Malvina and César Cui, Tikhvin Cemetery, Saint Petersburg
The Belyayev circle was a society of Russian musicians who met in Saint Petersburg, Russia between 1885 and 1908, and whose members included Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov, Vladimir Stasov, Anatoly Lyadov, Alexander Ossovsky, Witold Maliszewski, Nikolai Tcherepnin, Nikolay Sokolov, Alexander Winkler among others. The circle was named after Mitrofan Belyayev, a timber merchant and amateur musician who became a music philanthropist and publisher after hearing the music of the teenage Glazunov.
Portrait of Mitrofan Belyayev by Ilya Repin
Portrait of Alexander Glazunov by Ilya Repin, 1887
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Dmitri Shostakovich, 1925
