Jeremy Pound introduces the influential group of 19th-century Russian composers also known as The Five. <\/p>
The Mighty Handful was a group of Russian composers<\/a> who, led by Mily Balakirev, sought to create a distinctly Russian style of classical music.<\/strong><\/p>\n Based in St Petersburg, the five composers worked closely together from the late 1850s to around 1870. Largely self-taught, they represented a source of opposition to the conservatories recently founded in Moscow and St Petersburg, which some felt were confined by German tradition.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Their distinctive name was not self-adopted but came from a sentence in critic Vladimir Stasov\u2019s review of a concert in Moscow on 24 May 1867, in which music by four of the composers was featured: \u2018May God grant that [the audience retains] for ever a memory of how much poetry, feeling, talent and ability is possessed by the small but already mighty handful\u2019.<\/p>\n The group is often also known as \u2018The Five\u2019, a term first used in a letter from Balakirev to Tchaikovsky in 1870. (Although influenced by the group, Tchaikovsky<\/a><\/strong> himself was always insistent on not being too closely associated with it.)<\/p>\n In that same year, shortly before the group went their separate ways, four of them \u2013 Borodin, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui \u2013 began work on a collaborative opera called Mlada<\/em>, but it was never completed.<\/p>\n\n
How did they become known as The Mighty Handful?<\/h2>\n
Who were the five members of The Mighty Handful?<\/h2>\n
Mily Balakirev (1837-1910)<\/h3>\n