César Antonovich Cui (Russian: Цезарь Антонович Кюи, romanized: Tsezar Antonovich Kyui; IPA: [ˈt͡sjezərʲ ɐnˈtonəvʲɪt͡ɕ kʲʊˈi] ; French: Cesarius Benjaminus Cui; 18 January [O.S. 6 January] 1835 – 26 March 1918) was a Russian composer and music critic, member of the Belyayev circle and The Five – a group of composers gathered 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 (equivalent to full general), taught fortifications in Russian military academies and wrote a number of monographs on the subject.
Cesarius-Benjaminus Cui was born in Vilna in the Russian Empire (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) into a Catholic family of French and Polish–Lithuanian descent, the youngest of five children. The original French spelling of his surname was "Queuille." His French father, Antoine (Anton Leonardovich) Cui, entered Russia with Napoleon's army; in 1812, he was injured during the battle near Smolensk and (following the defeat) would settle in Vilna. He married local noblewoman Julia Gucewicz; some sources indicate that her father was the Lithuanian architect Laurynas Gucevičius.
The young César grew up learning French, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. As a secondary school (gymnasium) student in Vilan, he took music lessons with Stanisław Moniuszko in 1850. Later that year, before completing his gymnasium education, Cui was sent to Saint Petersburg to prepare to enter the Chief Engineering School, which he did the following year at age 16. In 1855, he graduated from the academy; following advanced studies at the Nikolaevsky Engineering Academy (now Military Engineering-Technical University), he began his military career in 1857 as an instructor in fortifications. His students over the decades included several members of the Imperial family, most notably Nicholas II. Cui eventually ended up teaching at three of the military academies in Saint Petersburg. Cui's study of fortifications gained from a frontline assignment during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 proved important to his career. As an expert on military fortifications, Cui eventually attained the academic rank of professor in 1880 and the military rank of general in 1906. His writings on fortifications included textbooks that were widely used, in several successive editions (see bibliography below).
Despite his achievements as a professional military academic, Cui is best known in the West for his 'other' life in music. As a boy in Vilna, he received piano lessons, studied Chopin's works, and began composing little pieces at fourteen years of age. In the few months before he was sent to Petersburg, he managed to have some lessons in music theory with the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko, who was residing in Vilna at the time. Cui's musical direction changed in 1856, when he met Mily Balakirev and began to be more seriously involved with music.
Even though he was composing music and writing music criticism in his spare time, Cui turned out to be an extremely prolific composer and feuilletonist. His public "debut" as a composer occurred in 1859 with the performance of his orchestral Scherzo, Op. 1, under the baton of Anton Rubinstein and the auspices of the Russian Musical Society. In 1869, the first public performance of an opera by Cui took place, William Ratcliff (based on the tragedy by Heinrich Heine); it did not ultimately have success, partially because of the harshness of his own writings in the music press. All but one of his operas were composed to Russian texts; the one exception, Le flibustier (based on a play by Jean Richepin), premiered in 1894 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris (twenty-five years after Ratcliff), but it did not succeed either. Cui's more successful stage works during his lifetime were the one-act comic opera The Mandarin's Son (premiered publicly in 1878), the three-act The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1883) (based on Pushkin), and the one-act Mademoiselle Fifi (1903) (based on Guy de Maupassant). Besides Flibustier, the only other operas by Cui performed in his lifetime outside of the Russian Empire were The Prisoner of the Caucasus (in Liège, 1886; the first time any opera by The Five was performed outside Russia, but this was also its sole performance outside Russia) and the children's opera Puss in Boots (in Rome, 1915).
Cui's activities in musical life also included membership on the opera selection committee at the Mariinsky Theatre; this stint ended in 1883, when both he and Rimsky-Korsakov left the committee in protest of its rejection of Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina. From 1896 to 1904, he was director of the Petersburg branch of the Russian Musical Society.
Among the many musicians Cui knew in his life, Franz Liszt looms large. His book, La musique en Russie, and his Suite pour piano, Op. 21, are dedicated to the elder composer. Cui's Tarantelle for orchestra, Op. 12, formed the basis for Liszt's last piano transcription. In addition, Liszt valued the music of Russian composers quite highly; for Cui's opera William Ratcliff, he expressed some of the highest praise.
Two personalities of direct significance for Cui were women who were specially devoted to his music. In Belgium, the Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau (1837–1890) was most influential in making possible the staging of The Prisoner of the Caucasus there in 1885. In Moscow, Mariya Kerzina, with her husband Arkadiy Kerzin, formed a performance society in 1896 called the Circle of Russian Music Lovers, which began in 1898 to give special place to works by Cui (among those of other Russian composers) in its concerts.
Throughout his rather long and active musical life, Cui won many accolades. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, several foreign musical societies honored Cui with memberships. Shortly after the staging of Le flibustier in Paris, Cui was elected as a correspondent member of the Académie Française and was awarded the cross of the Légion d'honneur. In 1896, he was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Literature and Art. In 1909 and 1910, events were held in honor of Cui's 50th anniversary as a composer.
Cui married Malvina Rafailovna Bamberg (Russian: Мальвина Рафаиловна Бамберг pronounced [mɐlʲˈvʲinə rəfɐˈiɫəvnə ˈbam⁽ʲ⁾bʲɪrk]) in 1858. He had met her at the home of Alexander Dargomyzhsky, from whom she was taking singing lessons. Among the musical works Cui dedicated to her is the early Scherzo, Op. 1 (1857), which uses themes based on her maiden name (BAmBErG) and his own initials (C. C.), and the comic opera The Mandarin's Son. César and Malvina had two children, Lidiya and Aleksandr. Lidiya, an amateur singer, married and had a son named Yuri Borisovich Amoretti; in the period before the October Revolution, Aleksandr was a member of the Russian Senate.
In 1916, Cui went blind, although he was still able to compose small pieces by means of dictation. He died on 26 March 1918 from cerebral apoplexy and was buried next to his wife Mal'vina (who had died in 1899) at the Smolensky Lutheran Cemetery in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg). He was the longest lived member of the five and had been the group's last living member since Balakirev's death in 1910. In 1939, his body was reinterred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, to lie beside the other members of The Five.
As a writer on music, Cui contributed almost 800 articles to various newspapers and other publications in Russia and Europe between 1864 and 1918 (he "retired" from regular music criticism in 1900). His wide coverage included concerts, recitals, musical life, new publications of music, and personalities. A significant number of his articles (ca. 300) dealt with opera. Several of his themed sets of articles were reissued as monographs; these covered topics as varied as the original 1876 production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth, the development of the Russian romance art song, music in Russia, and Anton Rubinstein's seminal lectures on the history of piano music of 1888–1889 (see list of writings below). In addition, as indicated above as part of his profession, Cui also published many books and articles about military fortifications.