Nikolay Dmitriyevich Kashkin (; 15 March 1920) was a Russian music critic as well as a professor of piano and music theory at the

Moscow Conservatory The Moscow Conservatory, also officially Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory () is a higher musical educational institution located in Moscow, Russia. It grants undergraduate and graduate degrees in musical performance and musical research. Th ...

for 33 years (1866–96 and 1905–08). The son of a

Voronezh Voronezh ( ; , ) is a city and the administrative centre of Voronezh Oblast in southwestern Russia straddling the Voronezh River, located from where it flows into the Don River. The city sits on the Southeastern Railway, which connects wes ...

bookseller, Kashkin was a self-taught musician who had started giving piano lessons by the time he was 13 years old. In 1860 he travelled to

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

for further study in piano with Alexandre Dubuque. There he met Herman Laroche, Nikolai Rubinstein and

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer during the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popula ...

. He contributed music criticism primarily to the ''Russian Register'' and the ''Moscow Register'', sometimes under the pseudonym "Nikolai Dmitriev."Tchaikovsky Research
/ref> As a critic, Kashkin would do valuable service in the promotion of Tchaikovsky's music. Beginning with Tchaikovsky's unfinished opera The Voyevoda which was half-destroyed by the composer and attemptively reconstructed starting in he 1930s, Kashkin was a strong advocate for Tchaikovsky's work. He was an early support of Tchaikovsky's penultimate opera, The Queen of Spades, arguing it would become a leading name in Russian operatic repertoire. It was he who provided the epithet "Little Russian" for Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony. Tchaikovsky dedicated the song "Not a Word, O My Friend", Op. 6, No. 2 (1869) to him. Kashkin was also a support of the "National School" of Russian music developed by the group known as The Five. Kashkin published his recollections of Pyotr Tchaikovsky three years after the composer's death in 1893.

Works

Essays

* 1897: "Essay on the history of Russian music" * 1897: "Opera stage of the Moscow Imperial Theater"

Monograph

* 1896: "Memoirs" of Tchaikovsky

References

Further

Brown, David, ''Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840-1874'' (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978) {{Authority control 1839 births 1920 deaths Music critics from the Russian Empire Music educators from the Russian Empire Piano educators Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Academic staff of Moscow Conservatory