Alexander Dargomizhsky was a Russian pianist and composer of operas, folk song settings, and orchestral works. He was known for his role in the development of Russian music, as the evolutionary link between Mikhail Glinka and the Five. He was born in 1813 at his father's farmhouse in the Tula district, south of Moscow. His family was staying there temporarily to escape the invading French army, led by Napoleon. He had a wealthy upbringing and received a private education that included piano lessons from his teacher, Louise Wohlgeboren. Then he studied with Adrian Danilevsky, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade Dargomizhsky not to compose because he thought that it wasn't appropriate for someone of his aristocratic social status. This was followed by lessons with Franz Schoberlechner, a former student of Hummel. He also studied the violin with P. Vorontsov for a brief time in 1822, but he eventually lost interest. In 1827, he began working as a government employee where he was regularly rewarded for his efficiency. He still composed, performed socially, and attended opera performances, but he never considered pursuing music with any serious conviction until he met and befriended Mikhail Glinka in 1833. He studied Glinka's notebooks and exercises from when took counterpoint lessons from Siegfried Dehn. In a combination of his appreciation for French literature and his newly found inspiration to compose, Dargomizhsky completed his first opera in 1841. Esmerelda was composed in the French grand opera style, and the libretto was based on a novel by the French author, Victor Hugo. Russian opera houses were reluctant to perform the new work because Italian-style operas were popular; French-style operas had fallen out of fashion in the 1830s. Its 1847 premiere was not very successful, but critics did acknowledge his mature writing for such an inexperienced composer. After travelling through Berlin, Paris, and Vienna in the mid-1940s, he came to realize his appreciation for Russian culture and began to study and analyze Russian folk music. He wanted to explore and develop the comic and dramatic aspects of Russian music on a large scale, a concept that Glinka touched on in his music. He had a vision of composing in a style that was grandiose, purely Russian, and he wanted to emulate the entire range of human emotions. He accomplished this in his Rusalka, which was completed in 1855 and had a successful premiere in 1856. He wrote several settings of Russian folk songs around this time in which he also explored emotional expression. In 1866, he began composing The Stone Guest, which was an opera that combined all the compositional concepts he had been developing. The following year he was elected president of the Russian Musical Society, which took a toll on his health and his compositional output. In January 1869, he had finished The Stone Guest, but it only existed in the form of a piano reduction and had not been orchestrated when he passed away days later. Dargomizhsky's friends and members of the Five helped with completing the work for performance. César Cui composed the Prelude and part of the first scene, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrated the entire opera in 1870. The premiere of The Stone Guest in 1872 generated mixed reviews, but the work was held in high regard by the Five for its dramatic emotional expression and the rejection of traditional musical form. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi