Background
Cui was born in Vilnius, now in Lithuania. He received piano lessons and instruction in music theory as a child, but after leaving school he entered Saint Petersburg's School of Military Engineering, and began a military career. He became an expert on fortifications. In 1857, when Cui met Mily Balakirev, he became more seriously involved with music, becoming a member of what would eventually be constituted and known as The Five.
Even though he was composing music and writing music criticism in his spare time, Cui turned out to be an extremely prolific composer and writer. In addition to many piano and chamber pieces, numerous choruses, several orchestral works, and hundreds of songs, he seems to have put his greatest hope in his operas, of which he composed fifteen. In 1869 the first public performance of an opera by Cui took place; this was his William Ratcliff (based on the tragedy by Heinrich Heine); but it did not have success after eight performances, 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 (on a play by Jean Richepin), premiered at the Opera-Comique in Paris in 1894, but was not a success after four performances, partly because of an illness contracted by the lead tenor, the upcoming production there of Verdi's Falstaff, and the vogue for Richard Wagner. Cui's more successful stage works during his lifetime were the one-act comic opera The Mandarin's Son (publicly premiered in 1878), the three-act Prisoner of the Caucasus (1883), based on Pushkin, and the one-act Mademoiselle Fifi (1903), based on Maupassant. Besides Flibustier, the only other operas by Cui performed in his lifetime outside of the Russian empire were Prisoner of the Caucasus (in Liege, 1886) and the children's opera Puss-in-Boots (in Rome, 1915).
Cui died on March 13, 1918 and was buried next to his wife Mal'vina, who had died in 1899, at the Lutheran Cemetery in Smolensk. In 1939 his body was reinterred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia to lie beside the other members of The Five.
Cui as Music Critic
As a writer on music, Cui contributed almost 800 articles between 1864 and 1918 (mostly during 1864-1900) to various newspapers and other publications in Russia and Europe. 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: Кольцо Нибелунгов (The Nibelung Ring, 1889, from his review articles about the premiere production, Байрейтское музыкальное торжество [The Bayreuth Music Festival], 1876); La musique en Russie (1880, from the periodical Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris); Русский романс (The Russian Romance, 1896). An additional set of articles was devoted to an important lecture series by Anton Rubinstein: Сеансы А.Г.Рубинштейна. Курс истории литературы фортепианной музыки (Sessions by A.G. Rubinstein. A Course in the History of the Literature of Piano Music, serialized in Nedelia, 1889; French edition published in L'Art, revue bimensuelle illustree that same year under the title Cours de litterature musicale des oeuvres pour le piano au Conservatoire de Saint Petersbourg). Perhaps not incidentally, as part of his profession, Cui also published many books and articles about military fortifications.
Because of rules related to his status in the Russian military, in the early years his musico-critical articles had to be published under a pseudonym, which consisted of three asterisks (***); in Petersburg musical circles, however, it became clear who was writing the articles. In 1860s, his musical reviews in the St.Petersburg Vedomosti newspaper earned him the nickname "musical nihilist" due to his disdain for music before Beethoven (such as Mozart) and his advocacy of originality in music. Sarcasm was a regular feature of his feuilletons.
Cui's primary goal as a critic was to promote the music of contemporary Russian composers, especially the works of his now better-known co-members of "[The Five]." Even they, however, were not spared negative reactions from him here and there, especially in his blistering review of the first production of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov in 1873. (Later in life Cui championed the music of this late colleague of his, to the point of making the first completion of Musorgsky's unfinished opera Fair at Sorochintsk.)
Russian composers outside of "The Five," however, were often more likely to produce a negative reaction. This derived at least partly from distrust of the western-style conservatory system in favor of the autodidactic approach that "The Five" had practiced. Cui lambasted Tchaikovsky's second performed opera, The Oprichnik, for instance; and his oft-cited stinging remarks about Rachmaninoff's Symphony No.1 (which Cui described as depicting the Seven Plagues of Egypt, written for a conservatory in Hell), combined with a bad conducting performance by Glazunov, led to Rachmaninoff tearing up the manuscript of the symphony.
Of western composers, Cui favored Berlioz and Liszt as progressives. He admired Wagner's aspirations concerning music drama, but did not agree with that composer's methods to achieve it (such as the leitmotive system and the predominance of the orchestra). Whereas in the Russian press Cui wrote about both Russian and western composers, his foreign (primarily Francophone) articles featured the former.
Late in life Cui's presumed progressiveness as espoused in the 1860s and '70s turned reactionary against the new "modernists" such as Richard Strauss. Cui's very last published articles (from 1917) constituted merciless parodies, including the little song "Гимн футуризму" ("Hymn to Futurism") and "Краткая инструкция, как, не будучи музыкантом, сделаться гениальным модерн-композитором" ("Concise Directions on How to Become a Modern Composer of Genius without Being a Musician").
Summation as Composer
As to the current status of Cui the composer, in the last few decades one of his children's operas (of which he composed four) entitled Puss-in-Boots (from Perrault) has had wide appeal in Germany. Nevertheless, despite the fact that more and more of Cui's music is being made available in recent years in recordings (including his short opera Feast in Time of Plague, from Pushkin), his status today in the repertoire is considerably small, based (in the West) primarily on some of his piano and chamber music (such as the violin and piano piece called Orientale (op. 50, No. 9)) and a number of solo songs. The received wisdom that he is not a particularly talented composer, at least for large genres, has been cited as a cause for this state of affairs; his strongest talent is said to lie in the crystalization of mood at an instant as captured in his art songs and instrumental miniatures. Although his abilities as an orchestrator, too, have been noted as inferior to those of his compatriots, some recent recordings (e.g., of his one-act opera Feast in Time of Plague) suggest that Cui's dramatic music might be more interesting to pursue with regard to this feature.
Cui's works are not so nationalistic as those of the other members of The Five; with the exception of Pushkin, his operas do not display a strong attraction to Russian sources. Russian musical style can be in passages from his first act of the collaborative Mlada (1872), The Captain's Daughter, a couple of the children's operas, and a few songs. The vast majority of his vocal music is based on Russian texts. His style is more often compared to Robert Schumann and to French composers than to Mikhail Glinka or to Cui's Russian contemporaries.
Bibliographical Information
The first extensive study of the composer was written by a close acquaintance of his in the 1880's, La Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau: César Cui: esquisse critique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1888). The only full-length biography of Cui is A.F. Nazarov's Tsezar' Antonovich Kiui (Moskva: Muzyka, 1989).