Nikolai Alexeyevich Titov (; 10 May 1800 in St. Petersburg – 22 December 1875 in St. Petersburg) was a Russian composer, violinist, and Major General in various regiments during the 19th century. He is considered to be the "Grandfather of the Russian Romance." His compositional style was considered to be in the pre-classical orientation, thus setting the groundwork for the developments by Glinka and his contemporaries. He is considered to be one of the most popular romance composers of the 19th century. His songs were praised for their homely sensibility and ruminative harmonic language, albeit encased in simple yet effect forms that appealed to the at-home Amateurs and seasons musicians alike. His repertoire can still be heard today.
Family and children Nikolai Alexeyevich Titov was born on April 28, 1800, in St. Petersburg to a family of art song and small-form composers. Titov also had a younger brother named Mikhail Alekseyevich, who was likewise a notable and technically proficient composer of romances, salon plays, and other small genres during the 19th century.
Nikolai Titov was married in 1893 to Sofia Alekseevna Smirnova, great grandmother of Russian Postwar painter Natalya Nesterova, and went on to have two sons named Nikolai Nikolaevich and Alexander Nikolaevich.
Titov's cousin, Nikolai Sergeevich (1798–1843), is recorded as being the true author of at least 18 songs that were previously asserted to be Titov's.
Life Nikolai Titov was born April 28, 1800, in St. Petersburg, and is the son of General . Titov's godfather was the Emperor Alexander I, who was then still the heir to the throne of the Russian Empire following Alexander's passing. He received general education until the age of 8 at home, then in the First Cadet Corps, although two years after his admission he had to leave due to poor health, after which he visited several private boarding houses, from which he completed the course at the boarding house of Saint-Florent, Haute-Corse.
In 1817 he was appointed as an Ensign in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. In 1819 he was transferred to the Finnish Life Guards Regiment, and on March 27, 1822, he was promoted to Officer.
In 1830 he retired for domestic reasons to Pavlovsk, but in 1833, at the suggestion of the sovereign himself, he again entered military service - in the Life Guards of His Imperial Highness, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich's Ulan Regiment. In February 1834, he fell from his horse and was badly hurt, becoming bedridden for a long time after. After his recovery, he left combat services and was transferred as an Official of special assignments to the Commissariat Department, where he later held consecutive positions - Superintendent of a state factory of Officer Affairs, Director of a Moose Factory, and a Member of the General Presence.
On November 26, 1849, he was awarded the Order of St. George 4 cl. No. 8203: For the impeccable service of 25 years in the officer ranksHe retired in 1867 with the rank of Lieutenant General. He died on December 10, 1875, and is buried at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery.
Musical career Titov's family ancestry extends back a millennium, and many prominent musically inclined persons are included in Titov's chronology. His lineage stems back three cycles and merges military careerdom and musical composition work. Thus, composing and musical adeptness had always been an important secondary, albeit a secondary none of the less. More colloquially known as the Enlightened Amateur status, this class of non-specialist yet highly passionate individuals had been the vital cornerstone of cultural development in Russia during the 19th century, as due to salons, balls, and other artistically minded groups had sprung up everywhere, giving members of the Russian aristocracy and well-off individuals the chance to create and contribute, despite their varying degrees of formalistic training. Adjacent with the Russian Enlightenment, the amateur composer had taking a foothold in the Russian gentry, and the distinction between Patron, composer, and audience member were forever blurred. In this changing landscape, the Titov "dynasty" would begin to be created.
At the head was Nikolai Sergeevich Titov, a composer, poet and playwright who had primarily dealt with folk-infused musical comedies. However, he is most known for his involvement in contributing to an expansive network of theatrical hostings and private venues in/around 1766-1769 prior to their centralization with the founding of The Bolshoi Theater in 1776. Additionally, his Uncle Sergei Titov and cousin Nikolai Sergeyevich were also involved in the compositional atmosphere in Russia, although their presences and works have all but been forgotten.
Although Titov's notoriety as an evocative and well-developed Amateur composer, Benefactor and highly venerated Salon host, his compositional career had no straight path nor prediction for future success. For although he was granted preliminary training by tutors and family members when he was younger, and was born into a relatively musical family, he quickly started to develop a distaste for musical ventures, and pursued military life instead. His father, A. N. Titov adamantly attempted to coax the young Titov into musical life, but was not successful initially. At age 8 he entered into the First Cadet Corps, and would not venture back to music until around age 19. Once he began formal training, he quickly improved thanks in part to the private training in music-theory he received from Italian composer, notable guitarist, and pedagogue Mauro Giuliani. Due to this, he became far more proficient and trained than his brother Mikhail Alekseyevich.
Beginning around 1819, his love of music started to grow and he then began dabbling in composition, producing rudimentary works as exercises before finally creating one of his first pieces, that being a romance around the anonymous poem "Rendez la moi cette femme chérie." This was enough to convince his father that his son could still have a musical career yet, and recommended he take theory and composition lessons in a formal manner. Thus, he quickly began digesting theory treatises and learning compositional rules, along the way learning how to play the piano. However, due to his late-blooming and fairly self-taught stature, using the theoretical teachings and works of Italian composers like Giovanni Zamboni and Carlo Evasio Soliva to improve his technical capabilities and create his aesthetic pallet, he was never able to progress farther than Amateur status and enter in the grosser historical record. Despite his social success as a Romance composer, alongside contemporaries like Alyabyev, Verstovsky, and Varlamov, he never developed further than salon repertoire and other more elementary forms and was noted as being harmonically and structurally simple in comparison with his father's practiced aptitude.
In the 1820s, Titov began publishing his dance works professionally and in frequent regularity, beginning in 1823 with the publication La Harpe du Nord, and again in 1824 with the square dance "Vieux péchès" in A-minor on themes of Russian folk-songs, a novelty in the early 19th century. Additionally, in 1824 he began publishing his military marches which became instantly popular and were used thoroughly within the Courts, so much so that he had regular, commission work from Grand Dukes Nikolai and Mikhail Pavlovich themselves. In total, over 30 instrumental works were attributed to his name, along with some poetry, although his quatrains are regarded as underwhelming and insignificant creations. Some of his texts for his songs may be his own poetry as well.
Around the 1830s, Titov made his acquaintance with two, more well-known Russian composers, namely M. Glinka and A. Dargomyzhsky. Titov would routinely ask them for advice regarding compositional qualms and career troubles. Right from the initial meeting, the two had become in favor of the soldier-turned-composer/Patron and enjoyed his compositions. Titov's relationship with another progenitor of the Russian romance style Alexander Varlamov, was matured to the point that Varlamov had dedicated his romance "The Vagrant's Nightingale" to his buoyant and genuine friend. His demeanor was one of a youthful glow and he shared a sincere devotion to the Russian national consciousness. Thus, when the Russian taste started turning towards Italian sensibilities and foreign operatic styles, he mourned the lack of attentive noticings of the [now] historically recognized composers such as his two, original colleagues and mentors Glinka and Dargomyzhsky: "All that is ours, Russian, dear, we do not know how to value it, and to our shame we incense and worship everything foreign... But the time will come when the worthy will be rewarded worthy. " In 1830, aftering have spent about 13 years in the Preobrazhensky Regiment, he settled in Pavlovsk, St. Petersburg, where in the same year a collection of his works set to Russian and French texts was published, although only about 10 of his songs, with only a handful of his dances and piano works, ever officially appeared in publiciation.
Evening salons His residence in St. Petersburg, during his lifetime, became one of the most prolific places for prestigious evening gatherings or salons, where the Russian Intelligentsia and nobility would venture for evenings of artistic performance and socializing. A frequent guest was Titov's own younger brother Lieutenant-General Sergei Nikolaevich Titov (1770-1825), a musician himself in cello and viola, along with being a minor composer, mainly creating vaudeville operas, with some of his works incorrectly assessed to be of his eldest brother's hand. He also wrote ballets, most notably "New Werther", written in 1799 based on the Germanic epistolary or fictionally-authentic story The Sorrows of Young Werther by J. W. von Goethe.
During these evening salons, a variety of chamber-inspired compositions and smaller-form instrumental/vocal works were intimately performed. Due to the well attendance by notable luminaries and social celebrities of the day, Titov's younger brother Mikhail Titov was inspired to pursue a musical career.
Style Because of his taste for dance provocations, albeit within the context of simpler overall designs, his works tend to use upbeat rhythms in the guise of more conventional forms. Many song used dances as the underpinning like the gallop, waltzes, polka, and especially the quadrille. However, the most notable aspect of his work came from the personable and intimate atmospheres that his romances, of which he was best known, cultivated in the listener. His works were imbued with an authentic air through utilizing simple and more comprehensible forms, coupled with an unfettered harmonic framework creating in-turn a profoundly inviting and pleasurable effect. Titov's public appeal came from his expert command of melody, which adhered to typical song form (ABA), resulting in a cyclical aesthetic which was easily recognizable and catchy. Additionally, Titov's piano works, while less dramatic and more miniature in size, were popular among Amateur, home audiences for their simplistic beauty and attainable, yet emotionally effective, language.
It is noted that, although his developments in strophic form and inviting harmonicity were praiseworthy, he still had clear theoretical mistakes when it came to musical grammar and prosody.
Russian romance