Five, The

or The Mighty Five

Group of Russian composers who, in the 1860s, banded together in an attempt to create a truly national school of Russian music.

The Five were César Cui (1835–1918), Aleksandr Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. A somewhat larger group around this core was referred to as "the Mighty Handful."

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▪ Russian composers

also called  The Russian Five  or  The Mighty Five , Russian  Moguchaya Kuchka (“The Mighty Little Heap”) 

      group of five Russian (Russia) composers—César Cui (Cui, César), Aleksandr Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr), Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay)—who in the 1860s banded together in an attempt to create a truly national school of Russian music, free of the stifling influence of Italian opera, German lieder, and other western European forms. The original name of the group, Moguchaya Kuchka, was coined in a newspaper article in 1867. Centred in St. Petersburg, the members of The Five are often considered to have been a rival faction to the more cosmopolitan, Moscow-centred composers such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich), although Tchaikovsky often used actual folk songs in his music and Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov emphasized traditional European training in their work. Precursors of The Five were Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail) and Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky (Dargomyzhsky, Aleksandr). They were succeeded by a less energetic generation including Anatoly Lyadov (Lyadov, Anatoly), Sergey Taneyev (Taneyev, Sergey), and Aleksandr Glazunov (Glazunov, Aleksandr).

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