Saint Petersburg School

The Saint Petersburg school is the Russian national school of composition centred on the imperial capital in the later nineteenth century. It begins with *Mikhail Glinka* and *Alexander Dargomyzhsky* and takes institutional form in the circle of *Mily Balakirev* — *César Cui*, *Modest Mussorgsky*, *Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov* and *Alexander Borodin*, known as the Five — and in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, founded 1862. Its composers built a Russian art music from folk song, Orthodox chant, oriental colour and historical and fairy-tale subjects, in deliberate contrast to the German academic tradition represented by Moscow.