Arensky had the misfortune to be gifted in an age of geniuses, and the talent to make it not matter. A star pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg, he was made a professor at the Moscow Conservatory at just twenty-one, where his own students included Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Glière, a teaching legacy few composers can match.
His musical devotion belonged not to his teacher but to Tchaikovsky, whose warmth and melodic candour shaped everything Arensky wrote. When Tchaikovsky died in 1893, Arensky's grief produced his finest music: the Second String Quartet, with its variations on a Tchaikovsky song, music so loved he arranged it for full string orchestra, in which form it fills concert halls to this day.
The rest is a Russian novel in miniature: brilliance, restlessness, cards, drink, and tuberculosis, which killed him in a Finnish sanatorium at forty-four. Rimsky-Korsakov predicted he would be quickly forgotten. The Piano Trio in D minor and the Tchaikovsky Variations have spent a century proving him wrong.
