Cui - Cantabile for cello and piano. You can download the sheet music Cui - Cantabile for cello and piano on this page. This beautiful musical composition - is a traditional sample of music for string instrument by the recognized composer of music. This composition impress listener by the beautiful dialog between cello player and piano rhythm and other musical features. To view the first page of Cui - Cantabile for cello and piano click the music sheet image.
Despite his achievements as a professional military academic, Cui is best known in the West for his "other" life in music. As a boy in Vilnius he received piano lessons, studied Chopin's works, and began composing little pieces at fourteen years of age. In the few months before he was sent to Petersburg, he managed to have some lessons in music theory with the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko, who was residing in Vilnius at the time. Cui's musical direction changed in 1856, when he met Mily Balakirev and began to be more seriously involved with music. Even though he was composing music and writing music criticism in his spare time, Cui turned out to be an extremely prolific composer and feuilletonist. His public "debut" as a composer occurred 1859 with the performance of his orchestral Scherzo, Op. 1, under the baton of Anton Rubinstein and the auspices of the Russian Musical Society. In 1869 the first public performance of an opera by Cui took place; this was his William Ratcliff; but it did not ultimately have success, 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, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1894, but it did not succeed either. Cui's more successful stage works during his lifetime were the one-act comic opera The Mandarin's Son, the three-act Prisoner of the Caucasus, based on Pushkin, and the one-act Mademoiselle Fifi, based on Guy de Maupassant. Besides Flibustier, the only other operas by Cui performed in his lifetime outside of the Russian Empire were Prisoner of the Caucasus and the children's opera Puss in Boots.
