The story
The Moscow Conservatory is first of all a music school, founded in 1866 by the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, and its Great Hall on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, opened in 1901, is one of the city's main concert halls. Art-seekers come for one large canvas inside it.
Ilya Repin, then just out of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, painted Slavic Composers in 1871 and 1872 for the Slavyansky Bazar, a new hotel and restaurant on Nikolskaya Street run by the restaurateur Alexander Porokhovshchikov. The picture gathers more than 20 Russian, Polish and Czech musicians in one imagined room, with Glinka in the foreground and Chopin among the Poles, although many of them never met and some lived generations apart.
After the Second World War the canvas was brought to the Great Hall to take the place of a stained-glass window of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music, destroyed in October 1941 when a German bomb struck the building. After the restoration of 2011 the painting was moved to a new place in the building.
