Is minic a théann an bhréag níos faide ná an fhírinne (seanfhocal)

Falsehood often travels further than the truth (Irish proverb)

The present volume offers a critical reassessment of the career and achievement of Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881–1950), a Russian composer who was regarded in his native country as one of the major figures of his era, but whose work has only recently begun to emerge from the neglect into which it fell after his death. Such a reassessment is long overdue. Myaskovsky's oeuvre contains superbly wrought music of compelling vividness and imaginative power: the quality of his finest contributions to the genres central to his creative preoccupations – the symphony, the string quartet, the piano sonata – has yet to be fully recognised.

Perhaps the most serious hindrance to a more extensive revival of interest in Myaskovsky has been the difficulty of finding out very much about him. Little has been published on the composer in any language other than Russian: until fairly recently, music lovers in the English-speaking world have had few sources of information at their disposal other than encyclopædia articles and the brief treatments accorded him in standard reference works on Russian music. These sketchy and often misleading accounts convey a very inadequate impression of a life that was unusually rich in interest – not least because of the single-mindedness with which Myaskovsky pursued his artistic vocation in the face of many difficulties throughout a turbulent era marked by dramatic political and social upheaval. Unlike Prokofiev and Shostakovich, whose exceptional gifts were apparent from childhood, Myaskovsky developed late and had to struggle long and hard to remedy the deficiencies of his haphazard early musical education: a military engineer by profession, he was twenty-five before he managed to extricate himself from the army and enrol to study composition at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. After completing his studies in 1911, he eked out a penurious existence while writing two symphonies and several other works that gave the first intimations of his potential stature as a creative artist. He was called up from the reserves immediately on the outbreak of the First World War and posted to Russia's western front, from which he was lucky to return alive; he remained in the armed forces throughout the grim aftermath of the October Revolution until the offer of a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1921 enabled him to resign his commission.