A SOBER-MINDED LADY 

“I come from the Roma people, and as you know all Romas are brilliant singers and dancers,” Lyubov Demeter says. “Yet, I’ve risen far above my predecessors in achievement, because I’m a graduate of first a music school and then the Moscow Conservatory as a singer. I’m the only Gypsy woman in Russia, and, maybe, in the whole world, with a conservatory degree. I know not another Gypsy woman who graduated from a conservatory. All Roma ladies are exceptionally talented but they generally lack the drive to finish a higher school.” 

Nevertheless, Lyubov Demeter is proud of her Romany roots, of which she can talk hours on end. Her father was a Hungarian-born Gypsy, her mother was a Russian Gypsy. Gypsies are known to live as clans and do not normally mix with other people. But progress, Lyubov Demeter says, kills a lot in man, and even the Gypsies, who live away from society, get affected by it. Progress forces on you a particular lifestyle, makes you keep the required pace of life and imposes certain values on you, which makes it obligatory for you to follow them or drop out. Gypsies have always had a special style in clothing and observed a number of other rules of behaviour. For one, if a bride is not a virgin, her parents will be held in uttermost disdain and disgrace for years. The most honoured Gypsy man is the one with most wealth. But, as Lyubov Demeter says, nearly all of Roma traditions have now been forgotten. The Gypsies are becoming more society-friendly. They change their habits and grow more socialized to enjoy modern values too. And this change has in a way affected Lyubov Demeter, who never does any fortune-telling and who rose up in society through nothing else but her skills and innate talent. 

“You have to work for that, and work very hard indeed,” Lyubov Demeter says. “I, for one, started singing when I was three and ever since I never saw myself in a genre other than music. My destiny was clear from the very start. And every inch of my success I owe to myself alone, because I pushed my way through on my own supported by no one but my own ambition. I just set my mind to it, and that’s it. And my desire to study at the Moscow Conservatory was so overwhelming and I worked my way through so doggedly that even my parents thought I ought to set more modest goals for myself. But I was adamant that I just had to get in there, and so I did.” 

For Lyubov Demeter school and schooling have been very important. Whatever your occupation, it’ll be worthless without proper schooling, she says. And school itself is nothing but a start on the long way to the top. It’s only a start because you can’t master an art at one stroke, a couple of years or so, which is nothing compared to a lifetime. Artistry requires a lifetime or even more to excel in and the further you proceed, the more labyrinths of the unknown open up before you. 

After Conservatory Lyubov Demeter went to work for Mosconcert, an organization arranging concert activity for performers. She stayed with it for about thirty years giving solo concerts all over the country. About fifteen years ago Lyubov Demeter pieced together a Gypsy ensemble, in which she is a lead singer. One of the musicians and the head of the group is her husband Vasily, with whom they’ve been together for about twenty-six years. That the marriage is still alive is due to Demeter’s sober head.  

“Vasily Alexandrovich is an expert in sound-engineering and a brilliant violinist,” Lyubov Demeter says. “He, too, graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in Professor Oistrakh’s class. A high status of this kind makes it imperative for you, whether you want it or not, to reckon with him, if you have brains of course. The rehearsals are difficult but we manage to survive them. We have to, there’s no getting away from that. When we rehearse, we shout at one another, we argue, we often get mad at one another and may even start throwing things at one another. I once asked an American couple, both violinists, about the way they handled the rehearsals and they said they just shut all doors and windows when they plan it to prevent the neighbours from injuring their ears on the worst of abusive vocabulary they had ever heard. 

The problem is the same with other musical couples. Music is subjective in nature. I may like it and you may not. I think this, you think that. So it’s more than problematic to present any proof to support your point of view in music. You need a lot of time to let the music flow through you before you can form an opinion of it. In a family where both husband and wife are musicians a sober mind is as indispensable as air. One had to be sober-thinking for such a marriage to survive. 

I remember I was once in hospital and I was going to get married then. That was my first marriage and my first husband was not a musician. As my mum came to visit me in the hospital, she pleaded with me not to marry the guy. He isn’t a musician, she said, he is out of your circle, you’ll find it hard to live with him, she pleaded. You ought to marry a musician, a pianist, so that you’d sing and he’d play to you, my mum said. And I remember a hospital nurse who happened to overhear our conversation say “Why? One will play, the other will sing, and who’s gonna work?” 

A joke as it was, it had a grain of truth in it, like any joke. Because if you take music seriously, it’s hard work. Lyubov Demeter knows that better than anyone. In her words, this kind of work requires tremendous psychological and physiological effort, for it touches the finest strings of your soul. In some three minutes that a romance plays you live through the heroine’s life and go through all her sufferings. You think of these sufferings, you play them, you feel them and you sing them…”

For Lyubov Demeter singing is something that can hardly be taught properly. That’s why she is not particularly fond of teaching singing.

“I have very few students, I don’t like teaching vocal art,” Lyubov Demeter says. “This is something unbearably difficult. A pianist can show his students how to sit, how to touch the keys, how to position themselves against the piano and how to place their hands and  fingers. But a singer cannot just glance into the student’s larynx and tell him how to position the vocal cords. This is something young singers have to work out for themselves and far from everyone succeeds in hitting on the right position. Teaching the art of singing is far more difficult than any other musical genre. Our singing instrument is the most complicated of all.” 

Lyubov Demeter never sings for pleasure. This is one of the principles she observes – work and leisure stand separately in her always rational and sober mind. Hobby is hobby, work is work, and there’s no need to bundle the two. Lyubov considers herself a universal Gypsy singer, which she is, since in Russia she sings in Russian, and in Europe she sings in Caldarari, the language of European Gypsies. Russian Gypsies, she says, are best in dancing, and the Bulgarian – in singing. But the most important thing, after all, is to know where you stand and to follow your path.