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By Olga Fyodorova
…July 1943. There is a crowd of people looking at the Conservatory billboard
in Moscow.
“We are in the very middle of summer and they are having a concert... And
look at this billboard, it’s huge!”
“I’m not at all surprised, take a look… It says it is the first performance
by the State Russian Choir conducted by Alexander Sveshnikov.”
“And I thought it was not the best of time for setting up new choirs! We
are at war and the Nazis are trampling our land! In besieged Leningrad
people are starving to death! We must pool all our efforts to crush the
enemy! Scores of people have died and as many wounded. I was only discharged
from hospital today and tomorrow I’ll be on my way back to the battlefront.
And here in Moscow they are setting up a new choir, I just can’t believe
it!”
“They’re just back from Leningrad. I had concerts there and I realized
that people there need more than just bread, they need good music too.
I have played for our soldiers and know from experience that good music
may be really uplifting. Hearing a good Russian song, so beautiful and
free flowing, our war-wearied soldiers think about their loved ones back
home and fight with renewed fervor. By the way, yesterday I heard
them singing on radio. They are absolutely wonderful! Go and buy a ticket,
you won’t regret it, believe me! It’s going to be a real celebration!”
The choir quickly made it to the top and small wonder because Alexander
Sveshnikov was such a great choirmaster adding shine to each outfit he
ever worked with.
Choir music became an integral part of his life early on. He grew up in
Kolomna, a small town near Moscow with many churches and monasteries each
with an excellent choir all its own and which little Alexander enjoyed
listening to. He started singing there at age 7 and when his voice began
to mutate, he served as assistant precentor there.
At 17 and having made up his mind to become a professional precentor, Alexander
Sveshnikov entered the Moscow Synodal School whose choir was famous both
in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. Their foreign tours always created
a furor and Alexander could never forget how people he had never seen before
listened with bated breath to the beautiful Russian church chants…
Finishing the Synodal school, Alexander Sveshnikov signed up as a precentor
at one of Moscow’s central cathedrals. The parishioners loved the sound
of that choir. Sometimes people came in only to enjoy the well-modulated
voices and especially the absolutely fantastic basses the young precentor
had somehow managed to find.
Shortly after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks cracked down hard on the
Church in their bid to push the nation away from religion. Everything
that deviated from that new communist dogma was ruthlessly being stamped
out, churches desecrated, shut down and blown up and the priests who refused
to give up their creed, being arrested, tortured, incarcerated and executed…
Alexander Sveshnikov wanted none of that happening to him though. Being
one of the few clerics to wholeheartedly give up on their Orthodox beliefs,
he went even further breaking up with his friends and teachers and refusing
to help any of them, lost and persecuted during those tragic years…
He was now busy setting up amateur choirs at factories and workers’ clubs
where they rehearsed martial-style and artistically lacking revolutionary
marches which earned him a pretty comfortable existence and made his name
increasingly famous across the nation.
It was not at all surprising, therefore, that Alexander was eventually
put at the head of Russia’s oldest professional choir – the Leningrad Capella
and, at the very heat of World War Two he was entrusted with establishing
the State Russian Choir…
Hard driven and ambitious, Sveshnikov never did one job at a time. In 1944
with the final victory over Nazism still months away, he organized a boy’s
choir in Moscow much like the one that had traditionally existed under
the Leningrad Capella. Only boys with good voices were admitted with
choir singing being the main subject and musical and general subjects peacefully
coexisting under one roof. Many of the choirboys lived at a boarding
house fully provided for by the state.
The school opened exactly when it was needed most by the kids whose parents
had perished in the war. The first lineup consisted mostly of orphans and
the school became their home, music - their life, and Alexander Sveshnikov
- their strict father whom they literally idolized.
Each morning this tall, thin and very upright man entered the old
mansion in downtown Moscow to conduct the choir class and delve deep
into the smallest details of his students’ everyday life.
Alexander Sveshnikov was determined to stick to the highest musical standards
only, including the Orthodox chants he sang in his childhood. In
a strictly atheist country like the Soviet Union, however, this seemed
a near impossibility. Looking for a way to get around the ideological curbs,
he supplied the old chants with new texts bereaved of any ideological,
let alone religious, meaning. Instead of praising the Almighty they lauded
the Sun, and the Christmas theme was replaced by a narrative eulogizing
the beauties of the Russian nature.
In 1948 the Communist authorities launched a major crackdown on the country’s
best composers. Sergei Prokofyev, Dmitry Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturtian
and other talented musicians were being officially anathematized as “formalists”
and thrown out of the Moscow Conservatory. In a bid to safeguard
the young generation from all kinds of “bad influences” they decided to
put the no-nonsense Alexander Sveshnikov at the head of the Moscow Conservatory.
The new rector clamped down hard on any signs of dissent from the correct
line. Any student caught leafing through a score by a modern Western composer
was immediately thrown out, just like those dressing according to Western
fashion, and those who were late for the lectures even for one short minute…
Students and teachers were grumbling never daring to speak out loud for
fear of being branded as troublemakers - a charge that could easily
wind them up in jail.
For 26 years Alexander Sveshnikov was rector, and those were the most severe
years in the entire history of the Moscow Conservatory.
And still, his stint gave rise to a whole constellation of brilliant
choirmasters, Sveshnikov’s students all, who made Russian choir singing
great again…
Always the darling of the Soviet establishment, Alexander Sveshnikov was
lavishly decorated and died at the advanced age of 90. Just a few months
before his demise, he was still working conducting a boy’s choir of his
own State Choir and each time to packed audiences who listened in with
bated breath. Even his worst enemies admitted that Sveshnikov
was the greatest choirmaster alive…
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