In 1920 Russia was in the throes of a civil war where the White
Guards were fighting to bring back the good old days and the Red Army was
defending the revolutionary gains of 1917… At a time when the future of
this country was being decided on the battlefields, art was desperately
trying to survive… In 1920 people were singing the song The Red Army Beats'
em All written by the 23 year-old composer and pianist Samuil Pokrass who,
like his two younger songwriting brothers, was a loyal Bolshevik. Even
though, a few years later, he emigrated to the United States never to come
back again, his song, glorifying the Red Army, was never banned, unlike
works by other emigre composers and writers like him. Moreover, The Red
Army Beats' em All eventually became very popular in the world. Put to
different words, it later reappeared as The Vienna Workers March in Austria,
The Red Reserves March in Hungary and in 1936 served as the Chapayev Battalion
March in Spain…
The song written by Samuil Pokrass was played at each and every
mass celebration they had in Soviet Russia in 1920 (the Bolsheviks had
a strong penchant for glitzy, over-the-top extravaganzas). The Palace Square
in Petrograd (now St.Petersburg) was the scene of street theme shows held
in grand style and involving thousands-strong choirs and orchestras. On
May Day, now called the International Workers' Solidarity Day, they held
a larger than life event there billed as An Anthem to the Liberating Nature
of Labor. On November 7th, the third anniversary of the October revolution,
the citizens bore witness to a really grandiose and equally far-fetched
re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace set to the stirring heroic
music by Ludwig van Beethoven…
In 1920 they organized a series of memorial concerts in Moscow
marking five years since the death of the great Russian composer Alexander
Skryabin.
Skryabin's music, which only recently seemed so exalted, had
since taken on strong revolutionary undertones, the composer had come to
symbolize the revolution itself and his compositions were widely played
all over the new Russia…
Skryabin's music could often be heard at free concerts traditionally
held for Red Army soldiers and once every two weeks they were holding such
concerts in the Moscow Conservatory's poorly heated Big Hall given by the
country's leading choirs, orchestras and lead singers from the world-famous
Bolshoi Theater. The year 1920 saw the premieres of two innovative ballets,
one being Alexander Gorsky's own vision of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at the
Bolshoi Theater. A new libretto had been written especially for the new
production by the famous theater director and a founding father of the
Moscow Art Theater Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko who tried to add zest
to the whole story by bringing to a sharper relief the forces of Good and
Evil. To add movement to the ballet, they dramatically cut short on the
purely dance numbers which they thought were slowing down the action.
The new production was stirring and impressive, but its poetic
elegance which had always been so characteristic of Tchaikovsky's ballet
was gone once and for all…
In Petrograd, Igor Stravinsky's Petrouchka ballet finally made
it onstage in Russia. Originally commissioned by the famous impresario
Sergei Dyagilev and his Ballet Russe troupe, Petrouchka premiered in Paris
in 1911, the time when Ballet Russe was ruling supreme. It so happened,
however, that none of Stravinsky's ballets written for Dyagilev's troupe
had never before been performed in Russia. The 1920 premiere at the Mariinsky
Theater, staged by Mikhail Fokine and using the scenery and costume designs
carefully recreated from nine years before by their author, Alexander Benois,
was a resounding success.
In 1920 the 19-year-old Conservatory student Vladimir Sofronitsky
was making his debut in Petrograd. The moment he started playing Chopin's
Prelude, everyone knew that a new poet of piano playing was born, a musician
with an absolutely unique perception of the surrounding world…
Professor Genrikh Neuhaus was quick to appreciate Sofronitsky's
larger-than-life talent: "His playing was rousing in me a very special
feeling of something beautiful, like lilies of the valley or lilacs in
their springtime bloom which, touching as they are, always bring out memories
of something very sacrosanct, just like the first love…"
Sofronitsky's successful debut swung open to him the doors of
the country's most prestigious concert venues and before long he was one
of Russia's best-loved pianists always playing to packed audiences…
The war and the destruction, famine and overall suffering it
entailed, were absolutely terrible, the cities were changing hands each
day, and human life seemed to have lost its worth…
Caught in the very middle of that human tragedy, composer Reingold
Glier thought he would never be able to write music again. A man whose
compositions once were extensively played in concerts throughout Europe,
he was now stranded in war-gripped Kiev which was changing hands in rapid
succession… The composer himself was holding the absolutely crazy job of
director of the local Conservatory. All he did was looking for firewood,
looking after the instruments, putting tuition back on track and making
sure his students had something to eat. "It's easier to write a dozen
symphonies," he said, "than run a conservatory in the time of
war"…
Small wonder that, invited to move down to the more peaceful
Moscow and take up the job of a conservatory professor there, Glier happily
agreed. In the fall of 1920 he was already in the capital writing music
for a new ballet…
Realizing that his elitist art would hardly ever sit well with
the new revolutionary Russia, the once hugely popular crooner Alexander
Vertinsky, stepped aboard the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich steamship
bound for Constantinople. November 14th of 1920 was the start of 23 long
years of wanderings…
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH
CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.
