Composer Sergei Prokofyev, who had emigrated from Russia in 1918,
was now thinking about getting back. He had already made several concert
tours of Russia, playing and conducting his works in Moscow and Leningrad
invariably enjoying the warm welcome accorded him by the ordinary music
lovers and communist leaders who rightly believed the return of such an
internationally-acclaimed musician would help boost the country's reputation
in the world.
When in May, 1936, Sergei Prokofyev with his wife and two children
finally settled down in Moscow, he was blissfully unaware of the trials
and tribulations awaiting him in his native country. Prokofyev brought
home several new compositions, including the Russian Overture based on
national themes and written for an unusually large symphony orchestra.
In the same year, Sergei Prokofyev was commissioned by the artistic
director of the Children's Theater, Natalya Sats, to write a musical fairy
tale for children, Peter and the Wolf - an ingenious novelty in which every
character is portrayed by a special instrument, Peter's grandfather by
the bassoon, the Wolf - by French horns in a low register, the clumsy duck
- by the oboe… And the wily cat - by the clarinet… Peter and the Wolf quickly
became a hit and has since been widely played in children's concerts.
Meanwhile, Moscow Conservatory post-graduate Aram Khachaturian
completed a piano concerto which became his first major composition. "This
music is filled with the melodies of my native Armenia. It will be the
first concerto drawing on the musical heritage of one of our peoples…"
wrote the 33 year-old composer.
Khachaturian entrusted the performance of his first concerto
to Lev Oborin, a brilliant pianist who just recently had triumphantly performed
at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw. Oborin immediately fell
in love with Khachaturian's music.
This music is absolutely mindboggling," he said. "It
is hard driving, one of a kind, great on solos and very melodic…"
Musicologist Boris Yarustovsky who attended the premiere, wrote
that "it was like an explosion of life-giving juices spurting out
from the earth itself…"
…Two years after its January 1934 premiere in Leningrad, Dmitry
Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was still going strong with 93 performances
played at Leningrad's Maly Theater and 83 - at Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's
theater in Moscow. The opera was also staged by Moscow's Bolshoi Theater
and several major European theaters as well. Lady Macbeth inspired generally
glowing accounts and continued to enjoy a great vogue until the fateful
day of January 28, 1936 when an article in the authoritative newspaper
Pravda, unsigned, but reputed to have been written by an important Soviet
official, condemned the opera as theatrically vulgar and musically formalistic.
"A listener is immediately dazzled by a deliberately ill-sounding
cacophony of sounds where disjointed pieces of musical phrases come out
for a moment only to disappear in the deafening and screeching maelstrom
of this jittery, noisy and neurotic music," thundered the anonymous
servant of Stalinism. "To follow this so-called music, is absolutely
impossible, much less to memorize it…"
In the Soviet Union, an article in Pravda was an instruction
to action and its repercussions were immediate. The article had a profound
effect on Soviet musicians and opened a series of discussions in the press
in which not only Shostakovich, but also his erstwhile exegetes were attacked.
His less successful and much less talented colleagues were gleefully savoring
an opportunity to take their revenge on the genius for what they said was
an overly "superficial writing manner". Shostakovich who was
reading all those accounts silently and without comment, learned that his
opera had been withdrawn from the performance list of each and every theater
in the country…
Although Shostakovich publicly expressed agreement with the points
of the Pravda article, he found it extremely difficult to reform his musical
lines and to formulate a new stylistic credo. He spent that difficult year
writing his Fourth Symphony…
The Fourth Symphony was put in rehearsal by the Leningrad Philharmonic
and its chief conductor Fritz Schtidrie. The premiere was scheduled for
November, but the symphony was withdrawn at the last moment by the composer
after he heard it and observed the reactions of the players.
Shostakovich declared the new symphony a failure and withdrew
the score feeling it was the best way he could possibly save his creation.
Only 25 years after did the Fourth Symphony finally see daylight…
"I know not another place where people breathe so freely,"
goes a line from a popular Soviet song composer Isaak Dunayevsky wrote
in 1936. Ironically, it was originally meant for a Grigory Alexandrov's
1936 blockbuster movie, Circus. Six years later, the song started being
used as a call sign for Radio Moscow.
Grigory Alexandrov's film not only highlighted the happy life
lived by the Soviet circus artists but also pointed a finger of accusation
at the racial discrimination rampant in the United States. An American
circus artist Mary gives birth to a black baby and comes to perform in
the Soviet Union. What was looked on as a crying shame back in America,
was absolutely all right in the USSR. The whole thing culminates in the
whole cast singing a lullaby to Mary's dark-skinned baby…
Also in 1936 there came out another movie with Dunayevsky's music.
In the Captain Grant's Children based on a eponymously-titled novel by
Jules Verne, Dunayevsky brought to the max his talent of a composer of
catchy melodies. The songs became immediately popular, especially the Captain's
Song sung by the popular actor Nikolai Cherkasov who played the part of
the erratic geographer Jacques Paganel.
The famous French pianist Alfred Courteois played a series of
concerts in Moscow and Leningrad performing music by Weber, Schumann, Chopin
and Liszt.
In Moscow, the Bolshoi Theater rolled out two almost simultaneous
premieres, both led by well-known foreign conductors. Fritz Schtidrie was
presenting his production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Erich
Kleiber - his version of Bizet's Carmen opera. Both maestros heaped praise
on the Russian singers…
In Leningrad, the Kirov Ballet and the city Circus partnered
to produce Ruggiero Lenocavallo's two-act opera Pagliacci. All proceeds
were donated to the Spanish Children's Fund…
In Moscow, the company of the Vakhtangov drama theater was presenting
their version of William Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing. The
music was written by the young composer Tikhon Khrennikov. The tunes he
wrote for the play became immediately popular and were continuously played
on the radio .
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH
CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.
