St Petersburg полностью

Shostakovich’s editions did not win out over the Rimsky-Korsakov versions. In the twentieth century, the idea took hold that Mussorgsky should be performed whenever possible in the composer’s own versions. What Rimsky-Korsakov saw as “carelessness,” “clumsiness,” and “composer’s deafness” was now perceived as visionary breakthroughs. The movement for Mussorgsky’s rehabilitation began in Petersburg in the 1910s and received its strongest impulse in Leningrad in 1928, when Boris Godunov had its first performance in the author’s version. And so Mussorgsky gradually became a part of the Petersburg canon.

This helped guarantee the viability of the Petersburg musical tradition. The Petersburg school of composition retained its characteristic striving for form, brilliant orchestration, and exotic harmony but also acquired a taste for the emotional, “wavelike” development of musical material àla Tchaikovsky and the dramatic “Dostoyevskian” contrasts àla Mussorgsky.

Placed by history among particularly harsh conditions, sometimes struggling for its very existence, the Petersburg school of composition nevertheless continued to develop. It absorbed the creative heritage of its famous pupils, in particular the structural and rhythmic innovations of Stravinsky and Prokofiev’s methods of melodic development. Later, the school came to be associated with the tradition of the so-called philosophical symphonies in the style of Shostakovich, the composer of fifteen symphonies, a man recognized by many as one of the world’s giants in this genre in the twentieth century.

Shostakovich, pleased by the success of his First Symphony on the night of its premiere, probably did not think about Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the fate of the Petersburg school just then. After the concert Steinberg, Malko, and Mitya’s young friends went to the Shostakovich home to celebrate.42 Steinberg gave Shostakovich a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Malko, more agitated than usual, returned late at night and could not sleep. He wrote a letter to a friend that night: “I have the feeling that I have turned a new page in the history of symphonic music and discovered a major new composer.”

Shostakovich had the gift of charm and easily won over new acquaintances. He was particularly comfortable and animated with adults, despite his apparent awkwardness and a certain shyness. He was even perceived by some of his older friends as being “electrically charged.”43

When Shostakovich was only seventeen, the Petersburg journal Teatr called him a genius. Early fame naturally attracted attention. But the young Shostakovich also projected the impression of an intense inner life. The first famous portrait of Mitya, done in charcoal and bloodred in September 1919 by the Petrograd artist Boris Kustodiev, depicts him deep in thought.

Kustodiev, who was forty-one, inscribed the portrait, “To my little friend Mitya Shostakovich from the artist.” Shostakovich had been introduced to the artist by a classmate, Kustodiev’s daughter, but it was the father who became his friend. For Kustodiev Shostakovich played Grieg, Chopin, Schumann, and his own first compositions. Kustodiev called him Florestan, after one of the characters in Schumann’s Carnival, impetuous and poetic: apparently Mitya was not too embarrassed to reveal himself to the artist, with the piano an intermediary in their communication.

For Shostakovich, Kustodiev personified a link with the Russian past. He was a member of Mir iskusstva, in which he had played an important role. Benois, the leader of Mir iskusstva, and the majority of his comrades were committed Westernizers. What interested them the most in Russian history was the classicist eighteenth century, where they found ties and parallels with western Europe. Kustodiev, who was enormously popular, felt out of place among the refined members of Mir iskusstva. The themes of his paintings were mostly folk Russian: fairs, holidays, dressed-up crowds, merchants, clerks, peasants, white churches with golden domes, troikas—all painted colorfully, with overflowing feeling, not at all in the style of Mir iskusstva. As Petrov-Vodkin recalled, the leaders of Mir iskusstva were silent before Kustodiev’s paintings. Some critics considered his works a revival of the traditions of the Wanderers, the final fireworks of that movement.