St Petersburg полностью

This passion for the Petersburg mythos, which was out of official favor in those years, found reflection in Chemiakin’s celebrated exhibit at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1966. (Chemiakin’s reputation among musicians was very high, even though the Artists’ Union rejected him totally; he was even asked to create the masks for an experimental conservatory production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose.) Chemiakin’s stylized Petersburg landscapes revitalized the almost lost tradition of tragic depiction of the city by the artists of Mir iskusstva, Benois and Dobuzhinsky. These calligraphic works are very sophisticated. To many viewers their ironic carnival spirit came as a revelation. His exhibit was a huge success. The authorities quickly sounded the alarm: the conservatory was pressured, and a week after its opening, the exhibit was shut down. Chemiakin was back in total isolation, surrounded by official hostility.

The situation of Leningrad music was significantly more liberal, thanks to the efforts of Andrei Petrov, a stammering but quickwitted composer of popular songs, who became head of the local Composers’ Union in 1964. Petrov tried to create a beneficial atmosphere for moderately modernistic works by Leningrad composers in a period when even the concept of a distinctive Petersburg school of composition was rejected by Moscow. In this Petrov stood out from two other pop-song writers who had earlier headed the city’s composers—Isaak Dunayevsky and Vassily Soloviev-Sedoi. While talented in their genre, they were very conservative.

Petrov aided Boris Tishchenko in particular. Petrov expedited the publication and performance of Tishchenko’s sprawling symphonies in the manner of Shostakovich and arranged lucrative commissions for theater and film scores. The income made Tishchenko’s daily life comfortable—he eventually moved into a well-appointed apartment in a prestigious neighborhood—but left him in an awkward position in 1966 when he completed his Requiem for soprano, tenor, and orchestra, based on Akhmatova’s poem.

Tishchenko wrote the music in secret since Akhmatova’s antiStalinist text, despite the Khrushchev thaw, was still strictly taboo. I first heard Tishchenko’s Requiem at a private performance in a piano reduction played by the composer, and the work made a strong impression on me and all the others present. Though a local performance was out of the question in those years, Tishchenko always refused any proposal to premiere the piece in the West.

The reason was undoubtedly Tishchenko’s fear of open confrontation with the authorities, which would lead to a loss of the privileges he enjoyed, a loss that even Petrov could not prevent. So the first publicly performed musical setting of Akhmatova’s Requiem became that of the British composer John Tavener, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1981. Accenting the religious aura of Akhmatova’s poetry, Tavener’s Requiem drew the attention of musicians in the West to the Petersburg mythos in the dark years of the Brezhnev stagnation.

Moscow looked askance at the Leningrad composers’ attempts at rebelliousness. When a concert of Leningrad music was held in 1965, an official in the Composers’ Union sneered, “Petersburg chopped a window into Europe and now some Leningrad artists have fallen out that window!” This was a reference to the experimental works of Sergei Slonimsky, who called himself a “white crow” for sticking to the traditions of Prokofiev in a city where Shostakovich’s followers were the majority.

In the 1960s Slonimsky toyed with and then abandoned the idea of basing an opera on a short story by Solzhenitsyn; but even his opera on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita was rejected by the authorities. Slonimsky noted bitterly that if Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov had been written in the years of the Soviet regime, it would never have made it into print or onto the stage.

The son of one of the active members of the Serapion brothers, the influential literary association of the 1920s, Slonimsky had an ear for poetry and was one of the first in the post-Stalin era to set the works of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Kharms. In the mid-sixties, around when Tishchenko first set the poems of Brodsky, Slonimsky used the poetry of Brodsky’s friend Rein for a song cycle. When Slonimsky presented this difficult music (in the presence of the agitated poet) at an informal recital at the conservatory where he taught composition, the large classroom was overflowing. Students watched the ruffled composer introduce his new opus, which used devices unknown to most of those present: he strummed, plucked, and banged on the strings of the piano, eliciting unusual and attractive sounds.