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Slonimsky could not have hoped for a better audience. Leningrad musical youth of the sixties were hungry for the new and unknown. We filled Maly Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic for the premieres of Shostakovich’s quartets, the intimate works of a wounded soul that was dear to us. But we also wanted to hear other music, outspoken and avant-garde.

The work of the émigré Stravinsky had been banned comparatively recently; he was invariably called a “rootless cosmopolite” or a “political and ideological renegade.” But after 1962. when the eighty-year-old composer visited Moscow and Leningrad after a half century’s absence and was received by Khrushchev himself, the situation changed somewhat for the better. Stravinsky’s later works were still performed rarely and reviewed dismissively, but his “Russian” works—Firebird, Petrouchka, Le Sacre du printemps— gradually entered the repertoire.

This breakthrough coincided with the start of the partial rehabilitation of other Russian émigrés; in particular, some of the Mir iskusstva group. I remember the instant sellout of the first postcard reproductions of watercolors by Alexander Benois. In 1962 the memoirs of choreographer Michel Fokine were published in an edition of thirty thousand copies, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes could be mentioned favorably. Some books illustrated by Dobuzhinsky were reprinted.

They were returning our past to us: cautiously, reluctantly, drop by drop. But we were persistent and resourceful. The poets of the Silver Age could be taken from the libraries only with special permission, so we would show up armed with official-looking letters testifying to our need to familiarize ourselves with the poetry of Kuzmin and Mandelstam for “ideological debates.” A bouquet of flowers for the librarian could open up the way to getting the piano score for the still-banned Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. I remember a friend bringing a roll of film he had taken of a book by Oberiut Zabolotsky published in 1929, and we spent the night in a stuffy darkroom, printing the book, page by page on photo paper; we wanted to share our discovery with other students.

At the former Maryinsky Theater—which, though renamed for the murdered Kirov, retained the luxury of tsarist times—we listened with delight to the operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, under the batons of Sergei Yeltsin and Konstantin Simeonov, as well as the occasional Prokofiev opera, but our hearts longed for the new. Benjamin Britten jolted our imagination, presenting several of his operas in Leningrad in 1964, including The Turn of the Screw, based on the Henry James story, which astonished us with its psychological subtlety. My friends and I, all students at the Leningrad Conservatory, decided to create our own experimental studio for chamber opera, and overcoming a multitude of bureaucratic obstacles, we produced several works.

We were the first to stage Veniamin Fleishman’s opera Rothschild’s Violin, based on the Chekhov story. This young Jewish student of Shostakovich died in 1941 defending Leningrad from the Germans in the ranks of the home guard. With two other composition students, Fleishman fired on enemy tanks from a pillbox that was finally surrounded and blown up. The home guard consisted of hastily selected, ill-trained, and poorly armed workers, students, and intellectuals of Leningrad. Zhdanov used them during the siege as cannon fodder; almost none survived.

Among the dead was the former director of the avant-garde Theater of Worker Youth (TRAM), Shostakovich’s friend Mikhail Sokolovsky. Shostakovich suffered the loss of his friends badly. Torn by guilt, he completed and orchestrated Fleishman’s unfinished opera. The premiere was successful, and Shostakovich was happy that the memory of his talented student was thereby preserved.

The Fleishman-Shostakovich opera was lyrical and tragic. But we wanted to laugh, too, and so I wrote an absurdist libretto, based on the old parody play Lyubov and Silin, for a friend, the composer Gennady Banshchikov. Banshchikov worked on the opera at night, and in order to wake up mornings, he constructed a device that blasted out Stravinsky’s Le Sacre when the alarm went off (he was a skilled mechanic, too); the wild sounds roused his neighbors as well. Banshchikov’s opera was bold and barbed; it attacked cultural censorship, xenophobia, and the illiteracy of the bureaucratic elite.