Rodion Shchedrin

Autobiographical Memories

Rodion Shchedrin, Anthony Phillips

• Publisher: Schott Music
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783795791742
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Rodion Shchedrin is internationally recognized as the pre-eminent contemporary composer of the Russian modern school. His autobiography looks back over an eventful life and provides a variety of stimulating insights behind the facade of the international music scene. Along the way Shchedrin elaborates highly personal views on the political situation and many other aspects of life in the former Soviet Union, turning an unsparing eye on the machinery of ideological repression exerted on artists as they struggled to interpret and conform to the constantly mutating diktats of the regime. A wealth of anecdotes and humorous observations offer the reader glimpses of the author's essentially sanguine and life-enhancing disposition.

CHAPTER 1

My genealogical tree

My father, Konstantin Mikhailovich Shchedrin, was born in 1894 into the family of a country priest in the village of Vorotsy, in the Russian countryside near the city of Tula. Vorotsy, in what was then the Tula Guberniya, lies about 40 kilometres south-west of Tula and 300 kilometres or so south of Moscow. Not long after, his father, my grandfather, whose name was Mikhail Mikhailovich Shchedrin, was moved to the small town of Aleksin, a picturesque place on the banks of the River Oka, the largest tributary of the Volga – although Aleksin's oldest inhabitants insist that the Volga flows into the Oka rather than the other way round, and therefore the Oka flows all the way into the Caspian Sea.

My grandmother, dignified by the name Elizaveta Nikolayevna née Doctorova, was also from a clerical family. As a matter of fact in those days it was frowned upon for a priest to marry a girl stemming from anything other than an ecclesiastical background. My memories of her are dim, as she died in 1944. She was known to me as “New Granny”, and that is what I called her to distinguish her from my maternal grandmother, “Granny Zina”, who looked after me from my very earliest days. Granny Zina lived near us in Moscow, whereas “New Granny” lived in Aleksin.

Grandfather Mikhail, the Aleksin priest, had eight children, all boys – not a sister among the lot. All eight, including my father, were educated at the Tula Seminary and received a good religious grounding. Grandfather departed this mortal coil before the Revolution but there still exists a pleasing memorial to him in Aleksin: the winding path leading up to the little church bears to this day the name of the “Shchedrinka”.

“New Granny” was a selfless woman and in her widowhood carried the entire burden of the household on her own, ensuring a good education for all her sons. She was the very soul of kindness, and spoilt me monstrously when we came to Aleksin for summer holidays. She would send presents to Moscow, dried pears in a canvas bag, well knowing my sweet tooth and my remarkable capacity to consume the pears in incredible quantities.

Family lore has it that all eight brothers were very musical, even though only three of them took music up as a profession. In the fine summer months Aleksin was famous for its sandy beaches, its water-meadows, its pine forest, its abundance of mushrooms, the excellence of its fishing – and not least for the “Shchedrin Brothers Orchestra”. I can tell you which brother played which instrument. My father played the violin; Uncle Sasha (Alexander Mikhailovich) the cello; Yevgeny Mikhailovich the piano. Viktor Mikhailovich was on clarinet, Mikhail Mikhailovich on double-bass. The “Shchedrin Brothers Orchestra” was to play a decisive role in my life.

Actors from the Maly Theatre troupe in Moscow often spent their summer holidays in Aleksin, and the “Shchedrin Brothers Orchestra” would be roped in to participate in vaudevilles, charades, literary readings and the like. My father's musical gifts were soon noticed, and one actress, Vera Nikolayevna Pashennaya, still a young woman but already well-known in Moscow, took an energetic interest in the fate of the fifteen-year-old “violinist”. Father was an accomplished player on any instrument that was to be found in Aleksin, and he possessed perfect pitch, but the most impressive of his qualities was a phenomenal memory. My own musical memory is not negligible, but Father's was one of the wonders of the world. Anything he either heard or read from notation he was able to reproduce either on the spot or later with hundred per cent accuracy. He was like a miraculous, natural tape-recorder. From my own experience of what he could do, I can state without fear of contradiction that legends of the musical memory of a Mozart, a Rachmaninoff, a Glazunov are in no way exaggerated …

Vera Nikolayevna paid from her own pocket to bring Kostya Shchedrin and his partly home-made violin to Moscow. She persuaded the then Rector of the Moscow Conservatoire, the composer Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov, to meet and hear him. Ippolitov-Ivanov must have been impressed by my father's natural gift; otherwise he would not have enrolled, as he did, young man from the provinces into the preliminary school of the Conservatoire without subjecting him to a formal examination. There my father spent the next two years, all the time having his tuition fees and living expenses supported by Pashennaya. A fine example of generosity on the part of a famous actress in those days of our Fatherland!

One day in 1959, soon after Maya Plisetskaya and I were married and living in a two-room apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospect, the telephone rang. I was not at home. Maya picked up the receiver.

“Is that the apartment of Rodion Shchedrin?” asked a deep, chest-toned, slightly husky woman's voice.

“Yes, it is,” answered Maya.

“This is People's Artist of the Soviet Union Pashennaya. Good day to you.”

“How do you do, Vera Nikolayevna.”

“To whom am I speaking?”

“I am Maya Plisetskaya, Vera Nikolayevna.”

There was a pause, then: “Whatever are you doing there?” asked a surprised Pashennaya.

“Well, Shchedrin is my husband,” Maya parried.

“Oh, I didn't know. Is Kostya Shchedrin a relation?”

“Rodion Konstantinovich is his son …”

Another pause, longer this time. Then: “Is Kostya himself still alive?”

“Sadly, he died some years ago.”

Vera Nikolayevna broke down and wept over the telephone. Later, she telephoned again to suggest that I compose incidental music to Ostrovsky's play The Storm, which she was planning to produce on the Maly Theatre stage as well as taking the role of the Kabanicha. Needless to say I agreed, and the play went into production, Pashennaya several times during work on it referring to her memories of summers in Aleksin. No doubt feelings from those distant days had sparked something in her heart. My music touched a chord with Vera Nikolayevna and she went so far – she was over seventy years of age at the time – as to request that it be played at her funeral. Her wish was respected.

In examinations at the Conservatoire my father so excelled in harmony tests that Ippolitov-Ivanov promoted him to the free-composition class in the Theory of Composition faculty led by Professor Sergey Nikiforovich Vasilenko. Among Vasilenko's other students at the time was the well-known conductor Nikolay Golovanov.

In those years Father was able, through what he earned playing for movies in the cinema equally on the violin, the viola or the piano, and also giving private lessons, to rent a room near Arbat Square. The year he graduated from the Conservatoire was a fateful year for Russia – 1917.

In our family politics were never discussed. We all knew how what a dangerous topic it was, especially in the presence of outsiders and children. For this reason there were many matters of which I became aware only much later, when my father was already dead. But I was then told by my uncle Yevgeny, Father's brother, who during that fateful year was living with him in the Arbat, of an episode that occurred in the very earliest days of the October Revolution in Moscow. A young Junker, scarcely more than a boy, escaping from the Red Guards who were pursuing him, had concealed himself in the entrance of the building where my father and uncle lived, under the wooden stairs. There they found him, shot him and stabbed him with their bayonets. My father and uncle opened the door to their flat a crack, cautiously keeping it on the chain. Struck dumb with terror they heard the desperate cries and the clatter of footsteps, a shot, followed by agonised groans. The instant the Red murderers left, the brothers approached the wounded young man as he lay sprawled on the staircase, hoping to render him assistance. But the Junker was dead, his face and body horribly disfigured by stab wounds. Yevgeny summed up the situation: “That first day taught us everything we needed to know”.

Two years later the two brothers were confronted by a predicament that could easily have had a fatal outcome. In the winter of 1920 Father and Uncle Zhenya were in the little town of Bogoroditsk, fifty kilometres or so from Tula. Late in the evening they heard a light tapping on the frost-encrusted window. It was a neighbour. “Listen lads, you'd better get out right now. They're coming for you tonight …”

There was not a moment to lose. Without pause for thought the two fugitive musicians piled into a farm sledge, its floor covered with hay, muffled themselves up to the eyes in blankets, and stole away into the impenetrable darkness of the blizzard. So it was that the two Shchedrin brothers evaded the clutches of the Bogoroditsk Cheka. Had they not been quick enough on that snowy winter night I would not have made my appearance into this world on another winter night in 1932. Merely the fact of being the son of a priest was enough to be accused of class disaffection, counter-revolutionary tendencies, treason. This was a time when church buildings were demolished, their bells hauled down and destroyed, ancient icons consigned to the flames, altars defiled, “servants of the cult” killed, exiled, their hair and beards shaved. Look at the television screens of today and watch them, our Communists of yesterday, the children and grandchildren of those brave fighters against “the opium of the people”, crossing themselves, exchanging kisses with the Orthodox triple kiss, standing reverentially candles in their hands as though they were glasses of vodka – and be afraid. A tragic fate overcame two of the elder brothers. They perished in the cellars of the NKVD. All the remaining six died in their own beds.

Father's graduation composition was the score of a one-act opera The Burial Mound, after Ibsen's play, earning him the diploma and status of a “Free Artist”. In 1918 he returned from Moscow to Aleksin, where he successfully organised the first music-school in the town. Later he came back once more to Moscow, which is where I was born and grew up.

For Father, as he himself used to say, there were three Gods. One was in the heavens, on earth were Chekhov and Scriabin. Those of Father's compositions with which I am familiar are strongly influenced by Scriabin's music; in fact he described himself as a “Scriabinist”. The influence is particularly marked in his best work – the Sonata for Violin and Piano, published in 1924. Later in life he fell under the sway of Chagall's paintings from his Vitebsk period, of which he had black and white reproductions. One picture, “I and the Village”, taken out of a monograph on the artist, adorned the wall of our apartment. “That is completely Aleksin,” he would always say.

But Konstantin Shchedrin did not become a professional composer. Much of his time was spent teaching, lecturing on music and playing the viola in the orchestra of the People's Palace Opera. He had had a job there before the Revolution, when the Provisional Government was still in power, and I can recall him telling me about the occasion when Alexander Kerensky came to address a wildly elated political meeting in the People's Palace Theatre. When Kerensky appeared on the stage he managed only one phrase: “When we meet together we are all seized with an irresistible enthusiasm …” before the eruption of a frenzied, ecstatic ovation that prevented him saying another word. He was carried out shoulder-high into the street, while the orchestra, in which my father was playing the viola, beat out a fanfare manfully trying to be heard through the din of applauding hands and throats screaming their delight.

In 1927, when he was teaching a class in piano and solfeggio at the Stasov Music School, my father fell in love with one of his students blessed with the euphonious name of Concordia, which made a pleasing contrast with her rather more prosaic surname Ivanova. Cora, as she was called at home, was a lively player of the popular and classic piano repertoire, including several of Scriabin's Preludes and Schumann's “Aufschwung”. Father was a devotee of Schumann's music as well, and I imagine that his pupil's choice of repertoire will have added to his feelings. Soon they were married, and Concordia Ivanova became Concordia Shchedrina. On 16 December (the birth date of Ludwig van Beethoven) 1932, I made my appearance into the world.

My father was in no doubt of the name I should be given. I ought to have been called Prometheus, after the poem by Scriabin he loved so dearly. Prometheus Konstantinovich. My mother categorically objected to this plan. Eventually the warring sides settled on a compromise: I would be named in honour of Robert Schumann. (Later, however, I adopted the more Orthodox Christian variant of Rodion.) While still a baby I was clandestinely christened in the little church at Sokolniki, on which occasion the priest, unfamiliar with Schumann or his music, expressed displeasure at the foreign name I was being given. My mother's name, Concordia, is, however, to be found in the Orthodox Church Calendar.

The time has come for me to tell you about the family on my mother's side. My grandfather, Ivan Gerasimovich Ivanov, from a lower-middle-class family in Tambov, was by common consent an exceptionally vivid personality. He was a virtuoso player on the guitar, sang drawing-room songs and possessed an inexhaustible fund of jokes and opinions on everything under the sun. He also spoke French fluently. He mastered everything he set his mind to. A tall, blue-eyed man with a moustache the colour of wheat and a light-brown beard, he had the charm to set many a maiden's heart aflutter. He worked on the railways all his life, starting as engine-driver's assistant and rising to be director of a line. At the time of the savage reprisals against the uprising of the 1905 Revolution Grandfather Ivanov and another driver, Ukhtomsky, had sprung a train-load of revolutionary workers successfully out of the capital. At full steam, wheels thundering along the tracks, their train blazed its way through lines of Cossacks and police enfilading the track. This dramatic episode of the abortive uprising was later commemorated in films and books, and for his feat Grandfather became one of the first recipients of the USSR's “Hero of Labour” accolade (forerunner of the “Hero of Socialist Labour”. We still have at home the official citation, signed by Kalinin, giving an account of the event. Bearing in mind the dubiously mixed social origins of our family, Grandfather's citation was a highly significant document. “It is our shield against adversity”, my mother's brother Igor Ivanovich, who followed his father into the railways, used to say.

In this connection I want to emphasise that at no time did any member of my family on either my father's or my mother's side, including my “revolutionary” Grandfather, join the Communist Party.

Before I reached the age of reason I perpetrated the supreme sacrilege of tearing our talismanic family bulwark into two equal halves. My act of rebellion precipitated universal indignation among my nearest and dearest. The citation was carefully glued back together on the reverse, rolled up into a cardboard tube and put away, and the author of the outrage soundly cuffed round the ears.

My maternal grandmother, Zinaida Ivanovna, was blue-blooded and her union with Ivan Gerasimovich achieved against the will of her parents. Her mother, that is to say my great-grandmother, Praskovya Afanasyevna Abolesheva, notorious for her uncertain temper, simply banned her rebel daughter from the house. That was the extent of her parental blessing on the marriage. But before this happened Zinaida who, as is right and proper for a daughter of the nobility had been born in St Petersburg, had completed her schooling at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens. She spoke three languages well, and sometimes during my restless childhood tormented me unbearably by forcing me to sit still in the little room in Sokolniki while I was subjected to passages from Hamlet in the original. She and my mother used to converse only in French, which drove my father mad.

Before the war I was moulded into a classic model of a “mother's little boy”. Mama would wash me – remember, we were living in a communal apartment – only in water that had been boiled. I wore short trousers and a little sailor's jacket and a splendid silk scarf tied in a bow round my neck. Nonetheless, my grandmother's aristocratic ancestry was kept well hidden from me, and I regularly had my nose rubbed in the Hero of Labour's citation which I had so shamefully desecrat...

Table of contents

• [Cover]
• [Zu dieser Ausgabe]
• [Titel]
• [Impressum]
• [Contents]
• [Widmung]
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Abbildungen