E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
Krielaars The Sound of Utopia
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-003-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Musicians in the Time of Stalin
E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-003-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Michel Krielaars is a writer and a journalist specialising in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, who currently writes for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC. He studied history and Russian at the University of Amsterdam and was a correspondent in Russia between 2007 and 2012. Krielaars has written novels, short-story collections and several books about Russia, including Through Chekov's Glasses and Travels through Russia, which won the Bob den Uyl Prize. He lives in Amsterdam.
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An attractive young man with the long, dirty-blond hair of a French singer approached me one summer morning in 2011 at the entrance to my Moscow flat. He was about thirty and had the kind of well-proportioned features you see in portraits of tsarist military officers in the Hermitage. A papirosa, a Russian filterless cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece, dangled from the left corner of his mouth. It was a Belomorkanal, which always reminded me of Konstantin Paustovsky’s books, in which everybody smokes them. The guy was drunk, but then, so were so many of the men in my neighbourhood.
The eleven-storey building on Goncharnaya Street, where I rented a spacious flat with huge rooms and glossy parquet floors while working as a correspondent for the morning daily NRC Handelsblad, had been built in 1948 by German prisoners of war. The façade resembled a neoclassical palace, with two imposing towers, one at either end, and a large archway leading to an interior courtyard. My neighbours were reverently impressed: German quality was a thing to be admired in Putin’s Russia, be it cars, washing machines or houses. The building’s first residents had been the high-ranking general staff of the Red Army whom Stalin had rewarded with a swanky apartment for their victory over Nazi Germany. After his death in 1953, the street became home to celebrity painters, entertainers, writers, musicians, dancers and scientists. They, too, had been rewarded for their services to the Soviet people. One category curiously high on the list was circus entertainers, like lion-tamers and wall-of-death daredevils. Once the red flag with the hammer and sickle came down for good, those original tenants vanished, as though they, along with communism, had been put out with the trash to make way for expats and the nouveau riche.
Some of the flats were still occupied by the now middle-aged children of those original tenants. Under communism they had lived like royalty, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union they suddenly had to survive in the new capitalist jungle. Those who failed often turned to the bottle, which could be had for a euro at the corner grocery. This young man must be one of these. He bowed deeply and addressed me in surprisingly impeccable Dutch with: “Good day, honourable sir! How do you do?”
He introduced himself as Andrei and told me he had spent his youth in The Hague and attended the Gymnasium Haganum high school. His mother had married a Dutch artist and wanted to make a go of it in the Netherlands. “Those were the best years of my life,” Andrei said, his expression clouded over with wistful nostalgia for Holland. “I’d be happy to sing some Brel for you this afternoon! I invite you to my flat on the eleventh floor. Come whenever you like. I have all the time in the world.”
He looked at me even more jovially than at first, as though we were old friends, so delighted was he to be able to speak Dutch again at last. But I suspected it was just as much an excuse to open a fresh bottle.
Andrei came from a family of artists. His mother, Natasha, was a watercolourist. His grandfather, Natasha’s father, was Vladimir Igoshev, quite a well-known Soviet painter. He died in 2007, and one can still admire much of his work in many Russian museums.
“Mama and I have lived in his apartment ever since,” Andrei said. He adds, rolling his eyes: “We bought it in 1992 for a hundred and fifty dollars. Now it’s worth a million, for sure. We’re guarding grandpa’s paintings, because, as you know, our country is run by desperados. They’ll rob you blind. I don’t want to come home one day and find out they’ve made off with everything.”
Later that afternoon I rang Andrei’s doorbell, more interested in his grandfather’s paintings than in his drunken renditions of Jacques Brel. He opened the padded door to the flat and said, like a Dutch Pushkin: “Do come in, honourable citizen of the finest and most beautiful country in the world, where the democracy is as pure as her splendidly painted skies with their noble clouds.”
I recognized the high ceiling and parquet floor of the entrance hall as identical to those in my flat. Only here, the space was filled with paintings, some of monumental proportions, stacked up against one another as though in a storeroom. I squeezed my way through into the living room and was transported to a Soviet residence from the 1950s. Antique sofas and armchairs jostled together. On a coffee table lay a few empty vodka bottles. The place smelt of a combination of dust, spoilt food, cigarette smoke and liquor.
On the walls were some excellent portraits of an older woman with a sun hat and a long white dress, drinking tea in a gazebo in a sumptuous garden. “My grandmother,” Andrei said, pointing to the series. “Pretty, isn’t she? And did you see this one?” He pointed to a portrait of an older, white-haired painter sitting in his studio. In his right hand he holds a paintbrush above a palette; a hunting dog rests its chin on his right knee. “Sierk Schröder, your fellow countryman. I knew him in The Hague. He posed there for my grandfather in 1991.”
In a corner of the room, under a large portrait of an Asiatic hunter, was a light brown Grotrian-Steinweg concert grand piano. I had not even sunk into one of the armchairs before Andrei slid onto the stool and began playing the opening bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Aside from the occasional wrong note, it wasn’t half bad, for an amateur. But then he abruptly changed registers and hoarsely launched into Brel’s “Le Plat Pays” and a soldier song by the Soviet singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky. This genre was clearly his forte.
Just as abruptly, he stopped and plopped down next to me. After pouring himself a glass of Armenian cognac, he told me that, after he graduated high school, his mother (by then divorced from the Dutchman) took him to Milan, where she had started a gallery for Russian art. “I started driving a Porsche when I was twenty,” he said. “When we got low on money, we’d sell one of my grandfather’s paintings. But actually, life’s best here in Moscow. Every night I’m in bed with a different pretty girl.”
Andrei sat back down at the piano, this time taking a stab at a Chopin nocturne. After barely five measures he leapt up and hurried off to the toilet.
He returned five minutes later looking haggard. “Sorry, too much to drink.” Now he went over to the vintage Rigonda stereo fixture and put on an LP. “Recognize this?” An impromptu by Schubert. “Sviatoslav Richter,” I answered without hesitation.
He looked at me, surprised, and sank into the chair opposite me. “In the eighties I used to go to his house concerts and had to turn pages for him,” he said. “And afterwards he would always caress my hair. He was in love with boys like me. You know he was…”—at which Andrei made the sound of a purring tomcat.
I’ve admired Richter ever since my student days. I played his CDs often but never heard him perform live, because he seldom did so. And if ever he did give a concert somewhere in Europe, it sold out in no time: Richter’s international fans tipped one another off as soon as word got out. If the concert was cancelled at the last minute, then too bad for them. But their resolve to hear him play made it worth the risk.
He gave a concert in Musis Sacrum in the Dutch city of Arnhem on 17 March 1991. To this day I could kick myself for not standing in line at the box office to snag an unclaimed ticket. Judging by the reviews in the press the next day, I had missed something really special.
Just after eight p.m. Richter emerged from the wings, timid as always, as though unsure of what business he had there. He wore a grey suit and large glasses with clear plastic frames, emphasizing the angular look of his face. If you didn’t recognize him from the robust head ringed with white hair and the long sideburns, you might mistake him for an usher who’d lost his way.
Once he sat down at the piano and the auditorium lights were dimmed, save a single reading lamp, all one could make out was his prominent jaw. After half a minute’s silence, his huge hands abruptly struck the keyboard. The concert of Bach’s English Suites Nos. 1, 3, 4 and 6 had begun.
Contrary to what one might expect from a pianist with such strong hands and an overwhelming physique, the sound was dry and measured. His control of the instrument and the notes commanded respect. The music sounded as if he put his unique and, most of all, vulnerable soul into it. And that was exactly what so appealed to me about Richter’s playing.
The music critic Katja Reichenfeld was muted in her review in the next day’s NRC Handelsblad, because in many ways the concert fell short of her expectations. She called the English Suites “less-than-accessible works that require a lucid and lively rendering”, which she felt...
