Autobiographical Memories
E-Book, Englisch, 286 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7957-9174-2
Verlag: Schott
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
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Weitere Infos & Material
My Genealogical Tree - Childhood - Return to Moscow - The Choral Institute - Conservatoire - The World Around - In Search of Folk-Music - Three Successes - Cinematc Myths and the Death of my Father - Maya Plistskaya - Some Sinners and Saints - First Opera - Were There Musical Dissidents in the Former Soviet Union - Establishment Composers - Carmen Suite - Poetoria, the Prague Spring and the Lenin Oratorio - Dead Souls - Who is a Composer - How I Found Myself Occupying Shostakovich's Chair - Perestroika Years - The Tale of The Twelve Months - Lolita - People Throw Stones Only at Apple Trees with Apples on Them - Working with Lorin Maazel - 11 September 2001 and Mariss Jansons - Instrumental Concertos - The Sealed Angel in Berlin - Working Days, High Days and Holidays - Why Munich - Boyarinya Morozova - Post Scriptum - List of Compositions - Index
My Genealogical Tree - Childhood - Return to Moscow - The Choral Institute - Conservatoire - The World Around - In Search of Folk-Music - Three Successes - Cinematc Myths and the Death of my Father - Maya Plistskaya - Some Sinners and Saints - First Opera - Were There Musical Dissidents in the Former Soviet Union - Establishment Composers - Carmen Suite - Poetoria, the Prague Spring and the Lenin Oratorio - Dead Souls - Who is a Composer - How I Found Myself Occupying Shostakovich's Chair - Perestroika Years - The Tale of The Twelve Months - Lolita - People Throw Stones Only at Apple Trees with Apples on Them - Working with Lorin Maazel - 11 September 2001 and Mariss Jansons - Instrumental Concertos - The Sealed Angel in Berlin - Working Days, High Days and Holidays - Why Munich - Boyarinya Morozova - Post Scriptum - List of Compositions - Index
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...
