Gavriil Popov's hard luck story

 

Film poster for She Defends the Motherland. Gavriil Popov wrote the score for the movie and recycled much of the music into his second symphony.

Is this one of the saddest stories in classical music, or one of the weirdest?

Imagine that you are best known for a very long first symphony. Except that after one performance, it was banned, and you never got to hear it again. There have been at least four recordings of your symphony -- not bad for an obscure composer -- but you never got to hear them, because they weren't made until years after your death.

I am referring to Gavriil Popov (1904-1972), one of the three Soviet composers featured in the new Gregor Tassie book, The Three Apostles of Russian Music, which I have not been so much reading as carefully devouring page by page.

I knew the outlines of the story about Popov's symphony, but Tassie fills in details. The symphony was premiered in 1935 to a "mostly hostile audience" and Popov noted in his diary that the symphony was under rehearsed and poorly performed. That was the last performance and the last time Popov got to hear an orchestra playing it. The score resurfaced a decade after Popov's death, according to Tassie.

That wasn't Popov's only bad experience. Tassie reveals that Popov had hoped to write the score for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky movie. Of course, Prokofiev got the job instead. Popov tried to write an opera about Nevsky instead but ran into numerous obstacles and was never able to finish it. 

Tassie's book also has depressing passages about the two other composers he focuses upon, Nicolai Roslavets and Alexander Mosolov. Shostakovich and Prokofiev managed to largely survive the system, but Tassie's trio had their troubles. But they also had their successes, and Tassie writes about that, too. 

I did feel somewhat better about Popov's journey after I read the section about him on Tassie's book. The fate of his first symphony is sad, but despite the ban and the criticism he received for being a "formalist," he continued his composing career. He made a living largely by writing film scores, often recycling the film music into his symphonies and other compositions. I listened again last night to his second symphony, the "Motherland," and it's a very enjoyable potboiler. It was a comeback symphony, akin to Shostakovich's Fifth, and Popov had great success with it, which he understandably enjoyed. 

Exciting new book on Russian avant-garde composers

I read dozens of books every year. Every once in awhile, I will run across a new book title and get the odd sensation that the author has written a book just for me.

While that doesn't happen often, it has just happened to me again. The Three Apostles of Russian Music by Gregor Tassie is not, as you might guess from the title, about Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky. It is in fact about three composers I focus upon at this blog: Nicolai Roslavets, Gavriil Popov and Alexander Mosolov.

I have only had time so far to read the Introduction and the first chapter of the library copy I managed to get my hands upon, but I can already report that the book is the product of immense research and that Tassie really knows his subject (he knows Russian fluently, he's in touch with all of the top Russian scholars of the three composers, he got help from staff at museums and institutes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, etc. etc. 

This is the sort of book in which even the footnotes require careful study. Here is footnote No. 40, which points me to some Myaskovsky works to try: "Myaskovsky's Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth symphonies, and Fourth String Quartet did experiment with serialism -- author." 

Larry Sitsky's Russian Futurism book and music recordings

Larry Sitsky is a prominent Australian composer; the guy who does the myaskofiev 2 Twitter account, Melvyn Madigan, tells me Sitsky is well known as a composer in Australia, although perhaps most respected as an academic, writer and pianist. He's also Australia's most commissioned composer, Madigan tells me. 

Sitsky has tried to promote the music I write about  here in two different ways.

His book, Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900-1929, covers the music I write about in this blog. It is written for musicologists, but I was able to understand parts of it, such as Sitsky's contention that Alexander Mosolov's piano sonatas are just as good as Prokofiev's. It's a pretty expensive book, unfortunately, and I can't afford it. 

Sitsky also has recorded an album, Russian Rarities, which has almost four hours of piano music. The composers featured on the album are Vladimir Deshevov, Arthur Lourie, Alexander Mosolov, Nicolai Obukhov, Leonid Polovinkin, Vladimir Rebikov, Nikolai Roslavets, Anton Rubinstein and Vladimir Scherbakov. 

Sitsky's notes on the album are available online. He writes, "Were it not for the eventual Stalinist suppression, the group of composers represented on these CDs could well have led and surpassed their European counterparts in their sheer audacity and exuberance." If you stream the album, you can download the digital booklet.