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.