Russian composer Nikolai Myaskovsky never achieved the wide renown of his compatriots, but his compositions deserve a wider hearing. The music of Myaskovsky is a bridge between the Russian Romantics and the 20th century modernists.
By Paolo Hooke
When we think of Russian composers, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) from the Romantic period, and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), come to mind. But what about the bridging generation, the composers who straddled the eras of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union? Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) are prominent, but they emigrated from Russia in 1918 and 1920 respectively, after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950) remained in Russia.
He has not achieved the wide renown of his compatriots, but his compositions deserve a wider hearing. The music of Myaskovsky is a bridge between the Russian Romantics and the 20th century modernists. Myaskovsky studied with Anatoly Liadov and Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory, becoming friends with his fellow pupil Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), a friendship that would last 44 years.
Myaskovsky’s Symphony no 6 in E flat minor, op 23, composed amidst the tumult that followed the revolution, is a monumental work and arguably the most important Russian symphony from the 30 years following Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no 6 in B minor, op 74 Pathétique. Myaskovsky’s symphony is the missing link between the Pathétique Symphony of 1893 and Shostakovich’s Symphony no 4 in C minor, op 43 of 1935-36. Shostakovich’s Symphony no 4 portrays the grandiosity, bombast, and sheer terror of the 1930s Soviet Union to devastating effect, whereas Myaskovsky’s Symphony no 6 is a moving and melancholic farewell to the victims of revolution.
The symphony is an attempt to come to terms with the tragedy and mystery of death. Myaskovsky suffered tragedy himself in the years preceding the symphony. His father, a former Tsarist general, was murdered by Red Army soldiers in the winter of 1918-19, and his aunt, to whom he was close, died in the winter of the following year. Myaskovsky’s Symphony no 6 has been described as a ‘shattering farewell to a bygone era’. The composer spent the summer of 1922 in Klin (a town 85 kilometres north[1]west of Moscow), the same place where some thirty years before, Tchaikovsky had written his Pathétique Symphony.
Whatever the psychological influence of Klin, Myaskovsky continued the quasi-programmatic drama of Tchaikovsky’s late symphonies in which a conflict is expressed and then resolved in music. People in the audience wept at the premiere of Myaskovsky’s Symphony no 6 in 1924, just as they did at the premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony no 5 in D minor, op 47, in 1937. Myaskovsky, certainly does not fit the image of a model Soviet composer who greets the revolution without doubts; like Shostakovich, he was denounced in the notorious Zhadanov Decree of 1948 as a composer ‘adhering to a formalist and anti-popular trend’.
In the 1920s, the musicologist Boris Asafiev commented that Myaskovsky was “not the kind of composer the Revolution would like; he reflects life not through the feelings and spirit of the masses, but through the prism of his personal feelings. He is a sincere and sensible artist, far from ‘life’s enemy’, as he has occasionally been portrayed. He speaks not only for himself, but for many others.”
Myaskovsky left behind a valuable and underappreciated legacy: 27 symphonies, including the Symphony no 6, a musical record and reflection of the tragic post-revolution years.
Listen to World of a Symphony prepared and presented by Paolo Hooke on Thursday 18 July at 8pm.
Alexander Mosolov, Music of machines Zavod (The Iron Foundry) op 19
Nikolai Myaskovsky, Pathétique Overture in C minor, op 76
Alexander Mosolov, Piano Concerto no 1, op 14
Nikolai Myaskovsky Symphony no 6 in E flat minor, op 2
