Tikhon Khrennikov, Prolific Soviet Composer, Dies at 94

Obituary by Allan Kozinn, published today in The New York Times

Tikhon Khrennikov, a prolific Russian composer and pianist best known in the West as an official Soviet antagonist of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, died yesterday in Moscow. He was 94.

His death was widely reported in the Russian media. The English-language Web site Russia-InfoCentre (russia-ic.com) said his farewell ceremony would take place in Moscow tomorrow.

Mr. Khrennikov, regarded as a promising young composer in the 1930s, was able to survive in the perilous currents of Soviet politics from the Stalin era on. In 1948 Josef Stalin personally selected him to be the secretary of the composers’ union. He was the only head of a creative union to retain his post until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Khrennikov saw the value of ingratiating himself with Soviet leaders early in his career, when he adopted the optimistic, dramatic and unabashedly lyrical style favored by Soviet leaders. He based his first opera, “Into the Storm” (1939), on “Loneliness,” a novel by Nikolai Virta that Stalin was known to have liked.

By the mid-1940s, his star was rising on the strength of works like his broad-shouldered, blustery Symphony No. 2, as well as his First Piano Concerto (1933), his incidental music for Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” (1936) and many wartime patriotic songs.

In the late 1940s he endeared himself to both Stalin and the cultural ideologue Andrei Zhdanov by endorsing Zhdanov’s decree that music must embody nationalistic Soviet values and by criticizing composers who seemed to be abandoning those values in favor of modernist experiments.

Whether or not he was behind Zhdanov’s public denunciation of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and others for “formalism” in 1948 (he insisted, in his 1994 memoir, “That’s How It Was,” that he was buffeted by the same winds as everyone else), he threw his weight behind it. At the first Congress of Composers, two months after Zhdanov’s attack, he took up the cudgel himself, declaring: “Enough of these symphonic diaries, these pseudo-philosophic symphonies hiding behind their allegedly profound thoughts and tedious self-analysis. Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and popular decadence.”

In “Testimony,” the supposed and still hotly disputed posthumous memoirs of Shostakovich, published by Solomon Volkov in 1979, Shostakovich is quoted as saying that his problems with Mr. Khrennikov began when he sent him a long, friendly letter discussing what he saw as problems with “Into the Storm.” Until then, Shostakovich said, Mr. Khrennikov kept a portrait of Shostakovich on his desk. But he took the criticism amiss and became Shostakovich’s mortal enemy.

In a 1979 speech, Mr. Khrennikov denounced “Testimony” as a “vile falsification concocted by one of the renegades who left our country.” But Shostakovich did leave an unassailably authentic comment about Mr. Khrennikov, a lampoon in the form of a cantata, “Rayok,” which remained hidden until after his death in, 1975, but was performed privately in his home (and has been performed publicly since 1989).

Mr. Khrennikov was able to play both sides of the political fence, however, particularly when prodded by other musicians. After the 1948 denunciation of Prokoviev, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich persuaded Mr. Khrennikov to provide money quietly to buy Prokofiev food. Harlow Robinson, the Prokofiev biographer and expert on Russian music, has said that Prokofiev’s widow, Lina, told him that Mr. Khrennikov had been kind and supportive to her in the late 1950s, after her husband’s death. Mr. Khrennikov did occasionally support composers who were in danger of official attack, even supporting the Sinfonietta by Moshe Vaynberg during the anti-Semitic purges of 1948-49.

Mostly, though, he is known for the composers he opposed. Although he reportedly helped Alfred Schnittke get his First Symphony performed, in 1974, he denounced him soon thereafter, and never relented. In 1979 he criticized seven Russian composers — Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov, Alexander Knayfel, Viktor Suslin, Vyacheslav Artyomov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denisov — for allowing their works to be performed outside the Soviet Union. He declared an official ban on their works.

Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov was born in Yelets, in central Russia, on June 10, 1913. He began his musical studies as a pianist but was composing as well by the time he was 13. He enrolled at the Gnessin School in Moscow in 1929 and at the Moscow Conservatory in 1932. He completed his First Symphony (1935) as his graduation work and began to win attention with his music for a production of “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow.

In the 1960s he returned to the concert stage to perform his three piano concertos. He also wrote a cello concerto, which was given its premiere by Rostropovich in 1964, and two violin concertos, both given their premieres by Leonid Kogan, in 1959 and 1975. His catalog also includes 10 operas, 3 symphonies, 6 ballets, 2 musical theater works (“Wonders, Oh Wonders,” for children, from 2001, and “At 6 P.M. After the War,” from 2003) and many chamber works and songs.

“I was a person of my times,” Mr. Robinson, the Prokofiev biographer, quoted Mr. Khrennikov as repeatedly telling him about his history under the Soviets. “It’s very hard for anyone who did not live here through those times to understand them and the way we lived.”