Obituary: Tikhon Khrennikov

Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 15 August 2007

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.”

The radiant rowdiness of Alfred Schnittke

Tom Service, The Guardian, 15 January 2001

Alfred Schnittke’s music is defined by diversity. His symphonies lurch from modernist violence to quotations from Beethoven; his concertos contain everything from baroque pastiche to jazz solos; and his chamber music is brutal then beguiling.

This BBC weekend was the first major retrospective of Schnittke’s work since his death in 1998; it included appearances from his closest friends, including violinist Gidon Kremer, cellist Alexander Ivashkin, and the composer’s widow, the pianist Irina Schnittke.

There was no more telling contrast in the first two days of concerts than that between the riotous First Symphony, composed in 1969-72, and the Concerto for Mixed Choir, written in 1985. The symphony was played in the Barbican by Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, while the BBC Singers and Stephen Cleobury performed the concerto in the haunting intimacy of St Giles, Cripplegate.

Schnittke’s First Symphony is one of the great showpieces of the recent orchestral repertoire, and the BBCSO’s performance was a major event. The 70-minute symphony began with every musician playing as they walked on stage, creating a ferocious dissonance. It goes on to parody genres of music from military marches to waltzes, and the niceties of concert-hall convention.

After one outburst, a violin and piano duo started a separate performance in front of the first violins – disregarded by the orchestra, which continued to play. Violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Simon Mulligan gave a hyperactive recital, mercilessly satirising the virtuoso tradition. At the end of the symphony, the players continued performing on the journey backstage, only to reappear exactly as they did at the start of the symphony, before Brabbins finally called a halt to proceedings.

Next to this extraordinary collage, the serene concentration and austere atmosphere of the Concerto for Mixed Choir, settings of sacred verses by the 9th century Armenian Grigori Narekatsi, could have been the work of another composer. Yet there is a profound connection between the archaic style of the concerto and the “polystylism”, as Schnittke described it, of the symphony.

Although the First Symphony is often hilarious, there is a tragic tension in the piece between its hidden architecture and the fragments of music Schnittke pastes over it. The funny stuff on the surface has a deadly serious meaning; it’s the modernist structure underneath that Schnittke is really parodying. So the timeless qualities of diatonic melody and plainchant in the choir concerto (and in other of Schnittke’s works of the 1980s performed over the weekend, such as the Fourth Symphony) are one way of bypassing the dilemma of the symphony. Yet the ultimate irony is that these languages are no less borrowed than any passage of the First Symphony.

At the end of his life, Schnittke found a musical language that escaped the conflicts of his previous music. The London Sinfonietta gave the world premiere of Fragment, part of a piece they had commissioned from Schnittke in 1994, but which he never finished. There is an amazing conviction and clarity about the work’s three existing movements. Even more striking was the British premiere of the radiant Eighth Symphony, given by the BBCSO under conductor Eri Klas. There, the earlier tussle between styles and structures is replaced by a music that is more unified but also more terrifying: a stillness and calm that seems to reflect Schnittke’s gaze upon death.

Obituary: Tikhon Khrennikov

Gerard McBurney, The Guardian, 19 September 2007

Tikhon Khrennikov: Philistine functionary who kept an iron grip on postwar Soviet music and persecuted dissident composers

The composer, pianist and emblematic Soviet functionary Tikhon Khrennikov, who has died aged 94, will be remembered outside Russia for his drearily dispiriting effect on postwar Soviet culture, his ponderous and largely unchallenged reign over musical life in the USSR from Stalin to the age of Gorbachev, and his dishonourable role in spearheading the attacks on Prokofiev, Shostakovich and other talented composers in the so-called Zhdanovshchina (or state-directed purging of musical life) of 1948.

In his native land, his reputation is more complicated. While most educated Russians would concur with this negative assessment of his career – and “career” is the word – there are some musicians even today who feel that Khrennikov was a more honourable man than he has been given credit for, that he protected his colleagues in difficult times, ensured some kind of stability in the day-to-day running of Soviet music – and that things could have been a lot worse had someone else been in charge.

His music, while it may appear to sophisticated listeners facile, badly orchestrated and comically derivative, still has a certain charm for older Russians with less demanding tastes. Perhaps this is because those lumbering, but sometimes catchy, patriotic tunes remind them of the hard times when such music provided a precious excuse for light-heartedness and celebration.

Khrennikov was born into pre-revolutionary poverty, the youngest of a large family, in Yelets, 200 miles south of Moscow. A talent for composing and playing, first on the mandolin and guitar, then on the piano, enabled him to contact the composer and teacher Mikhail Gnesin, who in 1929 brought him to his musical school in Moscow, to study composition with Gnesin himself and piano with Efraim Gelman. In 1932, Khrennikov moved to the Moscow Conservatoire, to the class of Vissarion Shebalin, one of the most talented Soviet composers of his age. Later he joined the piano class of the legendary Heinrich Neuhaus, who taught Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, among others.

By the time he graduated in 1936, Khrennikov had made a reputation as a serious composer with his First Piano Concerto (1933), which he performed himself, and his First Symphony (1935). He followed these with an opera, Into the Storm (1939), based on a novel by Nikolai Virta, supposedly a favourite of Stalin’s. There is a story that Shostakovich wrote to Khrennikov with critical observations on this work: if true, it suggests an origin to the long history of difficult relations between the two men.

The great stage director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko encouraged Khrennikov to turn to opera, having been struck by his earlier theatrical efforts, among them a 1934 score for Natalia Sats’s famous Musical Theatre for Children and attractively fresh music for a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Vakhtangov theatre. Thereafter, theatre and theatricality, and later cinema, remained at the heart of Khrennikov’s work.

His popular songs were mostly composed for films and plays, and several of his larger works are developments of such pieces. Much Ado About Nothing, for example, was reworked several times, ending up as a full-scale opera Much Ado About Hearts (1972) and a ballet, Love for Love (1975).

Before the second world war, Khrennikov had already made a name for himself as a willing young political activist and busybody, and the success of his patriotic music in wartime ensured he was a useful man to have around. Towards the end of 1947, Andrei Zhdanov, who had already led the postwar cultural purges of literature, philosophy, film-making and various scientific and journalistic disciplines, turned his attention to music.

Why should the dictatorship of the world’s largest country have bothered at all with composers? This was the age of radio, cinema and the gramophone record, and through these mass media music was a powerful influence on the daily life of the nation and (crucially) its loyalties. The Union of Soviet Composers, which was largely reformed by Zhdanov in 1948, was a means for the state to control in minute detail what millions of people listened to from the cradle to the grave. And Khrennikov was the man to make sure this happened.

Anyone who met Khrennikov realised that he loved power. From the crowing Stalinist vulgarity and crude threats of his 1948 onslaughts on Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian and his own teacher Shebalin, through his philistine enthusiasm for keeping knowledge of the outside world at bay in the 1960s and 70s, and his amazing influence over Soviet broadcasting, publishing, recording and concert life, he was a figure of historical and political significance. He made and broke the careers of hundreds of musical figures, and was dauntless in his opposition to any trend that threatened the hold of socialist-realist music and the stridently patriotic and à la russe manner he considered the true path in music (and the style in which his own talents were heard to best effect).

When modernism began to penetrate the Soviet Union as a result of the Khrushchev thaw, Khrennikov and his henchmen stamped on the “outrageous disgraces” being perpetrated by composers such as Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and Valentin Silvestrov. Later, he turned his aggressive attentions to even younger figures like Dmitri Smirnov, Elena Firsova and Alexander Knaifel.

In the early 1960s, the brilliant Italian modernist Luigi Nono was invited to the Soviet Union, on the unmusical grounds that he was a leading light of the Italian Communist party. When a young Moscow modernist, Nikolai Karetnikov, met Nono and exchanged scores and ideas about 12-note rows, he was promptly summoned to Khrennikov’s office and carpeted with the words: “You hobnob with foreigners! You give them your music! How dare you? There is such a thing as discipline!” Khrennikov was equally unrelenting in his hostility to western popular music – smuggled Beatles tapes conquered Soviet youth with astonishing speed – and jazz.

At the same time, like so much of Soviet power, Khrennikov’s rule functioned with carrot as well as stick. He helped many composers when they fell on hard times: he issued orders for families to be housed, for children to be given clothes, for food to be made available, for pieces to be allowed to be performed. Among those he protected were several talented composers who made a quiet but profitable living composing his later works from the somewhat exiguous sketches that were all he himself had time to write.

Naturally, with the Yeltsin revolution of 1991, Khrennikov finally fell from power and grace. But he never left the stage. In 1993, the newspaper Kultura published a celebration of his 80th birthday, complete with an astonishing picture of the composer on his knees in Yelets cathedral being blessed by the local bishop (after years of opposition to any composer interested in religion). He continued to compose (a ballet entitled Napoleon caused much mirth) and published two self-justifying memoirs.

The first of these, That’s the Way It Was (1994), is a surprisingly good read, with recollections of Stalin that show Khrennikov still in awe of the tyrant he served. More recently, he was decorated by Vladimir Putin. Khrennikov’s wife, Klara Vaks, is widely believed to have been a formidable influence on his success. She predeceased him; the couple had one daughter.

Tikhon Nikolaevich Khrennikov, composer and administrator, born June 10 1913; died August 14 2007