No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
VALENTIN SILVESTROV AND PUTIN'S WAR IN UKRAINE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2023
Abstract
This article draws on published interviews and personal correspondence with the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) to situate the development of his musical aesthetics and international reputation within the context of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022. In particular, the article focuses on Silvestrov's use of sacred musical genres as a means of engaging directly with his contemporary political environment; it also explores the ways in which Silvestrov and his music have recently become an unequivocal symbol of defiance in the face of Russian aggression, a position that stands in stark contrast to the avowed disinterestedness in and removal from politics that characterised his works of the 1970s and 1980s.
- Type
- RESEARCH ARTICLE
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Valentin Silvestrov, interview with Gerard McBurney (1994); no translator is acknowledged but is most likely McBurney. My thanks to David Fanning for lending me a transcript of the interview tapes.
2 Ibid.
3 This includes publications by M. P. Belaieff Musikverlag.
4 The Symphony No. 5 is available on hire order from Schott Music, and Quiet Songs is listed as ‘in preparation’. A previous edition of Quiet Songs was published by Sovetskiy kompozitor in 1985. Stupeni has never been published and is currently not listed by Schott, though there are extant versions of the score including a fair-copy manuscript of the original version and a Schott/Belaieff editorial proof from around 2015 of the revised version.
5 https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/ (accessed 11 June 2022).
6 Andrew Burn, liner notes, Kirill Karabits, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Boris Lyatoshinsky: Symphony No. 3; Grazhinya, p. 7. 2019, Chandos, CHSA5233.
7 Valentin Silvestrov, interview with the author (20 March 2019); transcribed by Inga Nikolenko and translated by the author; my emphasis.
8 This view shares similarities with Peter J. Schmelz's interpretation of Silvestrov's music as ‘polystylistic’, although I refrain from using this term here because of its potential ambiguity. For an exploration of polystylism as cultural practice in the late Soviet period, see Schmelz, Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
9 Silvestrov, interview with the author.
10 Silvestrov also emphasises organic imagery in his description of poetic verse as ‘a shrub’ and music as ‘ivy that curls around the branches of the shrub’; see Gillies, Richard Louis, Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985 (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 186–87Google Scholar.
11 Silvestrov, interview with McBurney.
12 Silvestrov, interview with the author.
13 Tatjana Frumkis, liner notes, Iana Ivanilova and Alexei Lubimov, Valentin Silvestrov: Stufen. 2000, Megadisc Classics, MDC7832.
14 Silvestrov, interview with the author.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid. The connotations of nuclear radiation in the language Silvestrov uses spark associations with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1985 and resonate in the present context of concerns over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, a focal point of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
18 Frumkis, Tatjana and Silvestrov, Valentin, ‘Sokhranyat′ dostoinstvo…’, Sovetskaya muzïka, 4 (1990), p. 12Google Scholar.
19 Consider in this regard the Swiss composer and music critic Andreas Zurbriggen's recent article in which he writes: ‘In a radical break [radikalen Bruch] Silvestrov turned away from the western avant-garde during the 1970s’; emphasis added. Zurbriggen, ‘“Ich bin längst in die Musik emigriert” – der ukrainische Komponist Valentin Silvestrov’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 May 2022, www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/der-ukrainische-komponist-valentin-silvestrov-ich-bin-laengst-in-die-musik-emigriert-ld.1683245 (accessed 3 September 2022).
20 Schmelz, Sonic Overload, p. 94.
21 A few extant sketches and drafts are held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch/en/collections/p-t/valentin-silvestrov.html, accessed 5 April 2022), though it is often difficult to tell how these relate to the published works (my thanks to Peter J. Schmelz for this observation).
22 Frumkis, Tatjana, ‘Preface’ , Silvestrov, Valentin, Klavierwerke Band II (Werke von 1954 bis 1973) (Mainz: M. P. Belaieff, 2010)Google Scholar.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 43Google Scholar.
27 Shestidesyatniki is a Russian term used to refer to the generation who came of age during the 1960s, to which Silvestrov belongs (sometimes translated as ‘men of the 60s’ or ‘the sixtiers’).
28 For a discussion and analysis of this vocal cycle, see Gillies, Singing Soviet Stagnation, pp. 140–97.
29 For an in-depth study of the resurgence of Russian Orthodox Christianity and its links to Russian nationalism, see Brudny, Yitzhak M., Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
30 For more on these figures, see Zubok, Vladislav, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 252–53, 338Google Scholar.
31 A cycle of 11 pieces can be heard in a live recording of a concert given by Silvestrov in Berlin shortly after he left Kyiv (https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-berlin-march-17-2022, accessed 25 August 2022). In his brief talk before the concert Silvestrov directly links the first five of these works to his experience of displacement, stating: ‘The first four [sic] pieces arose [voznikli] in the period when we moved from Kyiv and went to Germany. Actually, not four but the first five pieces. But the first piece I'm going to play is the melody that arose when we crossed the border from Poland to Germany. It's called ‘Elegy’. As we drove, we saw endless queues of refugees fleeing Ukraine. It was a very sad scene.’
32 Demo recordings by the composer can be found at https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/album/2019-4 (accessed 25 August 2022). ‘Pesnopeniya’ has been rendered variously in English as ‘chants’, ‘hymns’, ‘canticles’, ‘psalms’, etc.
33 Two complete recordings of Maidan 2014 can be found on Silvestrov's Bandcamp page: the first is a home recording made in 2014 of the composer singing the work and accompanying himself at the piano (https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/album/maidan-2014-2014-a-capella, accessed 25 August 2022); the second is a live recording of the work performed in 2016 at Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv (https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/album/2014-live-at-st-michaels-monastery-2016, accessed 25 August 2022). A third home recording containing movements from Maidan 2014 can be found at https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/album/2014 (accessed 25 August 2022). A studio recording of the work by Mykola Hobdych and the Kyiv Chamber Choir for ECM was released on 30 September 2022, marking Silvestrov's 85th birthday.
34 Silvestrov, interview with the author.
35 Zurbriggen, ‘“Ich bin längst in die Musik emigriert”’.
36 Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 151Google Scholar; emphasis and transliteration in original. For a definition of vnye, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, pp. 126–34; for the application of the term to musical culture of the post-Stalinist era, see Schmelz, Peter J., Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gillies, Singing Soviet Stagnation.
37 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, p. 150.
38 Silvestrov, interview with the author.
39 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, pp. 126–27.
40 www.bbc.com/mediacentre/proginfo/2022/31/bbc-proms-ukrainian-freedom-orchestra (accessed 30 August 2022); my emphasis.
41 Transcribed from BBC Proms 2022, Prom 19a: Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra (BBC Radio 3, 31 July 2022), www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0019l18 (accessed 30 August 2022). Wilson's comments appear at 01:29–01:56. Wilson interprets the ‘inhaling and exhaling’ sound as representing Larissa Bondarenko's dying breath, but this is slightly problematic since Silvestrov used this same effect at the end of his Symphony No. 5, completed almost 15 years before Bondarenko's death.
42 A widely circulated video of the recital being disrupted by police can be found at https://youtu.be/tntNSUb2v5w (accessed 31 August 2022).
43 Jeffery Arlo-Brown, ‘Dangerous Symbols: Alexei Lubimov's Anti-War Concert, Interrupted’, Van Magazine, 20 April 2022, https://van-magazine.com/mag/alexei-lubimov-ukraine/ (accessed 30 August 2022).
44 Anastassia Boutsko, ‘Valentin Silvestrov: “Was macht ihr Kremlteufel?”’, Deutsche Welle, 16 March 2022, www.dw.com/de/valentin-silvestrov-was-macht-ihr-kremlteufel/a-61149397 (accessed 30 August 2022). All quotations from the interview in the following discussion are taken from this source unless otherwise stated (translations from German and Russian are my own).
45 ‘Kremlteufel’ is from the German transcript of the interview, though it is not clear what the exact Russian wording used was.
46 https://youtu.be/HYoauPJil70 (accessed 30 August 2022).
47 Arlo-Brown, ‘Dangerous Symbols’.
48 Silvestrov, interview with McBurney. It is likely that Lubimov is thinking of Silvestrov's expulsion from the Ukrainian Union of Composers in 1970 (he was permitted to rejoin in 1973).
49 For numerous recollections and descriptions of Shostakovich's character, see Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
50 Silvestrov, interview with the author. Even in the recent DW interview Silvestrov emphasises this point, stating ‘I've never dealt with politics, that's true’.
51 Boutsko, ‘Valentin Silvestrov: “Was macht ihr Kremlteufel?”’.
52 Arlo-Brown, ‘Dangerous Symbols’.
53 Liner notes, Mykola Hobdych, Kyiv Chamber Choir, Valentin Silvestrov: Maidan. 2022, ECM 2359.