Sviridov - the rumor of the era

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Art is not only art. It is part of the religious (spiritual) consciousness of the people. When art ceases to be this consciousness, it becomes "aesthetic" entertainment. People who are not close to this spiritual consciousness of the people do not understand the essence of art, its sacramental meaning.

G. V. Sviridov

For several decades, the whole country has been listening to the music of Georgy Sviridov for several decades. It was his melodies "Time, forward!" was destined to become a harbinger and a symbol of all the main news of the last half century. Probably, this is the foresight of fate - in the past century there was no composer whose work is so strongly associated with Russia, its primordial culture and spiritual foundations.

short biography

On December 3, 1915, in the district town of Fatezh, Kursk region, the firstborn was born into the family of a telegraph employee and a teacher. Parents had peasant roots and could not even imagine that their son, Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov, would become one of the most famous composers in Russia. A few years later, his brother and sister were born. In 1919, the youngest son of the Sviridovs died from a Spanish flu, and then his father died. The family moved to Kursk, where Yura began to play the balalaika, and then the capable child was accepted into the orchestra of folk instruments. The teachers of the music school recommended the young man to continue his education in Leningrad. With their light hand, in 1932, Yura entered the musical college. Then he went to the conservatory, where he was lucky enough to become a student of D. D. Shostakovich. However, Sviridov's relationship with his great teacher was far from cloudless. He even dropped out of the conservatory in his last year, without returning to classes after the defeat that Shostakovich performed on him to six songs to the words of A. Prokofiev. Communication between composers resumed only a few years later.

In the summer of 1941, Sviridov was promoted from a musician to a soldier, but by the end of the same year his poor health did not allow him to continue serving. It is impossible to return to besieged Leningrad, where his mother and sister remained, and until the lifting of the blockade he works in Novosibirsk. In 1956 Sviridov moved to the capital. In Moscow, he leads a busy social life, holding leading positions in the Union of Composers.

While still a student, the composer marries pianist Valentina Tokareva, in 1940 they had a son, Sergei. The marriage did not last long, already in 1944 Sviridov left the family for young Aglaya Kornienko. After 4 years, he again becomes the father of his son, George Jr., immediately after the birth of which he moves to his third wife Elsa Gustavovna Klaser. Georgy Vasilievich outlived both of his sons. Sergei committed suicide at the age of 16, after which Sviridov had his first heart attack. Georgy Georgievich died on December 30, 1997 from a chronic illness. The composer never learned this tragic news - his wife was going to tell him about it when he gets stronger after a recent heart attack. This never happened - a week after the death of his youngest son, on January 6, 1998, Sviridov passed away.

Interesting Facts

• The composer has no direct descendants. Elsa Gustavovna died four months after him. All the creative heritage of Sviridov is dealt with by his sister's son, art critic Alexander Belonenko. He created the National Sviridov Fund and the Sviridov Institute. He published the book Music as Destiny, based on the diaries that the composer kept since the late 60s. In 2002 this edition was declared book of the year. In 2001, the first complete notational guide to Sviridov's works was compiled, unpublished music texts were restored. In 2002, the publication of the Complete Works of G. V. Sviridov in 30 volumes began.
• Sviridov named his eldest son in honor of Sergei Yesenin. The youngest son Georgy Georgievich was an outstanding specialist in medieval Japanese prose. In 1991 he was invited to work in Japan. For him, it literally became a salvation - due to chronic renal failure, he needed regular hemodialysis, which was done for free in Japan.
• Vasily Grigorievich Sviridov, the composer's father, died in tragic circumstances. During the First World War, he was mistakenly hacked to death with a saber by the Red Army, taking the form of a postal employee for the White Guard. The younger sister Tamara was born after the death of her father.
• Georgy Vasilievich was an encyclopedically educated person. His home library consisted of more than 2,500 books - from ancient playwrights to Soviet writers. He was well versed in painting and sculpture. There are eyewitness memories of how he led a tour of the halls with paintings by Turner in a London art gallery.
• Both in rehearsal work and in everyday life, Sviridov was harsh and authoritarian, he could not stand unprofessionalism and lack of principle.
• Sviridov was a passionate book lover and fisherman.

• Georgy Vasilievich, unlike many of his fellow contemporaries, was not a wealthy person. For example, he did not have his own dacha, living on the state, and the piano that was in his house was rented from the Union of Composers.
• At the end of his life, the composer regretted that he had not written an opera, since he mistakenly believed that this genre had exhausted itself. However, two of Sviridov's operettas, "The sea spreads wide" and "Lights", were very popular.
• The crisis of 1948, which followed the Politburo's resolution on the opera Great Friendship by V. Muradeli, also affected Sviridov, although his name was not included in the resolution. His teacher, D. D. Shostakovich, whose students also fell into disgrace, accompanied by an information vacuum, the lack of orders for works and the ability to perform them. It was a time when a lot was written “on the table”.
• One of the most successful and significant works of the composer, "Pathetic Oratorio", divorced Sviridov and Shostakovich. Dmitry Dmitrievich did not like Mayakovsky, and in the presence of other musicians criticized the idea of a piece based on his poems. Most of the composer's public supported Shostakovich's opinion. Attempts were made to block the award of the Lenin Prize to the sonata. However, the work was highly appreciated by the commission for the prize and personally by M. Suslov, thanks to which the composer nevertheless became a Leninist laureate. But this confrontation in absentia, as well as the subsequent creative differences, cooled the relationship between the composers for many years. Nevertheless, shortly before his death, Sviridov admitted that of all the music of the 20th century, he sincerely loved only the music of Shostakovich.
• In the early 60s, Sviridov wrote a new version of the USSR anthem on the verses of A. Tvardovsky. It was never made public and was preserved only in the personal archive of the composer.
• Of all the composers, Sviridov put Mussorgsky and Borodin above the rest for their unconditional adherence to the canons of the Russian folk and spiritual musical tradition. He considered Khovanshchina the greatest work of Russian art.
• A few months before his death, the composer became an honorary citizen of Moscow.
• The only monument in the world to G. V. Sviridov. Since 2005, his memorial museum has been created in the Fatezh house where the composer was born.

Years of creativity

Unlike his teacher and idol, D. D. Shostakovich, Georgy Vasilievich was by no means a "child prodigy." His first compositions date back to 1934-1935 - these are pieces for piano and romances on poems by A. S. Pushkin. The great poet will be destined to become a companion of the composer's work for many years. It is the music for Pushkin's "Snowstorm" that will become the most famous of his works. It will also become his "trap" - no later compositions were performed as often, it was her that was preferred by the listeners.

For a composer professing classical musical forms, the choice of the main creative direction - vocal music, song, romance - was also unconventional. Although sonatas were written, and the Piano Trio, awarded the Stalin Prize, and music for dramatic performances, and even the only symphony. But it was Pushkin's romances that changed the life of the 19-year-old aspiring composer. Sviridov wrote them both in the noisy dormitory of the musical college, and in his own home, sick and hungry in St. Petersburg, strengthened and caressed by his mother's warmth in Kursk. The romances were immediately published, and in the year of the centenary of the poet's death they were performed by many outstanding singers.

The composer was inspired by poets of the first magnitude - Lermontov, Tyutchev, Pasternak, R. Burns, Shakespeare. He set to music and the style of Mayakovsky, and even prose by Gogol. Perhaps the most beloved and closest to him were Sergei Yesenin and Alexander Blok. Starting with the vocal cycle "My father is a peasant" and the vocal-symphonic poem "In memory of S. A. Yesenin", written in 1956, Sviridov constantly uses Yesenin's poems to create his works. Almost as often he turns to the poetry of Blok, whom he considered the prophet of his country. Among the works: "Voice from the Chorus", the cycle "Petersburg Songs", the cantata "Night Clouds" and the last large-scale work, which took 20 years to create - the vocal poem "Petersburg". The composer finished this work knowing that he would entrust his first performance to the young baritone D. Hvorostovsky. The premiere took place in London in 1995. In 1996-2004, the singer released two discs of Sviridov's works. For many years, E. Obraztsova was Sviridov's muse, with whom several romance concerts were made, where the composer personally accompanied the singer, records were recorded.

Choral music was a notable direction of Sviridov's work. These are “Five Choirs to Words by Russian Poets”, and the cantata “Kursk Songs” based on folklore sources, awarded the State Prize, and the famous “Pushkin Wreath”. The author designated the genre of this work as a choral concert. The wreath is one of the symbols of life itself with its cycle of seasons, the cyclical nature of birth and death. Thoughts and feelings, external and internal, are intertwined in it. From the creative heritage of the poet Sviridov chose 10 poems - written at different times, from 1814 to 1836, different in themes, mood, famous and almost forgotten. Each of the parts of the concert, striving to correspond to the poetic fundamental principle, has its own sound. The author is not limited to the choir, he introduces instrumental accompaniment, bell ringing, uses the sound of the second chamber choir.

In 1958-1959, Sviridov created the seven-part "Pathetic Oratorio" on the verses of V. Mayakovsky. This work became a symbol of a new stage in the composer's life. The oratorio was unusual for many - a literary source (after all, Mayakovsky's poetry was considered anti-musical), an expanded composition of the orchestra and chorus, and a bold musical form. The work was awarded the Lenin Prize.

With rare exceptions, such as the cantata "Ode to Lenin" to the words of R. Rozhdestvensky, Sviridov did not betray his vocation - to glorify Russia, its people, nature, culture, spirituality. One of the last works of the master was the choral composition "Chants and Prayers", written on the themes of the psalms of David.

Sviridov's music in cinema

Since 1940, Georgy Vasilyevich has worked for cinema 12 times. The music for the two films surpassed the fame of the pictures themselves. In 1964, Vladimir Basov filmed "Snowstorm" based on the story of the same name by Pushkin and invited Sviridov to write music. Lyrical melodies were born that perfectly reflect the patriarchal life of the provinces of the Pushkin era. In 1973, the composer compiled “Musical illustrations for the story of A. S. Pushkin's "Snowstorm". A year later, the film "Time, Forward!" Was released. about the builders of Magnitka. The leading roles were played by the best actors of their time. Sviridov's music vividly expressed the enthusiasm and emotional upsurge of Soviet youth.

The composer's other films include Rimsky-Korsakov (1952), Resurrection (1961), Red Bells. Film 2. I saw the birth of a new world "(1982). In 1981, the operetta "Lights" was filmed (the film "It was behind the Narva outpost").

Sviridov's music is rarely used in film soundtracks. Some of the few are: "Lorenzo's Oil" (1992), "Dead Man Walking" (1995), "Tanner Hall" (2009).

Sviridov chose a song as his main form of creativity. He drew inspiration from the way people live, believing that art should be simple and understandable. As a religious man, he remembered that in the beginning there was a word. The composer put the word above all else. Therefore, he devoted his life to the combination of words and music. Today, two decades after the departure of the creator, his music still lives on - popular, relevant and in demand by listeners.