Meyerhold held that rows were a school for artists, because when people fight they reveal their most basic traits and you can learn a lot.
Probably Meyerhold was right. While I didn't spend much time on the streets, I did see enough rows. Small ones and bigger ones too. I can't say that it enriched my life, but it has given me a lot to tell.
I had not expressed a desire to study music before I began taking lessons, although I had some interest in music and listened ear to the wall when a quartet met at the neighbors'.
My mother, Sofia Vasilyevna, saw this and insisted that I begin known throughout the Soviet Union and among leftist circles of the Western intelligentsia. Despite that fact, Meyerhold disappeared without a trace in the years of the "great terror." In the fifteen years that followed, if Meyerhold was written about at all, it was usually in this vein: "All the work of Meyerhold, ringleader of formalism in the theater, is a betrayal of Russia's great culture and a groveling before the bourgeois unprincipled art of the West." During the "thaw,''
Shostakovich was one of the first to work toward Meyerhold's "rehabilitation."
4
learning the piano, but I hedged. In the spring of 1915 I attended the theater for the first time and saw The Legend of Tsar Sa/tan. I liked the opera, but it still wasn't enough to overcome my unwillingness to study music.
The root of study is too bitter to make learning .fo play worthwhile, I thought. But Mother had her way and in the summer of 1915 began giving me lessons. Things moved very quickly, I turned out to have absolute pitch and a good memory. I learned the notes quickly, and I memorized easily, without repetition-it came on its own. I read music fluently and made my first attempts at composing then too.
Seeing that things were going well, Mother decided to send me to the music school of Ignatiy Albertovich Gliasser (he died in 1925). I remember that at one recital I played almost half the pieces in Tchaikovsky's Children's Album. The next year, 1916, I was promoted into Gliasser's class. Before that I had been studying with his wife, 0. F.
Gliasser. In his class I played sonatas by Mozart and Haydn, and the following year, Bach's fugues.
Gliasser treated my composing quite skeptically and didn't encourage me. Nevertheless, I continued composing and wrote a lot then. By February 1917 I lost all interest in studying with Gliasser. He was a very self-confident but dull man. And his lectures already seemed ridiculous to me.
At the time I was studying at the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium. There was no certainty yet in the family that I would be a musician and they planned for me to become an engineer. I was a good student in all my subjects, but music began taking up more and more time. Father had hoped that I would be a scientist, but I didn't.
I was always a diligent student. I wanted to be a good student, I liked getting good grades, and I liked being treated with respect. I've been like that since childhood.
That may be the reason I left Gliasser's school. Mother was against it, but I held my ground. I make decisions of that kind instantly. I decided not to go-and I didn't. And that was it.
My parents were, without a doubt, intelligents. And consequently had the required subtle spiritual make-up. They liked Art and Beauty.
And incidentally, they had a special affinity for music.
Father sang; he sang gypsy romances, things such as "Ah, it's not you I love so passionately" and "The chrysanthemums in the garden 5
have faded." Magical music, they called it, and it was a great help to me later on when I banged away in cinemas.
I don't renounce my interest in gypsy songs. I don't see anything shameful in it, as opposed to, say, Prokofiev, who pretended to be enraged when he heard such music. He probably had a better musical education than I did. But at least I'm not a snob.
Mother studied at the Petersburg Conservatory with Rozanova, the same woman to whom she later took me. She played the piano rather well. There's nothing particularly significant in that, for in those days there were many more amateur musicians than there are now. Take my neighbors' quartet, for instance.
In an old book I read, the local dignitaries-governor, police chief, and so on-got together and played the Mendelssohn Octet. And that was in some small town. If the chairman of the city council, the police chief, and the Party chief of Ryazan or some place like that were to get together today, what do you think they could play ?
I rarely reminisce about my childhood. Probably because it's boring to reminisce alone, and the number of people with whom I could talk about my childhood is diminishing.
The young aren't interested in my childhood. And they're absolutely right. It may be interesting to know about Mozart's childhood, because it was unusual, and because his creative life began so early. But in my biography the events that could possibly be of some interest come much later. My childhood had no significant or outstanding incidents.
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. The one exception to this is Stravinsky. In his memoirs the most interesting part is his childhood.
There's one thing that displeases me greatly: why did Stravinsky say such bad things about his parents ? You get the impression that he's taking revenge for his childhood.
You can't take revenge on your parents. Even if your childhood wasn't very happy. You can't write a denunciation of them for your descendants, to the effect that Father and Mother were terrible people and I, poor child, had to put up with their tyranny. There's something despicable about that. I do not wish to listen to people denouncing their parents.
6
Sometimes I think that I've forgotten what my childhood was like. I have to strain to remember small scenes from my early years and I don't think that they are of any interest to others.
After all, I wasn't dandled on Leo Tolstoy's knee. And Anton Pavlovich Chekhov didn't tell me stories. My childhood was totally average. There was nothing extraordinary about it and I just can't seem to remember any special, earth-shaking events.
They say that the major event in my life was the march down to the Finland Station in April 1917, when Lenin arrived in Petrograd. The incident did take place. Some classmates froin Shidlovskaya and I tagged along with the small crowd that was marching to the station.
But I don't remember a thing. If I had been told ahead of time just what a luminary was arriving, I would have paid more attention, but as it is, l don't remember much.
I remember another incident more clearly. It took place in February of the same year. They were breaking up a crowd in the street. And a Cossack killed a boy with his saber. It was terrifying. I ran home to tell them about it.
There were trucks all over Petrograd, filled with soldiers, who were shooting. It was better not to go out in those days.
I didn't forget that boy. And I never will. I tried to write music about it several times. When I was small, I wrote a piano piece called
"Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution." Then my Second and Twelfth Symphonies addressed the same theme. And not only those two symphonies.