The lecturing tired Sollertinsky's vocal cords and he decided to see a teacher to help his voice. As usual, the vocal teacher performed his magic with disastrous results. Sollertinsky's voice was ruined and he became hoarse.
Once Sollertinsky was handed a note from the audience. He opened it, smiling, and read, "Enough wheezing." Sollertinsky shut up and left the stage.
Composers had a great fear of Sollertinsky, who was famous for his wit. Asafiev,* for instance, never did recover from Sollertinsky's re-
*Boris Vladimirovich Asaficv (1 884-1 949), musicologist and composer. It would be no exaggeration to say that Asaficv is the most important representative of Russian thought on music throughout the country's musicological history. (His work is only now becoming known in the West.) Unfortunately, high scruples were not among the character traits of this brilliant scholar and critic. It is important to stress Asafiev's significance because the reader of this book might easily come away with an inaccurate picture of his impressive accomplishments. Some of the best 41
mark about one of his ballets that had been given a lush production:
"I'd be happy to watch, I just can't stand listening."
Once I was at the Philharmonic, where they were playing Stravinsky's Nightingale. Sollertinsky came on with a brief introduction.
He began listing musical works dealing with China and said, "Well, there's also Gliere's Red Poppy, forgive the expression." Gliere was sitting next to me and turned color. He went backstage in the intermission and said, "Why do you apologize for mentioning Red Poppy ?
My composition isn't a swear word, you know."
The Red Poppy, staged by Lopukhov* at the Kirov Theater, was immensely popular. Gliere wasn't a bad fellow, but he was a mediocre composer. Yet his ballet stayed on the boards endlessly, for decades. In the fifties they changed the name to The Red Flower, when it was discovered that in China the poppy was the raw material for opium and not the symbol of revolutionary fervor that Gliere had thought.
Another of Gliere's works that has unflagging popularity is "Hymn to a Great City." I shudder every time I get off the Red Arrow Express at the Leningrad Station because Gliere's composition blares from every loudspeaker. The travelers duck their heads and walk faster.
Sollertinsky was mostly right _in his attitude toward Western music.
He never tried to run ahead of progress, as Asafiev did, and therefore he didn't have to change his opinions as often as Asafiev. Sollertinsky's love of Mahler speaks for itself. In that sense he opened my eyes.
Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer.
Mahler and Berg are my favorite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, or Krenek and Milhaud, whom I liked when I was young but cooled toward rapidly.
It's said that Berg's Wozzeck influenced me greatly, influenced both my operas, and so I am often asked about Berg, particularly since we have met.
It's amazing how lazy some musicologists can be. They write books pages ever written about Shostakovich belong to Asafiev, though the two men's relationship varied at different times. Shostakovich could not forgive Asafiev for the position he took in l 948, when he allowed his name to be used in an attack on the "formalist" composers. Shostakovich told me that he destroyed his correspondence with Asafiev. Asafiev used the pseudonym "Igor Glebov" for his critical pieces; whence the references in this book to "lgors and Borises."
*Fyodor Vasilyevich Lopukhov (1 886-1 973), avant-garde choreographer, produced Shostakovich's ballets Bolt and Bright Stream.
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that could cause a cockroach infestation in their readers' brains. At least, I've never had the occasion to read a good book about myself, and I do read them rather carefully, I think.
When they serve coffee, don't try to find beer in it. Chekhov used to like to say that. When they listen to The Nose and .Katerina lzmailova they try to find Wozzeck, and Wozzeck has absolutely nothing to do with them. I liked that opera very much and I never missed a performance when it played in Leningrad, and there were eight or nine performances before Wozzeck was removed from the repertory. The pretext was the same one they used with my Nose-that it was too hard for the singers to stay in condition and they needed too many rehearsals to make it worthwhile; and the masses weren't exactly beating down the doors.
Berg came to Leningrad to see his Wozzeck. Musically, Leningrad was an avant-garde city, and our production of Wozzeck was one of the first, I think right after the Berlin production.
It was known beforehand how pleasant a man Berg was because the critic Nikolai Strelnikov told everyone. Strelnikov wrote innumerable operettas and was sure that he was a great opera composer manque. I can imagine how he bored Berg in Vienna, for in Leningrad he practically ran him to the ground. He dragged Berg to a rehearsal of one of his operettas and then told everyone how Berg had praised him. And really, Berg turned out to be exquisitely polite. Everyone liked Berg; he was nice and he didn't behave like a visiting guest star. He was rather shy and kept looking behind him.
We later learned the cause of his shyness. Berg had been terrified of coming to Leningrad. He didn't know what awaited him and he feared that there would be some sort of scandal with Wozzeck. And there was more. Just before the premiere he received a telegram from his wife begging him not to enter the opera house because she had learned that they would throw a bomb at him.
You can imagine his condition. He had to go to the rehearsal and he kept waiting for the bomb. And the officials who greeted Berg seemed quite grim. That's why he kept looking around. But when Berg realized that there probably wouldn't be any bomb he grew bolder, even asking to conduct his own work.
A composer · conducting his own work usually looks ridiculous.
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There are a few exceptions, but Berg didn't add to the list. As soon as he started waving his arms, the wonderful Maryinsky Theater orchestra disintegrated, each member pulling in his own direction.
It did not bode well, but the situation was saved by Vladimir Dranishnikov, the theater's chief conductor. He stood behind Berg and signaled the orchestra. Berg didn't notice a thing because he was so engrossed in the process of conducting.
The premiere of Wozzeck went brilliantly. The composer's presence added to the excitement. But why had he been welcomed so coldly? I learned the reason later. It turned out that the singer who was supposed to play Marie developed angina. In any other country they probably would have postponed the premiere, but not here. How could we fall flat on our faces in front of foreigners ?
It only appears that we despise foreigners and everything foreign.
Morbid contempt is the reverse face of morbid adulation. And contempt and adulation coexist in one soul. A good example of that is Mayakovsky. In his poems he spat on Paris and America, but he pref erred to buy his shirts in Paris and .he would have been willing to climb under a table to get his hands on an American fountain pen.
And it's the same with musicians. We all talk about having our own school, but the performer who is the most highly regarded here is one who's made a name for himself in the West. I'm still surprised that the pianists Sofronitsky and Yudina* gained such unheard-of popularity with almost no appearances in the West.