• "Nepman music" is one of the official pejorative definitions of pop music, an object of constant persecution in the Soviet Union. NEP (New Economic Policy, proclaimed by Lenin in 1 921
in the race or economic problems) led to a renaissance or private enterprise and to the appearance or restaurants and nightclubs where, in addition to gypsy music, they played the tango, fox trot, Charleston, and so on-that is, "bourgeois" music. In 1928 Maxim Gorky in Pravda called jazz
"music of the fat bourgeoisie," and for many years this was an official definition.
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made a nice impression. And his music is like his personality; everything is in place, well put together, and it's not merely craft, it has feeling and meaning and content. It's just impossible to listen to. The music doesn't spark, it doesn't spark. But gypsy songs, damn them, do.
Go figure it out.
I want to have time to write that opera based on Chekhov. I love Chekhov, I often reread "Ward Six." I like everything he wrote, including the early stories. And I feel sorry that I didn't do as much work on Chekhov as I had wanted to. Of course, my student Veniamin Fleishman wrote an opera based on Chekhov's "Rothschild's Violin."
I suggested he do an opera on the subject. Fleishman was a sensitive spirit and he had a fine rapport with Chekhov. But he had a hard life.
Fleishman had a tendency to write sad music rather than happy music, and naturally, he was abused for it. Fleishman sketched out the opera but then he volunteered for the army. He was killed. He went into the People's Volunteer Guard. They were all candidates for corpsehood. They were barely trained and poorly armed, and thrown into the most dangerous areas. A soldier could still entertain hopes of survival, but a volunteer guardsman, no. The guard of the Kuibyshev District, which was the one Fleishman joined, perished almost completely. Rest in peace.
I'm happy that I managed to complete Rothschild's Violin and orchestrate it. It's a marvelous opera-sensitive and sad. There are no cheap effects in it, it is wise and very Chekhovian. I'm sorry that our theaters pass over Fleishman's opera. It's certainly not the fault of the music, as far as I can see.
I would like to write more music on Chekhovian themes; it's a shame that composers seem to overlook Chekhov. I have a work based on motifs from Chekhov, the Fifteenth Symphony. It's not a sketch for The Black Monk, but variations on a theme. Much of the Fifteenth is related to The Black Monk, even though it is a thoroughly independent work.
I never did learn to live according to Chekhov's main tenet. For Chekhov all people are the same. He presented people and the reader had to decide for himself what was bad and what was good. Chekhov remained unprejudiced. Everything inside me churns when I read
"Rothschild's Violin." Who's right, who's wrong? Who made life nothing but steady losses? Everything churns within me.
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M USSORGSKY and I have a "special relationship." He was an entire academy for me-of human relations, politics, and art. I didn't study him with only my eyes and ears, for that's not enough for a composer or any professional. (That holds for other arts as well. Think how many great painters spend years slaving over copies without seeing anything shameful in it.) I revere Mussorgsky, I consider him one of the greatest Russian composers. Almost simultaneously with the creation of my piano quintet, I was busy on a new edition of his opera Boris Godunov. I had to look through . the score, smooth out a few wrinkles in the harmonization and some unfortunate and pretentious bits of orchestration, and change a few discrete progressions. A number of instruments had been added to the orchestration that had never been used by either Mussorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov, who edited Boris.
Mussorgsky had made many changes and corrections on the advice of Stasov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others, and then Korsakov made quite a few changes on his own. Korsakov's edition of Boris Godunov reflects the ideology, ideas, and artistry of the last century. You can't 226
help respecting the enormous amount of work done by him. But I wanted to edit the opera in a different way, I wanted a greater symphonic development, I wanted the orchestra to do more than simply accompany the singers.
Rimsky-Korsakov was despotic and tried to ma:ke the score submit to his own style, rewriting a lot and adding his own music. I changed only a few bars and rewrote very little. But certain things did have to be changed. The scene in the forest outside Kromy had to be given a worthy spot. Mussorgsky had orchestrated it like a student afraid of failing an exam. Falteringly and badly. I did it over.
This is how I worked. I placed Mussorgsky's piano arrangement in front of me and then two scores-Mussorgsky's and Rimsky-Korsakov's. I didn't look at the scores, and I rarely looked at the piano arrangement either. I orchestrated from memory, act by act. Then I compared my orchestration with those by Mussorgsky and Rimsky
Korsakov. If I saw that either had done it better, then I stayed with that. I didn't reinvent bicycles. I worked honestly, with ferocity, I might say.
Mussorgsky has marvelously orchestrated moments, but I see no sin in my work. I didn't touch the successful parts, but there are many unsuccessful parts because he lacked mastery of the craft, which comes only through time spent on your backside, no other way. For instance, the polonaise in the Polish act is abominable, yet it's an important moment. The same holds for Boris's coronation. And the bell-now, what kind of bell is that? It's just a pathetic parody. These are very important scenes and can't be tossed away.
Of course, there was one notable character, Boris Asafiev, who proposed that there was a theoretical basis for Mussorgsky's incompetence. This Boris was known for his ability to invent a theoretical basis for almost anything. He spun like a top. Anyway, Asafiev maintained that all the scenes I just mentioned were orchestrated wonderfully by Mussorgsky, that it was part of his plan. He intended the coronation scene to be lackluster to show that the people were against Boris's coronation. This was the people's form of protest-clumsy orchestration. And in the Polish act, Asafiev would have you believe, Mussorgsky was exposing the decadent gentry, and therefore let the Poles dance to poor instrumentation. That was his way of punishing them.
Only it's all nonsense. Glazunov told me that Mussorgsky himself 227
played all these scenes for him on the piano-the bells and the coronation. And Glazunov said that they were brilliant and powerful-that was the way Mussorgsky wanted them to be, for he was a dramatist of great genius from whom I learn and learn. I'm not speaking of orchestration now. I'm talking about something else.
You don't enter by the front door in composition. You have to touch and feel everything with your own hand. Listening, enjoying, saying,