Naturally, we didn't work together, we didn't turn into Ilf and Petrov. Either I hindered him or he hindered me. I don't make any secrets out of my work. I don't need any special conditions and I don't pretend to be lost in another sphere. There was a time when I could
• Aram Khachaturian.
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compose anywhere, with any amount of noise around me, with just a corner of a table to write on. Just as long as people didn't shove too much. But now it's much harder for me. And now I'm less eager to make broad announcements about my plans, for instance that I've thought of an opera on a contemporary theme-on mastering virgin lands and fallow ground-or a ballet on the struggle for peace, or a ·
symphony about cosmonauts.
When I was younger, I did make such imprudent remarks, and people still ask me when I am going to complete my opera The Quiet Don. I'll never finish it because I never started it. It was just that, to my great regret, I had to say so to get out of a difficult situation. This is a special form of self-defense in the Soviet Union. You say that you're planning such-and-such a composition, something with a powerful, killing title. That's so that they don't stone you. And meanwhile you write a quartet or something for your own quiet satisfaction. But you tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears. They'll leave you alone. Under the powerful shield of such "creative plans" you can live a year or two in peace.
I think that every composer must answer for his own work. That doesn't mean that I'm opposed to collaboration in principle-it certainly works in literature-but I just don't know of any successful attempts in music. And Khachaturian and I did not become the exception to the rule, particularly since we were ordered to become coauthors. Therefore I certainly didn't treat the matter too seriously.
Maybe I let him down as a result, I don't know.
Meeting Khachaturian means, first of all, eating a good, filling meal, drinking with pleasure, and chatting about this and that. That's why, if I have the time, I never turn down a meeting with him. So we got together. We ate and drank, discussed all the latest news. We didn't write a single note, we didn't even bring up the subject of work.
And then it turned out that Khachaturian was really in the mood to work that day, but you see, I (0 mysterious Slavic soul!) led him off the path of righteousness.
We set another date. This time I was full of the desire to work, it was like a sports competition. I thought, Let's create a huge canvas called the National Anthem. We got together, and it turned out that 257
Khachaturian (0 mysterious Armenian soul!) was saddened by something. He didn't want to write, he felt philosophic and said that his youth was gone. In order to convince Khachaturian that it wasn't gone completely, we had to drink a bit. Next thing we knew, it was evening, time to go. And we still hadn't written a single note of our joint anthem.
We had to do something, so we made a decision worthy of Solomon.
Each would write his own anthem and then we would get together and see who had done a better job. The best bits from mine and the best from Khachaturian's anthem would go into our joint one. Naturally, there was the chance that we would write two anthems that could not possibly be combined, so we showed each other our work as we went along.
Each wrote his sketch at home, then we met, compared, and went home again. But now we had each other's version in our minds, as well. It went quickly, even though there were some difficulties. We had to make some critical remarks to each other, and Khachaturian is a very touchy fellow. It's better not to criticize him.
When he wrote the Concerto Rhapsody for Cello for Mstislav Rostropovich, • the cellist handled the situation very well. He wanted Khachaturian to make some improvements, but how could he tell him that? He would be mortally off ended. So this is what Rostropovich did. He said, "Aram Ilyich, you've written a marvelous work, a golden work. But some parts are silver, they need to be gilded." Khachaturian accepted criticism in that form, but I don't have Rostropovich's poetic gift.
In general, Rostropovich is a real Russian; he knows everything and he can do anything. Anything at all. I'm not even talking about music here, I mean that Rostropovich can do almost any manual or physical work and he understands technology.
I know a few things myself; for instance, I can still light a campfire with one match, in any wind. Well, at most, with two matches. I was taught the art in my youth and I'm proud of it. My favorite chore as a child was lighting the stove. I still can feel the coziness, the sense of
•Mstislav Lcopoldovich Rostropovich (b. 1 927), cellist and conductor. Shostakovich dedicated two cello concertos to him. Rostropovich has been living in the West since 1974. In 1978 he was deprived of his Soviet citizenship by special decree (see footnote p. 108). Rostropovich is tl(e'
musical director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.
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safety and security it gave me. It was a long time ago. I was a nimble youngster, I had the Russian knack. But I have a long way to go to be like Rostropovich, and naturally I lack his poetic and diplomatic gifts, so I had a harder time with Khachaturian.
Nevertheless, we combined our anthems into a single wonder of art.
The melody was mine, the refrain his. Let's not talk about the music; in fact, I wouldn't have dwelt on this at all if not for the tragicomic circumstances of its conception. But we almost got into an argument over its orchestration. It would have been silly trying to combine two orchestrations. It would have been faster to choose his or mine, and even faster to just have one of us do it and both of us sign it. But which ? Neither of us wanted to do it, for our own reasons.
I settled the argument. I remembered a guessing game I played with my sisters to get out of unpleasant household chores. You had to guess which hand had the pebble. If you couldn't guess, you lost. I didn't have a pebble handy, so I asked Khachaturian to guess which hand held a matchstick. Khachaturian guessed and the loser, I, had to do the orchestration.
The auditions of the various anthems went on for a long time. Finally the leader and teacher announced that five anthems were in the finals. They were the ones written by Alexandrov, the Georgian composer Iona Tuskiya, Khachaturian, me, and Khachaturian and myself jointly. Now a more important round came up, held at the Bolshoi Theater. Each anthem was performed three times-without orchestra, orchestra without chorus, and chorus and orchestra. That way they could see how it would sound under different circumstances. They should have tried it under water, but no one thought of it. The performances, as I recall, weren't bad. Good enough for export. The chorus was the Red Army Chorus. The orchestra was the Bolshoi's.