Nikolai Roslavets
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolai Andreyevitch Roslavets (Russian: Николай Андреевич Рославец 4 January 1881 [O.S. 23 December], Dushatino, Ukraine - 1944, Moscow) was a significant Russian and also Ukrainian modernist composer of the period just before and just after the October Revolution. Though influential in the early years of the USSR as a champion of progressive Western composers, his music was politically suppressed at the end of the 1920s and he spent most of the remainder of his career virtually a ‘non-person’.
Roslavets is primarily of interest to historians because of his independent development of serial procedures. Serialism is usually associated with Arnold Schoenberg and his students, however Roslavets' system (which may predate Schoenberg's by a year or two) is actually more closely related to the mature style of Alexander Scriabin. Roslavets did not use serial procedures to create thematic material, as Schoenberg did, but instead created vertical pitch aggregates which he referred to as "synthetic chords," inspired by Scriabin's mystic chord. In Roslavets' earlier music, these sound objects erupt like breaching whales out of stretches of traditional tonal music; by 1913 he was writing pieces which consisted of only synthetic chords (although he continued to write tonal music as well).
Roslavets' music has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, as many of his scores once thought lost or destroyed have been unearthed. The music itself is by turns passionate and mysterious. There is a debt to Scriabin, but sufficient individual character to explain its increasing life in the concert hall and on recording.
There are among his works two violin concertos, five string quartets, two (unfinished) symphonies, two viola sonatas, two cello sonatas, six violin sonatas and several piano trios among other works.
Contents |
[edit] Life
Unlike almost all the composers of the Soviet era, Roslavets came from a peasant family. In autobiographical jottings dating from 1924, he described his birthplace as 'a godforsaken, half-Ukrainian, half-Byelorussian hole'. As a child he played the violin in a local string band; in 1886 he began work in the railway office in Kursk and began to study music by attending classes there. In 1902 was accepted as a student at the Moscow Conservatory where he studied violin, and composition under Sergei Vassilenko and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. He graduated in 1912, gaining a silver medal for his cantata Heaven and Earth, inspired by Byron's poetic drama. In 1915 and 1916 his were the only musical contributions published by Russian Futurist journals. He welcomed the 1917 Revolutions and was associated, along with Alexander Mosolov and Arthur Lourié, with the early Soviet avant-garde. After October 1917 he was made director of the Conservatory in Kharkiv, Ukraine until 1924, when he returned to Moscow and took up a position in the State Publishing House. Describing himself as 'extreme left-wing' and 'an intellectually creative proletarian', he directed its Political Department, edited the journal Muzykalnaya Kultura, and was one of the leaders of the Association for Contemporary Music. Nevertheless the direction of his artistic sympathies is apparent from his support for performances of the Second Viennese School and his authorship of articles including ‘On pseudo-proletarian music’. The tenth anniversary of the Revolution was celebrated in 1927 with a concert featuring the premiere of Roslavets's cantata October in the same programme with that of the Second Symphony, Dedication to October, of Dmitri Shostakovich. But for several years already his music had been under attack from the adherents of 'proletarian music' especially RAPM – the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians – as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois art for art's sake; in 1929 he was denounced as an 'enemy of the People' and in 1930 he was forced to publicly repent of his former artistic convictions. He spent some years in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, but returned to Moscow in 1933 where he lectured at the Polytechnic Institute and was later required to train military band leaders. He made a living out of this and other comparatively menial tasks until he was finally admitted to the Composers’ Union in 1940. He suffered a severe stroke in the same year and was semi-invalid until his death from a second stroke in 1944.
[edit] Style characteristics
While still a student Roslavets had already been engaged in the vigorous artistic debates occasioned by Russian Futurism, Russian Symbolism and other new ideas, and was close to visual artists such as Malevich. Deeply influenced by the later works of Scriabin, Roslavets's quest for a personal language began in 1909 and led in 1913 to his propounding a new harmonic system based on 'synthetic chords' that contain both the horizontal and vertical sound-material for a work (a concept close to that of Schoenberg's 12-note serialism). By the early 1920s Roslavets was sometimes being referred to as ‘the Russian Schoenberg’, but in an article published in 1925 the critic Yevgeni Braudo pointed out that this was no more helpful than to call Schoenberg ‘the German Debussy’. Though his music is often highly dissonant, Roslavets’s principles do not encompass 12-note formulations – except, like Scriabin, in passing. After his fall from grace, while in Tashkent, he turned for a while to working with folk material, producing among other works the first Uzbek ballet, Cotton. The works of his last years in Moscow show a simplification of his characteristic language to admit a more classical conception of tonality (for instance in the 24 Preludes for violin and piano), but are still individual in orientation.]
[edit] Posthumous reputation
As soon as Roslavets was dead his flat was ransacked by a group of former 'proletarian musicians' who confiscated many manuscripts, though others were saved by his widow. For thirty years afterwards Roslavets’s name, expunged from the music dictionaries, was hardly mentioned in Soviet musical literature, except in comments such as ‘Roslavets’s works are not worth the paper they are written on’. His name reappeared in a Soviet music dictionary in 1978 but scholars who attempted to claim some importance for him were still being attacked in the press as late as 1982. In the wake of Perestroika, however, Roslavets was among the creative figures who were rehabilitated. His grave in the Vagankovo Cemetery, which had remained unmarked, was identified in 1990, and many of his works have now been revived, published and recorded.
[edit] Works (selected list)
Orchestral: In the Hours of the New Moon, symphonic poem (1910); The Man and the Sea, symphonic poem after Baudelaire (1921); Symphony (1922); On the Earth’s Death, symphonic poem after Paul Lafargue (19-?); Violin Concerto No.1 (1925); October (1927), Komsomoliya (1928)
Chamber music: Chamber Symphony for 18 players (1934-35) [NB this is unrelated to the abandoned Chamber Symphony sketched in 1926, which was completed and orchestrated, also for 18 players, by Alexander Raskatov]; Quintet for harp, oboe, 2 violas and cello; 5 String Quartets (No.3 1920); 4 Piano Trios (19-?, 1920, 1921, 1927); Violin and piano: 6 Sonatas (1913, 1917, 19-?, 1920, 19-?, 1940; Nos.3 and 5 are lost and No.2 had to be reconstructed by Marina Lobanova), Poème lyrique (19-?), Three Dances (1923), Nocturne (1935), 24 Preludes (1941-42); Viola and piano: 2 Sonatas (1920s); Cello and piano: Dance of the White Girls (1912), Meditation (1921), 2 Sonatas (1921, 1922)
Piano music: Three Etudes (1914); Three Compositions (1914); Two Compositions (1915); Prelude (1915); Two Poems (1920); Five Preludes (1919-22); 5 Piano Sonatas (1914, 1916, 19- ?, 19-?, 1923)
Vocal: Heaven and Earth, Cantata after Byron (1912); many songs
