|
Home | Archive
From the Spring 2007 Musical Times
In memoriam
Galina Ustvolskaya 1919–2006
Two works by Ustvolskaya – Concerto for piano, timpani and strings (1946), and Symphony no.3 (1983) – encapsulate her special and striking contribution to 20th-century composition.
In retrospect, the concerto seems to sketch a transition from Shostakovichism (Ustvolskaya was still studying with him when it was written) to something more personal. But how is ‘personal’ to be defined? It’s far too neat simply to connect the music’s love-hate response to authority with Ustvolskaya’s refusal to marry her great mentor. Ingrid Jacoby, who has recorded the concerto (Dutton CDSA 6804, 2002), says of the ending that ‘akin to minimalism, Ustvolskaya drives home her message, steadily, slowly, and relentlessly. After these final striking pages of ever-intensifying, merciless repetition, we can perhaps share in her vision of beauty, suffering, and redemption’. Perhaps – or perhaps not: and Jacoby’s alignment of ‘merciless’ with ‘redemption’ focuses the issue. To my ears, there is more desolation than redemption in this music.
Nearly 40 years later, the symphony takes merciless repetition to extremes. But
there is no minimalist euphoria, whether sacred or secular, here. It is as if a mind disorientated by the imminent collapse of Marxism had turned to primitive religion, with a fanaticism more menacing than purifying. Many other later 20th-century composers allude to chant as one way of rooting a radical aesthetic, but Ustvolskaya goes further. Even the most basic generic associations, with slow marches, or with the kind of ‘dirge-canons’ for brass distantly echoing Stravinsky’s In memoriam Dylan Thomas are, in the end, suppressed. If Cage’s most radical achievement was to aestheticise non-music, Ustvolskaya, seven years his junior, manages the more difficult task of de-aestheticising music itself.
Only if you can connect the symphony’s instrumental sounds – scored for quintets of oboes, trumpets and double basses, trombone, three tubas, drums and piano – with the category of the sublime, where the terrifying turns into art, can you bring Ustvolskaya into the real world of musical expression. The task is made harder by the twice-declaimed text, taken from the medieval monk Hermanus Contractus, whose final cry ‘Jesus Messiah, save us! (Spasi nas! in Russian) seems more belligerent than penitential.
Was Ustvolskaya another liberating eccentric, capable, like Satie or Scelsi, of powerful musical thinking from time to time? Susan Bradshaw’s survey of her music (MT, Summer 2000) tells a fascinating story. In many ways, hers may be the music of a victim. And so, the crucial question remains: is it art?
Arnold Whittall
Galina Ustvolskaya: born 17 June 1919, Petrograd; died 22 December 2006, St Petersburg
|
