NIKOLAY MYASKOVSKY AND THE EVENTS OF 1948

• Published in: Music & letters Vol. 93; no. 1; pp. 61 - 85
• Main Author: Zuk, Patrick
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford University Press 01.02.2012; Oxford Publishing Limited (England)
• Subjects: Careers; Composers; Essays; Modernist art; Modernist music; Music composition; Music criticism; Music history; Music semiology; Music teachers; Musicology; Myaskovsky, Nikolay; Opera; Poetry; Symphonies
• ISSN: 0027-4224; 1477-4631
• DOI: 10.1093/ml/gcr144

This article presents the first detailed account in either English or Russian of Nikolay Myaskovsky's condemnation for the vice of 'formalism' in 1948, drawing on documentary sources that have become available since glasnost'. Contemporary observers were deeply puzzled by the treatment meted out to Myaskovsky by the authorities, which struck them as baffling and disproportionate, especially as he had long since renounced the dissonant harmonic idiom that he had employed intermittently in the 1920s and early 1930s. As two previously classified reports reveal, Myaskovsky's persistent cultivation of abstract instrumental music rather than 'democratic' text-based genres such as opera caused him to be regarded with deep suspicion. He was a convenient scapegoat for the expensive fiasco of the opera The Great Friendship by his student Vano Muradeli and was held responsible for the apparent failure of younger composers to write successful works on orthodox Socialist Realist lines.