Nikolai Karetnikov: Nikolay Nikolaevich Karetnikov (June 28, 1930, Moscow[2] — October 9, 1994 or October 10, 1994, Moscow) is a Soviet composer, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (1993), one of the most prominent representatives of the Russian post-war avant-garde.
Biography:
He was born in an intelligent family: his father, Nikolai Georgievich Karetnikov, was an adjutant and assistant commander of the 1st Siberian Regiment, an artist of the Moscow operetta, taught vocals; his mother, Maria Petrovna Gurevich (Sukhova in his first marriage), sang at the Bolshoi Theater, and later worked for many years in the vocal and dramatic part of the Moscow Art Theater, giving private singing lessons; grandmother, opera singer Maria Adrianovna Deisha-Sionitskaya, performed at the Imperial Opera together with Fyodor Chaliapin, author of the book "Singing in Sensations", popular among vocalists. He studied at the Central Music School with Vissarion Shebalin and Tatiana Nikolaeva and continued his education with Shebalin at the Moscow Conservatory, from which he graduated in composition in 1953. Unofficially, he took lessons from Philipp Hershkowitz, a student of Berg and Webern.
1957 became a turning point in Karetnikov's life. The arrival in Moscow of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who performed works by Schoenberg and Berg, made Karetnikov a convinced follower of the New Viennese School, to which, unlike his colleagues, he retained his devotion for the rest of his life and on the basis of which he developed his own style. In the same year, Karetnikov came to Orthodoxy and later became a parishioner of Father Alexander Men and godfather of Alexander Galich (1973).
The composer became famous for his early works - the oratorio "Julius Fuchik" (1953), the ballets "Vanina Vanini" (1962) and "Geologists" (1964), staged at the Bolshoi Theater by Vladimir Vasilev and Natalia Kasatkina. Subsequent works written in the technique of European modernism were severely criticized by the Union of Composers and were not performed for many years. Karetnikov's independent aesthetic, social and moral position further distanced him from the leading currents of the musical life of the USSR, and the composer went into a forced and, at the same time, voluntary "internal emigration"; he excluded from his portfolio almost all works written before 1959, and recognized the Third Symphony (1959) as the beginning of his career.
From the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, Nikolai Karetnikov worked on two large-scale stage works that became the most complete description of the composer's creative personality: the operas Till Eulenspiegel (1965-1985, libretto with Pavel Lungin) and The Mystery of the Apostle Paul (1970-1987, libretto with Semyon Lungin under the patronage of Father Alexander Men)). Till Eulenspiegel, filled with religious mysticism and political allegories, could not be staged on the official stage. In 1988, it was possible to make a studio recording of this opera for the eventually failed television performance by Anatoly Efros. Till Eulenspiegel only saw the stage in 1993 at the Bielefeld Opera House, Germany. The Mystery of the Apostle Paul was staged at the Mariinsky Theatre only in 2010.
During his lifetime, Karetnikov's music was performed extremely rarely. Unable to perform his works in public, the composer actively wrote music for theatrical productions and films (more than 40 dramatic performances and 70 film and television films), which became a kind of musical laboratory for him. Among the well-known are "A Bad Joke" (1965), "Flight" (1970) directed by A. Alov and V. Naumov, "Goodbye, Zamoskvoretskaya Punk..." Alexander Pankratov (1987), "Ten Days That Shook the World" (1965, Taganka Theater) by Yuri Lyubimov, "Fiesco's Conspiracy in Genoa" (1977, Maly Theater) by L. Kheifits, "Tevye the Milkman" (1985, Central TV) by Sergei Evlakhishvili and many others. In the last years of his life, the composer again turned to instrumental and sacred music, leaving the Second Chamber Symphony after his death, the orchestration of the last movement of which was completed by conductor Igor Blazhkov according to the author's direction.
He was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery.
4th Symphony and ballet "The Geologists
The 4th Symphony was conceived by Karetnikov in 1962 as a symphony-ballet in the technique of serial dodecaphony for the production of the ballet "Geologists" at the Bolshoi Theater. With the intensification of the "frost" after Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the Manege in December 1962, it became obvious that such a composition would not pass the artistic council of the Bolshoi Theater. As a result, Karetnikov replaced it with his earlier more conventional Dramatic Poem for Large Symphony Orchestra (1957), which he later excluded from his portfolio as a composer, with the addition of small fragments from the 4th Symphony. The revised work was adapted to the libretto by ballet directors Vladimir Vasilyov and Natalia Kasatkina based on the novel "The Unsent Letter" by V. D. Osipov and the 1959 film of the same name by M. K. Kalatozov.
Memory:
In 1990, the composer's book of memoirs "Themes with Variations" was published. Selected short stories from it were first published in the magazines "Ogonyok" and "Youth" in 1988, causing an ambiguous reaction from the public. The book was translated into French and Japanese and published in Paris (1990) and Tokyo (1996) by Éditions Horay.
In 1992, director Vadim Zobin shot a documentary film "The Profession of a Composer" about the composer's work with conductor Roman Matsov on the recording of Karetnikov's 4th Symphony.
In 1997, Professor of the Rostov State Conservatory A. Y. Selitsky published a monograph about Karetnikov "Nikolai Karetnikov. The Choice of Fate: Research". The book was republished by the publishing house "Composer" in 2011.
In 2011, the Corpus publishing house republished Karetnikov's book "Themes with Variations: Stories" as part of the Memoria series.
In May 2020, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of Karetnikov's birth, Ivan Limbakh's publishing house is releasing a revised and expanded edition of Themes with Variations with photographs from the composer's personal archive and a preface by the poet, translator, theologian and philologist Olga Sedakova. The collection includes two books of Karetnikov's memoirs: "Themes with Variations" (1990) and "Readiness for Being" (1992).
Evaluation of creativity:
Nikolai Karetnikov is an original successor of the traditions of Russian Orthodox sacred music and at the same time, for 37 years, a convinced adherent of the "classical" serial dodecaphony, on the basis of which he developed his own style. He does not abandon tonality where it is justified by a specific idea and integrates the twelve-tone technique with other techniques of musical writing. He managed to step over the experimentality of the language of the New Viennese people, organically combining the principle of seriality with the Russian symphonic tradition. Karetnikov was one of the first in post-war Russian music to use dodecaphony (late 1950s), and from the mid-1960s - polystylistics and eclecticism as a conscious creative method (the ballet "Little Zaches, nicknamed Zinnober" (1964-1967), the opera "Till Eulenspiegel" (1965-1985).