1881–1950 · Russia
Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky, a composer, teacher and music critic in Russia and the Soviet Union, lived from 1881 to 1950. He began as a military engineer, went on to write 27 symphonies, chamber music and piano pieces, and taught about 80 composers at the Moscow Conservatory. The site's catalogue includes his sonatas for piano and for cello and piano.
Nikolai Myaskovsky was born in April 1881 in the Novogeorgievsk fortress in the Warsaw province. His father, Yakov Konstantinovich, came from a line of military engineers, and his mother, Vera Nikolaevna, also came from a military family. Nikolai was the second of five children: the eldest son, Sergei, died young, and there were three sisters, Vera, Valentina and Evgenia. In 1888 the family moved to Orenburg and a year later to Kazan, where his mother died in childbirth. His father's sister, Elikonida Konstantinovna, took charge of the five children. She had a fine voice, and her stories about singing in the chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre, about productions and the lives of musicians awakened her nephew's interest in music. She also gave him his first piano lessons.
In 1893, after two classes of the real school, Nikolai was sent, in keeping with family tradition, to the Nizhny Novgorod Cadet Corps, where he sang in the cadet choir. In 1895 the family relocated to Saint Petersburg, and he moved to the Second Cadet Corps. Violin lessons led him into the corps symphony orchestra, conducted by N. Kazanli, from whom he began to take harmony lessons. He soon made his first attempts at composing, though the piano attracted him most. In 1896 he heard Arthur Nikisch perform Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony and his ballad Voevoda, and resolved once and for all to tie his life to music.
After finishing the cadet corps in 1899, Myaskovsky entered the Saint Petersburg Military Engineering School at his father's wish and received a military engineer's diploma in 1902. For a time he served in a sapper unit in Zaraysk and was then transferred to Moscow. From January to May 1903 he studied harmony there with Reinhold Glière and completed the whole course in those months. In 1904 he was posted to the 19th Sapper Battalion near Saint Petersburg, and for more than two years he studied with I. Krizhanovsky, working on polyphony, fugue and orchestration.
In the summer of 1906, without telling his military superiors, he enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. At the entrance examination he presented a three-movement Piano Sonata in C minor, which has not survived. He studied composition with A. K. Lyadov and orchestration with N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, while music theory was taught by Ya. Vitols. His fellow students included B. Asafyev and S. Prokofiev; the friendship with Prokofiev lasted for more than forty years. During his studies he met the conductor K. Saradzhev, who led the Moscow Evenings of Contemporary Music and the concerts in Sokolniki, where many of Myaskovsky's early works were first performed.
In 1906 his first works were published: six romances to poems by Zinaida Gippius, printed by the publisher Yu. Zimmermann at the composer's own expense. The first public performance of his music took place in 1908 in Saint Petersburg at the Evenings of Contemporary Music, where the romances The Moon and the Mist, Blood and Contradiction, to poems by Gippius, were given. That same year he wrote his First Symphony, and his diary contains the first mention of an idea for an opera based on Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. The idea stayed with him for about ten years; P. I. Souvtchinsky worked on the libretto, but the plan was never realised.
He graduated from the conservatory in 1911 and began to publish as a music critic. In three years the Moscow magazine Muzyka, edited by V. V. Derzhanovsky, printed 114 of his articles and notes on the musical life of Saint Petersburg and on new Russian and Western European music.
In 1914, when the First World War began, Myaskovsky went to the front with the sappers. As a result he could not attend the Moscow and Saint Petersburg premieres of Alastor in November, conducted by S. Koussevitzky. He served as a lieutenant in a sapper company, supervised engineering work and spent time at the front line. During 1915 his regiment repeatedly came into direct contact with German and Austrian troops and came under artillery fire. In one battle near Przemysl the composer was badly shell-shocked and was transferred from the active army to the building of a fortress at Revel. The city was relatively close to Saint Petersburg, which allowed Myaskovsky to attend the premiere of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1916.
After the February Revolution he was an active supporter of decisive action, and the soldiers, who trusted him as an officer, delegated him as their representative to the regimental committee. After the revolution Myaskovsky moved to the Naval General Staff of the Baltic Fleet in Petrograd. Family circumstances pushed him to do so: he took on the support of his sisters' families, who were at risk of starving. His father did not support his son's decision to serve the Soviet authorities, tried to leave for Ukraine and died at the very beginning of the Civil War.
In 1918 the capital was moved from Petrograd to Moscow, and Myaskovsky was transferred there together with the Naval General Staff. Alongside his service he joined the musical life of the city: he became a member of the jury of the State Music Publishing House and grew close to one of its organisers, P. A. Lamm, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. According to the recollections of O. P. Lamm, at the musical gatherings in the Lamm household, the so-called Wednesdays, all of the composer's symphonies from the Sixth to the Twenty-seventh were first performed, as well as all of his symphonic and chamber works in Lamm's arrangements for piano eight hands.
In 1919 Myaskovsky was elected to the board of the Collective of Moscow Composers. The following year his Fifth Symphony was performed for the first time. In 1921 he was demobilised, took the post of deputy head of the music section of the People's Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR and became a professor, teaching composition at the Moscow Conservatory.
In 1923 he wrote his Sixth Symphony in memory of his father. It was so successful that people began to call it the first symphony since Tchaikovsky worthy of the title of Sixth. In 1925–1927 the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies appeared. Myaskovsky, together with a group of Moscow composers, was a member of the Association for Contemporary Music (ASM), founded in 1924, which took as its main task the spread of new music, Russian and foreign. Members of the ASM disagreed with the theorists of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), who argued for the democratisation of academic music and believed that its style could be renewed only through the mass proletarian song.
In 1932 Myaskovsky was elected to the organising committee of the Union of Soviet Composers. In November 1937 the musicologist and composer N. S. Zhilyaev was arrested; although Zhilyaev had criticised Myaskovsky's early work, Myaskovsky wrote a letter in his defence. The letter went unanswered. Zhilyaev was accused of founding a terrorist organisation in order to kill Stalin, and was shot. From 1939 Myaskovsky was a member of the artistic council of the Committee for Arts Affairs under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, and from 1940 to 1950 a member of the editorial board of the magazine Sovetskaya Muzyka. In 1940 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Art Studies.
Myaskovsky's first compositions of the war years were three songs and two marches for wind band: Marching Song to words by M. V. Isakovsky for unaccompanied two-part chorus, Young Soldier to words by M. A. Svetlov and Battle Order to words by V. Vinnikov for voice and piano, together with the marches Heroic and Cheerful. From August 1941 to December 1942 the composer was in evacuation: first in Nalchik, then in Tbilisi and briefly in Frunze. After that he returned to Moscow and never left it again for the rest of his life, going away only in the summer to rest at Nikolina Gora. In Nalchik he wrote the Twenty-second Symphony, the first Soviet symphony about the events of the Great Patriotic War, the Twenty-third Symphony on Kabardino-Balkar song themes, and String Quartet No. 7, Op. 55.
The conditions of evacuation were hard: at times there was no electricity, no heating and no piano. During the war Myaskovsky created three symphonies, three quartets, a concerto for cello and orchestra, piano pieces and the cantata Kirov Is with Us. Prokofiev suggested that he write film music, but the composer declined, citing his lack of an illustrative imagination.
Myaskovsky also took part in competitions for state anthems. The RGALI archive holds his project for an anthem of the Soviet Union to words by S. Mikhalkov and G. El-Registan, prepared in 1943, and several versions of a state anthem of the RSFSR to words by S. Shchipachev, dating from 1946. According to A. A. Ikonnikov, the composer worked hard on the RSFSR anthem in 1945, and the version that was not submitted to the competition was used in the making of the Twenty-sixth Symphony.
In 1947 Myaskovsky was elected a deputy of the Moscow Soviet. In 1948 the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the opera The Great Friendship was issued, and the composer's name appeared on the list of formalists. His music was described as gloomy and not optimistic enough. The lyrical, nostalgic Twenty-fifth Symphony was described in the assessments of the time as alien to the working class, and the cantata The Kremlin at Night drew a storm of criticism for the way Stalin is portrayed in it and for the ambiguity of its text. A number of his works ceased to be performed in the USSR: the Sixth, Tenth, Thirteenth and Twenty-second Symphonies, the Pathetic Overture, the Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas, the vocal cycle On the Edge and the cantata The Kremlin at Night, all of which were placed on anti-repertoire lists.
In the same year Myaskovsky openly defended his colleagues Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian. Speaking at the Composers' Union, he described the resolution on the struggle against formalism as hysterical, which led to a conflict with T. Khrennikov.
In January 1949 a rough run-through of the Twenty-sixth Symphony, built on themes of ancient Russian znamenny chant, took place. According to A. A. Ikonnikov, it did not allow the work's merits to be fully tested, and his contemporaries did not hear or understand it. Myaskovsky spent the last two years of his life at a dacha near Nikolina Gora, putting his works in order and working on the last, Twenty-seventh Symphony. At the end of 1949 he destroyed part of his early piano sonatas and almost all the romances written in 1906–1914.
Nikolai Myaskovsky died of stomach cancer in August 1950 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery (plot No. 3), next to the graves of A. N. Scriabin and S. I. Taneyev. The first large monograph about him in English, written by Gregor Tassie and published in 2014, is titled Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music; the title goes back to an assessment by B. V. Asafyev.
Myaskovsky's music is austere and at the same time beautiful and lyrical. In it the composer's own ideas are joined with the late-Romantic tradition of Tchaikovsky, the modernism of Stravinsky and Prokofiev and the impressionism of Debussy; the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin is also noticeable. His early works are marked by gloomy, at times sinister colours, mingled with the heartfelt intonations of Russian Romanticism. The first ten symphonies (1908-1927) are written in heavy, dense polyphony with rich low registers and a powerful sound. In all, Myaskovsky wrote 27 symphonies.
The Sixth Symphony (1923), written in memory of his father, reflected the tragedy of a people split by civil war; its finale features a sombre Old Believer chorus. In 1925-1927 the composer experimented a great deal: the Seventh Symphony lies on the border between Russian Romanticism and French impressionism, the Eighth uses atonal constructions in the spirit of Schoenberg, and the Tenth and Thirteenth were created in the line of Schoenberg's explorations. From the early 1930s, beginning with the Eleventh Symphony, his style became lighter under pressure from the authorities: major keys came to dominate his music and the polyphony became simpler. The only sombre work of this period was the Thirteenth Symphony, and it had to be presented at a closed premiere.
The Sixteenth Symphony is dedicated to Soviet aviation, and its drama was inspired by the crash of the aeroplane Maxim Gorky in May 1935. The Twenty-first Symphony (1940) opened the final period of his work: it combines pure sonata form, a combination of dark and bright tones and philosophical depth. During the war the composer created several string quartets and three patriotic symphonies: the Twenty-second, the Twenty-third (on Kabardino-Balkar themes) and the Twenty-fourth. In the Twenty-fifth Symphony (1946) he reached the peak of his polyphonic mastery.
The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich named Myaskovsky's Cello Concerto among his ten favourite works written for the instrument, and for Rostropovich himself the composer wrote the Second Cello Sonata, Op. 81, which received a Stalin Prize of the second class in 1950. The site has sheet music for three works: Myaskovsky Piano Sonata 3 (Op. 19), Sonata N°5 and Myaskovsky Cello Sonata 2 (Op. 81, for cello and piano). All three are marked with the upper-intermediate level. The Third Piano Sonata is among the works that ceased to be performed in the USSR after 1948.
Today Myaskovsky's legacy is not widely known. Working at the junction of different currents, he was not fully accepted either by radical modernists or by supporters of the classical Romanticism of the 19th century. The researcher D. Gorbatov and the conductor G. Rozhdestvensky pointed out that the reason is that for some he is too heavy and avant-garde, and for others too conservative. In recent times a growing interest in his work has been noticeable abroad.