1881–1944 · Russia
Nikolai Roslavets (1881–1944) was a Russian and Soviet composer-innovator, violinist, theorist and teacher. A graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, he created his own new system of sound organisation and in the 1920s played a prominent part in the musical life of the USSR. The site offers his pieces, sonatas and a string quartet at the Intermediate+ level.
Nikolai Andreyevich Roslavets was born on 4 January 1881 in the Chernigov Governorate. By social estate he was registered as a peasant, but in fact he was the son of a railway employee; his grandfather, a well-off village carpenter, owned a workshop.
In the late 1890s the family moved to Kursk. There Nikolai joined the music classes of Arkady Abaza, where he learned to play the violin and piano and studied elementary music theory and harmony.
In 1902 Roslavets became a student at the Moscow Conservatory and studied there until 1912. Ivan Hřímalý taught him the violin and Sergei Vasilenko free composition, while Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Alexander Ilyinsky taught counterpoint, fugue and musical form. His studies were interrupted more than once: his tuberculosis flared up and he was treated in the south of Russia.
He graduated from the conservatory with two diplomas. His graduation work was the mystery Heaven and Earth after Byron (1912): it was awarded a large silver medal, and its author received the title of free artist.
By the early 1910s his works had drawn attention: among other things, they creatively developed the methods of Scriabin. By Roslavets's own admission, the late compositional principles of Scriabin had a considerable influence on the formation of his style.
On 13 December 1917 Roslavets was chosen as the first chairman of the Yelets council of workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies. In the first years of the revolution he ran a music school in that city and taught there.
The years after the revolution were the peak of Roslavets's public activity. Alongside Leonid Sabaneyev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Vladimir Derzhanovsky, Yevgeny Braudo and others, he was among the leaders of the Association for Contemporary Music (ASM). It carried forward the principles of the pre-revolutionary movement of "contemporaryism", promoted the best achievements of new music and kept up contacts with the West. Roslavets was one of the organisers of the professional union of composers and the managing editor of the journal Muzykalnaya Kultura; he taught in Yelets, Kharkiv and Moscow and worked at the State Publishing House.
In 1923–1930 he was an editor at the Main Repertoire Committee, a representative of the Glavlit censorship office at the State Music Publishing House and its senior censor, worked as a music critic, taught at the Moscow Music Polytechnic and chaired the composers' bureau of Vserabis. In the 1920s he grew close to Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Myaskovsky, and published original works on music theory.
Yet already in the 1920s Roslavets came under harsh pressure from the proletarian musicians, chiefly from RAPM (the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) and PROKOLL, a collective of students of the Moscow Conservatory. The authors of articles, V. Bely, L. Kaltat, L. Lebedinsky and others, called him a spokesman of bourgeois decadence, a composer alien and hostile to the proletariat, and later a formalist.
Fearing repression, in 1927 Roslavets passed the manuscripts, packed in a suitcase, to his brother, who lived in Ukraine. The brother's family was repressed in 1936, and all the manuscripts were lost.
By the end of the 1920s the pressure had grown. Roslavets was called a saboteur and a Trotskyist, and in 1930 he was blamed for patronising the Association of Moscow Authors, which was accused of promoting light music and spreading counter-revolutionary literature. The case against Roslavets was started by among others V. Bely, A. Davidenko, Yu. Keldysh, M. Koval and B. Shekhter. It ended in a purge, in effect a ban on working in his speciality. Roslavets had to admit publicly the political mistakes attributed to him and to repent of them.
For a time Roslavets worked at the Tashkent Music Theatre, and in 1933 he returned to Moscow. He was accepted into the Music Fund but not into the Composers' Union, and his works were not performed.
As someone who had gone through the purge, he was subjected to ostracism. Still, in 1933–1935 Roslavets worked as an editor at the Radio Committee, in 1936–1938 he served as a political editor at the Repertoire Committee, gave classes at courses for military conductors and at the Music Polytechnic, and in 1939 worked as artistic director of the VGKO Gypsy Ensemble.
A notable work of his last Moscow years is the four-movement Chamber Symphony for 18 solo instruments (1934–1935). In 1938–1939 he lived expecting new repressions. In 1939 he suffered a stroke and stopped appearing in public. He died in Moscow on 23 August 1944 after a second stroke and was buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery; the grave has not survived.
After the composer's death the idea took hold in the musical community, among colleagues too, that he had been repressed for political reasons; so his name went unmentioned until the 1950s. Then his niece E. F. Roslavets received official notification from the Secretariat of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR that N. A. Roslavets had not been subjected to repression.
Soon after the composer's death his flat was searched: representatives of the authorities came together with former proletarian musicians and seized manuscripts. The widow hid part of the legacy and later gave it to TsGALI (today RGALI). A few manuscripts were kept by Roslavets's favourite pupil, the composer Pyotr Vasilyevich Teplov; they are now in the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture.
From the 70s of the twentieth century interest in Roslavets's music began to revive. The concert of 27 December 1980 at M. Milman's Chamber Club, with an introduction by M. Lobanova, included a half devoted to Roslavets. According to one of the organisers, the composer Edison Denisov, the leadership of the USSR Composers' Union did not allow a concert devoted entirely to Roslavets. M. Lobanova herself, who studied and promoted the composer's legacy, was subjected to repression, including for a publication about him in a Western journal that the authorities had not authorised.
The collection Nikolai Roslavets: Works for Piano came out in 1989 from the publisher Muzyka. At that time M. Lobanova found in an archive the score of the First Violin Concerto, which had been thought lost. The world premiere of the symphonic poem In the Hours of the New Moon in her reconstruction was prepared in Moscow but was thwarted: the assembled material vanished without trace from the Bureau for the Promotion of Soviet Music. The premiere took place on 14 June 1990 in Saarbrücken, with the Saarbrücken Radio orchestra conducted by H. Holliger.
In 1990 M. Lobanova and E. Roslavets put the composer's grave at the Vagankovo Cemetery in order, but it was later razed again for new burials. In 1993 an ensemble bearing his name, the Roslavets Trio, was formed in Moscow. Every April Bryansk hosts the All-Russian Festival of N. Roslavets and N. Gabo, and the Surazh regional museum has a section of its exhibition about him. Roslavets's main works, many for the first time, appeared under Lobanova's editorship; his music has been put on records and discs, and programmes, concerts and festivals have been devoted to it. Only from the 1990s has his work been fully available to the wider public.
Roslavets is one of the major innovators of twentieth-century music, the creator of a new system of sound organisation and of the technique of the synthetic chord. Critics, beginning with V. Karatygin, called him the Russian Arnold Schoenberg, but as early as 1914 Nikolai Myaskovsky objected to that comparison and stressed the originality of his style. In Roslavets's system the mastery of chromaticism is combined with fairly strict rules; he arrived at them independently of Schoenberg, and his system allows more flexibility and freedom than serial technique. In the 1920s he extended his ideas to rhythm, form and counterpoint and devised his own method of teaching composition.
The composer himself acknowledged that Scriabin's late principles had a strong effect on how his style took shape; the channel for these ideas was Leonid Sabaneyev, a friend to Scriabin and to Roslavets alike. The classic examples of the new system are Sad Landscapes (1913), Three Compositions for Voice and Piano (1913), the First String Quartet (1913) and the First Violin Sonata (1913). His early programmatic statements strongly recall Futurist manifestos. From boyhood he was friends with Malevich, his music appeared in Futurist journals, and Futurist artists drew the covers for his scores. All the same, he never quite belonged to that circle, while his continuity with symbolism and Art Nouveau is obvious. Before 1917 Roslavets took the poems for his vocal works from Blok, Bryusov, Balmont, Verlaine, Gumilyov and Severyanin, and afterwards from Sologub and Zinaida Gippius.
After 1917 the composer's attention was largely focused on neoclassicism, including the style of Stravinsky. From the mid-twenties a new line appeared in his output: music in mass genres, among them Songs of the Revolution, songs of the working woman and peasant woman (1925) and a hymn of the militia for wind band (1926). He wrote the cantata October (1927) and the symphonic poem Komsomoliya (1928), and in the First Violin Concerto (1925) he enlarged the compositional scale. In the 1930s his creative activity declined, and in Tashkent he wrote the ballet-pantomime Pakhta, yet the Chamber Symphony (1934–1935) is counted among the peaks of his system in its late phase.
The site holds seven editions of Roslavets. Six of them are for piano: Five Preludes (1919–22), Two Poems (1920), 2 compositions, Piano Sonata No 5 and two sonatas, Roslavez Sonata No1 and Roslavez Sonata No2. The seventh is String Quartet No. 3 (1920), for string quartet. All of the editions are marked at the Intermediate+ level. It is convenient to begin with 2 compositions or Five Preludes.