”By the external (form) I mean a known constructive scheme for the composition, while  the internal form is also a scheme but of a different type – it is a scheme for the development of feelings and moods, which, I believe, should have the same logic as the external structure. As regards the content, I deliberately reduce this notion to the main components of a composition – its thematic, rhythmic, and harmonic material.
(...) Out of the three mentioned I recognize the absolute value and necessity only of the first two; I admire a good external form, but I admit its imperfection”.
Nikolay Myaskovsky  .
”Myaskovsky is more of a philosopher, his music is wise, passionate, gloomy, and deeply introspective.  In this respect he is close to Tchaikovsky, and I think he is, in essence, his inheritor in Russian music (...) He least of all cares about the public. Myaskovsky’s music reaches real depths of expressiveness and beauty. (...) Everything that is written by Myaskovsky is profoundly individual and revealingly psychological. This is not music which can quickly become popular”.
Sergey Prokofiev 

I. A FREE ARTIST NIKOLAY MYASKOVSKY

“Soviet composer, professor, musicologist, public figure. People’s Artist of the USSR (1946). Doctor of art critics (1940).
One of the major Soviet composers, and teacher of many Soviet composers.
(…) Having approached the 1917 October Revolution as a mature artist, Myaskovsky devoted his further aspirations to the tasks set by the social environment. It became the decisive factor of the artist’s biography…”
This is what the “Music Encyclopedia”, a canonical six-volume Soviet publication on music and musicians (1970-1980), says about Myaskovsky . Out of three Soviet major classical composers (the two others are Prokofiev and Shostakovich), Myaskovsky is the least known in the West. There are several reasons for this: the introverted character of his music, the author’s dislike of bright symbols, sarcasm, irony, buffonery or any theatrics in general. The above cited remarks by Myaskovsky on the internal and external forms of a composition are found in one of his best known articles on N. Medtner’s work. We could interpret these remarks in a metaphorical way: the “external form” was Myaskovsky’s destiny after October 1917 and it was not always perfect.  But under the hardest circumstances he was capable of keeping his inner freedom and his independence of spirit.
Myaskovsky is one of many Russian artists who stayed in the Soviet Union after the revolution but chose a kind of “internal emigration” as his way of existence and survival in the surrounding circumstances. However, it would hardly be correct to associate this “emigration” only with the political and social cataclysms generated by revolution.  Myaskovsky was searching for a special kind of freedom, the one that General Yakov Myaskovsky, his father, wrote about to Nikolay on 22 September 1902: “(…) only (…) a freedom which is a victory over oneself do I acknowledge as a freedom of personality; other freedoms – political, etc. — which are so widely and pathetically discussed I don’t recognize and don’t give two cents for, because all these loud freedoms result only in a rearrangement of those who are free and not free; those, who try to exploit and enslave others, and most of all shout of such freedoms for  themselves.
Those bright minds that introduced the word “freedom” for the first time did not, actually, define it and did not explain its essence (…). Only Christ clearly pointed out what freedom is – it is to control oneself, to overcome oneself.  So, you try to work in this direction and you will be a free person.”    And so the son learned his father’s lessons.
II. HIS LIFE
Nikolay Myaskovsky was born on 20 April 1881 in the fort town of Novo-Georgievsk (Polish name Modlin) in the Warsaw administration district of Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He was the second child of a senior military engineer, Yakov and his wife Vera Myaskovsky.  Nikolay had an older brother, Serge_, who died of tuberculosis as a teenager, and three sisters – Vera, Valentina, and Eugenia.  After their mother’s death in 1890, their aunt took care of the children. It was she who became Nikolay’s first musical teacher.
The family traditions and the difficulties of being widower with five children made General Myaskovsky place his children in boarding schools. Nikolay studied for a while in Nizhny Novgorod and then in the Second Cadet Corps in St-Petersburg and he eventually graduated from the Military Engineering College.  The family tradition led him to the choice of his profession; it was his duty to follow the example of his father.  Later the old general would explain to his son that being military engineer is the most humane army profession – as it does not demand “cannon fodder”, does not require the merciless drill and self humiliation.
Myaskovsky spent the early 1900-s however, struggling with the hard choice between his duty (military service) and his passion (music). Following the advice of his father he tried to combine both pursuits for some time (until 1907) continuing his musical studies and his professional military career which began to post him around the country.
While his first musical impressions dated from the mid 1890-s, of which the strongest one was hearing a live performance of Tchaikovsky’s Six symphony conducted by Arthur Nikish in St.Petersburg on 9 November 1896, his professional musical studies only started in 1903, although by then he already played piano and violin.  Myaskovsky wrote a letter to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, the giant of the St. Petersburg musical scene and received from him an introduction to Sergey Taneev, the leading composer of Moscow and director of the Moscow Conservatory.  He, in turn, introduced the young Myaskovsky to a recent graduate of the Moscow Conservatory – Reinhold Gliere. The latter took on Myaskovsky for his first private lessons on music theory, a necessary prerequisite to gain entrance to a conservatory.
Similarly, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov’s, Ivan Kryzhanovsky, also played an important role.  Myaskovsky studied with him for almost three years (from 1903 till 1906), and Kryzhanovsky introduced the young officer to the circle of the “Evenings of contemporary music”, the gatherings of the St-Petersburg’s enthusiasts of the modern music.
Myaskovsky entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1906 without resigning his post or informing his military command. (He later resigned while he was studying.)  Among his professors were Anatoly Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Glazunov, all well known composers of the day.  The latter, after getting acquainted with Myaskovsky’s First Symphony, granted him a stipend out of his own funds that allowed Nikolay to continue studies.
In the Conservatory Myaskovsky found himself in the same class with Sergey Prokofiev.  A reticent and dignified twenty-five year old officer and a sarcastic brash fifteen year-old teenager – Myaskovsky and Prokofiev were the paradoxical combination of personalities that resulted in a forty-three year long friendship. The correspondence of Prokofiev and Myaskovsky is an invaluable archive of musical impressions, a creative laboratory, and a panorama of Russian and European music of the first half of the 20th  century.
By the time of his graduation from the Conservatory (1911), Myaskovsky had composed  two symphonies, a symphonic poem “Silence” after Edgar Allen Poe, a piano sonata, romances, and chamber music.  Myaskovsky, formally a participant in the capital’s circle of modernist composers, was still different: for him complex musical expression was not an end in itself, but a consequence of his tragic perception of the surrounding world. ”He (…) does not want to hide the sharpness of his torments behind beautiful self-sufficient forms, or sound for the sake of sound” .
Although he embarked on composition it was 1911 also that Myaskovsky started working as a musical critic.  His essays and analytical articles (for example, on the works of Tchaikovsky and Nikolay Medtner) were the focus of attention of the Russian musical circles.
1914 brought new hardships for Myaskovsky. In the beginning of the World War I he was called back into the army and mobilized to the front-lines, where he served as an officer in military engineering units.  He suffered a concussion and spent some time in rehabilitation.  His letters from the front line are full of expressions of his hatred for the abominations of war, for the imperial ideology (in modern terms, he was rather a social democrat by his political views).  But his main concern was his nostalgia for his music.
He continued his service in the military until after the revolution when he served on the Soviet General Staff, and he was only able to return to creative work in 1918 when he composed the Fourth and Fifth symphonies.  Only in 1921 was he able to completely retire from military service, and he then moved to Moscow, to become a professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory.
Myaskovsky is the second most important professor of composition in the whole history of the Moscow Conservatory (the first being Sergey Taneev). A flawless musical taste, rare intuition and respectfulness to the students’ personalities, to their own creativity contributed to his becoming the dean of the school of Moscow’s composers. His numerous students were very different: they included the traditionalists Vissarion Shebalin and Dmitri Kabalevsky, the avant-gardists such as Alexander Mosolov and Leonid Polovinkin, and the first composer of the Orient who became famous in the West – Aram Khachaturian.
Myaskovsky’s music in the 1920s also was beginning  to be well known in the world.  His way to fame might have been much easier if he had had the opportunity and desire to promote his music himself.  But he only once, in 1926, visited Europe.  As a member of a Soviet delegation he participated in the unveiling of Chopin’s monument in Warsaw and then visited Vienna to negotiate with the director of the publishing house “Universal Edition“.
In the 1920-s Myaskovsky was a member of the Association of Modern Music, and then, after it was banned in 1932, he was a leading member of the Union of Soviet Composers.
Working as an editor of the State Musical Publishing House, Myaskovsky would review  new compositions and recommend them for publication.  Many of his reviews were not published, particularly when he wrote about music, which was suppressed or even directly banned in the USSR.  Myaskovsky was able to overcome his personal predilections in his reviews, for example, he could not emotionally accept the “Chamber Symphony” by the Russian avant-gardist Nikolyay Roslavets (1934); instead he wrote about the logic of the form and the harmony comprising sixths and sevenths chords together (the famous “sintetchords). 
Regular attendance at concerts and performances and profound discussions about modern music in the “circle of friends” which gathered weekly at the apartment of a friend and colleague at the Moscow Conservatory, Pavel Lamm broadened Myaskovsky’s musical knowledge.  He actually knew all Russian symphonic music composed in Russia and the USSR and almost all Western symphonic works. He compiled a “Chronograph of Western and Russian symphonic music” (from Bach to Glinka and up to the middle of the 20th  century). Included in this Chronograph was the music of the Russian émigrés.  In the list for 1936 it included Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony including the author’s musical advice.
In 1936 Myskovsky wrote his “Autobiographic notes on creativity” . Leaving his private life in the shadow, he presented his development in the needed ideological key – his path from that of a Russian composer to a Soviet one.  “Autobiographic notes” comprise many facts and observations valuable for researchers; however, there are also some schematic, “proper” conclusions.  The reason for these was that there was a very strict censorship, which Myaskovsky had to take into account.
Myaskovsky’s compositions in the 1930-1940s were characterized by a search for a “new simplicity” within which the “old complexity” naturally existed.
At the beginning of the Second World War Myaskovsky was evacuated from Moscow along with other leading composers for a year and a half going to Nalchik, Tbilisi, and Frunze, now Bishkek.  After his return to Moscow in December 1942 he never left Moscow again for a long time.
The last years of the composer’s life coincided with one of the gloomiest periods in the history of Russian music. The 1948 Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party condemned the music of the leading Russian composers of the day, including Myaskovsky, as “formalistic and anti-populist”.  Myaskovsky withstood this attack bravely. He would not attend the disgraceful trials, which were modestly called “ meetings of the Moscow composers and musicologists”, he was “the only one of the condemned, who humbled oneself neither with writing letters, nor with confession to his “crimes”, nor with repentance.” 
As a result of this campaign, in the spring of 1948, Myaskovsky was fired from the Moscow Conservatory, however, already that next fall following the request of the new Director Alexander Sveshnikov, he continued teaching there.  Among his last students were Karen Khachaturian, German Galynin, Andrei Eshpay and Boris Tchaikovsky.
The last two years of his life Myaskovsky suffered continuously from cancer. Having a premonition about his imminent death, he worked hard to put his manuscripts in order.  He destroyed his diaries, selected fifteen song cycles mainly of his early years and arranged them in a collection “For many years”, op.87
Nikolay Myaskovsky died in Moscow in his apartment surrounded by his sisters and close friends on 8 August 1950.

III. WORKS
III.1. Symphonies

“Composing my First Symphony determined my life. I realized that it was in this sphere of activity I would always search out the way of expressing myself. Theatre never attracted me, nor opera, nor ballet “, — wrote Myaskovsky in his autobiography. 
Myaskovsky finished the First Symphony in 1908 and wrote his last one (the Twenty Seventh) in 1950. His symphonies reflect the existentialist experiences of the artist in an epoch which was crushing the ideals of the “old art” with its tragic-philosophical concepts, mixed in with the fate the individual and the world.  The composer’s symphonies are parallel to the everyday time, to the morals and manners: “He was drawn to writing symphonies just as  he was drawn to life “ .
Looking into the deep psyche of Myaskovsky’s music displays him as an apologist for the 19th century.  Nevertheless he also managed to become a truly contemporary author with a unique musical language which absorbs, nevertheless, various earlier elements, such as Mussorgsky’s weeps and screams, Tchaikovsky’s dramatic pulses, or  Scriabin’s later chordal expressiveness, linear impulses and inspirations of serialism (in the music of 1920-s).
Myaskovsky’s music is shackled between silence and the scream (what is really astonishing is that his image is extremely close to the stance of Ingmar Bergman, a leading 20th century artist of the cinema).  The continual conflict between these poles dictated the principle contrast of his music between, on the one hand, heavy, multi-layer intensely dramatic slow sonorities and on the other, the realization of the flow of impulses of sound.
The sonata and polyphony are important principals of the dramatic development of Myaskovsky’s music. As a result of an interaction of these the musical form is dynamic yet distinct. Myaskovsky explores both structural and musical coloring opportunities of polyphony: for example, in one part of his Tenth Symphony, F-minor, op. 30, (1927) after a theme of Alexander Benua’s engraving based on Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, the fugue on the three themes (in the developing section) expresses the hero’s nightmares and hallucinations of the monument chasing him through the streets of St. Petersburg.
Already in Myaskovsky’s early symphonies his creative dualism is displayed: tragic philosophical orientation and extremely complicated works exist side by side with more objective and emotional expressions.  As an example, the Fourth Symphony, E minor, op. 17, with its horrible “sound pictures” of war is followed by the quiet Fifth Symphony, D-Major, op. 18, inspired by  the classical opera images of Petersburg composers. Both these works were composed in the upheavals of those fateful years of 1917-1918.
The tragedy of the Sixth Symphony,  E flat-minor, op. 23 (1921-1923) seems to quake to the foundations of existence.  According to the censored Soviet version (based on Myaskovsky’s  Autobiographic notes…) the work was inspired by the deserted cold streets of Petrograd, Myaskovsky’s empty house, recollections on his aunt’s death and Emil Verhaeren’s “Dawns”. The true story of the Sixth, however, has more than that: the Sixth is a requiem, written in memory of the composer’s father. In 1918, a revolutionary soldier shot dead the retired Yakov Myaskovsky on a public rail platform.
 The Sixth is the only symphony by Miaskovsy to include a choral part.  In the final  movement the choir sings Russian sacred lyrics (or dukhovny stikh)  .  Unlike the then new Soviet taste of optimistic symphonic finales Miasovsky has composed a so-to-say a “decrescendo structure” in the finale — from the French revolutionary songs to the sacred lyrics, according to a researcher, “which sounds like prayers of an entire peoples and of all humanity for mercy” .
Through the lens of his own tragedy, Myaskovsky has established a monument: his Sixth Symphony has become the confession of “a survivor in Russia”. The work was premiered on May 4, 1924 in Moscow and met with great acclaim.  Many in the audience were driven to tears. 
The style of Myaskovsky’s music in the 1930s dramatically changed.  Trying to find an explanation for this change through external causes is unhelpful. Following the completion of the Tenth Symphony with its high degree of complexity Myaskovsky (and — what’s amazing — Sergei Prokofiev  at the same time moved in the same direction) felt compelled to express himself with a simpler language.  Prokofiev termed this new style the “new simplicity”.  At the same time Myaskovsky sincerely tried to become “an artist of our time” (a phrase coming from “Autobiographic notes…” and the heading of the Myaskovsky’s Soviet biography by Alexei Ikonniov ). Myaskovsky’s symphonic creations of the 1930s revolve around a significant stylistic dualism (the Eleventh and Thirteenth symphonies, which Myaskovsky called “pages from a diary” e.g. personal references and the more objective style of the Twelfth and Fourteenth symphonies, attempting a new unified style. Myaskovsky was well aware of this dualism:  his refusal to permit the inclusion of his Thirteenth Symphony in a concert of Soviet music organized by Prokofiev in Paris was summed up by Myaskovsky:  “As for myself the features of my music would appear to be credible, but the face of Soviet music (thus presented) would appear to be a bit distorted”  (by my music’s inclusion). (January 1, 1934) .
Myaskovsky’s new style flourished in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and especially the Twenty-first symphonies,  This style is characterized by a lucid and simple harmony and an exquisite use of the diatonic keys, and the incorporation of many genres which he never used before.   For example the Sixteenth Symphony, F-Major, op. 39 (1936) is replete with genre influences.  Prokofiev felt one could perhaps notice “the trace of Glinka’s smile”  in the waltz theme of the second movement of this symphony or bucolic echoes in the trio in the same movement (“the composer invites us into a summer forest to hear the chirping of birds” ).
The Twenty-first Symphony, F sharp-minor, op. 51 (1940) is the summit of Russian symphonies of the 20th century.  In this small symphony in one movement, a dramatic element grows out of an introductory elegiac theme played by clarinet solo.  This quiet and tragic theme is a reminiscence of a “disappearing Russia”.
The last six symphonies by Myaskovsky were composed between 1942 and 1949, of which three during the war years.  While the Twenty-seventh Symphony, C-minor, op. 85 (posthumously premiered in Moscow on December 9, 1950) has gotten the most attention, the achievement of the Twenty Sixth Symphony in C Major should be recognized.  This latter was composed in 1948 shortly after the Resolution of the Communist Party’s Central Committee (February 10, 1948) which condemned Soviet composers in formalism and anti-populism.
The foundation of the symphony are themes from Russian sacred lyrics of the 15th – 16th centuries, which were collected and transcribed by the musicologist-folklorist, Victor Belyayev. These were the years when Soviet composers were coerced to write simpler music, oriented to everyday folkloric song and dance themes.  At the same time Myaskovsky turned to very origins of Russian music.  He wrote music about life and death, repentance and humility, of Christ’s path on heaven and earth; musical themes in his compositions which were far removed from the grim realities of 1948.  Through these creative acts of courage he predated the main themes of Russian musical research which occurred later in the 1950s and 1960s.
III.2. Piano sonatas. String quartets. Concertos. Vocal music.
Among other creative genres of the composer we want to mention  his piano sonatas, string quartets, concertos and vocal music.
The first four of his nine piano sonatas were written between 1909 and 1924.  Already in the First Sonata, D-minor, op. 6 (written while he was at the Conservatory between 1907 and1909) Myaskovsky’s style is full blown: the sonata in four movements starts with the  fugue marked in moderato.  Both the Second Sonata, F sharp-minor, op. 13 (1912) and the Third Sonata, in C minor, op. 19 (1920) have one movement.  The Second is like a Russian version of Franz Liszt’s Sonata, in B flat-minor.  The Third has much in common with Myaskovsky’s Fourth and Sixth symphonies.  
The Fourth Sonata, C minor, op. 27 (1925), in three movements, is one of his most complex musical statements.  It is full of desperate darkness and loneliness. The slow movement is written in a funereal saraband.
The final five sonatas were composed between 1944 and 1949 and they appear like sonatinas.  Myaskovsky employed in them unpublished sketches and drafts from his early years.
In 1910 Myaskovsky wrote two string quartets (D-minor, F-minor) but he published these works only in 1930, as numbers 3 and 4 of Opus 33, while two new ones from that year were the numbers1 and 2  Most of his quartets were written in  Myaskovsky’s later years and they represent his changing approach for the genre.  The quartets of Opus 30 look like “symphonies for four parts”.  Starting from the Fifth Quartet in E minor Opus 47 (1938) Myaskovsky  developed  an organic and characteristic  quartet style. The last, the Thirteenth Quartet, A minor, Opus 86 (1949) has become widely known. In it, the first of its four movements features a virtuoso fusing of a sonata form and a fugue structure with scatterings of polyphonic episodes.
Myaskovsky was the author of a Violin concerto and a Cello concerto. His Cello Concerto, C minor, Opus 66 (1944) is now the most often performed of any of the composer’s compositions.  This concerto is in two movements starting with a lento movement in a sonata form where the developing theme is combined with the solo cadenza. The concerto’s mood is very close to the Twenty-first symphony.
For a long time Myaskovsky’s Vocal music was not esteemed at its true worth. The composer himself in his “Autobiographic notes” tried to persuade Soviet authorities in the music establishment that he had “outgrown” his early symbolist inclinations.
But the more one goes through Myaskovsky’s songs and romances the more one sees the same dualism:  there are the epic and philosophic songs based on Russian 19th century poetry (like “Meditations”, Opus 1, 1907, marking Myaskovsky’s first official composition had lyrics from the verses of Eugene Baratynsky, who was rated one of the leading poets of Pushkin’s times) — and as well the complicated mystic symbolist songs (based on poetry from the Russian “Silver Age” of the late 19th century).
Often it is his vocal output which is the only key to understanding the musical language of the composer’s ideas.  “Myaskovsky was one of those composers who deeply and sincerely understood symbolist poetry. His music demonstrates a special empathy for the suffering tone of this poetry and it captures the tragedy of its spiritual devastation“ . According to one musicologist, Myaskovsky’s songs are permeated with the musical equivalents of poetic symbols.  These musical equivalents also showed up in his symphonic works, and are especially noticeable as pivotal elements in Myaskovsky’s Sixth and Twenty-sixth symphonies, both  based on poetic foundations. 

IV. PERFORMANCES OF MYASKOVSKY’S WORKS
“Whether from the bareness of any content or from his contempt for including any sort of sonoric delight, Myaskovsky’s creative works remain difficult for the public to understand”  . This assessment of the renowned Russian composer and musicologist, Boris Asafiev, remains pertinent today.
Myaskovsky’s music was conquering the world concert stages slowly but persistently. Between the World Wars I and II in the west, his works were the most performed of any Russian composer.  Leading conductors such as Nikolai Malko, Frederic Stock, Herman Sherkhen, Leopold Stokovski,and Eugene Ormandy played Myaskovsky’s symphonies in Europe and the USA.  Conductors Sergei Koussevitsky, Albert Couts, Konstantine Sarajev, Nikolai Golovanov, Evgeny Mravinsky, Oskar Fried, George Sebastian, Eugen Senkar performed them in Russia and the USSR.  The composer was only rarely satisfied with the performances of his own symphonies.  One such occasion was his admiration for the interpretation of the Twenty-first Symphony by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra: “Superb in every respect: tempo, the sound, the meaning” (Excerpts from the Diaries, January 15, 1945 ) .
Myaskovsky was in fact satisfied listening to the interpretations given to his chamber and piano music in performances by top Soviet and European artists: he approved the piano interpretations of Sergei Prokofiev, Samuel Feinberg, Heinrich  Neuhaus, Walter Giseking, Svyatoslav Richter, was partial to the performances of his quartets by the Beethoven Quartet, members of which were for many years his good friends  The composer had also had a preference for Ekaterina Kopossova-Derzhanovskaya’s  performances of his vocal music.
Myaskovsky had a long-term friendship with the leading musician and conductor of the Red Army orchestra, Ivan Petrov. Impressed by Petrov’s arrangement for his Eighteenth Symphony for brass band, Myaskovsky composed the first symphony ever written for winds in the Soviet period (the Nineteenth, E flat-Major, op. 46, 1939).
The fate of Myaskovsky’s music after his death has been sad.  In general it can be said that in the 1970s and 80s, performers were cool to Myaskovsky’s music.  Perhaps the most important event, however, was the recording of his complete symphonic works by the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the USSR under the direction of Evgeny Svetlanov as part of a larger recording project “The Anthology of Russian symphonic music” which was completed in 1993.  In the past decade Myaskovsky’s music is attracting renewed interest.  This catalogue of Myaskovsky’s works may serve to widen the familiarity of this leading Russian composer of the 20th century amongst a new generation of performers.




Michael Segelman