The Madonna of Stalingrad

"I spent Christmas evening with the other doctors and the sick. The Commanding Officer had presented the letter with his last bottle of champagne. We raised our mugs and drank to those we love, but before we had had a chance to taste the wine we had to throw ourselves flat on the ground as a stick of bombs fell outside. I seized my doctor's bag and ran to the scene of the explosions, where there were dead and wounded. My shelter with its lovely Christmas decorations became a dressing station. One of the dying men had been hit in the head and there was nothing more I could do for him. He had been with us at our celebration, and had only that moment left to go on duty, but before he went he had said: "I'll finish the carol first, O du fröhliche!" A few moments later he was dead. There was plenty of hard and sad work to do in our Christmas shelter. It is late now, but it is Christmas night still. And so much sadness everywhere."

The German army was trapped outside Stalingrad during the bitterly cold Christmas of 1942. Among the German troops was Kurt Reuber, a clergyman and doctor. Drawing on the back of map of Russian (the folds can be seen on the reproduction above) he used a stick of charcoal to portray Mary holding the baby Jesus in her arms, and shielding Him with her arms. The words above are taken from Kurt Reuber's last letter before he was captured by the Russians. He perished in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp.

His family chose the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin to display the Madonna of Stalingrad, and to pass on the message of light, love, and a sense of protection contained in this moving drawing. A message particularly appropriate at this Christmas time.

Two copies of the Madonna have been sent from Berlin as symbols of hope and reconciliation. One is in Coventry Cathedral which was destroyed by German bombs in 1940, and reconsecrated in 1962 with the first performance of Britten's War Requiem. The other is in the Russian Orthodox Church in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).

For more on the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church take An Overgrown Path to Music rises from the ruins in Berlin
The full story of Kurt Reuber and the Madonna, from which the quotation above was taken, can be read here. Image credit: Scanned from reproduction purchased in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Serial music - exploring the labyrinth

Several interesting points came out of my 'In Conversation' event with Alina Ibragimova before last night's Britten Sinfonia concert. One of them was that, following her CD of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's music, Alina's next recording will be the two violin concertos of Mykola Roslavets. In his excellent A Concise History of Western Music (CUP ISBN 0521842948) Paul Griffiths writes that 'The past is not a path we and our predecessor's have travelled but a labyrinth, and a labyrinth forever in flux', and Mykola Roslavets is an excellent example of how we are still exploring the labyrinth that is serial music.

Received wisdom tells us that Arnold Schoenberg originated serial composition, but did he? Mykola (Nikolai) Roslavets (left) was born in Ukraine in 1881. Although he was influential in the early years of the USSR as a champion of progressive Western composers, his music was politically suppressed at the end of the 1920s. Due to this he spent most of the remainder of his career as a ‘non-person’, and died in Moscow in 1944. But post-perstroika his music is having something of a renaissance.

Roslavets is of more interest than the many minor Russian composer of the period. He used a form of serial composition, and it may have pre-dated Schoenberg. The two composers approached the new tonal landscape from very different directions. Schoenberg used serial techniques to create a horizontal thread through his compositions, whereas Roslavet aggregated them vertically in a manner influenced by his countryman Alexander Scriabin. Roslavet's output included orchestral. chamber and piano music, as well as the two violin concertos that Alina Ibragimova is recording.

But Nikolai Roslavets is not the only pretender to the serial music crown. The Austrian Josef Matthias Hauer (below) was indisputably working ahead of Schoenberg. In 1919 he devised a proto-serial composition technique using twelve-tone rows with variable tone sequences. Hauer lived from 1883 to 1959, and his compositions were branded 'degenerate art' by the Nazis. In a link to another path Hauer is thought to have been a model for characters in both Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. There is much unpublished music by Josef Mattias Hauer, and all his compositions after 1940 are described by him as Zwölftonspiel or Zwölftonmusik - twelve-tone song, or twelve-tone music. A recording project there perhaps?

Another piece of received wisdom worth revisiting is that serial techniques were the sole preserve Central European. In 1956 the English composer William Alwyn (below) developed his own take on the new tonalities in the Allegro of his Symphony No. 3. This uses an alternation of eight note and four note groups in a pattern suggested to the composer by Indian classical music quite sometime before Philip Glass and others made such fusions fashionable. William Alwyn may not have the cachet of his American and Central European peers, but his music certainly deserves greater recognition.

But in the end it doesn't really matter who invented serial music. As Paul Griffith explains history is not linear, but is a labyrinth where change is constant. Within the labyrinth several composers independently developed their own serial languages, and they are all worth exploring. Alina Ibragimova's CD of Nikolai Roslavets' violin concertos is being recorded with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and will be released by Hyperion in 2008. And there is more on William Alwyn here.

* I am aware that 'serial techniques' and 'twelve-tone music' are terms that may not be familiar to all my readers. Here is a wonderfully lucid explanation from A Pilgrim Soul by Meirion and Susie Harris. Which also gives me an opportunity maintain the gender balance by linking to another English pioneer of serial techniques, Elisabeth Lutyens:

'Serialism, the twelve-tone method was a logical extension of the abandonment of tonality (the key system) which had begun long before the end of the nineteenth century. As music progresses towards dissonance and away from tonality, it became obvious that some other source of coherence would be needed, some alternative means of organising the material as effectively as the key system had done.

The key system gave automatic priority to certain notes in the scale; but to those using the serial method, all twelve notes of the octave, black and white, were equally important, and all were used as the basic material of any composition. In serial music the fundamental idea of the composition was presented in a series of the twelve notes in a characteristic order, with no note repeated until all the others had been used, to ensure that none had precedence. The whole piece was to be evolved from this basic set, by a process of continuous variation and development, so that every part of the work could in some way be related to the original idea.

Both the horizontal and the vertical dimension of the musical 'space' were penetrated by the basic idea, so that not only the melodies but also the harmonies were regulated by the order of notes within the series and the relationship between them. For variety, the series could also be played upside down, back to front, and transposed up or down the scale, as long as the order of the notes was preserved.

Those who used the serial technique felt it vital to explain that it was no more mechanical, no more a formula than the key system with all the rules it possesses. It was not a prescription, but a tool to help different composers express themselves differently, adapting the method to their own ends. 'I do not compose principles,' wrote Schoenberg angrily, 'but music'.'


Main images are, of course, by M C Escher. The header is Convex and Concave, the lower is Day and Night. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Stravinsky - the cricket wearing spats

'It was November, extremely cold with an east wind. I crossed the Channel and called on Stravinsky. He was living in the Fauborg St Honore, in a very elegant apartment. He was spruce and gnome-like, immaculately dressed, and looking more like a business executive than a composer. But this impression changed as we sat talking: he was precisely like a cricket wearing spats. Just as a cricket will stay immobile, then suddenly bound into the air with a spring of compressed energy, so I had the feeling that Stravinsky might bound through the ceiling at any moment. He looked alert, nervous though not neurotic, as though he had just emerged from one of those baths where you are rubbed with ice and beaten with birch-sticks.

... Suddenly...the cricket sprang, 'I want to show you something,' he said, and led me into his study. It was a small room, clinically tidy with an upright piano. Stravinsky went straight across the room to a shelf beside his piano and took down a portrait bust which he gave me to hold. I held the bust, which I did not recognise, and Stravinsky stood beside me as though he were observing a two minute's silence. 'Webern is the greatest composer of this century,' he said finally. He took the portrait from me and put it back on the shelf.

From that moment our relationship was less formal. He told me he always composed at the piano: he had to hear the note to be absolutely certain it was precisely the sound he wanted. Dozens of kinds of pencils, paper-clips, contraptions for punching papers and threading them together littered a side-table. The room was full of gadgets or desk-toys which he believed made him more efficient.

Stravinsky was pathetically pleased that I had called on him. He feared my generation 'had got lost in Sibelius and had never heard of his music'. I told him how much I admired the Symphony of Psalms and his Octet for Wind Instruments - especially. I said, the very last part of it. He picked up a score and went to the piano. 'You mean from here?' he asked. 'Precisely.' 'Yes,' he said., 'I joined that bit on. I wrote it originally as an epitaph for Debussy.'

I tried to interest him in Britten, but he was too self-absorbed to be aware of anybody else's work. He was interested only in Webern, somebody he could use. I mean nothing derogatory in that.'

Ronald Duncan describes a 1936 meeting with Stravinsky in his book Working With Britten (The Rebel Press ISBN 0900615303). Duncan was the librettist for The Rape of Lucretia and also worked on Peter Grimes.

Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia at noon, June 5th 1882 in the old Russian calendar. This birthdate is usually translated as June 17th in the new calendar, but sometimes as June 18th, and even June 19th by Naxos. Whichever day, happy birthday Igor!

Now read about Stravinsky's Tibetan connection. View Stravinsky videos on YouTube via this link, and here is a 3 minute copyright cleared sample from his 1944 Mass - .

The photo shows Stravinsky in his Paris studio in 1929. The audio sample is via Boosey & Hawkes and is performed by the Gregg Smith Singers and Columbia Symphony Winds & Brass from Sony SM2K 46301. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

In search of the lost score

Hello, I have read with interest your posts about Russian composers and Stalin. Your blog is highly informative and entertaining as well, and on an amazingly wide array of topics. I've been trying to find scores by and information about Vavera Gaigerova and Valery Zhelobinski (Jelobinsky). These tantalizing figures have proven completely elusive, yet they were published by the Soviet houses during their lives. Do you know of any resources that I might consult that may lead to performance material? I've been asking folks around the world to no avail. What did the Soviets do with music by composers who fell out of favor? Did they destroy it or bury it within archives? If I can find material I am reasonably sure that I can get recordings made.

My apologies for bothering you out of the blue. Thanks for any info you might offer. Regards, John McLaughlin Williams.

Can anyone help John? Add Comments below, or email to me at overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk and I'll pass it on.
And while we are on the subject of lost scores read about Furtwängler and the forgotten new music.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Music is in the soul of Russia

Stephen Moss tells it like it is in his Guardian music blog, and links to On An Overgrown Path:

It is of course distressing news that the great Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich is seriously ill in a Moscow hospital. Long may this remarkable performer and life-force live. I once shared a lift with him on the morning after a concert he had conducted in Milan, and his extraordinary energy was apparent even then - at 7.30am, following a party that had gone on into the early hours. A bear hug from "Slava" leaves you winded: his commitment and passion, for life and for music, are legendary; listen to him perform the Bach cello suites or conduct Tchaikovsky's ballets, and you will soon realise why he has been a towering presence in music-making for half a century.

How many other ailing classical musicians would make the news in the way that Slava has? And an even more pertinent question: if Slava were British, would our head of state or prime minister have made a special trip to hospital to wish him well, as Russian president Vladimir Putin is said to have done recently? Somehow, I can't imagine the Queen or Blair rushing to be at the bedside of Charles Mackerras or Colin Davis or Janet Baker if, perish the thought, they were seriously ill in hospital.

In Britain, the link between culture and politics is less umbilical than in Russia. The part serious art plays in national life and the taste of our leaders is also rather more restricted. Perhaps if Lester Piggott had a life-threatening condition, our racing-mad Queen would gallop to his aid; and Blair would, presumably, want to be there if, say, Noel Gallagher was stricken with something terrible. But Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies? Even the Master of the Queen's Music would, I suspect, only get a card.

Putin is said to be fond of the popular classics - Tchaikovsky and Schubert have been mentioned - and also claims to have read a good deal of Russian literature. This may just be spin. But I like to believe it is true - that the steely-eyed but sweet-faced former KGB colonel really does have a penchant for great music and a soft spot for Slava, who is also a political hero in Russia for standing alongside Boris Yeltsin in the face of a communist coup in 1991. And that this represents something profoundly Russian - the sense that music is in the soul of this great nation. That what is now thought of as a country of oligopolists and mafiosi, poverty, hunger and exploitation, is still, at heart, the land of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Horowitz, David Oistrakh, Maxim Vengerov ... and on and on. Russia has given more to music-making in the past 120 years than any other country.

The close link between politics and art has a downside, as Shostakovich discovered when Stalin began to take an over-critical view of his work in the 1930s. But I almost prefer that to the indifference of our own leaders, who wouldn't know a Tintoretto from a traffic cone. Thatcher, Major, Blair - do they have an ounce of artistic interest between them? No wonder the Millennium Dome's celebration of culture on New Year's Eve 1999 was such a fiasco: it was organised by a political class for whom great art has no value. Whose budget is to be slashed so the Olympics can get its billions? Why, the Arts Council of course.

Soviet communism proved to be a disaster, but boy did it take the arts seriously - Jade Goody and Cat Deeley would not have been major figures in Smolensk circa 1938. And I don't suppose President Putin is perfect, but he certainly knows a great musician when he sees one - and somehow finds the time in what must be a busy day running his chaotic country to tell a sick man what he has meant to Russia.

Meanwhile back On An Overgrown Path let's remember that Dmitri Shostakovich dedicated both his cello concertos to Mstislav Rostropovich. Listen, and see, Rostropovich talking about Shostakovich and the composition of Cello Concerto No 1 via these BBC Radio 3 online resources.
Rostropovich on playing to Shostakovich
Rostropovich on the Cello Concerto no. 1

And now read more about the musical tastes of our politicians
Photo credit Lavandeira jr/EPA. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Let's celebrate the good news from Kiev

Why are we so fixated on bad news from the former Soviet Union? When we are not replaying yesterday's revelations about Shostakovich, Stalin's purges and communist black-lists we are broadcasting today's news about gas prices and murder by plutonium. It is all rather sad, and baffling, because there is so much to celebrate in this vibrant region. So today, let's counterbalance the awful religous persecution, that lasted from the revolution of 1917 to the millenium of the Russian Church in 1988, with the good news of a new cathedral that is nearing completion in Kiev in Ukraine, and then follow that story with a download of music from one of the region's monasteries.

The new patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in Kiev, which can be seen in my photo above, is a five-domed church 49 meters wide, 56 meters long and 61 meters high. It combines traditional design with contemporary features. Four of the gilded domes, representing the four evangelists, surround a larger, central dome, representing the figure of Christ. There is capacity for some 1,500 faithful to worship. When the new cathedral is completed the spiritual centre of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church will move from St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv to the capital of Ukraine, where currently the Greek Catholics only have two small churches.

The Cathedral of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is sited on a channel of the Dnipro River, and there is a special alleyway to allow for processions to the banks of the Rusanivka Channel for Epiphany celebrations. Noted Ukrainian architect Mykola Levchuk designed the structure, which took the top prize for contemporary building designs for religious structures at a recent architectural design contest in Moscow.Mykola Levchuk, 62, from Kiev, is the director of the renown local architectural practice Kyivproyekt.

Now playing - Orthodox Church Music from Ukraine sung by the monks of The Holy Trinity, St Jonah Monastery, Kiev. This monastery was founded in 1862, but was suppressed in 1934. Following the collapse of communism the monastery once again became a religous foundation centred on the monastic church, which dates from 1871. Services are also held in the Zverinetskoe cave complex nearby which has been a place of worship since the 13th century. This excellent CD of hymns from the All-Night Vigil is from a catalogue of more than 100 recordings of Orthodox music on the Ikon label which is linked to the Diocese of Sourozh in London, part of the Patriarchate of Moscow. If you like Rachmaninov's take on the Orthodox Vespers you are going to like the real thing - listen to this 1' 12" MP3 file of Antiphons of Ascent (Tone 4) from Matins -

* The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is building the patriarchial cathedral in Kiev, is the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and is a Church of the Byzantine rite which recognises Papal supremacy. The Holy Trinity - St Jonah Monastery is part of the Russian Orthodox Church which recognises the Patriarch of Moscow as its head.

* It is extraordinary that the Eastern Orthodox Church (of which the Russian Church is part) is not better known in English speaking countries. It has 240 million members around the world, making it the second largest Christian congregation after the Catholics. The Orthodox Church is the original Christian Church founded by the followers of Jesus, from which the Catholics and Anglicans split. St Stephen's Press, the publishing house of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Diocese of Sourozh, has an excellent slim introduction to the church. The title is The Orthodox Church, the author is Sergei Hackel (that link is to a biography well worth reading), the ISBN is 0951903721, the cover is shown here, and it is available from Amazon. Readers interested in liturgical music and the visual arts are urged to explore the riches of the Orthodox faith.

* Recommended web resources include Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church - Religous information service of Ukraine - History of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Orthodox links - Encyclopedia of Ukraine. IOCC is the official humanitarian aid agency of Orthodox Christians worldwide. It was founded in the US in 1992, and has field offices in Russia, Georgia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia Herzogovina, Romania and Jerusalem.

For more inspirational new cathedrals and monasteries with musical connections take An Overgrown Path to Evry Cathedral, and La Tourette in France, and Prinknash Abbey in England.
With many thanks to the French langauage newsletter of my spiritual home in France, the Benedictine L'Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux, for the heads-up on this story. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Soviet blacklist fatigue sets in

BBC Radio 3 is currently running a commercial radio style promotional trailer for their Sofia Gubaidulina festival next weekend, and this trailer uses Soviet blacklisting as a positive feature of Gubaidulina's music. Now I am a huge fan of Sofia Gubaidulina, and have already praised the festival here. But using Soviet blacklisting as an endorsement is a dangerous path to go down. Among the other contemporary musicians who could claim this particular endorsement are Village People (above), Donna Summer and Julio Iglesias. And does the fact that the Soviet state concert agency Goskoncert actively promoted Shostakovich's music from 1955 reduce his claim to be a great composer?

Now read about The frustration of the classical music industry
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The Madonna of Stalingrad

"I spent Christmas evening with the other doctors and the sick. The Commanding Officer had presented the letter with his last bottle of champagne. We raised our mugs and drank to those we love, but before we had had a chance to taste the wine we had to throw ourselves flat on the ground as a stick of bombs fell outside. I seized my doctor's bag and ran to the scene of the explosions, where there were dead and wounded. My shelter with its lovely Christmas decorations became a dressing station. One of the dying men had been hit in the head and there was nothing more I could do for him. He had been with us at our celebration, and had only that moment left to go on duty, but before he went he had said: "I'll finish the carol first, O du Frohliche!" A few moments later he was dead. There was plenty of hard and sad work to do in our Christmas shelter. It is late now, but it is Christmas night still. And so much sadness everywhere."

The German army was trapped outside Stalingrad during the bitterly cold Christmas of 1942. Among the German troops was Kurt Reuber, a clergyman and doctor. Drawing on the back of map of Russian (the folds can be seen on the reproduction above) he used a stick of charcoal to portray Mary holding the baby Jesus in her arms, and shielding Him with her arms. The opening words are taken from Kurt Reuber's last letter before he was captured by the Russians. He perished in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp.

His family chose the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin to display the Madonna of Stalingrad, and to pass on the message of light, love, and a sense of protection contained in this moving drawing. A message particularly appropriate at this Christmas time.

Two copies of the Madonna have been sent from Berlin as symbols of hope and reconciliation. One is in Coventry Cathedral which was destroyed by German bombs in 1940, and reconsecrated in 1962 with the first performance of Britten's War Requiem. The other is in the Russian Orthodox Church in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).

For more on the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church take An Overgrown Path to Music rises from the ruins in Berlin
The full story of Kurt Reuber and the Madonna, from which the quotation above was taken, can be read here. Image credit: Scanned from reproduction purchased in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk