Shchedrin Rodion Konstantinovich

Shchedrin Rodion Konstantinovich

Main article: History of music in Russia

Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin - Russian composer, author of 7 operas, 5 ballets, 3 symphonies and 14 concerts, numerous works of chamber, instrumental, choral music, actively wrote for cinema and theater.

Biography

Even in the 4th year of the Moscow Conservatory, Shchedrin became a member of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR for the First Piano Concerto (1954). In this work, for the first time in classical music, he introduced a ditty - the Siberian "Balalaechka Buzzes" and the famous "Semenovna." The concert received an ambiguous assessment from representatives of musical circles: most of them found the innovation of the work audacious and unfounded, and someone (Shchedrin suggested that Khachaturian) recommended including the composition in the program of the next plenum of the Union of Composers.

He worked a lot for the cinema. In particular, he wrote the music for the film "Height" (1957) directed by Alexander Zarkha, including the song "March of Installers" ("We are not stokers, not carpenters"), which glorified its creator throughout the Soviet Union.

Since 1958 he was married to ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.

Since 1962 - Secretary of the Board of the Union of Composers of the USSR.

Shchedrin gained fame very early, and primarily in theatrical genres: his ballets "The Little Humpbacked Horse" (1960), "Carmen Suite" (1967), the opera "Not Only Love" (1961) were staged at the Bolshoi Theater.

Shchedrin wrote mainly for classical compositions. But in its ideas and designs, its scores were innovative.

The opera "Not Only Love" (1961) is often compared to "country prose" in literature, "Mischievous Ditties" (1963) has become a subtle and somewhere even hooligan stylization of folklore.

It was for his wife that he composed his ballets, the most famous and most performed of which was the Carmen Suite (1967) - a biting transcription of Bizet's music, which the composer arranged for strings and drums.

Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, according to whose idea the production was born, persuaded to take up the re-layout of Georges Bizet's opera, first by Dmitry Shostakovich, then Aram Khachaturian. Those refused to "compete" with Bizet.

In the 1960s, such compositions as the concert for the Mischievous Ditties Orchestra (1963) and the oratorio Lenin in the Heart of the People, based on folklore material, as well as Poetoria for the Reader, Female Voice, Choir and Orchestra to Poems by A.A. Voznesensky "(1968; the poet himself spoke in the reader's party).

During this period, Shchedrin's style, initially focused on rather traditional folklorism, began to be characterized by a combination of elements of folk art and "avant-garde" techniques (elements of dodecaphony, sonoristics, etc.) The composer himself defined his style as "post-avant-garde"; in reality, it can be recognized as an "eclectic" style, which by no means denies the presence of great composing skills and virtuoso techniques of orchestral and instrumental writing.

He left the number of teachers at the Moscow Conservatory, entering into conflict with the party leadership of the theoretical and composer faculty.

1972 - USSR State Prize for the oratorio "Lenin in the Heart of the People" and the opera "Not Only Love."

Shchedrin told about this oratorio: "The fact is that in 1968 I refused to sign a letter when I brought our troops into Czechoslovakia, and the Voice of America notified about it.... And clouds have thickened over me.... And I had to do something... The authorities have thousands of opportunities to cut off your oxygen. Thousands. Not very noticeable. But the centenary of Lenin was just approaching, and I did just as my very close friend Andrei Voznesensky, who wrote 'Longjumo', did. To just somehow get out of this difficult situation with honor. And I think I got out with honor because the lyrics of that oratorio were documentary mements.'

In 1973 he was elected chairman of the board of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR. He worked in this post until 1990, voluntarily leaving it, after which he was left in the role of honorary chairman of the Union of Composers of Russia. The fact that at the head of a huge Russian composer organization for so many years there was a serious composer of an innovative orientation played an extremely progressive role. Great was his personal help to composers, musicologists, conductors.

Shchedrin's ballets Anna Karenina (1972), The Seagull (1980), The Lady with the Dog (1986), and the opera Dead Souls (1977) were also seen at the Bolshoi Theater.

Rethinking composer and spiritual music in a new way. Quite unexpectedly, Leskov's prose was embodied in his Russian liturgy in nine parts of The Captured Angel (1988) for the choir a capella and pipe.

In fact, this is the Liturgy using, including Old Believer spiritual texts. The work was written by Shchedrin in 1988.

Leskov's story "The Captured Angel" combined 9 parts, but did not serve as a program for Shchedrin's music. Separate elements were taken from it: the name, the text for the first number ("Angel of the Lord"), the image of the priest, the plot "cycle of purification." As the composer himself notes, he was attracted in the story of the icon painter Sevastyan, who painted the ancient miraculous icon desecrated by the powerful, primarily the idea of ​ ​ imperishable artistic beauty, magical, uplifting forces of art.

In relation to the liturgy, the composer did not set out to reproduce its entire sequence, but selected only a number of texts (from Everyday Life, Minea) with permutations and abbreviations. Stylistically, the principles of the Russian banner chant were used in the music (Shchedrin says that he can read hook musical writing) - the smoothness of singing, the "flatness" of the melody, the hopelessness. "

State Prize of the Russian Federation (1992) - for the choral music "Captured Angel" by Leskov.

In the 21st century, having created three operas at once - "The Enchanted Wanderer" (2002), "Boyar Morozov" (2006) and "Left-hander" (2012-2013) - Shchedrin advanced to the first row of modern opera composers.

The definition of the genre of the work given by Shchedrin: "The life and suffering of the boyar Morozova and the sister of her princess Urusova" is rooted not only in Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Virgin of Fevronia," but also deep into the history of church and singing art of Russia. In the 20th century, this genre was prepared by the choral cantatas of V.N. Salmanov and Sviridov, of course - by the unsurpassed "choral action" of V.Gavrilina. In the work of Shchedrin himself - "The Execution of Pugachev" (1981) for the choir a cappella, and a large choral form, united by a literary form in the 9-private "Captured Angel." Thus, the choral opera "Boyaryna Morozova" is perceived as a synthesis and the pinnacle of the composer's searches in this direction. [...] the almost complete absence of stage action brings Shchedrin's opera closer to oratorio genres, in fact, to the genre of "passions," which is quite correlated with the history of feat and suffering for faith. The choral beginning, as the embodiment of the folk image, is one of the most characteristic features of Russian historical opera. "I do not understand the actions of individual historical persons without a people, without a crowd, I need to pull them out into the street," said V. Surikov. It is known that in the painting "Boyar Morozov" the artist first depicted the crowd, and only then the title character. It is the reaction of others, with all its contradictions shown with such expressiveness, that makes it possible to judge the significance of the event, its dramatic strength. The people are praying and outrageous, frightened and cruel, not merging into the general mass, but expressive in individuals, for every grin and every tear is important to the story, which L. Tolstoy defined as "the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind." He identified in the same years when Mussorgsky created the most piercing "folk" dramas in the history of music. At the end of the 20th century, this tradition received a kind of continuation in the opera work of Shchedrin, first in "Dead Souls," and 30 years later in "Boyar Morozova."

2025: Death in Munich at the age of 93

Rodion Shchedrin died in August 2025 at the 93rd year of his life in Munich.

The ashes of ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who died in 2015, will be scattered over Russia along with the ashes of her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, in accordance with the artist's will, which she made with her husband.

The will itself in 2015 was published by Vladimir Urin, who was then the general director of the Bolshoi Theater, whom the composer introduced to the document.

"Our bodies will be cremated after death, and when the sad hour comes of the death of one of us who will live longer, or in the event of our simultaneous death, both of our ashes will be combined together and dispelled over Russia," the will says.