Shebalin Vissarion Yakovlevich

Main article: History of music in Russia

Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin is a mighty figure in the musical life of Moscow in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born on May 29 (June 11), 1902 in Omsk, in the family of Yakov Vasilyevich Shebalin, a mathematics teacher at the Omsk gymnasium, and Apollinaria Apollonovna Shebalina, a housewife.

At the Moscow Conservatory, he studied with Myaskovsky, whom he idolized and to whom he sought to get into the class. As Shebalin later recalled, he literally "looked in the mouth" of his teacher and treated him as a "creature of the highest order."

Immediately after graduating from the conservatory in 1928, Shebalin began to teach in it and very soon established himself as an outstanding teacher with the broadest outlook and liberal views. Khrennikov, B. Tchaikovsky, E. Denisov, Karetnikov, Gubaidulin studied with Shebalin.

In 1942, Shebalin headed the Moscow Conservatory as rector, but during the Zhdanovschina (1948) he was dismissed from his post.

Compositions

Romances

Romances occupy an important place in the creative heritage of Shebalin, he has more than 80 of them and most reflect the composer's subtle poetic flair (he himself composed poetry). "Five Passages from Sappho" was created by young Shebalin back in Omsk, the city where he was born, and where in just a year he completed a full course of study at a music school, preparing to move to Moscow.

It is striking that a 19-year-old young man from a distant, devastated by the Civil War and the revolutionary devastation of Siberia chose for his early composing experience exquisite translations of Vyacheslav Ivanov, which were published only a few years ago. The five excellent extremely brief romances are varied and colourful. In each of them, Shebalin finds his unique and very natural textural and harmonic solution (although not without the influence of Scriabin's music).

The young composer builds "Excerpts" according to the suite principle: from the lyrical introduction (... "I do not love"), through the scratch part ("Do I have a girl...") to the sad and even slightly tragic climax of the entire cycle ("The term is not..."). This is followed by a serene interlude ("Into the Circle of the Nymph Cave..."), and the composition ends with a stormy emotionally elevated ending ("Not Oaks of Raids..."). The fresh and even somewhat bold, on the verge of atonal, harmonic language of "Five Passages" is notable.