Nikolai Myaskovsky - Last Ten Years and Classicizing

Last Ten Years and Classicizing

The year 1941 saw Myaskovsky evacuated, along with Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian among others, to what were then the Kabardino-Balkar regions. Here he completed the Symphony-Ballade (Symphony No. 22) in B minor, inspired in part by the first few months of the war. Prokofiev's Second String Quartet and Myaskovsky's Symphony No. 23 and Seventh String Quartet contain themes in common — they are Kabardinian folk-tunes the composers took down during their sojourn in the region. The sonata-works (symphonies, quartets, etc.) written after this period and into the post-war years (especially starting with the Symphony No. 24, the piano sonatina, the Ninth Quartet) while Romantic in tone and style, are direct in harmony and development. He does not deny himself a teasingly neurotic scherzo, as in his last two string quartets (that in the Thirteenth Quartet, his last published work, is frantic, and almost chiaroscuro but certainly contrasted) and the general paring down of means usually allows for direct and reasonably intense expression, as with the Cello Concerto (dedicated to and premiered by Sviatoslav Knushevitsky) and Cello Sonata No. 2 (dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich).

What there is not is much experiment, no suggestion as with some earlier works that Scriabin or Arnold Schoenberg might still be an influence. Some things may work better and some worse in a late style like this. This may have been an attempt to dodge condemnation by the authorities, especially after the Zhdanov Decree. There was no dodging possible, and in 1947 Myaskovsky was singled out, with Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev, as one of the principal offenders in writing music of anti-Soviet, 'anti-proletarian' and formalist tendencies. Myaskovsky refused to take part in the proceedings, despite a visit from Tikhon Khrennikov pointedly inviting him to deliver a speech of repentance at the next meeting of the Composers' Union. He was only rehabilitated after his death from cancer in 1950, leaving an output of eighty-seven published opus numbers spanning some forty years and students with recollections. (There is also a recollection in the Volkov-Shostakovich book Testimony.) Myaskovsky was awarded with the Stalin Prize six times — no other composer was awarded this prize so often.