Markus Hinterhäuser

Music from the Black Hole

Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonatas

Harry Haskell

The history of 20-century music is replete with mavericks, misfits, and mystics, but no composer wore those labels more proudly—or with greater justification—than Galina Ustvolskaya. Born two years after the Russian Revolution in what was then called Petrograd, Ustvolskaya stayed tenaciously rooted in her native soil through the city’s transformation to Leningrad and its post-Soviet reincarnation as Saint Petersburg. She was one of Russian music’s notable survivors. And like other iconoclasts who refused to toe the party line, she paid a heavy price. Although Ustvolskaya escaped official condemnation, she was relegated to a kind of internal exile, a shadowy cult figure whose music was rarely heard in the USSR and all but unknown to the world at large until the late 1980s. Eleven years before her death she ventured abroad for the first time, to hear the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra premiere her Third Symphony under Valery Gergiev. But by then she had quit composing and had neither the strength nor the desire to bask in her belated celebrity.

A recluse in her private life, Ustvolskaya was tight-lipped about her music; the few interviews she granted under duress tended to be terse and uninformative. Numerous anecdotes attest to her prickly personality. According to the musicologist Rachel Claire Jeremiah-Foulds, her craving for privacy was so strong that “she and her husband reportedly bought four tickets instead of two every time they went on holiday, so that they did not have to share their train compartment with anyone else.” Ustvolskaya approached her work in an equally self-reliant spirit, saying, “I do not have drafts; I compose at the table, without an instrument. Everything is thought out with such care that it only needs to be written down. I’m always in my thoughts. I spend the nights thinking as well, and therefore do not have time to relax. Thoughts gnaw me. My world possesses me completely, and I understand everything in my own way… For me, the most important things are nature, silence, rest. But not people… The best thing is loneliness, because in loneliness I find myself, and through this I can actually live.”

The ingredients that went into Ustvolskaya’s music—driving rhythmic ostinatos and minimalist repetitions, dissonant tone clusters and adamantine blocks of sound, extreme dynamic contrasts and an aggressive thrust that verges on bombast—are the common vocabulary of modernism. Yet her tough-minded, rough-hewn music sounds like no one else’s. Ustvolskaya’s claim that “there is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead,” may have been overblown, but it was not wholly unfounded. She was particularly touchy about the putative influence of her teacher Dmitri Shostakovich. For many years their relationship was close and mutually admiring: Shostakovich quoted from his pupil’s music in two of his own works and even, on at least one occasion, proposed marriage. In the mid-1960s, however, Ustvolskaya abruptly turned on her mentor with a vengeance, publicly dismissing his music as “dry and soulless.” In her unquenchable thirst for autonomy, she succeeded in forging a style that was, to a remarkable extent, sui generis. Whatever Ustvolskaya did or did not glean from Shostakovich, their music is similarly saturated with existential bleakness and meditative intensity. Although several of Ustvolskaya’s later works feature sacred texts and subtitles, she maintained that they were generically “spiritual” rather than explicitly religious in nature. The composer Viktor Suslin, who represented Ustvolskaya at the Sikorski publishing house in Hamburg, linked her artistic sensibility to Leningrad’s history of violence and repression during her formative years. She herself described her music as emanating “aus dem schwarzen Loch” (from the black hole). Late in life, she disavowed most of the comparatively accessible (and ideologically acceptable) works she had written early in her career and pruned her catalogue to a mere 25 works, including symphonies, chamber music, and piano sonatas. “I don’t believe those who write 100, 200, or 300 works,” she declared, pointedly referring to Shostakovich. “It’s impossible in each of several hundred works, in such an ocean of works, to say anything new!”

Piano and percussion—the former characteristically treated almost as a member of the percussion family—are the common denominators in Ustvolskaya’s oeuvre. The Piano Concerto of 1946, the earliest work in her official catalogue, was followed a year later by the first of the six sonatas that would occupy her on and off until 1988. The piano sonatas were not conceived as a cycle; indeed, Ustvolskaya discouraged cyclical performances until trusted interpreters like Frank Denyer, Alexei Lubimov, and Markus Hinterhäuser persuaded her that the approach could be fruitful. Hearing the sonatas in sequence sheds light on their similarities as well as their differences. Sonatas Nos. 1 and 6 are the most concise, each taking less than ten minutes to play, while the intervening four are appreciably longer. Structurally, too, the sonatas vary considerably, consisting of one to ten untitled movements that are mostly joined without breaks. Tonight’s performance offers a chance to survey the totality of Ustvolskaya’s achievement, from the sharply accented declamatory figures that open the First Sonata to the harsh, densely packed sonic booms that bring the group to a close.

The 1940s: Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2

Dating from the late 1940s, Ustvolskaya’s first two piano sonatas betoken her interest in the spare, linear counterpoint that was a hallmark of Shostakovich’s early style. Indeed, Sonata No. 1 coincided with the 28-year-old composer’s graduation from the Leningrad Conservatory and her incipient efforts to wean herself from his tutelage. The work is laid out in four movements of vividly contrasting characters: a prefatory peal of brightly pinging eighth notes and shimmering trills; a livelier movement characterized by slashing dotted figures and wide, athletic leaps; a turgid, funereal intermezzo; and a schizophrenic finale that morphs from a soothing lullaby into something altogether more sinister as its two-against-three rhythms undermine the stability of the music’s relentlessly trudging pulse. Sonata No. 2 of 1949 is more lyrical and introspective. Its two movements are closely related thematically: the hypnotic, chant-like quality of the meandering melodic lines has struck some commentators as evidence of Ustvolskaya’s awakening spirituality and the inspiration she seems to have drawn from the music of the Russian Orthodox Church. (Jeremiah-Foulds further suggests that the music’s stoic quietude represents a highly personal protest against the Stalinist persecution of Shostakovich and other alleged “formalists” that peaked in the late 1940s.) Yet there is more than a hint of despair in the sonata’s Sisyphean struggle to scale the heights of lyricism by dint of persistent repetition. Moreover, Ustvolskaya’s decision to abandon bar lines and time signatures in this and her remaining four sonatas means that the music is as untethered metrically as it is melodically and harmonically.

The 1950s: Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4

If the Second Sonata offered a foretaste of the minimalist repetition that would figure prominently in Ustvolskaya’s later works, Sonata No. 3 (1952) elevated the technique to the structural level. Both individual notes and melodic cells are obsessively reiterated throughout the work; the latter often incorporate the interval of a half-step, giving the music a dark, brooding character. The longest of Ustvolskaya’s six sonatas, No. 3 is cast in a single movement, its monolithic bulk articulated by frequent shifts of tempo, texture, and dynamics. Pauses and silences allow the music space to breathe, as do the intermittent chorale-like passages in slowly moving block chords that reflect Ustvolskaya’s—and Shostakovich’s—interest in Bach. (Both composed sets of Bachian piano pieces in the early 1950s, and Shostakovich presented his protégée with the manuscript of his 24 Preludes and Fugues.) These contemplative interludes offset the visceral impact of the pounding rhythms that prompted one critic to dub Ustvolskaya “the lady with the hammer.”

The structure of Sonata No. 4, composed in 1957, is more clear-cut. Its four movements are run together without breaks, and Ustvolskaya’s manipulation of the thematic material produces a strong sense of organic unity. The three soft, closely spaced chords heard at the very beginning of the work reverberate in the second and fourth movements; undulating chains of equal-value notes constitute another subtle unifying motif. On the other hand, Ustvolskaya seems equally intent on creating disjunctures, as in the jarring contrasts of texture and motion that mark the onset of movements 2 and 3. In the finale, nervously twitching trills and isolated notes surrounded by rests conspire to conjure a phantasmagorical atmosphere.

The 1980s: Sonatas Nos. 5 and 6

In the 29 years that separate the Fourth and Fifth Sonatas, Ustvolskaya underwent a personal and artistic metamorphosis. The more she withdrew into the hermetic isolation that stimulated her creative juices, the more violent her music became, the starker its contrasts of register and dynamics grew, and the more virtuosity and stamina it demanded on the part of the pianist. In Sonata No. 5 (1986), Ustvolskaya adopted a kind of symmetrical “arch” construction, with the last of its ten short movements (or sections, as they are labeled in the score) recapitulating the first. Even her musical notation changed: the austere simplicity of the earlier scores was replaced by ever more specific and detailed instructions for phrasing, hand placement, the execution of tone clusters, and so forth.

Although Ustvolskaya’s last two sonatas were sandwiched between symphonies that incorporate edifying sacred texts, neither work offers much in the way of spiritual solace or redeeming grace. Sonata No. 6 of 1988, the next-to-last entry in the composer’s pareddown catalogue, assaults the senses with a savage and unremittingly loud barrage of tone clusters that tests the limits of the performer’s and listener’s endurance, even though it lasts little more than seven minutes. The concentrated ferocity of Ustvolskaya’s apocalyptic vision is interrupted only once, by a series of ethereal, Messiaen-like chords just before the end. Paul Griffiths’s comment about the Fifth Sonata applies equally to the Sixth: “We are a long way from reassurance, and from joy.”