Rodion Shchedrin, the composer, died on August 29 at ninety-two. My latest Music for a While is devoted to him. That podcast is here. I offer a personal appreciation, reading from some of my correspondence with Shchedrin. I also, of course, offer music—by Shchedrin and others.
He was born in Moscow in 1932; he died in Munich, his adopted home. His wife, who preceded him in death, was Maya Plisetskaya, one of the greatest ballerinas of all time. I used to say, “They must be the most talented couple in the world—rivaled, perhaps, by Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf,” those tennis greats.
In my podcast, I quote Shchedrin as saying, “For thirty-five years, there was a dictatorship of the avant-garde, and I was never a part of it.” Bear that word “dictatorship” in mind.
A week or so ago, I wrote an essay on the general subject of music and beauty (to be published in the not-too-distant future, I think). Did you know that beauty is controversial in music? It is, to a degree.
In this essay of mine, I recall a Q&A I did with Michael Haas, a music scholar, before an audience in Salzburg. That was in 2005, when the Salzburg Festival was highlighting “forbidden” composers, which is to say, composers forbidden by the Nazis. Among them were Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Korngold.
After the war, said Haas, they faced “a second dictatorship”—essentially, “a dictatorship of the avant-garde,” to use Shchedrin’s words.
My friend Lee Hoiby (1926–2011) was known to say, “I felt the hot breath of the composition police on my neck every time I wrote a major third.”
In 2002, I interviewed another American composer, Ned Rorem (1923–2022), who told me this:
I always felt like the Prodigal Son’s brother. I had never gone astray. People for many, many years did music of a particular kind because they thought they should—music of incredible complexity. Everyone wanted Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez. For nearly a generation, my music was “vulgar,” but that was the music that was in me. Now one can write anything one wants to.
Can they? There is certainly more freedom now, and less censoriousness. But the policemen, or commissars, still lurk.
In any event, Rodion Shchedrin was a highly interesting, and very gifted, man, and my Shchedrin-centric Music for a While is, again, here.
