Famous women composers. Women are composers. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin

TEXT: Oleg Sobolev

AS IN ANY OTHER AREAS OF CLASSICAL ART Western world, in the history of academic music there are countless forgotten, but worthy of a story about themselves women. Especially in the history of composer's art. Even now, with the number of notable female composers growing every year, works written by women are rarely included in the seasonal schedules of the most famous orchestras and concert programs of the most famous performers.

When a work by a female composer does become the object of audience or journalistic attention, the news of this is necessarily accompanied by some sad statistics. Here's a fresh example: This season the Metropolitan Opera played the genius Love from Afar by Kaia Saariaho - the first opera, written by a woman, shown at this theater since 1903. It is comforting that the compositions of Saariaho - as, for example, the music of Sofia Gubaidulina or Julia Wolf - are performed quite often even without such news feeds.

Selecting a few lesser-known musical heroines from a long list of female names is a difficult task. The seven women, which we will talk about now, have one thing in common - they, to one degree or another, did not fit into the world around them. Someone solely because of their own behavior, destroying cultural foundations, and someone - through their music, which cannot be matched with an analogue.

Louise Farranc

Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she became famous in the world of European music in the 1830s and 1840s as a pianist. Moreover, the girl's performing reputation was so high that in 1842 Farranc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory. She held this post for the next thirty years and, despite the pedagogical workload, managed to prove herself as a composer. However, it was more likely that she did not “manage to show”, but “could not fail to show”. Farranc came from the most famous dynasty of sculptors and grew up among the best people of Parisian art, so the act of creative self-expression for her was extremely natural.

During her lifetime, having published about fifty compositions, mostly instrumental, Madame Professor received rave reviews about her music from Berlioz and Liszt, but in her homeland Farranc was perceived as an overly non-French composer. In France, every first promising author wrote hours-long operas, and the Parisian's laconic and inspired by the music of the era of classicism really ran counter to the fashion of the time. Quite wrong: her best works - like the Third Symphony in G minor -, to put it mildly, do not get lost against the background of the mastodons of that time like Mendelssohn or Schumann. Yes, and Brahms, with his attempts to translate classicism into the language of the romantic era, Farranck bypassed for ten, or even twenty years.

Dora Pejacevic

A representative of one of the most noble Balkan noble families, the granddaughter of one of the bans (read - the governors) of Croatia and the daughter of another, Dora Pejacevic spent her childhood and adolescence exactly the way in world pop culture people like to portray the life of young and carefully guarded by a family of young aristocrats ... The girl grew up under the strict supervision of English governesses, almost did not communicate with her peers and, in general, was brought up by her parents with an eye on a further successful marriage for the family, rather than a happy childhood.

But something went wrong: Dora, as a teenager, caught fire with the ideas of socialism, began to constantly conflict with her family and, as a result, at twenty-odd years, she was cut off from the rest of the Peyachevichs until the end of her life. This, however, only benefited her other hobby: at the dawn of the First World War, the rebellious noblewoman established herself as the most significant figure in Croatian music.

Dora's compositions, evenly inspired by Brahms, Schumann and Strauss, sounded extremely naive by the standards of the world around her - for example, at the time of the premiere of her old-fashioned piano concerto in Berlin and Paris, they were already listening to Pierrot Lunar and Sacred Spring. But if we abstract from the historical context and listen to Pejacevich's music as a sincere declaration of love for the German romantics, then it will be easy to notice her expressive melodism, made at a high level of orchestration and careful structural work.

Amy Beach

The most famous episode in the biography of Amy Beach can be retelled as follows. In 1885, when she was 18 years old, Amy's parents married her to a 42-year-old surgeon from Boston. Even then, the girl was a virtuoso of playing the piano and hoped to continue her music studies and performing career, but her husband decided otherwise. Dr. Henry Harris Audrey Beach, preoccupied with the status of his family and guided by the then ideas about the role of women in secular New England society, forbade his wife to study music and limited her performances as a pianist to one concert a year.

For Amy, who dreamed of concert halls and sold-out recitals, this turned out to be tantamount to tragedy. But, as often happens, the tragedy gave way to triumph: although Beach sacrificed her performing career, she began to devote herself more and more to writing and is now unambiguously defined by most researchers as the best American composer of the late romantic era. Two of her main works - the Gaelic Symphony published in 1896 and the piano concerto that followed three years later - are really beautiful, even if by the standards of those years they are completely devoid of originality. The most important thing is that in Beach music, as one might assume, there is absolutely no place for provincialism and parochialism.

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger is much more famous in the circles of serious admirers, researchers and simply lovers of American folk music than in the world of academic music. Why? There are two key reasons: first, she was the wife of musicologist Charles Seeger, and therefore the ancestor of the Seeger clan, a family of musicians and singers who have done more to popularize American folk than anyone else. Secondly, for the last ten years of her life, she worked closely on cataloging and arranging songs recorded on numerous trips by John and Alan Lomax, the largest American folklorists and collectors of folk music.

Surprisingly, until the beginning of their life together, both Ruth and Charles Seeger were composers of an extremely modernist sense, applying the word "folklore" to their music with great difficulty. In particular, the works of Ruth Crawford in the early 30s can only be compared with the works of Anton Webern - and even then only in terms of skillfully constructed drama and laconically concentrated musical material. But if Webern's traditions shine through every note - it does not matter whether Austrian or Renaissance music - then Seeger's works exist as if outside of tradition, outside the past and outside the future, outside America and outside the rest of the world. Why is a composer with such an individual style still not included in the canonical modernist repertoire? Mystery.

Lily Boulanger

It would seem, what kind of music could an eternally sick, deeply religious and pathologically modest French woman from high society compose at the beginning of the last century? That's right - one that could serve as a good soundtrack for the Day of Judgment. The best compositions of Lily Boulanger are written on religious texts such as psalms or Buddhist prayers, they are often performed as if by an improperly adjusted choir to a torn, non-melodic and loud musical accompaniment. You cannot find an analogue to this music on the fly - yes, it is partly similar to Stravinsky's early works and to Honegger's especially fiery compositions, but neither one nor the other reached such depths of despair and did not go into such extreme fatalism. When composer Gabriel Fauré, a friend of the Boulanger family, established that three-year-old Lily had perfect pitch, her parents and older sister could hardly have imagined that this gift would be embodied in something so unangelical.

By the way, about my sister. Nadia Boulanger turned out to be a figure in the history of music by far more significant. For almost half a century - from the 20s to the 60s - Nadia was considered one of the best music teachers on the planet. Having very specific views both on music that was new for those times, and on music in the literal sense of the word, classical, tough, irreconcilable and exhausting her students with the most difficult tasks, Nadia, even for her ideological opponents, remained an example of musical intelligence of unprecedented memory and power. Perhaps she could have become as significant a composer as she turned out to be a teacher. In any case, she began exactly as a composer - but, by her own admission, after Lily's death, something broke inside Nadia. Having lived for 92 years, the older sister never reached the heights of the few works of the younger, burnt out from Crohn's disease at the age of 24.

Elizabeth Maconkey

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the greatest British composer of the last century, was a passionate champion of national musical traditions. Thus, he enthusiastically reworked folk songs, wrote choral works suspiciously similar to Anglican hymns, and, with varying success, rethought the work of English composers of the Renaissance. He also taught composition at London's Royal College of Music, where his favorite student in the 1920s was a young Irish girl named Elizabeth Maconkey. Decades later, she will tell that it was Vaughan Williams, even though he was a traditionalist, advised her never to listen to anyone and in composing music to focus only on her interests, tastes and thoughts.

The advice was decisive for Maconca. Her music has always remained untouched by both the global trends of the academic avant-garde and the eternal English-Celtic love of rural folklore. Just in her student years, who discovered Bela Bartok for herself (a composer, by the way, who also worked outside of any obvious tendencies), Makonki in her works naturally started from the mature music of the great Hungarian, but at the same time, she consistently developed her own style, much more intimate and introspective. Vivid examples of the originality and evolution of Makonka's composer's imagination are her thirteen string quartets, written from 1933 to 1984 and together forming a cycle of quartet literature, in no way inferior to those of Shostakovich or Bartok.

Vitezslava Kapralova

A few years before the First World War, an inconspicuous Czech composer and concert pianist Vaclav Kapral founded a private music school for novice pianists in his native Brno. The school continued to exist after the war, soon earning a reputation as one of the best in the country. The stream of those wishing to study, and to study specifically from the Corporal himself, even for a short while made the composer think about stopping all the rest of his activities in favor of teaching.

Fortunately, his daughter Vitezslava, who at that time had not yet celebrated her tenth birthday, suddenly began to demonstrate an extraordinary talent for music. The girl played the piano better than many adult professionals, memorized the entire classical song repertoire and even began to write small pieces. The corporal developed a plan, surprising in the degree of arrogance, stupidity and commercialism: to grow from Vitezslava a real monster of music, capable of replacing him as the main teacher of the family school.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. The ambitious Vitezslava, who wanted to become a composer and conductor, at the age of fifteen entered two corresponding faculties at the local conservatory at the same time. So that a woman wants to conduct - this was not seen in the Czech Republic of the 30s before Kapralova. And to conduct and compose at once - it was generally unthinkable. It was to compose music that the newly enrolled student began in the first place - and of such a quality, such a stylistic variety and in such volumes that there is really no one to compare with.

Great women of Russia

Anastasia Moreva

The Voronezh Composers' Organization dedicated the spring music and educational quiz to the great women of Russia. Her heroines are Catherine the Great, Natalya Goncharova, poetesses Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, woman-cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Adults and young participants of the quiz with interest learned little-known facts from the biographies of outstanding women, listened to the performance of the Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Lyubov Kontsova, the soloist of the Voronezh Opera Elena Petrichenko.

For example, the Russian Empress Catherine II laid the foundation for female education in Russia. On her initiative, the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, a school at the Academy of Arts, and the Society of Two Hundred Noble Maidens were opened. Catherine was engaged in literary activity, leaving behind a large collection of works - notes, translations, fables, fairy tales, comedies, essays, as well as a libretto for several operas. Took part in the weekly satirical magazine "Anything and everything".

Natalia Goncharova - wife and muse of A.S. The poet's lines are dedicated to Pushkin: "I am married and happy ... This state is so new to me that it seems that I was reborn." Married to the great poet, she gave birth to four children. The program included works by M.I. Glinka, A.S. Dargomyzhsky, as well as the Voronezh composer Vladimir Naumov on verses by A.S. Pushkin.

Many first heard the name of the genius woman, poet and writer Evdokia Rostopchina. She was familiar with A.S. Pushkin, M.I. Lermontov, V.A. Zhukovsky, N.V. Gogol, meetings with whom served as an impetus for writing his own poems. She composed lyric plays, novels in prose, dramatic plays for the theater. In St. Petersburg, in the Rostopchins' house, musical evenings were often given, which were attended by F. Liszt, M.I. Glinka, Prince V.F. Odoevsky, writers A.N. Ostrovsky and L.A. May, as well as artists M.S. Shchepkin, I. V. Samarin and others. We are interested in the fact that the Countess spent two years in the Voronezh estate owned by her husband - the city of Anna. The opening of the evening was the performance of the romances "You Remember Me" by E. Krylatov and "Morning" by A. Rubinstein to the lyrics by E. Rostopchina.

The listeners were presented with romances by the Voronezh composer Alexander Ukrainsky to the poems of Anna Akhmatova "Love", "Let the organ's voices burst again", glorifying the triumph of art, spring, love, real poetry. The text of the poems is conveyed in the composer's music with amazing shrillness and penetration.

Marina Tsvetaeva – a poet who praises natural beauty and joyful feelings of love. The difficult life path of Tsvetaeva is reflected in her work, which is saturated with the motives of romantic love, rejection and loneliness. The works of another Voronezh composer A. Mozalevsky were written on the verses of M. Tsvetaeva, which completed the evening program.

"It is more likely that a man will give birth to a child than a woman will write good music," the German composer Johannes Brahms once said. A century and a half later, women composers gather the world's largest concert halls, write music for films and come up with important social initiatives. "April", together with the cosmetic brand NanoDerm, talks about women whose talent and work helped to refute the stereotype about the "male" profession of a composer.

1. Cassia of Constantinople

The Greek nun Cassia was born into a wealthy Constantinople family in 804 or 805. Today she is known not only as the founder of the convent in Constantinople, but also as one of the first female hymnographers and composers.

Cassia was very beautiful and, according to some sources, in 821 even participated in the bride show for the emperor Theophilos. The girl was not destined to become the wife of the emperor, and soon Cassia was tonsured a nun in order to spend her whole life in the monastery founded by her. There, Cassia composed church hymns and canons, and an analysis of her works containing references to the works of ancient authors allows us to draw a conclusion about the girl's good secular education.

Cassia of Constantinople is one of the first composers whose works can be performed by contemporary musicians.

2. Hildegard of Bingen

The German nun Hildegard Bingen was an extraordinary person not only when it came to writing music - she also worked on works on natural science and medicine, wrote mystical books of visions, as well as spiritual poetry.

Hildegard was born at the end of the 11th century and was the tenth child in a noble family. From the age of eight, the girl was raised by a nun, and at 14 she began to live in a monastery, where she studied art and liturgy.

The girl began composing music to her own verses as a child, and already in adulthood she collected her works in a collection called "Harmonious Symphony of Celestial Revelations." The collection includes chants, combined into several parts on liturgical themes.

3. Barbara Strozzi

Italian composer Barbara Strozzi, later dubbed "the virtuoso", was the illegitimate daughter of the poet Giulio Strozzi, who later adopted her. Barbara herself had four illegitimate children from different men. The girl was born in 1619 in Venice and studied with the composer Francesco Cavalli.

Strozzi wrote cantatas, ariette, madrigals, and her father Giulio wrote the texts for her daughter's works. Barbara became the first composer to publish her works not in collections, but one at a time. The music of Barbara Strozzi is performed and reissued today.

4. Clara Schumann

Born Clara Wieck was born in 1819 in Leipzig, in the family of the famous piano teacher Friedrich Wieck in the city and country. From an early age, the girl learned to play the piano with her father, and already at the age of 10 she began to successfully perform in public.

Together with her father, Clara toured Germany, then gave several concerts in Paris. Around the same time, young Clara began writing music - her first works were published in 1829. At the same time, young Robert Schumann became a student of Friedrich Wieck, whose admiration for the teacher's talented daughter grew into love.

In 1940, Clara and Robert got married. Since then, the girl began to perform music written by her husband, often she was the first to present to the public new compositions by Robert Schumann. The composer Johannes Brahms, a close family friend, also entrusted the debut performance of his works to Clara.

Clara Schumann's own writings were distinguished by their modernity and were considered one of the best examples of the romantic school. Robert Schumann also highly appreciated the writings of his wife, who, however, insisted that his wife focus on family life and their eight children.
After the death of Robert Schumann, Clara continued to perform with his works, and interest in her own work flared up with renewed vigor in 1970, when recordings of Clara's works first appeared.

5. Amy Beach

American Amy Marcy Cheney Beach is the only woman in the so-called "Boston Six" of composers, which, in addition to her, included musicians John Knowles Payne, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward McDowell and Horatio Parker. The composers of the Six are believed to have had a decisive influence on the formation of American academic music.

Amy was born on September 5, 1867 into a wealthy New Hampshire family. From an early age, the girl studied music under the guidance of her mother, and after the family moved to Boston, she began to study composing. Amy Beach's first solo concert took place in 1883 and was a great success. Two years later, the girl got married and, at the insistence of her husband, practically stopped performing, focusing on writing music.

With her own works, she later performed on tour in Europe and America, and today Amy Beach is considered the first woman who managed to make a successful career in the high art of music.

6. Valentina Serova

The first Russian female composer, nee Valentina Semyonovna Bergman, was born in 1846 in Moscow. The girl failed to graduate from the St. Petersburg Conservatory due to a conflict with the director, after which Valentina began to take lessons from the music critic and composer Alexander Serov.

In 1863, Valentina and Alexander got married, and two years later the couple had a son, the future artist Valentin Serov. In 1867 the Serovs began to publish the magazine Music and Theater. The couple maintained friendly relations with Ivan Turgenev and Polina Viardot, Leo Tolstoy, Ilya Repin.

Valentina Serova was rather anxious about her husband's work, and after his death she published four volumes of articles about her husband, and also completed his opera The Power of the Enemy.

Serova is the author of the operas “Uriel Acosta”, “Maria D“ Orval ”,“ Miroed ”,“ Ilya Muromets. ”In addition to music, she also wrote articles on the art of composing, published memoirs about her meetings with Leo Tolstoy and memories of her husband and son.

7. Sofia Gubaidulina

Today the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina lives and works in Germany, but in her native Tatarstan, music competitions and festivals dedicated to the famous native of the republic are held annually.

Sofia Gubaidulina was born in the city of Chistopol in 1931. As a girl, she graduated from the Kazan Music Gymnasium, and then entered the Kazan Conservatory, where she studied composition. Having moved to Moscow, Gubaidulina continued her studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and after graduation she received an important parting word for herself from the composer Dmitry Shostakovich: "I wish you to go your own" wrong "way."

Together with Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina was one of the trinity of Moscow avant-garde composers. Gubaidulina worked a lot for cinema and wrote music for such films as "Vertical", "Man and His Bird", "Mowgli", "Scarecrow".

In 1991, Sofia Gubaidulina received a German scholarship and has since lived in Germany, regularly coming to Russia with concerts, festivals and various social initiatives.

“In ancient Greece, all harpers were men, and now it is a“ female ”instrument. Times are changing, and Brahms's words that “a man would rather give birth to a child than a woman would write good music” sound frivolous, ”Sofia Asgatovna said in an interview.

As in any other area of ​​Western classical art, there are countless forgotten but worthy women in the history of academic music.

Especially in the history of composer's art.

Even now, with the number of notable female composers growing every year, works written by women are rarely included in the seasonal schedules of the most famous orchestras and concert programs of the most famous performers.

When a work by a female composer does become the object of audience or journalistic attention, the news of this is necessarily accompanied by some sad statistics.

Here's a fresh example: This season the Metropolitan Opera played the genius Love from Afar by Kaia Saariaho - the first opera, written by a woman, shown at this theater since 1903. It is comforting that the compositions of Saariaho - as, for example, the music of Sofia Gubaidulina or Julia Wolf - are performed quite often even without such news feeds.

Selecting a few lesser-known musical heroines from a long list of female names is a difficult task. The seven women, which we will talk about now, have one thing in common - they, to one degree or another, did not fit into the world around them.

Someone solely because of their own behavior, destroying cultural foundations, and someone - through their music, which cannot be matched with an analogue.

Louise Farranc (1804-1875)

Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she became famous in the world of European music in the 1830s and 1840s as a pianist. Moreover, the girl's performing reputation was so high that in 1842 Farranc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory.

She held this post for the next thirty years and, despite the pedagogical workload, managed to prove herself as a composer. However, it was more likely that she did not “manage to show”, but “could not fail to show”.

Farranc came from the most famous dynasty of sculptors and grew up among the best people of Parisian art, so the act of creative self-expression for her was extremely natural.

During her lifetime, having published about fifty compositions, mostly instrumental, Madame Professor received rave reviews about her music from Berlioz and Liszt, but in her homeland Farranc was perceived as an overly non-French composer.

In France, every first promising author wrote hours-long operas, and the Parisian's laconic and inspired by the music of the era of classicism really ran counter to the fashion of the time.

Quite wrong: her best works - like the Third Symphony in G minor -, to put it mildly, do not get lost against the background of the mastodons of that time like Mendelssohn or Schumann. Yes, and Brahms, with his attempts to translate classicism into the language of the romantic era, Farranck bypassed for ten, or even twenty years.

Dora Pejacevic (1885-1923)

A representative of one of the most noble Balkan noble families, the granddaughter of one of the bans (read - the governors) of Croatia and the daughter of another, Dora Pejacevic spent her childhood and adolescence exactly the way in world pop culture people like to portray the life of young and carefully guarded by a family of young aristocrats ...

The girl grew up under the strict supervision of English governesses, almost did not communicate with her peers and, in general, was brought up by her parents with an eye on a further successful marriage for the family, rather than a happy childhood.

But something went wrong: Dora, as a teenager, caught fire with the ideas of socialism, began to constantly conflict with her family and, as a result, at twenty-odd years, she was cut off from the rest of the Peyachevichs until the end of her life.

This, however, only benefited her other hobby: at the dawn of the First World War, the rebellious noblewoman established herself as the most significant figure in Croatian music.

Dora's compositions, evenly inspired by Brahms, Schumann and Strauss, sounded extremely naive by the standards of the world around her - for example, at the time of the premiere of her old-fashioned piano concerto in Berlin and Paris, they were already listening to Pierrot Lunar and Sacred Spring.

But if we abstract from the historical context and listen to Pejacevich's music as a sincere declaration of love for the German romantics, then it will be easy to notice her expressive melodism, made at a high level of orchestration and careful structural work.

Amy Beach (1867-1944)

The most famous episode in the biography of Amy Beach can be retelled as follows. In 1885, when she was 18 years old, Amy's parents married her to a 42-year-old surgeon from Boston. Even then, the girl was a virtuoso of playing the piano and hoped to continue her music studies and performing career, but her husband decided otherwise.

Dr. Henry Harris Audrey Beach, preoccupied with the status of his family and guided by the then ideas about the role of women in secular New England society, forbade his wife to study music and limited her performances as a pianist to one concert a year.

For Amy, who dreamed of concert halls and sold-out recitals, this turned out to be tantamount to tragedy. But, as often happens, the tragedy gave way to triumph: although Beach sacrificed her performing career, she began to devote herself more and more to writing and is now unambiguously defined by most researchers as the best American composer of the late romantic era.

Two of her main works - the Gaelic Symphony published in 1896 and the piano concerto that followed three years later - are really beautiful, even if by the standards of those years they are completely devoid of originality. The most important thing is that in Beach music, as one might assume, there is absolutely no place for provincialism and parochialism.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

Ruth Crawford Seeger is much more famous in the circles of serious admirers, researchers and simply lovers of American folk music than in the world of academic music. Why?

There are two key reasons: first, she was the wife of musicologist Charles Seeger, and therefore the ancestor of the Seeger clan, a family of musicians and singers who have done more to popularize American folk than anyone else.

Secondly, for the last ten years of her life, she worked closely on cataloging and arranging songs recorded on numerous trips by John and Alan Lomax, the largest American folklorists and collectors of folk music.

Surprisingly, until the beginning of their life together, both Ruth and Charles Seeger were composers of an extremely modernist sense, applying the word "folklore" to their music with great difficulty. In particular, the works of Ruth Crawford in the early 30s can only be compared with the works of Anton Webern - and even then only in terms of skillfully constructed drama and laconically concentrated musical material.

But if Webern's traditions shine through every note - it does not matter whether Austrian or Renaissance music - then Seeger's works exist as if outside of tradition, outside the past and outside the future, outside America and outside the rest of the world.

Why is a composer with such an individual style still not included in the canonical modernist repertoire? Mystery.

Lily Boulanger (1893-1918)

It would seem, what kind of music could an eternally sick, deeply religious and pathologically modest French woman from high society compose at the beginning of the last century? That's right - one that could serve as a good soundtrack for the Day of Judgment.

The best compositions of Lily Boulanger are written on religious texts such as psalms or Buddhist prayers, they are often performed as if by an improperly adjusted choir to a torn, non-melodic and loud musical accompaniment. You cannot find an analogue to this music on the fly - yes, it is partly similar to Stravinsky's early works and to Honegger's especially fiery compositions, but neither one nor the other reached such depths of despair and did not go into such extreme fatalism.

When composer Gabriel Fauré, a friend of the Boulanger family, established that three-year-old Lily had perfect pitch, her parents and older sister could hardly have imagined that this gift would be embodied in something so unangelical.

By the way, about my sister. Nadia Boulanger turned out to be a figure in the history of music by far more significant. For almost half a century - from the 20s to the 60s - Nadia was considered one of the best music teachers on the planet. Having very specific views both on music that was new for those times, and on music in the literal sense of the word, classical, tough, irreconcilable and exhausting her students with the most difficult tasks, Nadia, even for her ideological opponents, remained an example of musical intelligence of unprecedented memory and power.

Perhaps she could have become as significant a composer as she turned out to be a teacher. In any case, she began exactly as a composer - but, by her own admission, after Lily's death, something broke inside Nadia. Having lived for 92 years, the older sister never reached the heights of the few works of the younger, burnt out from Crohn's disease at the age of 24.

Elizabeth Maconkey (1907-1994)

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the greatest British composer of the last century, was a passionate champion of national musical traditions. Thus, he enthusiastically reworked folk songs, wrote choral works suspiciously similar to Anglican hymns, and, with varying success, rethought the work of English composers of the Renaissance.

He also taught composition at London's Royal College of Music, where his favorite student in the 1920s was a young Irish girl named Elizabeth Maconkey.

Decades later, she will tell that it was Vaughan Williams, even though he was a traditionalist, advised her never to listen to anyone and in composing music to focus only on her interests, tastes and thoughts.

The advice was decisive for Maconca. Her music has always remained untouched by both the global trends of the academic avant-garde and the eternal English-Celtic love of rural folklore. Just in her student years, who discovered Bela Bartok for herself (a composer, by the way, who also worked outside of any obvious tendencies), Makonki in her works naturally started from the mature music of the great Hungarian, but at the same time, she consistently developed her own style, much more intimate and introspective.

Vivid examples of the originality and evolution of Makonka's composer's imagination are her thirteen string quartets, written from 1933 to 1984 and together forming a cycle of quartet literature, in no way inferior to those of Shostakovich or Bartok.

Vitezslava Kapralova (1915-1940)

A few years before the First World War, an inconspicuous Czech composer and concert pianist Vaclav Kapral founded a private music school for novice pianists in his native Brno. The school continued to exist after the war, soon earning a reputation as one of the best in the country.

The stream of those wishing to study, and to study specifically from the Corporal himself, even for a short while made the composer think about stopping all the rest of his activities in favor of teaching.

Fortunately, his daughter Vitezslava, who at that time had not yet celebrated her tenth birthday, suddenly began to demonstrate an extraordinary talent for music. The girl played the piano better than many adult professionals, memorized the entire classical song repertoire and even began to write small pieces.

The corporal developed a plan, surprising in the degree of arrogance, stupidity and commercialism: to grow from Vitezslava a real monster of music, capable of replacing him as the main teacher of the family school.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. The ambitious Vitezslava, who wanted to become a composer and conductor, at the age of fifteen entered two corresponding faculties at the local conservatory at the same time. So that a woman wants to conduct - this was not seen in the Czech Republic of the 30s before Kapralova.

And to conduct and compose at once - it was generally unthinkable. It was to compose music that the newly enrolled student began in the first place - and of such a quality, such a stylistic variety and in such volumes that there is really no one to compare with.

It is understandable why in the TV series Mozart in the Jungle it is Kapralova who becomes the role model for the heroine Lizzie, who cannot sit idly by: Vitezslava died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 - but at the same time, the number of compositions written by her exceeds the catalogs of very, very many authors.

It is logical to assume, however, that this phenomenal girl did not live to see her final composer's triumph.

For all their formal quality, Kapralova's compositions are stylistically very similar to the music of the leading Czech composer of those years Boguslav Martin, who was also a great friend of the Corporal family, who knew Vitezslava from childhood and even managed to fall in love with her shortly before the girl's death.

Veronika Dudarova, Sofia Gubaidulina, Elena Obraztsova are names known not only in Russia, but also abroad. Remembering the great women musicians of the 20th century.

Veronica Dudarova

Veronica Dudarova. Photo: classicalmusicnews.ru

Veronica Dudarova. Photo: south-ossetia.info

Veronika Dudarova was born in Baku in 1916. In 1938 she graduated from the piano department of the music school at the Leningrad Conservatory and made an unusual decision for that time - to become a conductor. At that time, there were no women in the USSR who decided to join a symphony orchestra. Veronica Dudarova became a student of two masters - Leo Ginzburg and Nikolai Anosov.

She made her debut as a conductor at the Central Children's Theater in 1944. Then she worked at the opera studio of the Moscow Conservatory.

In 1947, Veronika Dudarova became the conductor of the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, and in 1960 she took the post of chief conductor and artistic director of this orchestra. Dudarova's repertoire gradually included a huge amount of works - from Bach and Mozart to Alfred Schnittke, Mikael Tariverdiev, Sofia Gubaidulina.

In an interview, she repeatedly spoke about bloody rehearsals, about the fact that sometimes you have to "severely achieve results." In 1991, Dudarova organized and headed the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia. Her name is included in the Guinness Book of Records: she became the first woman in the world to work with symphony orchestras for over 50 years.

Festival dedicated to Veronika Dudarova:

Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia Gubaidulina. Photo: remusik.org

Sofia Gubaidulina. Photo: tatarstan-symphony.com

Composer Sofia (Sania) Gubaidulina was born in 1931 in Chistopol. Her father was a surveyor, her mother was a primary school teacher. Soon after the birth of their daughter, the family moved to Kazan. In 1935, Sofia Gubaidulina began to study music. In 1949 she became a student of the piano department of the Kazan Conservatory. Later, the pianist decided to write music herself and entered the composing department of the Moscow Conservatory - first in the class of Yuri Shaporin, then Nikolai Peiko, and then in graduate school under the direction of Vissarion Shebalin.

Colleagues of Sofia Gubaidulina noted that already in her first works she turned to religious images. This is especially noticeable in the scores of the 1970s and 1980s: "De profundis" for button accordion, violin concerto "Offertorium" ("Sacrifice"), "Seven Words" for cello, button accordion and strings. This was also manifested in later works - "Passion according to John", "Easter according to John", "Simple Prayer".

“My goal has always been to hear the sound of the world, the sound of my own soul and study their collision, contrast, or, conversely, similarities. And the longer I walk, the clearer it becomes to me that all this time I have been looking for the sound that would correspond to the truth of my life. "

Sofia Gubaidulina

In the late 1980s, Sofia Gubaidulina became an internationally renowned composer. Since 1991 she has been living in Germany, but often comes to Russia. Today, festivals dedicated to her are held in different countries; the best musical groups and soloists collaborate with her.

A documentary about Sofia Gubaidulina:

Elena Obraztsova

Elena Obraztsova. Photo: classicalmusicnews.ru

Elena Obraztsova was born in 1939 in Leningrad. When the time came to enter the university, the girl chose the vocal department of the Leningrad Conservatory, although her father insisted that her daughter study radio engineering. In 1962, a student of Obraztsova became the winner of the Glinka All-Union Vocal Competition. Soon the young singer made her debut at the Bolshoi Theater - her first role was Marina Mnishek in "Boris Godunov" by Modest Mussorgsky.

The singer's Russian repertoire also includes Martha from the opera "Khovanshchina" by Mussorgsky, Lyubasha from "The Tsar's Bride" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Helen Bezukhova from "War and Peace" by Sergei Prokofiev. Elena Obraztsova performed the part of the Countess in The Queen of Spades by Pyotr Tchaikovsky throughout her entire musical career. The singer said: “I can sing it for up to a hundred years, as long as the voice sounds. And it is overgrown and overgrown with new colors ".

One of the most famous roles from the foreign repertoire of Obraztsova was Carmen in Bizet's opera. Not only Soviet, but also Spanish listeners recognized her as the best performer of this part.
Obraztsova's partners were Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Mirella Freni. An important event in the singer's life was the meeting with the composer Georgy Sviridov: he dedicated several vocal compositions to her.

Life Line program with Elena Obraztsova:

Eliso Virsaladze

Eliso Virsaladze. Photo: archive.li

Eliso Virsaladze. Photo: riavrn.ru

Eliso Virsaladze was born in Tbilisi in 1942. Her grandmother, the famous Georgian pianist Anastasia Virsaladze, was her teacher at the school and conservatory. In 1962, Eliso won third prize at the II International Tchaikovsky Competition. In 1966, after graduating from the Tbilisi Conservatory, she entered the graduate school of the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Yakov Zak.

Since 1967, Eliso Virsaladze has taught at the Moscow Conservatory. Among the graduates of her class are the laureates of international competitions Boris Berezovsky, Alexey Volodin, Dmitry Kaprin.

In the pianist's repertoire, a special place is occupied by the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev. She often performs in an ensemble with cellist Natalia Gutman.

"This is a large-scale artist, perhaps the strongest female pianist right now.", - this is what Svyatoslav Richter said about Virsaladze.

Today Eliso Virsaladze performs a lot with solo and chamber programs, often plays with orchestras. She speaks of concerts as a sacrament: "You go on stage and belong to the composer you are performing and the audience you play for.".

Program "Collection of Performances" and concert by Eliso Virsaladze:

Natalia Gutman

Natalia Gutman. Photo: classicalmusicnews.ru

The future cellist was born in Kazan in 1942; she received her first cello lessons from her stepfather, Roman Sapozhnikov. Then she studied at the Central Music School at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1964, Natalia graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, class of Galina Kozolupova, and in 1968 she graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory, where her leader was Mstislav Rostropovich.

Back in her conservatory years, Natalia became a laureate of several competitions, including the II International Tchaikovsky Competition. In 1967 she began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory.

“If I just professionally swing the bow and think about my own - it will be immediately heard! For me, the automatism of execution, indifference is a terrible failure! " She says.

Now Natalia Gutman teaches young musicians in many European cities, organizes major festivals and continues to tour.

Speech at the "December Evenings" at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts:

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