Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music. By Gregor Tassie

Abstract

With only his nostalgic Cello Concerto (1944) enjoying regular exposure in the concert hall or on disc, Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881–1950) was seen as a marginal, one-work composer for most of the post-war period. More recently his twenty-seven symphonies and thirteen string quartets have been tiptoeing back into the frame, with a consequent shift of emphasis in the scholarly literature. A recurring presence in the writings of and about his closest musical associate Sergey Prokofiev, he has recently begun to attract attention in his own right. In an influential New York Times piece reprinted in On Russian Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), Richard Taruskin hailed a figure of unsuspected stylistic range: ‘I was astonished to discover how far out on the modernist limb Myaskovsky had gone before Stalin sawed it off’ (p. 292). Durham University’s Patrick Zuk has gone further in questioning whether Myaskovsky’s career supports or rather undercuts long-held assumptions about the coercive nature of compositional development in the USSR. His article ‘Nikolay Myaskovsky and the Events of 1948’ appeared in the February 2012 issue of the present journal.