The remarkable St. Petersburg composer Galina Ustvolskaya died today
at the age of eighty-seven. She studied with Shostakovich during the
Second World War, and, at first, she imitated her teacher’s music, as
did so many young Soviet composers. But in the late forties she forged
her own style — austere, hieratic, an intermingling of skeletal
counterpoint and crashing cluster chords. Shostakovich was fascinated
by her, and, after the death of his first wife, Nina, he proposed
marriage to her, without success. He also intensely admired her music,
and consciously echoed it in developing his own late style. It was
perhaps at the moment that Shostakovich submitted several of his works
to Ustvolskaya’s scrutiny that centuries of male dominance of the art
of composition finally came to an end. “I am a talent,” Shostakovich
said to her, “you are a phenomenon.” In her youth, Ustvolskaya paid her
dues by writing works on socialist-realist themes, but, in later years,
she defied the official atheism of the Soviet system by addressing
religious subjects: her trio of Compositions from the seventies carried
the subtitles “Dona nobis pacem,” “Dies irae,” and “Benedictus qui
venit.” I wrote more about this singular figure back in 1995. There are dozens of recordings of her music; a good place to start would be with the ECM disc Misterioso.
