Lydia Jardon

Miaskovsky or The Inner Exile

Nikolai Miaskovsky was born in 1881, in a turbulent Europe that Marcel Gauchet describes as "the crater of the years 1880-1914". Let us also understand this word in its alchemical sense: it is in this crucible that the elements that will make up the 20th Century are being elaborated and assembled. It was a particularly difficult gestation period for Russia: that same year, 1881, Tsar Alexander II died in a bomb attack, and the first pogroms heralded massacres on a completely different scale. During the composer's childhood, the system of alliances that would lead to the First World War was established and, even before 1914, almost set the world on fire several times. Russia, in full industrial development, benefited from considerable foreign investment, including the famous Russian loans. This led to the emergence of a working class, which was accompanied by the social conflicts typical of industrialised societies: the first major Russian strike broke out in the Orekhovo-Zuyevo cotton factories in 1885.

When he finished his studies in 1911, Miaskovsky, an engineer officer (like his father, an atypical and pacifist general), had already left the army to devote himself entirely to music. He only practised his new profession for a short time. Mobilised in 1914 and sent to the front, the composer was a horrified actor and witness of the first world conflict. Wounded in his soul and in his flesh - he suffered a concussion - he witnessed, on the battlefields, the birth of a century whose brutality he would experience. After the fall of the Tsar and until 1918, Miaskovsky served on the Soviet general staff, more out of patriotism than political conviction, it seems. A tragic paradox: that same year, his father was shot on a station platform by a revolutionary soldier.

The civil war ended in 1921 with the defeat of the White Russians and the assumption of total power by the Soviets. After the mistakes and catastrophic economic experiments of the early communist era, the NEP (New Political Economy) seemed to announce a return to realism and prosperity. Miaskovsky's life evolved at the same pace as that of his new homeland. That same year, 1921 (1919, according to some sources), he was appointed professor at the Moscow Conservatory and settled into his life as a composer and teacher. Did the young Soviet Revolution give him hope for a fairer, freer society, for a world that had made a new start 'in the new affection and noise'? The new society, despite its shortcomings, was a place of artistic and social experimentation, an enormous cultural ferment. We know what would happen once Stalin came to power: after the Kulaks - peasants "owning their own production tools" and opposed to collectivisation - the new bourgeois class born of the NEP was exterminated, the avant-gardes were brought to heel, and "realism adapted to socialism" became the regime's official doctrine. The year 1930, which marked the definitive advent of totalitarianism, also saw the suicide of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who embodied the avant-garde utopia, and the creation of the Gulag.

Is it from this period that Miaskovsky's "inner exile" dates, as the musicologist Michael Segelman calls it? For in the face of the tragedy of history, the composer may have remembered his father's advice: "The only form of freedom that I recognise," wrote the general to his son, "is victory over oneself. [...] Only Christ has shown us what [the word 'freedom' means]: to tame oneself, to surpass oneself. Work in this direction, and you will be free. It is still difficult to say anything about the composer's religious convictions. But the testimonies attest that, at the very least, he adopted what might be called a "philosophy of withdrawal"; that of overcoming oneself, of being in the world without being of the world, and of compensating for external and tragic forces with inner strength. This detachment, this height of vision, to which his entire life testifies, made the composer the moral conscience of his profession.

Miaskovsky needed a lot of moral height to withstand the 1948 persecution launched by Jdanov against the most prominent Soviet composers, including Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Miaskovsky himself. Jdanov, the man of the famous doctrine, and wearing the tragic and surreal double hat of Minister of Police and Culture, accused them of Formalism - in other words, of engaging in "petty-bourgeois and anti-people" musical research. He pits the terrorised musicians against each other. The Composers' Union is a Soviet Union in miniature. The most absurd directives were applied, people were mobilised to resolve invented contradictions, they denounced each other to save their situation or simply their skin. Throughout the Soviet Union, as in that of the composers, anguish and lies reign (1). Even sleep, which flees: Chosta-kovitch, like many of his compatriots, with his suitcase packed at the foot of his bed, went to bed fully clothed and spent his nights spying on the slightest noise while waiting for an arrest that, for him, would never come. Like Macbeth, Stalin is watching. It is certainly not awareness of his deed or guilt that keeps him awake: he spends his nights drawing up a list of his victims.

Miaskovsky did not play the game of the persecutors. He refused to be self-critical, either publicly or in writing, and to attend the 'meetings of Moscow composers and musicologists' or the public humiliation sessions organised at the Conservatory in front of the students.

How far can one push detachment? The two world wars, the spectacle of Soviet society absurdly devouring its children, purge after purge, circle after circle, in the name of the inflexible march of history (did Stalin offer his compatriots as holocausts to better ward off death, he who wrote that "only death wins"?), the persecutions of 1948 and the perversion of human bonds that they entailed certainly affected the composer's failing health, which deteriorated dramatically. He died two years later, surrounded by his family, on 8 August 1950.

In both human and political terms, Miaskovsky was essentially a moderate. As such, he probably never fully embraced historical determinism, the 'singing tomorrows', and even less the 'material' advent of a new man (and a new musical language that would have been the corollary). Even before Stalin eliminated all traces of avant-gardism in the USSR, his natural inclination would probably have been to cultivate and extend the classical language. The symphony is his favourite form. It allows him to refine a tried and tested craft, and to keep all his attention on capturing on music paper the most subtle vibrations emanating from the "inner man", precisely. This does not make him an "anti-modernist". He analysed, commented on and taught his students the works of Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Strauss and Schoenberg, and explored, on his own account, some of the territories they had opened up.

In fact, for a time Miaskovsky also developed a highly advanced musical syntax, as the Second, Third and Fourth Sonatas recorded here testify. These are crater works, which have nothing to envy to the piano works of Prokofiev, Rachmaninov or his Western contemporaries. Lydia Jardon describes the power, the profusion and the intimidating pianism that seems to exceed our limits - is it intended for a 'new man'? This, the performer of this disc adds, is 'music of wrath'. This is anger, musically symbolised by the Dies Irae (2) that underlies the entire Second Sonata (1912) - and by a final fugue whose raging theme seems to be driven to desperate madness.

The Second and Third Sonatas, which are in one movement and do not, unlike the Fourth, benefit from the relative relaxation of a slow movement, give the impression of absolute and hopeless disarray. They seem to begin with the same distraught phrase, but in a different way. What the three sonatas have in common is that they open - and sometimes conclude - with a furious musical gesture, a kind of raging punch on the keyboard. They are like three versions of the same work, each time more radical, and share, within a very strong architectural thought, the extreme exploration of registers, extraordinary piano passages bordering on tonal or psychological dissolution, and an obsessive and monomaniacal motivic writing, the growing and panic-stricken repetition of ideas, codas struck as if by hammer, and this relentless struggle between the right and left hands, perpetually sending back themes and motifs with the utmost violence, which seems like the struggle of a soul against itself. It is worth noting that, as a sign of hope and a symptom of conflict resolution, this "Trilogy of Anger" (the Second, Third and Fourth Sonatas) ends (last movement of the Fourth Sonata) in an equally savage mood, but this time in a joyous and bouncing mood.

Besides, what is this music angry about? A Soviet music critic might have answered: "against a worm-eaten social order, an old mould from which a new world must emerge". Let us bet that what Miaskovsky wants to get rid of is himself, the old man who must be "tamed" and "overcome", according to his father's precepts, "to be free". For if the works we have just mentioned really have something to do with the inner world of their author, what can the latter do to avoid succumbing to it, to overcome such violent tensions and, turning the tables, to find inner peace?

A spiritualist perspective on the New Man, which communist ideology considered from a material point of view. Nikolai Miaskovsky could have adopted the words of his contemporary Pessoa: "I am a man for whom the external world is an internal reality".

Pascal Ianco

(1) Let us remember that 1948 was also the year of the Lyssenko affair, which was the exact counterpart, in the scientific field, of the persecutions launched against composers. Throughout the USSR, which was literally "walking on its head", 1948 saw the substitution of lies for reality.
(2) Dies Irae, which we will find again ten years later in the Sixth Symphony.