the life of the machines - Vladimir Stoupel

1916, a work that was neither finished nor authorized by
the composer himself, but was found in his estate and
published only in the 1990s. As in Mossolov’s Fourth
Sonata, it is a one-movement sonata, in the tradition of
Scriabin, in which the “classical” formal stations (exposition,
development, recapitulation) are emulated almost
schematically. But in listening to it, hardly any of this is
to be perceived: wavelike-organic progressions and opulent-resonant
sound help just as imperceptibly as elegantly
to overcome this.
The Polish-Jewish composer and pianist Władysław
Szpilman was born on 5 December 1911 at Sosnowiec
(near Katowice), Poland. After attending Warsaw’s Chopin
Music School, he studied piano (with Leonid Kreutzer and
Arthur Schnabel) and composition (with Franz Schreker)
at the Berlin Academy of the Arts. When the National
Socialists came to power in 1933, he went back to his
home country. He was the only member of his family to
survive the Warsaw ghetto. Szpilman gave an account of
this in his impressive book The Pianist: The Extraordinary
True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945,
upon which Roman Polanski based his prize-winning
movie The Pianist. After the war, Szpilman was active in
an administrative position at the Polish Radio. With the
violinist Bronislaw Gimpel, whom he knew from the time
of his studies, he maintained a close working relationship
that was to result in the 1960s in the establishment of
the Warsaw Piano Quintet. Szpilman died in Warsaw on 6
July 2000 at the age of eighty-eight.
Szpilman’s music clearly followed the popular tendencies
of the 1920s and 30s. Thus, he mixed the serious and the
popular, took up jazz influences, and understood how to
express himself ambiguously and with ironic distance.
Szpilman did not just make a name for himself with
so-called classical music, but also with music for radio
plays and movies, children’s songs, and ca. five hundred
pop songs. In 1961 he founded a pop song festival that
still takes place every year in Sopot.
The piano suite The Life of the Machines (1934) is ostensibly
informed by all sorts of etude-like kinetic energy,
which is however always kept witty, relaxed , and elegant.
The first movement, without tempo indication
(“Langsam anfangen” / “starting slowly”), plays with
tone and chord repetitions out of which songlike contours
gradually emerge. Dissonances of seconds as well
as transparent layers of fourths and sevenths dominate
in the tonal image. The Andante middle movement
(“Maschinen im Ruhezustand” / “machines in an idle
state”) offers a delicate-bitter cantilena accompanied
by modally colored supporting chords; the mechanical
is joined here somewhat subliminally by folklore (mazurka
rhythm). The finale (“Toccatina,” Allegro ritmico)
builds a bridge back to the beginning, whereby the
playful-virtuoso element is allowed to develop more
exuberantly. Recognizable as models, both in pianistic
as well as compositional-technical terms, are Sergei
Prokofiev and the French impressionists (Debussy,
Ravel). Not strenuous stamping, but impressionistic
sensitiveness mark these original images of machines.
At the same time, these are more than just loosely
strung together genre pieces (“suite”); the order and
character of the movements entirely justify the title
“Sonatina.”
Many progressive Russian artists put great hopes on the
October revolution of 1917. They were filled with enthusiasm
for the utopian goals of the Soviets, and hoped
that they could place their new, experimental means of
expression at the service of “social progress.” A fusion
of the artistic and political avant-garde seemed attainable.
Disillusionment followed rather quickly however.
Already by the end of the 1920s, creative independence
that deserved this name was unwanted and suspicious.
Not a few artists experienced reprimands, restrictions
of elementary civil liberties, and even imprisonment.
The composer Alexander Mossolov is a prime example
for this tragic development.
Born in Kiev on 11 August 1900, Alexander Mossolov grew
up in Moscow in a middle-class environment. In 1918 he
joined the Red Army as a volunteer and fought against
the White Army. After being wounded and working for a
time as a pianist for silent movies, Mossolov studied piano
and composition (with Reinhold Glière and Nikolay
Myaskovsky) at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to
1925. By 1928 he had written some thirty works – including
a chamber opera (The Hero), a symphony, a string
quartet, vocal cycles, piano music, and a piano concerto –
with which he made a name for himself as one of
Russia’s most progressive “leftist” composers. His
orchestral work The Iron Foundry (1928), a “machine
music” modeled on Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231,
caused a sensation and was also championed by prominent
conductors in the West.
The year 1928 was the turning point in Mossolov’s creative
biography: Works slated to be performed (including
a new opera The Dam) were removed from the schedule
at the behest of the highest authority, and the press
began to speak disparagingly of his music. In 1932, still
hoping for an improvement in the situation, Mossolov
wrote a letter to Stalin in which he complained that performances
and publications of his works were becoming
increasingly less frequent. Yet, times had changed,
and the “avant-garde” oriented on Western models no
longer found favor. In 1936, Mossolov was expelled from
the composers association under a pretext, and accused
in 1938 of being a “counterrevolutionary” and sentenced
to eight years of labor camp. To be sure, the imprisonment
was reduced to a year thanks to the intervention of
his former teachers Glière and Myaskovsky, yet Mossolov
was not allowed to dwell in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev
until 1942. Starting in the late 1930s, Mossolov adapted
himself to the official expectations: he henceforth wrote
in an unspectacular, “conservative” idiom that was
praised by the critics as “socialistic realism with a smattering
of impressionism.” Mossolov died in 1973 after
protracted illness, unnoticed by the musical public.
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