Tikhon Khrennikov

His obituary in the Economist neatly catches how Russians view him - I quote it in full below. And the Economist is anti all things Soviet.

Tikhon Khrennikov, Stalin's music master, died on August 14th, aged 94

HAD he been born in Iowa, Tikhon Khrennikov might have enjoyed a modest fame. Early discovery as a talented pianist; studies in composition, perhaps at the Juilliard School; schmoozing with Hollywood actors and directors, who would have appreciated his amiable character and his ear for a good tune. Irving Berlin and George Gershwin might have been his friends; he might have been remembered, like them, for hummable classics.

But Mr Khrennikov was born, one of ten children, into a horse-trading family in provincial Yelets, four years before the Russian revolution; and he died 16 years after the Soviet Union became Russia again. Over this period he was presented with moral choices and political demands which, as a musician, he should have been spared. He was not—like Sergei Prokofiev or Dmitri Shostakovich—a great composer. But he was the chief composer.

As secretary of the composers' union, a title he received from Joseph Stalin in 1948 and kept until the USSR disintegrated, in 1991, Mr Khrennikov had enormous powers. But he had never sought them. He had come to Moscow to be a musician, and seemed likely to succeed: not so much with classical pieces, though his first symphony was conducted by the flamboyant and popularising Leopold Stokowski, but with scores for theatre and film.

The music that made him most popular was the set of songs and serenades he wrote for the 1936 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Vakhtangov theatre in Moscow. That moment was one of respite and relief, squeezed between brutal collectivisation and the beginning of the great terror. In 1935 Stalin proclaimed that “Life has become better, comrades, life is becoming more joyful,” and Mr Khrennikov's music fitted perfectly that brief, cloudless mood. In the imagined world of the Vakhtangov production evil was simply a mistake, introduced from outside, that had to be corrected.

Water-glasses and storms
Two years later such a mistake crept into Mr Khrennikov's own life. His two brothers were arrested on bogus charges. He tried to correct this evil, hiring the best lawyer he could find, and, incredibly, managed to rescue one of them. The other, however, disappeared in the Gulag.

Mr Khrennikov was scarred, but his music was unaffected. Just as Shostakovich captured the tragic side of Soviet culture, so Mr Khrennikov unswervingly expressed its optimism and Social-Realist clarity. At school, a favourite instrument had been the bright, sunny-sounding water-glasses. In later life, his songs were like him: benevolent, lyrical, slightly overweight, decent and well-meaning.

In 1939 his opera “Into the Storm”, based on a heavyweight novel by Nikolai Virta, was the first in which Lenin appeared as a character on the stage. The production was praised by Stalin and encouraged him, later, to give Mr Khrennikov his post at the composers' union. This appointment, coinciding with Stalin's campaign against “formalism” and “rootless cosmopolitans” proved as much a curse as a reward. Mr Khrennikov was only 35; his career was young. “I want to write music. What am I to do?” he asked Alexander Fadeev, the head of the writers' union, as both men waited for their special food parcels. “Connive,” replied Fadeev.

Mr Khrennikov did so. That year he read out a draconian speech which condemned Shostakovich and Prokofiev for their formalism, accusing Prokofiev of “grunting and scraping”. But he claimed that the speech had been pre-written in the Kremlin; he himself liked Prokofiev's music as much as he liked Bach and Tchaikovsky. “Live and let live” had been his father's advice to him. For all his rhetoric, he attended Prokofiev's funeral in 1953 and helped his first wife when she came out of prison. Though he publicly disliked the avant-garde music of Alfred Schnittke, he was among the first to help Schnittke when he suffered a stroke in 1985. And he was instrumental in inviting Igor Stravinsky to Russia in 1962.

He was part of a ruthless system; but he did not deliver up Jewish composers to Stalin's goons, and did not write negative references when the party demanded them. (Instead, he would say that the composer had been warned of the dangers of modernism, as if the lesson was already safely learned.) None of the composers he had charge of was killed; very few were arrested. Many, however, reported on him—for being influenced by his Jewish wife, Klara Vaks, and for sheltering Jews. But Stalin's approval gave him a certain freedom. Instead of writing hymns to his boss, like many of his peers, he made songs about the soft light in Moscow windows.

Having made himself comfortable within the regime, he extended these comforts to others. The Soviet Union looked after its artists well. Mr Khrennikov had a huge budget which was spent on building special apartments and dacha compounds for composers. The world he created behind the gates of the Ruza compound by the Moscow river, where among small lanes and woods “his” composers could find a strange, beguiling privacy, was much more tolerant than the country. The Western press called him a lackey and dictator when he died, but Russians, who knew him, did not.

Aug 30th 2007

http://www.economist.com/node/9721710