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with Anatoly Lyadov, himself a student of Liszt’s, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. This was where Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev studied. The great composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov taught there for 40 years, and taught Lyadov. Lyadov in turn taught Prokofiev and Bortkiewicz. Rachmaninoff began his studies there. This was the nerve center of Russian music, along with the Moscow Conservatory.
St. Petersburg is and always was the most elegant city in Russia, built from scratch with slave labor by Czar Peter the Great, who then had the architect killed. It is a city of fancies and follies: Smolny and Trinity Cathedrals, the immense Winter Palace, St. Michael’s Castle, Peterhof, the Church
of the Savior. Because of its canals, it is called the Venice
of the North. Its culture was very French, and you can hear that influence in Bortkiewicz’s Preludes. Nevsky Prospect is possibly the greatest grand promenade in the world. Bely’s great novel St. Petersburg intricately captures the feeling of this magical city. Nabokov and Rachmaninoff, Dostoyevsky and Mussorgsky came of age in it.
Having an estate in the Ukraine was the equivalent of having a ranch in Montana: Ukraine was the unspoiled countryside of which every city dweller dreams, an immense plain riven with streams and woods, where the nobility could dream of utopia, where composers had the time and space to think of nothing but composing. Lyadov lived on his wife’s Ukraine estate and came into town to teach, but basically lived and composed in the deep countryside.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory paints a heartbreak- ingly gorgeous picture of the summer idyll of Ukraine, before the Revolution eliminated the White Russian intelligentsia overnight, which had been Europeanized by Peter the Great. In the same way, Hitler wiped out the great artistic culture that Germany and Austria had become, overnight creating
a Viennese culture in the United States, where most of the exiles settled.
Like other aristocratic Russians, Bortkiewicz was driven
from Ukraine to Istanbul, then to Vienna, then driven from Vienna by the Nazis. He returned to Vienna in time for World War II, which brought him to the brink of ruin. All his compositions (along with his publishers) were destroyed in bombing raids, but by the end of the war he obtained a small position at the Vienna City Conservatory where he eked out a living and composed his late great Preludes, his Piano Concerto, and his First Symphony, when his friends realized they had a great composer in their midst. He was 75. Shortly after performing what would be his last pieces at the Musikverein in Vienna, he died of a stomach flu. Running from the world, he composed to the end in the style of the late 1890s, as did Rachmaninoff. Their music was frozen by the unraveling of the social fabric in which they had grown up.
Bortkiewicz based his music on Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, early Scriabin, and Ukrainian folksongs.
The preludes from his Op. 40 are pure Chopin, and ideally suited to Julien’s sense of the gossamer, the mournful, the evanescent. Nothing lasts more than three minutes. You could be in a Paris salon on a rainy evening around 1840, or at a Liszt concert in the 1850s. The fifth prelude might be from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The sixth might be early Scriabin. The last prelude might be Liszt, with a very brief (one measure) jazz riff before the concluding octaves
of the coda (Rhapsody in Blue had been written seven years earlier). Rachmaninoff would also integrate the occasional Gershwin into his Byzantine friezes. But Rachmaninoff was living in Hollywood.
For Bortkiewicz, time has stopped, or gone backwards. Despite being in exile all his life, despite poverty, fear, hav- ing no sense of country because of constant persecution—a life on the run—Bortkiewicz has preserved an inner core of gentle days in a Viennese park, the chords of his childhood (although he was 54 before he wrote his Op. 40), and a gentle nostalgia for the life in the countryside taken from him by the accident of living in the wrong place at the wrong time.
2018 Summer Season 89