CRASSH

Galina Ustvolskaya’s compositional voice is commonly regarded as just as forceful as it is uncompromising, and certainly if one was to base a judgment upon Ustvolskaya’s unyielding, spiritually adamant catalogue of works (mirrored by her obstinate character) this could not be considered an entirely ignorant assertion. Art Lange, for example, is not the only music critic to be prompted to publish claims that there was “no evidence of Ustvolskaya compromising with the Party line – she never stooped to writing secular cantatas or programmatically accessible music for theatre or films, or to use recognisable folk material in glibly popular ways”. But, as so often in Western commentary of Soviet life, the reality was far more complex that these superficial – and, unfortunately, erroneous - observations. In reality, Ustvolskaya had to live, and to survive as a composer she had to come to some understanding with the state, a union that Ustvolskaya would live to, ostensibly, deeply regret. Indeed, there are numerous other compositions that Ustvolskaya completed during her career that are rooted firmly in the Socialist Realist tradition, and counterbalance the resoluteness that is constantly tangible in her well-known repertoire that was originally composed “for the drawer”. The existence of these works, however, is not huge scandal in itself, as every other Soviet composer had similar embarrassments to their name, almost without exception.
    What remains truly fascinating about this “un-catalogued” list is that following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ustvolskaya could so little tolerate these works, that she reorganised her catalogue and took the extraordinary step of erasing these works from her personal history. It is now incredibly difficult to find recordings and scores of these works. Having devoted much of my research to finding these scores and recordings, this paper will begin to fill the literary void surrounding these works, by comparing the compositional approaches of these lesser-known pieces with the items that remain in her main catalogue.
These pieces are also worthy of comparison with works in a similar style from other Soviet composers: Ustvolskaya frequently fought shy of Shostakovich’s exemplification of observing official requirements, publicly rebuking his practice during the final years of her life (when Shostakovich joined the Communist party, Ustvolskaya considered it complete moral weakness). Her Socialist Realist works were, in the main, created in the very earliest part of her career when Ustvolskaya was starting out as a composer, and, interestingly, were composed at the same time as she developed a musical style of uncompromising spiritual intensity anathema to the principles her Socialist Realist works strived to represent (some of her personal works were forced to wait over two decades for their premier and others were censored or outright banned). This paper argues that the main difference in approach between Shostakovich and Ustvolskaya as they were forced to comply with official demands, was that Ustvolskaya somehow managed to evacuate her personality to produce scores in a wholly acceptable Soviet style, from which she could be entirely disassociated.