Maxim Sozontovich Berezovsky ( ; ; ) was a composer of secular and liturgical music, and a conductor and opera singer, who worked at the Saint Petersburg Court Chapel in the Russian Empire, but who also spent much of his career in Italy. He made an important contribution to the music of Ukraine. Together with Artemy Vedel and Dmitry Bortniansky, both of whom have cited him as an influence, Berezovsky is considered by musicologists as one of the three great composers of 18th-century Ukrainian classical music, and one of the Russian Empire's first composers.
Berezovsky's place of birth and his father's name are known only from verbal accounts. He is traditionally thought to have been educated at the Hlukhiv Musical School; he may have also attended the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, although this is uncertain. In 1758, he was accepted as a singer into the capella at Oranienbaum, before being employed at the imperial court of Catherine II in Saint Petersburg, where he received lessons from the Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi. In 1769, Berezovsky was sent to study in Bologna. There he composed secular works, including Demofonte, a three-act opera seria that was the earliest Italian-style opera to be written by a Ukrainian or a Russian composer. He returned to Saint Petersburg in October 1773. The circumstances of his death in 1777 are not documented.
Berezovsky is best known for his choral works, and was one of the creators of the Ukrainian sacred choral style. Few of his compositions are extant, but research in recent decades led to the rediscovery of previously lost works, including three symphonies. His opera and violin sonata were the first known examples of these genres by an Imperial Russian composer.
Biography A lack of documentary evidence meant that little was known about Maxim Sozontovich Berezovsky until the 21st century. During the 1830s and 1840s, the librarians of the St. Petersburg State Academic Capella compiled details about his life and work. They had access to the composer's own scores and notes, but relied on anecdotal information from others who remembered him. The earliest writers to produce short biographies of Berezovsky were the German historiographer , the antiquary and book collector Eugene Bolkhovitinov, and the Russian poet and translator Nikolai Dmitrievich Gorchakov. Bolkhovitinov's unsubstantiated biography, written decades after Berezovsky's death, was used by later writers as the main source of information about the composer. Unconfirmed details still included in modern biographies include that he was a victim of his circumstances who was driven to suicide, either by debt or the lack of recognition of his creative genius.
Early life Berezovsky's father may have belonged to the petty nobility. Contemporary descendants of a brother, Pavel, associate the family's origins with the Cossacks. The family's coat of arms has also been preserved, testifying to its Polish origins.
Berezovsky's place of birth, father's name, and supposed period as a scholar at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, are known only from verbal accounts, and so are not known for certain. Once-accepted aspects of his life story originate from a largely fictional play by Peter Smirnov, written in 1841, as well as from a novel written in 1844 by the Russian writer Nestor Kukolnik.
It was in the past believed that Berezovsky was born on , as recalled by a teacher in the Capella in Saint Petersburg. Other 19th-century sources cite different years: 1743, 1742, and even 1725. Since being stated by an encyclopedic dictionary, published in 1836, that Berezovsky was born in around 1745, this year has become the accepted year of his birth. The month and the day of his birth appeared in works by and respectively. It is unclear where their information originated from.
Berezovsky's birthplace is unknown for certain, but according to many sources was Glukhov, at that time the main residence of the Hetman of Zaporizhian Host. During the 18th century, Glukhov served as the capital of the Cossack Hetmanate and the administrative centre of the Little Russia Governorate.
Education in Glukhov and Kiev During the 18th century, as choirs arose in Ukrainian churches, monasteries and schools, composers and singers raised choral music to a high artistic and professional level. In contrast to the Italian practice of employing castrati, the all-male Capella used boy sopranos. Ukraine became known as a place to recruit boys with excellent singing voices, and from the 1730s, Russian nobles brought talented youngsters from the region with them to perform at the Capella. From 1738, the was used by the Capella to provide boys with their initial training, before those that were selected were coached as singers at the court in Saint Petersburg. When their voices changed, those with the best voices were then trained as adult singers, and freed if they were serfs. Those not selected generally found work as government employees, or choristers in monasteries.
Berezovsky is generally considered to have been a boy chorister at the school in Glukhov. His name does not appear in surviving documents of this institution, but as it was the only one in the Russian Empire that trained singers for the Imperial Court Choir, it is likely that he was educated there, as were other composers such as Artemy Vedel, Hryhorii Skovoroda, and . He may have composed three- and four-part motets as a boy.
It was asserted by some 19th-century sources that Berezovsky received part of his education at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, but when the academy's documents were made public at the start of the 20th century, Berezovsky's name was not found amongst any of the student lists. There is no documentary confirmation of Berezovsky attending the academy.
Oranienbaum, and Saint Petersburg
On 29 June 1758, Berezovsky was accepted as a singer into the capella of the future Paul I of Russia, in Oranienbaum, near Saint Petersburg. There he sang in Italian operas and his name appears in printed librettos of the operas (1759) by Francesco Araja (when he played the role of Poro) and (1760) by Vincenzo Manfredini (when he portrayed Ircano). Some 1756 salary receipts are preserved, signed by "Beresevsky", that confirm that he was a paid as an opera singer at the Oranienbaum.
The future governor of Little Russia, Pyotr Rumyantsev, brought the 13-year-old Berezovsky to the royal court. He was employed at the court for 19 years, as an opera singer (until 1765), a musician in the orchestra (from 1766) and a composer (from 1774). In 1762, he became a singer of the Italian Saint Petersburg Court Capella. He was taught to compose and play the harpsichord by the Italian conductor Francesco Tsoppis, and was taught composing by the Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi. Berezovsky surprised Tsoppis when he created a series of well-written choral concerts. With Dmitry Bortniansky, he took part in a performance of Hermann Raupach's Alceste in Saint Petersburg.
During the 1760s, Berezovsky was a court staff-musician and composed concertos for church choirs. Influenced by the sacred concertos created by Italians at court, Berezovsky's new music in the Italian style was well received. He no longer sang as a principal after Catherine II became empress in 1762, perhaps because of his age, or because Russian musicians lost favour at court during her rule.
Married life In 1763, at the age of 18, Berezovsky married a girl he had known since his days at Oranienbaum, a court ballerina named Franzina Uberscher, who was the daughter of one of the court orchestra's horn players. Berezovsky belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, and Franzina was a Roman Catholic, so permission had to be sought for the marriage. Having worked for 11 years as a dancer in the court theatre, in 1774, she was dismissed due to her age.
According to the conductor musicologist , Berezovsky had another wife named Nadiya Matviivna, but the Ukrainian musicologist Olga Shumilina asserts that Franzina changed her name when she married into the Orthodox Church.
It is not known for certain why, shortly after Berezovsky's death, a court employee received a payment from the imperial treasury that would normally have been given to his wife, who was still alive. A year after her husband's death, Nadiya Matviivna, left without means of subsistence, died in poverty. The death certificate, dated 1 January 1778, named her as the wife of Berezovsky, a chamber orchestra musician.
First Italian trip
It is unclear exactly when or how often Berezovsky went to Italy, but there is evidence he may travelled there more than once. An imperial document exists concerning two passports issued on 26 August 1764 to persons from Little Russia sent to Italy at the private expense of Kirill Razumovsky, the last Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host. One of the passports is thought to have been for Berezovsky. Razumovsky had taken him from Glukhov to St. Petersburg in late 1757. He acted as his mentor, and assisted him financially. The passport document read: "In Little Russia to Kiev to the Little Russian nobleman Maxim Berezevsky and the merchant Ivan Konstantinov, sent by His Eminence Hetman Count Razumovsky to Italy". The indication that Berezovsky was a nobleman reveals that he probably had certain privileges, and a good salary. Shumilina states that the passport may not have been for Berezovsky, as the name "Beresevsky" is not the same as "Berezovsky".
After his return from Italy, Berezovsky was hired as the deputy director of the Capella, with an annual salary of 500 rubles. His duties included writing operatic ballet music. This position is shown in a list of theatre employees that was made in 1766. His sacred choral concerts was performed in August 1766 in the Amber Room of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace in the presence of Catherine II. Five more concerts were written during the next two years and were praised by Italian musicians (including Galuppi) and courtiers alike.
Return to Italy
In 1769, Berezovsky, by then in his late twenties, made a return trip to Italy. He travelled first to Vienna, as a courier to the ambassador Dmytro Golitsyn, as stated in a border crossing document dated 26 May. From there he went to Bologna. There he studied with the composer Giovanni Battista Martini at the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna. He stayed in Italy until 1773.
Berezovsky did not have the necessary letter of introduction for Martini. The letter was sent to Martini in February 1770 by the director of the Russian imperial theatres, Ivan Yelagin, by which time Berezovsky was already in Bologna and had begun classes. Shumilina has proposed that the appearance of Berezovsky in Italy (at a time when Russia and the Ottoman Empire were at war) was not initially so that he could be taught by Martini, and that the Russian authorities used Berezovsky's tuition as a cover, so that he could act as a government agent.
In May 1771, Berezovsky formally requested to be allowed to take the graduation exam: