Borys Mykolaiovych Lyatoshynsky, also known as Boris Nikolayevich Lyatoshinsky, (15 April 1968) was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, and teacher. A leading member of the new generation of 20th century Ukrainian composers, he was awarded a number of accolades, including the honorary title of People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR and two Stalin Prizes.
He received his primary education at home, where Polish literature and history was held in high esteem. After completing school in 1913, he entered the Faculty of Law at Kyiv University, and as a graduate was employed to teach music at the Kyiv Conservatory. During the 1910s, Lyatoshynsky wrote 31 works of various musical genres. During the 1930s he travelled to Tajikistan to study folk music and compose a ballet about the life of local people. From 1935 to 1938, and from 1941 to 1944, he taught orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory. During the war, Lyatoshynsky was evacuated and taught at the Conservatory's branch in Saratov, where he worked on arrangements of Ukrainian songs, and organised the transportation of Ukrainian musical manuscripts away to safety.
Lyatoshynsky's main works are his operas The Golden Ring (1929) and Shchors (1937), the five symphonies, the Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes (1926), the suites Taras Shevchenko (1952) and Romeo and Juliet (1955), the symphonic poem Grazhyna (1955), his "Slavic" piano concerto (1953), and the completion and orchestration of Reinhold Glière's violin concerto (1956). Many of his compositions were rarely or never performed during his lifetime. A 1993 recording of his symphonies first brought his music to worldwide audiences.
Despite his music being criticised by the Soviet authorities, who officially banned such compositions as his Second Symphony, Lyatoshynsky never adhered to a style of socialist realism. His music was written with a modern European style, and skilfully includes Ukrainian themes. His early musical style was influenced by his family, his teachers (including Glière), and by Margarita Tsarevich. The existence of a Polish side to Lyatoshynsky's family resulted in Polish themes being central for many of his works. He also drew inspiration for his early compositions from Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Scriabin. His musical style later developed in a direction favoured by Shostakovich. Soviet and Ukrainian composers who studied under Lyatoshynsky, and were influenced by him, include Myroslav Skoryk and Valentyn Sylvestrov.
Biography Family and early life
Borys Lyatoshynsky was born on 3 January 1895, in Zhytomyr, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). His parents were both musical and well-educated, and their son received his primary education at home. The Lyatoshynsky family lived in towns and cities throughout Ukraine during Borys's childhood. His father was a history teacher, who during his career was the head teacher of high schools in Zhytomyr, Nemyriv, Kyiv, and—from 1908 to 1911—in Zlatopil. Lyatoshynsky's mother Olha Borysovna played the piano and sang. Borys had an older sister, Nina.
Polish literature and history was held in high esteem in the Lyatoshynsky household; Borys read a lot as a boy, especially the historical and romantic works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and Stefan Żeromski. He signed his early musical compositions under the pseudonym 'Boris Yaksa Lyatoshynsky', using the name of a Polish knight who had fought in the Battle of Grunwald. His earliest pieces included mazurkas, waltzes, and a Chopinesque scherzo, which bear little resemblance to compositions written later in life. The existence of a Polish side to Lyatoshynsky's family resulted in Polish themes being central for much of his work. Zhytomyr was the cultural and administrative centre of a region long inhabited by ethnic Poles, and his first music teacher was of Polish origin.
Lyatoshynsky graduated from the Zhytomyr Gymnasium in 1913. Later in life, he recalled that he "became really interested in music" at school; he mastered the violin, and created his first compositions, which included a piano quartet. The pieces, although naïve and unoriginal, revealed his musical talent, and motivated his father to encourage his efforts as a schoolboy composer. In Zlatopol, Lyatoshynsky took piano lessons from a school teacher whom he later remembered with great warmth. In 1914, he first met his future wife Margarita Tsarevich.
Student years
The first work written by Lyatoshynsky was thought by musicologists to have been a mazurka, written on 20 January 1910, when he was 15. However, during the 1910s, Lyatoshynsky wrote 31 works of various musical genres—20 of which were discovered in 2017— none of which were known by his previous biographers. The pieces have provided scholars with an indication of the creative potential of the young composer.
In 1913, on the advice of his father, Lyatoshynsky entered the Faculty of Law at Kyiv University. When his piano quartet was performed in public in time for his father's birthday, the local press praised the work, although it was clear to those who heard the piece that the piano part was over-dominant. Lyatoshynsky's family decided to ask the composer Reinhold Glière, then the director and professor of the newly opened Kyiv Conservatory (now the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music), to teach the young man composition. His mother brought Glière the score of the quartet, and Glière agreed to teach him. A postcard has survived which reads: “I invite His Excellency Mr. Borys Lyatoshynsky to my first lesson. Professor Glier." Lyatoshynsky's early musical style was influenced by his family, his teachers, and his future wife Margarita Tsarevich—in his letters to her written between 1914 and 1916, his first ideas about writing music are revealed.
Lyatoshynsky enrolled at the Conservatory as a student. He graduated from the university in 1918. After graduating from the Conservatory the following year, he was employed there as a music composition teacher. During his student years, he composed his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 1 (1915), and his Symphony No. 1, Op. 2 (19181919, revised in 1967). According to the musicologists Igor Savchuk and Tatiana Gomon, perhaps the most tragic of his early piano works is "Mourning Prelude", a transitional work and one of his most powerful, which was written on 19 December 1920, the day his father died of typhus.
During this early period of Lyatoshynsky's development as a composer, he drew inspiration from works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Glazunov, and Alexander Scriabin. Many young composers of the Russian Empire similarly regarded Scriabin's experiments as a turning point in music. Lyatoshynsky's Piano Trio No.1 (1922) for violin, cello, and piano, is a work that attempts to have greater dynamic content and complexity; its sections are more contrasting than in previous works.
Career at the Kyiv Conservatory From 1922 to 1925, Lyatoshynsky, then a 25-year-old lecturer and teacher of composition in the Kyiv Conservatory, organised and led the . He was appointed as professor of composition in 1935. During the 1920s, the Communists introduced a policy of korenizatsiia ("indigenization"), designed to foster indigenous cultures as a way to undermine what was perceived as imperial domination. Korenizatsia produced a cultural climate that encouraged Lyatoshynsky and his contemporaries to be experimental and innovative.
During the first half of the decade, Lyatoshynsky concentrated mainly on composing chamber music for the violin and the piano, writing pieces such as his String Quartet No 2, the Trio for piano, violin and cello, and two piano sonatas. He also composed songs, some of them set to the lyrics of the Chinese ancient poets. Reflections (1925), a cycle of seven pieces for the piano, is one of a small number of works for the instrument; his other piano works are the sonatas (written in 1924 and 1925), Ballade (1928), a suite (1942), and seven of his , written in 1942 and 1943.
During the 1920s Lyatoshynsky composed a series of romances based on the writings of poets that included Heinrich Heine, Konstantin Balmont, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Percy Shelley, Maurice Maeterlinck, and a setting of Heine's poem "Black sails on a boat" (19221924). Other works include his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1924), and the String Quartet No 3. His opera The Golden Ring (written in 1929), based on a novel by the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, describes the struggle of the Ukrainians against the Mongol invaders in the 13th century. The Golden Ring was not considered to adhere to the doctrine of the Communist Party. His second opera, Shchors (1937), was based on the story of the Ukrainian communist Mykola Shchors during the conflict in Ukraine that followed the end of the First World War. The Piano Sonata No.1 was published in Moscow in 1926, the year he composed an overture based on Ukrainian folk music—the Overture on Four Ukrainian Themes, his first attempt at integrating his own musical style with original folk tunes. In June that year, Glière performed the premiere of Lyatoshynsky's First Symphony in a concert programme.
During 19311932, Lyatoshynsky wrote an orchestral suite for orchestra. From 1932 to 1939, he was a committee member of the Bureau of the Union of Composers of Ukraine. Following the commission from the officials of the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre, he travelled to Tajikistan to study folk music and compose a ballet about the life of local people. In 1932, he composed his Three Songs on Tajik Themes for violin and piano, based on the folk music of the region.
Second Symphony
The Second Symphony in B minor was commissioned in 1933 by the Organizing Bureau of the Union of Soviet Composers, to be premiered in Moscow along with a number of other works by Ukrainian composers. Lyatoshynsky worked on the symphony for six months during 1934. The work was criticised in the press, even though it had yet to be performed, with one critic writing: "The second symphony, with its external complexity and imposing sound, leaves the impression of an extremely empty, far-fetched work”. Due to the national mourning at the time for the Soviet politician Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the premiere was cancelled.
Moscow Conservatory and evacuation to Saratov From 1935 to 1938, and from 1941 to 1944, Lyatoshynsky taught orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory. He was the chairman of the Union of Composers of Ukraine in 1939.
When the threat to Kyiv became real during the German invasion of the USSR, the government in Moscow worked to protect the city's main artistic organisations and artists. Theatre groups, orchestras, and composers were evacuated to the interior of the USSR. Whilst helping to develop the culture and art of the republics they were sent to, Ukrainian artists continued to develop their national music.
Many faculties of the Moscow Conservatoire, including the music department, were relocated to Saratov, a town near the Volga, and Lyatoshynsky was evacuated there along with his colleagues, In Saratov, the Ukrainian Taras Shevchenko Radio Station broadcast political speeches and daily concerts of Lyatoshynsky's arrangements of Ukrainian music. He created solo pieces, and works for chamber groups, notably his "Ukrainian Quintet" for piano and strings (1942, 2nd ed. 1945), which was awarded the State Prize in 1943. Other works included the String Quartet No 4 (1943), a suite on Ukrainian folk tunes for string quartet (1944), and a suite for a quartet of wooden wind instruments (1944). He established contacts and worked collaboratively with the administrators of the local Concert Hall and Radio Committee. Under his leadership, Ukrainian musical manuscripts were transported away to safety.