Composer  Edison  Denisov
 
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Edison Vasil’evich Denisov, one of the most influential Russian composers of his generation, was born on 6 April 1929 in Tomsk, Siberia. His father was an engineer and his mother a doctor. He studied mathematics, before moving, encouraged by Shostakovich, to the Moscow Conservatory in 1951. After graduation in 1959 he began to teach analysis and orchestration, but, despite repeated requests, it was 30 years before he was officially allowed to teach composition. Unofficially he quickly gathered younger students around himself, introducing them to new pieces from Russia and abroad. This work was to have vital influence on the history of modern Soviet music. Denisov’s boundless curiosity about what was happening outside the closed world of Soviet music was first awoken in the late 1950s. He soon discovered what were to remain his principle fascinations: French music, the Second Viennese School, and the postwar avant-garde of Boulez and Stockhausen. In 1964 he wrote The Sun of the Incas, a chamber cantata which stridently announced the appearance of a modernist on the conservative Soviet scene. After several notable essays in a post-Webernian idiom, including 3 pieces for piano 4 hands (1967) and the brilliant String Trio (1969), in 1970 Denisov wrote Peinture for orchestra, in which he at last felt he had found his own language. Soon he was embarked on a substantial series of concertos for virtuoso performers, including a lyrical Flute Concerto (1975) for Aurèle Nicolet, a more robust Violin Concerto (1977) for Gidon Kremer, and a colourful Concerto for Flute and Oboe (1979) for Nicolet and Heinz Holliger. A more melancholy side to Denisov’s nature can be found in Tod ist ein langer Schlaf (1982), for cello and strings, and the Requiem (1980), which Denisov himself considered one of his most successful achievements. Fascination with French culture led him to the writings of Boris Vian on whom he based the cantata La Vie en Rouge (1973) and the lavish and Duke-Ellington-haunted opera L’Ecume des Jours (1981). In response, the French took him to their hearts, giving the opera its 1986 premiere at the Opéra-Comique, commissioning the massive Symphony No.1 (1987) and, in Denisov’s troubled last years of illness, supporting expensive medical treatment and giving him and his young family a second home in Paris. For all his absorption in modern Western music, Denisov was deeply loyal to his Russian roots. This is especially reflected in his several song-cycles for voice and piano, including Your Sweet Face (1980, after Pushkin) and On the Snowy Bonfire (1981, after Blok), in which he revived in his own terms the 19th century song-traditions of Glinka and Mussorgsky. In 1992, fired by newly awoken religious feelings, Denisov wrote The Story of the Life and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ, an hour-long oratorio for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Thereafter, despite painful ill-health, he continued composing prolifically, completing a Symphony No.2 only months before his death in Paris in 1996. Edison Denisov is published by Boosey & Hawkes.   --  Reprinted by kind permission of Gerard McBurney/Boosey & Hawkes  --  Throughout this webpage, names which are links refer to my Interviews elsewhere on this website.  BD

ED:  It's very difficult to say because, for instance, Rozhdestvensky, who has conducted this work twice in Moscow treats the work completely differently.  That's completely normal.  Rozhdestvensky has a different approach to the work, and every musician will have a different approach.

BD:  Do you write in this leeway for interpretation, or is that something that you just expect out of each interpreter?

ED:  I do think that a composer should participate in the first performance of a work.  He should work with the conductor and help to shape it.  He doesn't change things in the score, but he does adapt things.  He learns a lot from the process of working with a conductor on the premiere.  Here, I didn't really need to work with Barenboim because he'd already done it in Paris.  The only thing was that here I felt I was able to help with was the balance.

BD:  But once the composer gets it the way he wants it, is there then not room for someone else's ideas in it?

ED:  One of the wonderful things about music is, in fact, that one can always find a new interpretation.  Just to take, for instance, a Mozart sonata.  There are lots of different interpretations; you can argue about them and some you will like better than others, but many of them will be convincing.  For instance, I've heard a recording of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations marvelously.  András Schiff plays them in quite a different way, but I find it equally convincing.  For me those are the two best performers of the Goldberg Variations, but they are completely different interpretations.

BD:  Do you think there will come a time when there will be such wild divergence of opinion about your own music?

ED:  If it gets played.  [Chuckles]

BD:  How do we get it played more?

ED:  Most often, and especially when it's abroad in the West, it is at the initiative of the performer.  For different composers there are countries in which they get played more, and some countries when they're played less.  For me, countries where my music is played the most are France and Germany.

BD:  Are you having a renaissance now in the United States?

ED:  It's hard to say "renaissance," because it's the first time I have been here.  [Laughter all around]  When a person comes to a country, he meets people, he gets to know them, gets to know musicians, and then the possibility is that they might play him.

BD:  Have you basically been pleased so far with your trip here?

ED:  Basically, yes, so far I am pleased with this trip.  I like the atmosphere; I feel very comfortable here, and although I haven't seen very much, I really feel like it's not my first trip here.  It is like I have been here before.  Americans seem to be very open, just like Russians.  I find it very comfortable because they're very open and heartfelt.

BD:  Can you compare and contrast the audiences in Russia with Western Europe, in Paris or Germany?

ED:  The public everywhere is great, but it does strike me that the public in Moscow, in Russia, is a little bit more open to new music than elsewhere.

BD:  Really?  Why?

ED:  I don't really know the answer.  It may be, first of all, that they have fewer concerts, so there's less competition.  Or it may be that people there simply need more to hear what contemporary artists are saying.  I don't like it when you have a "special" public for contemporary music.  I like it best when you have a normal public, a public that comes for traditional music.  I have had some premieres in Paris

that comes to hear your music?

ED:  My music is not easy to approach; it has a great inner tension and concentration.  There's some music that is very easy to come to and appreciate on a first hearing.  Mine doesn't really fall into that category.  Any advice I could give would be that you should listen to it more than once.

BD:  You indicate that your music is perhaps more difficult than some.  Is that by design, or is that just the way it has to be written?

and that you can listen to many, many times and always take away something new.  By comparison, think of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which you can read in youth, you can read in middle age, you can read in old age, and you will always get something very different and new.  Whereas if you read de Maupassant's Bel Ami, the first time it's a wonderful book, but if you read it a second or third time you won't really take away much that's new.  Also compare the Russian novelist Turgenev with Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.  When you read Turgenev the first time, you will take away all the information you need to know.  It doesn't mean that one is better than the other, it just means it's a different type of approach, a different type of meaning.

BD:  Is the music that you write for everyone?

ED:  Yes.  I am, in principle, against elitism.  I think my music is for everyone.  I am against elitism, in contrast to my colleague, for instance, Sofia Gubaidulina, who thinks that in principle, music should be elite.

BD:  In your music, or in any music, is there a balance between artistic achievement and an entertainment value?

ED:  It's very hard to write a piece of music that would have both qualities.  I'm not opposed to diverting music, nor against entertaining music at all.  For instance, my Sonata for Flute and Guitar I consider pure entertainment.  I have written some music that I consider pure entertainment, but they are a little less important than other works.  This is because there are fewer of those works inside me.  There are some composers who really don't put anything of themselves into their pieces.  Varèse, Roussel and Xenakis are composers whom I admire, but I don't hear anything personal coming from inside them in that music.  It's very objective music.  We get closer in the music of Schubert, for instance, because all of Schubert is like a page out of his life; you can hear it as a page out of his diary.  Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony is also a work that is straight out of his life, and many of the symphonies of Shostakovich are like that.

BD:  Do the pages that you write come out of your life?

ED:  Basically, yes.  There are some works that are very, very close because they seem to be straight out of the insides.  The opera The Foam of Days, the ballet Confession, the Requiem.  They're a little bit closer to me than other works because they are so personal.  A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for two pianos called Dots and Lines [for two pianos, eight hands], and in that work there's nothing personal at all.  But there are very few of those works.

BD:  Are there any works that are perhaps too close to you?

ED:  Yes, and probably the one that's that close is the opera The Foam of Days.  When I choose a subject or poetry to set, I select those that are the ones that I might have written myself if I were a poet.

BD:  We've somewhat danced around this, so let me ask it straight out.  What is the purpose of music?

ED:  I think that music can give people a great deal.  Large scale compositions always have some kind of message.  Music, in principle, is an art form that is very deeply spiritual.  The art of music is much deeper and more mysterious, and penetrates into mysteries of existence much more and with greater depth and accuracy and directness than the art of words.  It is not accidental that music is connected with the church, both Catholic and Russian Orthodox.  Music, like mathematics, deals in a realm that approaches mystery, and beyond which begins what we call "God."

BD:  And this is coming from someone who was working in a state where they deny the existence of God!

ED:  Well, they don't, anymore.  Officially they said there was no God, but that doesn't mean anything.  The Russian people have always been deeply religious.  Russians are very deeply religious, and it would've been impossible to erase that.  I consider that one of the greatest evils wrought upon us by the Soviet government.  So in my Requiem, I used two theses, or antitheses.  First, poetry of Francisco Tanzer to the effect that in our time there are ten confessions that have been forgotten, and I juxtaposed that to selections from the Psalms from the Bible.  When you look at the television in the United States, you can see immediately that the Ten Commandments have been forgotten.  You can see that there's a cult of murder on television, and it's true in Russia, too, and in Paris.  But it's very obvious on television here that they're propagating a cult of murder.

BD:  How does your music try to counteract this?

ED:  Music should bring light to people.  Music can have a good effect on people.  It can bring salvation to people; it can act on the soul.  I am not against commercial music, but much of contemporary rock or pop music is, in fact, deleterious.  It has a bad effect on the souls of young people.  If you go back to The Beatles, that was real music.  That was great; or Pink Floyd.  But if you look at what's on television, commercial music, that's nothing.  It's like rotten drugs; it's an anti-spiritual direction.  If you take real music

BD:  What advice do you have for young composers coming along?

ED:  A young composer should know his technique; he should have his technique down solid, but he shouldn't make a cult of it.  For instance, I admire some of the students of Boulez, but I heard, not long ago, a concert conducted by Boulez where some of the student compositions were performed.  There was one piece which was 30 minutes long, and there was no music there; all that was there was technique.

BD:  One last question.  Is composing fun?  [Note: After rendering my question to the composer, the translator quietly said to me,

This interview was recorded in Chicago on May 16, 1991.  Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB in 1994 and again in 1999.  A copy of the audio tape was placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2011.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.