A Man to Remember . . .

. . . and to continue to enjoy: the composer Rodion Shchedrin

Rodion Shchedrin (Yuri Belinsky/Itar-Tass)

I was planning to interview Rodion Shchedrin in March 2020—on March 10, specifically. We had arranged it. I was introduced to Shchedrin through our mutual friend Solomon Volkov, the musicologist. We were going to meet, Shchedrin and I, at his home in Munich. But then the pandemic hit. And everything was ... off.

We had some phone calls. It was a kick, let me tell you, to hear Shchedrin on the other end of the line, in his halting English. (I know no Russian.) He was warm and kindly. He called me “dear Jay,” as he did in his e-mails: “Well, dear Jay, I have to tell you ...”

In May 2020, I e-mailed him to ask how he was getting along. He answered,

My dear Jay, thanks for your nice hello!

First of all, I’m still alive. For almost two months now, I have been in Lithuania. There is also a quarantine here, but a softer one. [Less strict than in Munich, I think he meant.] Besides, I’m in the countryside and can work a little. I hope that the quarantine will pass and we will be able to meet and talk about everything.

Health reports from New York are disturbing. Please be careful, dear Jay!

Yours,
Rodion

(I have tidied up the maestro’s English, for the sake of general comprehension. But frankly, I find it endearing in the original.)

Rodion Shchedrin was one of the outstanding composers of our time. He died on August 29, at 92.

I wrote about him in 2011, in a piece headed “A Composer’s Hour.” The Lincoln Center Festival, in New York, was going to feature three of his ballets, including Carmen Suite, his arrangement of Bizet’s score. I wrote, “Maya Plisetskaya, one of the greatest dancers of all time, premiered this ballet with the Bolshoi in 1967.” I proceeded to say,

Shchedrin has a great affinity for ballet in general, and for Plisetskaya in particular: They were married in 1958. They are still an attractive, even a glamorous couple, she in her mid-eighties, he in his late seventies. Also, you could argue that they are the most talented couple in the world. Seriously. Of course, you might put in a bid for Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, too.

Plisetskaya died in 2015, at age 89.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Shchedrin and Plisetskaya lived mainly in Munich. His English had a flavor of German about it, which was only natural. He might write “sommer,” for example, instead of “summer.”

In that 2011 piece, I wrote,

Rodion Shchedrin was born on Dec. 16, 1932. (There was another composer born on December 16: Beethoven.) His father was a composer and music teacher. Many, many composers have been sons of composers, or of professional musicians: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, to begin with. Shchedrin’s first name is an old-fashioned Russian one, shared by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The last name looks fearsome in its spelling, but is easy to pronounce, or approximate: Shed-REEN.

How about his education?

He studied with two top musicians at the Moscow Conservatory: Yuri Shaporin and Yakov Flier. The former was his composition teacher, the latter his piano teacher. Flier was little-known in the West, unlike some other pianists from the Soviet Union. But he was magnificent. Shchedrin has said he was the best he ever heard, after Vladimir Horowitz. That’s a powerful statement, even allowing for a student’s natural loyalty.

Shchedrin himself was a very good pianist, as his recordings attest.

“With respect to composition,” I wrote,

Shchedrin came of age in “a rather lean time,” as he put it in an interview earlier this year. Even the Impressionists—Debussy, Ravel—were scorned as tune-happy squares. Abstraction and devotion to method were the rule of the day. “For 35 years, there was a dictatorship of the avant-garde,” Shchedrin said in another interview, “and I was never a part of it.” He lays great stress on what he calls “intuition.” Especially in earlier years, he wrote his share of abstract, or semi-abstract, music. But he insists that “music should touch the heart and soul.” And he has referred to himself as “a post-avant-garde composer.”

He had “a huge appetite for music,” I wrote, “music of every period, and of every type.” He was like his friend Shostakovich, who made a statement I frequently quote: “I love everything from Bach to Offenbach.”

Here is a story about Shchedrin and Shostakovich (as related in my piece):

One summer, the Shchedrins and the Shostakoviches were vacationing together in Armenia. Shostakovich asked Shchedrin, out of the blue, “If you could take one score with you to a desert island, what would it be? And you have ten seconds to decide.” Shchedrin named Bach’s Art of the Fugue. Shostakovich—surprisingly, you may well think—named Mahler’s Song of the Earth.

Let me address an aspect of Shchedrin’s music, and of his character:

Often in his pictures, you see Shchedrin with a twinkle in his eye. He loves humor, as Shostakovich did. (Shostakovich did not have much to twinkle about.) The subtitle of Shchedrin’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 1 is “Naughty Limericks.” Later, he wrote Three Funny Pieces, for piano trio. (They are, too.) And his Humoresque is one of his most popular pieces—ingeniously funny, almost laugh-out-loud. Of course, the humor in Shchedrin’s catalogue can be of the dark or ironic kind. For 40 years, he composed in the Soviet Union, after all.

About his Concerto for Orchestra No. 1, I once wrote to him,

It may amuse you to know that I exchange naughty limericks with friends—via text—regularly. It is an innocent, lighthearted habit that makes life sweeter!

Later on, I wrote him about another Concerto No. 1—his first piano concerto. His answer, I can’t quite decipher. But, so help me, I love it nonetheless.

Dear Jay,
Great to have your greeting plus kind compliment about my first piano concerto!Thats was my one of the first steps to music...
So good-we both still alive in very strength time!!!...
Best to you!!
Yours Rodion

Here is a note from me in January 2024:

Rodion, I was talking to a young conductor the other day. He said, “I can’t believe how good ‘Nutcracker’ is. Every page. A lot of people consider the work hackneyed. But every page is well constructed and inspired.”

So true. I told him about a remark that you made in the 1970s, I believe. Someone had asked you, “What music are you prepared to listen to right now?” You answered, “‘Nutcracker’—and explained why.”

Shchedrin replied to me as follows:

Dear Jay,

My opinion about ‘Nutcracker’ now is the same! Maybe only stronger!

Yours,
Rodion

I loved that. “Maybe only stronger!”

Rodion Shchedrin wrote a great deal of music. His obituary in the New York Times did some accounting: five operas, five ballets, 33 orchestral works, 16 concertos, 24 chamber pieces, 31 solo-instrument pieces, 20 vocal works, 16 scores for films and plays.

I last corresponded with him in March of this year, saying,

Dear Rodion: The other night, I heard the Vienna Philharmonic, under Muti, play “Le Baiser de la fée.” So, Stravinsky treating Tchaikovsky. My main thought was, “Fine. But give me Shchedrin and Bizet, please!”

In his note back, he said, “This answer, I dictate, because my eyes are like blind.” What can you say in reply to that? I said something dorky, or trite, but sincere: that he would always be far-seeing to me.

A memorable artist and person, Rodion Shchedrin.