The Politics of Disharmony

It is a subzero day in February, but Denis Matsuev is making the other pianists in the room feel uncomfortably warm. Listening to the 22-year-old play Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz” is like listening to God create the universe: a fury of deafening thunderbolts mixed with unearthly beauty and tenderness.

“A talent like his turns up about once every 20 years, and when they do it’s usually here,” says the Milan Conservatory’s Vincenzo Barzani, who has just taught the master class in which Matsuev performed.

“Here” is the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, which Barzani calls “the greatest and most endangered conservatory in the world.”

To understand what concerns him, you must climb two flights of stairs--the conservatory’s 19th century lift is out of order today--to the rooms where students actually practice.

It is nearly as cold up here as it is outside. Piano students wear several layers of clothing and gloves with the fingers cut out. The conservatory cannot afford to heat these rooms, and it can’t afford to keep the pianos in tune, let alone replace missing ivories or broken strings.

A visit to the conservatory’s library is equally distressing. That Rachmaninoff score, with the composer’s dedication in his own hand? It’s falling apart, because the library doesn’t have climate-controlled storage areas.

That recording of the famous recital Emil Gilels gave here 50 years ago? It’s almost un-listenable now, because it wasn’t transferred to tape before it began to deteriorate.

All of this worries Matsuev, whose good looks and curly hair recall those of the young Van Cliburn. What worries him most, however, is that Serge Dorensky, his teacher, earns only $130 a month.

“I continually live with the fear that our best teachers will leave the country,” says Matsuev, who switched to Dorensky after his first teacher, Alexei Nasedkin, decided to work mostly in Japan, with its astronomically higher salaries. “In the five years I’ve been a student, five of the best [piano] teachers have left.”

While Matsuev worries about his teachers, his teachers worry about him.

After hearing his “Mephisto Waltz,” Barzani tells Matsuev: “It is time for you to go abroad to let people hear you, so that you can be as famous and as rich as you deserve to be.”

Five months later, when Matsuev wins first prize in the quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Competition, that time seems at hand.

In many respects, the young pianist’s triumph is business as usual. The Tchaikovsky, the world’s most famous competition, is almost always dominated by the Russians.

But this year, the standing-room-only crowd at the Bolshoi Zal--the conservatory’s great concert hall--must contend with something new: the smell of human excrement.

Like everything else in Russia, the hall is breaking down. Its antiquated plumbing simply can’t handle the thousands who have come to hear the world’s finest young pianists, violinists, cellists and vocalists.

The Tchaikovsky Conservatory has produced as many great instrumentalists as the rest of the world’s conservatories combined. But its future is threatened for the same reasons it cannot afford to fix its toilets.

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union may have been good for world peace. But they have been bad for music.

MUSICAL POWERHOUSE

The golden age of Soviet music was shaped by the iron hammer wielded by Josef Stalin.

In 1931, a group of musical prodigies gave a concert for Stalin and the other party bosses. Afterward, the dictator met with the children and their teachers and asked how they were living.

“Boris Goldstein, a 10-year-old violinist with a big talent and an even bigger mouth, got up and said conditions were ‘terrible,’ ” says Lev Ginzburg, a Russian music historian.

“There was terrified silence after [Goldstein] spoke,” Ginzburg says. “Everyone in the room thought the NKVD [the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a predecessor of the KGB] would be knocking on their doors that night and that they would be waking up in the morning in Lubyanka prison.

“Finally, Stalin said, ‘Well, then something must be done.’ ”

One result of that meeting was the establishment of free professional schools that were to prepare gifted children to enter the Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) conservatories directly. These “central schools” were soon followed by the creation of similar preparatory institutions for the other conservatories in the former Soviet Union--eight in Russia, four in the Ukraine and 10 in other Soviet republics.

Like Hitler, Stalin understood the propaganda value of culture. He realized that the achievements of musicians (like those of chess players, dancers and athletes) could demonstrate the superiority of communism over capitalism.

“Unlike our leaders today, Stalin went to the theater every night,” says Sergei Usanov, the current director of Moscow’s Central School. “He established big salaries for conservatory professors, who were getting 5,000 rubles a month [the equivalent of about $332] when doctors were making only 1,000. He was a monster, but his influence is one of the reasons that this country grows talented musicians like mushrooms in the rain.”

The system that Stalin helped to create made the Soviet Union the world’s classical music powerhouse, with Moscow as its center.

Moscow began to attract the most ambitious and well-known performers, composers and teachers from other cities. Violinist David Oistrakh and pianists Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter arrived from Odessa in the 1930s; they were followed a decade later by composer Dmitri Shostakovich, pianists Vladimir Sofronitzky and Maria Yudina and cellist Daniel Shafran from Leningrad.

Each year, teachers from the Moscow schools would scour the provinces for gifted children. Many of the most promising would be relocated to Moscow, with their families, so that they could study at the Central School. Such was the case, for example, of the 9-year-old Vladimir Ashkenazy (from Gorky) and the 11-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich (from Baku).

The country’s excellence in teaching music has it roots in the 1860s when the Rubinstein brothers, Anton and Nikolai, founded the St. Petersburg and Moscow conservatories. Russian achievements in music were paralleled by similar flowerings in other arts. Russia’s late entry into the Industrial Age and its belated development of a middle class made it hungry to catch up to the rest of Europe.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia had produced musicians such as pianists Sergei Rachmaninoff and Josef Lhevinne, violinists Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. The revolution of 1917 led to the departure of some of the country’s great figures, but most remained. And the pedagogy that had produced a Rachmaninoff and a Heifetz was to be elaborated, systematized and, in the 1930s, collectivized.

The results were apparent in the decades after World War II, when young Russian musicians, particularly pianists, surpassed their Western contemporaries in competition after competition.

“When you get really young people molded by a really strong force, you achieve interesting results,” says pianist Ivan Davis, who teaches at the University of Miami. “I usually don’t see people until they are graduate students. At that age you can refine them, but you can’t awaken them to music. The Soviets had the ability to teach young kids, and they didn’t wait until they were 18 to match them with good teachers.”

The Russian success may also have been a measure of attitude: Americans may admire classical music, but Russians revere it.

The Soviet citizens of the post-World War II years probably would have been just as absorbed by the TV sets, popular movies, washing machines and flashy, relatively inexpensive automobiles that thrilled Americans.

“But,” pianist Vladimir Feltsman says, “our government devoted our economy to different sorts of things: to heavy industry, which produced items such as tractors; to scientific research, which few people understood; and to culture, including sports and the arts, which we cared about all the more because we didn’t care about the others.”

Musicians also enjoyed an enviable position in Soviet society. Even teachers at the approximately 5,000 children’s music schools (not to be confused with the much more prestigious central schools) earned salaries equal to those of doctors or engineers.

Things were different for the musicians who came later, especially after the beginning of glasnost in the late ‘80s. The switch to a free-market economy made cities like Moscow as expensive as New York. The once generous salaries of conservatory professors dwindled to about a tenth of their former earning power. Life became more difficult still for teachers of children.

“Once people could make a good living [in Russia] by teaching music to children, and once parents encouraged their talented children to become musicians, because it meant that they would lead good lives,” says Richard Rodzinski, executive director of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. “If those times are past, as they seem to be, then the future of Russian music is in serious trouble.”

LOW SALARIES

Last February, a sign posted at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory’s entrance bore a familiar message: “No checks will be received today--tomorrow perhaps.”

By Friday, the sign was covered by graffiti, one of which declared: “If we wait until Judgment Day, then and only then can Russians expect justice and (perhaps) a check.”

While the faculty and staff began to receive checks three weeks later, the librarians--whose salary was $20 a month--struck for more than two months for a wage increase. After receiving a $2 raise in April, the librarians returned to work. At summer’s end, the students still haven’t received their $16 monthly stipends.

“Salaries here are terrible ,” says Daniel Pollack, a Los Angeles pianist who teaches at USC. A finalist in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition, he was a juror during last summer’s event. “But,” he adds, “the pianos are just as bad.”

Including faculty and students, Moscow’s conservatory has about 400 pianists; between 1982 and 1998, the conservatory acquired no new pianos and did not rebuild any.

For Moscow’s music students--and not just its pianists--this is more than a nuisance. It is a hazard, particularly during the long winter.

“An out-of-tune piano makes it all-but-impossible for a singer to stay in tune,” says conservatory choral-conducting student Marianna Rusziak. “But any singer who cannot properly locate the key and must also sing in temperatures so cold that he cannot properly warm up his vocal cords is in danger of permanently damaging his voice.”

Conservatory students often have to scramble to make ends meet. The 24-year-old Rusziak, for example, lives in a small, four-room apartment, which she shares with two families. Because she speaks fluent English, she can earn enough to eat by scheduling baby-sitting jobs for Western families around appointments as a translator. That means long working days and short nights that often do not leave her enough time for her studies.

While the conservatory is free for Russians, citizens of the new republics formed from the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine or Georgia, must pay. This upsets those who care about the musical traditions that once embraced the entire Soviet empire.

“It is a serious problem that talented people in the cities of what used to be the USSR can’t study at the conservatory if they cannot afford it,” Matsuev says. “Imagine how much poorer Russian music would have been if poor boys from Odessa and Baku had not been allowed to come to Moscow so that they could become Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich. Those were the days that my teachers reminisce about.”

It sometimes appears that the future of Russian musicians--if not of Russian music--is in the West. Russian musical emigres to the West have included not only established instrumentalists like Evgeny Kissin, but also young musicians, such as Lera Auerbach, at the beginning of their careers.

Auerbach was only 17 when--on a 1991 visit to the United States--she decided not to return to her homeland.

“I love the passionate nature of Russian culture and Russian audiences--and that kind of passion is much harder to find in America,” says Auerbach, who lives in New York and who has begun to establish a reputation as a pianist and composer. “But my feeling was that Russia was a dead end--the sense of depression there was awful. I felt that if I was outside Russia I could relate to its culture more closely than if I remained inside.”

Even musicians who have not emigrated--such as conductors Yuri Temirkanov (the music director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and music director-designate of the Baltimore Symphony) and Valery Gergiev, who maintain St. Petersburg residences--spend most of their time in the West. In fact, Gergiev, the music director of the Kirov Opera and Ballet, has been able to pay the salaries of his musicians, singers and dancers by bringing them to the West often. The artists of the Bolshoi Theater, who tour much less frequently, have not been paid since the end of last year.

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Coming in Monday’s Calendar: Who’s prospering in today’s Russian classical music world--and who’s not.