ARAM KHATCHATURIAN

This year marks the 105th anniversary of birth
and the 30th year of the passing away of
the world famous Armenian composer

ARAM KHATCHATURIAN

Five years ago, UNESCO had declared 2003 as the year of Aram Khathcaturian.

On that occasion, Khatchatur I. Pilikian had written an article dedicated to the great Armenian composer. We think that you will find the reading of the article a rewarding experience. For that reason we are, herewith, re-circulating K.I. Pilikian's article.

Please note: Blogger was not able to upload the images of ARAM KHATCHATURIAN

for this article.

THE WORLD’S ARMENIAN COMPOSER

Aram Khatchaturian was 60 years old when in 1963 the International Committee for Peace celebrated the 250th anniversary of birth of Ashugh Sayat Nova (1713-1795), the Armenian minstrel who had excelled in composing verses in three languages with equal mastery, hence claimed by the peoples of Transcaucasia, Armenians, Georgians and Azeris, each as their own national Ashugh (= minstrel). Sayat Nova’s philosophy of life and love, his songs and poetry, his fame as a virtuoso kemanchist (Near Eastern fiddle) coupled with the legend about his beautiful singing voice; all had become the subconscious leitmotiv of Khatchaturian’s creative output. Apparently maestro Khatchaturian, the “Peoples Artist of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, had an obsession to write an opera about Sayat Nova. Alas, he never composed an opera.

Mahdesi (= pilgrim of Jerusalem) Karapet’s son Harutiun, renowned as Sayat Nova, was born in Tbilisi. So was the bookbinder Yeghia (Illich in Russian) Khatchaturian’s son Aram, the youngest of four brothers, who later recalled affectionately:

I loved singing and accompanying myself since childhood by playing percussive instruments, the latter available for me only in the form of household buckets or tea-pots. As for my songs, they were invariably folk songs I had heard from elderly people. During family reunions and feasts my mother [Ghumash = smooth-silk cloth] danced oriental folk dances. Her movements were gentle, beautiful and with legato. She also sang very pleasantly. I loved watching her dance. I admired her. [Aram’s opus no.1 of 1925 titled The Song of the Wondering Ashugh was dedicated to her]. Folk music was all around me in Tbilisi. Songs, dances and instrumental music (Tar, Kamancha, and Dahira) performed here and there and at all occasions. [Tar, Caucasian long-necked lute; Kamancha, Near Eastern fiddle, held and played vertically on the player’s knee; Dahira or Da’ira, Pers.Arab. = Circle, a small Tambourine]. My father too was well versed in Armenian folk tunes which he sang and accompanied himself on the Tar.

The first professional music I ever heard was a symphonic concert performed in a park, conducted by Tcherebnin (the Elder). I was then 12 years old. I remember vividly how I once rushed to the Tbilisi Opera Theatre to hear Absalom and Etheri. [Music by the Georgian composer Z.Paliashvili, himself a student of S. Taneyev who taught, among others, Rachmaninov, Schriabin, and R.Glier. In mid 1920’s, Glier became Khatchatrian’s first teacher of Instrumentation]. The orchestral sound, the songs performed on the stage and the whole scenery, all made a powerful impression on me. I was in my early teens. Then at fifteen I joined my school’s [Tbilisi Commercial College (1913-1920)] wind band [playing the Tuba]. There I soon started improvising and composing aurally waltzes and school marches for various combinations of wind instruments. But the notes of my compositions were jotted down by others. Meanwhile I taught myself somehow to play the piano [and compose music for the piano] on an old and broken instrument we happened to have then at home.

When my brother Suren came to engage young actors, painters and musicians for the Moscow Armenian State Dramatic Studio of which he was the director, I also joined them and found myself in Moscow in 1921. I was eighteen. A year later, and encouraged by Ashkhen Mamikonian, one of the tutors of the said Studio, I enrolled at the Gnessin Music Technical School. In view of my advanced age I was advised to study the cello [with tutors Bichkov and Borisyak]. Noticing the fast progress I made in my cello studies, my harmony teacher Mikhail Gnessin took me under his tutelage and secured for me a place in his composition class.

Composing music enthralled me so much that I abandoned my studies at the Moscow State University [studying biology during 1922-1925]. This year [1928/9] I shall be graduating from the Gnessin School, having also completed the course of composition (Fugue) with M.F.Gnessin, and instrumentation with R.M.Glier.

While at Gnessin School, Khatchaturian composed incidental music for the production of plays at the Armenian Drama Studio mentioned above. Nevertheless he was refused membership of the Composers Union and a salary, due to the fact that he had not yet had a concert performance of his own music proven by a printed programme.

Soon after graduation from Gnessin School, Khatchaturian studied at Moscow Conservatory (1929-1934). Post graduate work followed for another two years. The distinguished panel of tutors he worked with included Myaskovsky and Gnessin (composition), G. Konyus (harmony) and Vasilenko (orchestration).

While still a graduate student, the all influential Composers Union of the USSR accepted Aram Khachaturian’s membership in 1932. It was the year he composed his famous Toccata (part one of a Piano Suite), and the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano. On Prokofiev’s recommendation the latter Trio was performed and published in Paris. The event made Khatchaturian feel he was “in seventh heaven”.

That same year (1932) a string Quartet founded in 1924/5 by four brilliant instrumentalists (Gabrielian, Ohanjanian, Terzian and Aslamazian) was named after Komitas (1869-1935), the composer Vardapet (=reverend, priest), choral conductor, ethnographer and founder of scientific Armenian musicology. Komitas Vardapet was tutored in Tbilisi in 1895 by the composer Makar Yekmalian (himself once, like Khatchaturian’s own tutor Gnessin, a student of Rimsky Korsakov). If Khatchaturian’s creative subconscious was pulsated by Sayat Nova’s minstrel art, the music and musico-pedagogical precepts of Komitas illuminated Khatchaturian’s conscious mind. At the age of sixty four, Varpet (=maestro, guru) Aram stated:

If the contemporary Armenian composers wish, and they must wish to contribute towards the being and becoming of the Armenian music and its musical idiom, they ought to know Komitas inside out. (In a personal letter, dated 14th Oct 1967, Moscow, sent to London, addressed to K.I.Pilikian.)

Gnessin himself had met Komitas personally in Constantinople, in 1914. He had asked Komitas to shed light on the probable correlation between Jewish and Armenian melodies. Gnessin reported: “I felt the seriousness of Komitas’ scientific focus. When I heard his music later, I realised the enormity of his talent and what a great musician he was...Indeed what an interesting and original musical pedagogue he should have been”. (Little did anyone expect that Komitas would literally lose his mind in 1915, having witnessed and survived a tragedy that shook the foundations of humanity—the first genocide of the 20th century, when the proto Nazi government of the Young Turks executed a plan of total terror and annihilation against the Armenian people. Komitas died in a mental hospital in Paris, in 1935.)

In 1933, Khatchaturian composed an orchestral Dance Suite as if foreshadowing his great ballet compositions Gayane of 39/40’s and Spartacus of 50’s. The said Dance Suite was based on themes from Armenian, Georgian, Azeri and Uzbek musical idioms. That same year of 1933, Khatchaturian married his classmate sweetheart from the Moscow Conservatory, the composer Nina Makarova (1908-1976). A year later, Khatchaturian composed his diploma work, his Symphony no.1, which earned him a gold medal upon graduation. D. Shostakovich felt that Khatchaturian’s first symphony “is inebriated with life’s beauty and delight”. Two years later, Khatchaturian came to a much wider notice than ever before, with his Piano Concerto (1936). “Khatchaturian has succeeded in coupling the wealth of virtuosity with profundity of content”, declared Shostakovich. After a happy sojourn in Armenia in 1939, Aram’s and Nina’s first and only son Garen was born in 1940, the year of Khatchaturian’s exhilarating Violin Concerto— imbued in a masterly fashion with Armenian musical phraseology nurtured by Komitas Vardapet. Its first performer, the legendary David Oistrakh reported: “It is modern music in the truest meaning of the word”. In New York its impression was exhilarating (cited by G.Schnährson): “If it were possible to forge light, pure light, with all its brilliance into sound, then Khatchaturian has achieved precisely that in his masterpiece”.

As to Khatchaturian’s Symphony no.2, composed during the apocalyptic barbarities of World War 2, Dimitry Shostakovich, yet again, asserted: “Perhaps it is the first work where the tragic basis has achieved such heights. The marriage of the tragic with the life force acquires a great power here”.

Aram Khatchaturian was to lead the Composers Union for over 20 years, until his death in 1978. He had already served in its organising committee as the deputy chairman for nearly a decade (1939-1948). His dedication to the Composers Union was exemplary, tinged with some melancholy:

It taught me a lot. To me it was a second Conservatory. I was always in touch and working with such musicians as Glier, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shebalin and frequently with Shostakovich, Dunayevsky and others. It was an excellent school for me ... Even though [he concluded wryly], it meant also that I had less time to compose...

Forgoing the mention of Khatchaturian’s biographical details, suffice it to say that the rest of his creative achievement is indeed first and foremost part of the world’s music literature, history and performance, all canoed in an ocean of political turmoil and the upheavals of Nazi invasion, the World War 2, hunger and personal tragedies, and above all heroic survival from Beria-Stalin diabolic terror tinted with idiotic Zhdanovian denunciations. The latter caused directly the nine years gap in Khatchaturian’s leadership of the Composers Union (1948-1957), which ironically served as a bonus to be creative, allowing him to compose, among others, his ballet masterpiece, Spartacus. He had begun composing it in 1949 when he felt exasperated:

My great faith in the future notwithstanding, presently I am in a foul mood. There are many and very evil people around us. I know not where to escape...

Escape he did. He did through the only way he knew best, and survived. He composed to recreate and cast on the world stage a dancing slave with a difference— His slave was Spartacus, a freedom fighter, once rightly acclaimed as “the noblest martyr-saint of the revolutionary calendar”.

The rewards of such a heroic survival were immense and substantial too. There were innumerable prizes, medals, titles and honorary doctorates, professorships, memberships to Academies, and most importantly, a large number of publications of Khatchaturian’s works, and decades of performances of his ballets, concertos and symphonies in repertory theatres, opera houses and concert halls, all over the world.

Khatchaturian's compositions are, so far, collected in 24 volumes (Moscow. 1982-91). His oeuvre embraces nearly the whole gamut of musical compositions including incidental music for stage plays, and numerous film scores. He was a pioneer of musical compositions for motion pictures with sound, not only in Armenia, (Pepo of 1935), but in the whole of the USSR As to Pepo’s popular song The Saddle in my Hands (lyrics by Yeghishe Tcharentz, the great Armenian revolutionary poet, victim of Beria’s henchmen in 1937), Khatchaturian acknowledged his debt, yet again, to Sayat Nova:

When I composed Pepo’s song, I always had Sayat Nova in mind.

Forty years after Pepo’s song, Khatchaturian composed his Sonata Monologue for Solo Violin (1975), creating a mosaic of musical phrases and rhythmic patterns of acrobatic bow movements, glowing with virtual improvisation, all based on the melodic and rhythmic structure of the Sayat Nova song If You’re Wise. (This famous melody in fact belonged to an earlier Armenian minstrel, by the name of Baghtasar Dbir, who had composed the lyrics and the music of his enchanting canticle Arise from Your Royal Slumber in 1707).

The eminent music critic Asafiev thought that “Khatchaturian is the Rubens of music of oriental tales”. Asafiev’s metaphor implies opulence, monumentality, colour and compositional panache. Perhaps “abundance” says it all. Khatchaturian’s music is abundant with melodies, rhythm, harmony, a mastery of technical construction in an aura of virtual improvisation, and, above all, abundant with vitality and vertiginous exuberance— the marrow of it all is surely the abundance of love. As to the raison d’être of his love and life in music, Aram Khatchaturian explained it loud and clear:

My passionate aim in music is to open up the Armenian music, with its melodic and rhythmic abundance, passing it through the prism of European musical art and technique, while distancing its reconstruction from the tonic-dominant nausea of static harmonies. We should render our music such that it becomes the possession of all people.

Aram Khatchaturian fulfilled his aim and accomplished his task with majestic passion. Five days after his death in Moscow on the 1st of May 1978, he was interred on the 6th of May in his beloved Armenia, in the Yerevan Pantheon of artists, musicians, writers and scientists.

And today, this year of 2003, UNESCO has declared it as the year of Aram Khatchaturian.

Exactly as he wished, Khatchaturian’s music belongs today to all people, for generations to come. He is the world’s Armenian composer.

© 2003 Khatchatur I. Pilikian

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