Possibility of an island

When talking about Anglo-Russian musical ties, the first thing that usually springs to mind is the friendship between Benjamin Britten and Dmitry Shostakovich. Having met in 1960 in London, the composers remained in close contact and stayed for long periods at each other’s houses, Shostakovich’s name appearing on the title page of Britten's opera “The Prodigal Son,” to which Shostakovich responded by dedicating his Fourteenth Symphony to Britten. Likewise, there’s little more to add about the close relationship between the musical worlds of Britten and Shostakovich – they are related to each other just as much as other great writers who shared in their destinies and reflected in their work the catastrophic experiences of the 20th century.

The history of Russian music in general has always and at all times been written by Francophiles or Germanophiles – but not by Anglophiles. It is all the more surprising that one of the main cultural heroes of the Russian scene at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries was a composer who looked like an Anglophile par excellence. The point here, of course, is not so much about the direct influence of the British musical tradition nor the attempt to appropriate it on Russian soil, but about the special type of artistic consciousness, the genetic code, the modus vivendi so characteristic (or at least, close) to the residents of the United Kingdom.

The emphatic conservative, the dandy, the wit, unmistakably recognised by a trademark sense of humour. A sophisticated snob, in whose habits refinement is combined in the most natural way with unpretentiousness, shyness with total irony, and immanent paradox is implicated in the firm belief that the main mortal sin is to be boring. Meet Leonid Desyatnikov, a composer whose every work looks like a product of unity and a struggle of opposites. A composer who insists on being able to exist as an island, in oneself - and at the same time distinctly aware of oneself as part of the Motherland, part of the mass of world (musical) tradition.

The key theme, the protagonist and main instrument of Desyatnikov's works is the musical language. The composer of the ballet Opera (2013) and the vocal cycle Dichterliebe und Leben (1989) prefers to speak through linguistic jokes, juggling several meanings of the same lexemes and constantly operating through an untranslatable play of words. These clever tricks almost always have a tragic reverse side, so close to Samuel Beckett's absurdity here – but let the composer’s refined, elegant irony remind us rather of Oscar Wilde. Especially since Desyatnikov himself provides sufficient grounds for this: one of the most charming men in modern Russia, who has neither word nor aphorism, looking like the perfect twin of Lord Henry from "Portrait of Dorian Gray." 

The music of Desyatnikov also resembles a collection of refined beaux mots. Avoiding sonic extremism, shocking avant-garde manifestations and conceptual zaum, it clings tight to a rumour that seems not to be the most obvious for so-called "modern art" by its property – the quality of its treatment brought to perfection by expert craftsmanship. The pivotal point of this worthy virtuosity is the classic-romantic tradition. Desyatnikov almost always writes "on motives," "on the canvas," "in the direction" – commenting, leaving sidenotes, constructing a developed network of footnotes and hyperlinks: whether there is a need to specify that this cunning distance only reveals, emphasises the author's allegiance to this very tradition.

In different works, it manifests itself in different ways. In places, an exact quote is used as building material, which forms the basis for variations – the theme of the finale of Haydn's "Farewell Symphony" in "Variations on Obtaining a Dwelling" (1990), "Swan" from the "Carnival of the Animals" by Saint-Saëns in Du côté de chez "Swan" (1995), the final song from the "Winter Journey" by Schubert in Wie der Alte Leiermann... (1997). But almost as often, Desyatnikov deals not with a specific source, but with style, a cultural code, a set of artistic markers and hashtags: the widely interpreted English baroque, seen through the prism of the Pre-Raphaelites (Leaden Echo, 1990); the romantic Lied (Dichterliebe und Leben); the intonational world of Astor Piazzolla (Tracing Astor, 1999).

The common thread for the absolute majority of Desyatnikov’s works, however, remains a similar way of working with tradition – elimination, placing it in an unexpected, paradoxical context. In this sense, the Great Court of the British Museum, reconstructed by Norman Foster, looks like the most obvious plastic analogue of the music of the St Petersburg composer: the original and its reinterpreted quotations interact so intensively that the boundary between text and context gradually disappears. For each new score, this strategy is built up in its own way - the only constant is Desyatnikov’s tendency towards what Nikolai Gogol once called "an extraordinary combination of the highest words with the lowest and simplest ones."

In the early cantata "Gift" (1981), the peak of Russian classicism, the poetry of Gabriel Derzhavin is translated into the language of cross-cultural fusion, where progressive rock has equal rights with choral polyphony, and the gypsy violin with a magnificent harp solo from "The Sleeping Beauty" by Tchaikovsky. In "Sketches to Sunset" (1996), there is a common aesthetic denominator for Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Argentine tango. In "Russian Seasons" (2000), written by order of Gidon Kremer, the boundaries between East and West, paganism and Christianity, folklore and professional music, national and global, are blurred – in each of his key compositions, Desyatnikov follows a proven recipe for opening cultural reservations into an unlimited space, Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village.

Abolition of hierarchies and oppositions is in general the most important feature of the composer’s poetics, which clearly distinguishes him from his outstanding predecessors on the Russian musical Olympus of the 20th century. The dramatic conflict between the works of Dmitri Shostakovich, Alfred Schnittke and Rodion Shchedrin was based on the clearly pronounced antinomies of "one's own-another's," "high-low", "academic-traditional." Along with the "new simplicity" of Arvo Pärt and Valentin Silvestrov, in the historical sense, Desyatnikov's work is a reaction to the "great style" and "great narrative" of the late Soviet musical tradition, both in its official and its oppositional, dissident variant. In contrast to this, Desyatnikov began to gradually erase the boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow a few decades before, in 2000, American journalist John Seabrook gave Nobrow culture its name.

Desyatnikov himself is sceptical about any interpretation of his own creativity, any attempts to summarise and generalise the features of his style, having inscribed his heritage into the sociocultural context of art history. He loves and knows how to exist of himself – as well as in music, in its surrounding reality. A public intellectual who tries to appear as rarely as possible in public. The favourite character of the secular chronicle, whose absence at parties and galas produces much more effect than his presence would. An exemplary St Petersburger, nurturing his "island consciousness" and watching the artistic life concentrated on the capital's metropolis from the sidelines. A recluse, guarding his privacy, but making his own "private life as a composer" the subject of his work.

His main field of activity is chamber music, while his favourite genres are romance and the instrumental duet. The lyrical hero's conversation with his alter ego, in which the voices of others and the instantly recognisable intonation are almost indistinguishable from each other, and the cold cultural reflection conceals a living pain. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of writing (relating, incidentally, Desyatnikov with Britten) is the fragility and transparency of the letter even in the most monumental and densely populated genres. The symphony (The Rite of Winter 1949, 1998), the opera (“The Children of Rosenthal,” 2004) and the multi-act ballet (“Lost Illusions,” 2011) are becoming a refuge for the hidden utterance, whose author negotiates little, but is even more afraid to admit it to himself. Deceptively simple and as if democratic, Desyatnikov's music, despite all its popularity, will never become mainstream – because it actually hides in itself the riddle of a double or even a triple bottom.

..Through an opening in the wall you can see the beach. Next to the wall is a canvas on an easel. The canvas is transparent, like glass, and the coastal landscape on it exactly matches the real landscape behind the wall – so the visible reality is mixed with the illusion until they become completely indistinguishable from one another.

This description is not so much of the picture by René Magritte La condition humaine II, as the music of Leonid Desyatnikov.

The project is supported by Modern Artlife Foundation (M.ART)