Boris Klyuzner

Boris Klyuzner was a Soviet composer, a pupil of Mikhail Gnesin and Dmitri Shostakovich, and the author of four symphonies, four concertos, chamber instrumental and vocal music, and film scores. He was born on June 2, 1909, in Astrakhan, into the family of opera singer and music teacher Lazar Klyuzner and artist Lyubov Klyuzner, née Gordel. His father, a graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, had sung at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre under the pseudonym Lavrovsky and later taught voice in Astrakhan after being forced to leave Saint Petersburg. He was killed there in 1918 by a stray bullet during revolutionary unrest. Klyuzner's mother, an artist who worked at the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, died during the Siege of Leningrad. His elder brother died in the Civil War, and his middle brother was killed near Leningrad while serving in the people's militia at the start of the Great Patriotic War.

After his father's death in 1918, the family returned to Petrograd, his mother's native city. There Boris Klyuzner finished secondary school and from 1925 to 1927 studied piano at the Rimsky-Korsakov Music School for Adults. From 1931 to 1934 he completed compulsory military service in a cavalry regiment near Leningrad. After demobilization he studied architecture for two years at a construction institute. From 1936 to 1941 he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory, where his composition teacher was Mikhail Gnesin; in his final year he studied with Dmitri Shostakovich, with whom he later maintained a friendship. In 1937, while still a second-year conservatory student, he was admitted to the Union of Soviet Composers.

From 1941 to 1945 Klyuzner served in the active army and finished the war in Vienna with the rank of senior lieutenant. In the autumn of 1945 he was demobilized at the request of the Union of Soviet Composers in a petition signed by Shostakovich, Isaak Dunayevsky, and Gnesin. He taught composition at the music college attached to the Leningrad Conservatory and directed amateur choral ensembles. According to the recollections of his friend Vladimir Britanishsky, after the war Klyuzner nearly received a Stalin Prize for his Trio, but after the 1948 decree on music he was removed from the post of deputy chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Composers and subjected to a long period of disfavour.

From 1955 to 1961 he served on the board of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Composers. Grigory Orlov wrote that the emotional intensity present in Klyuzner's music was equally characteristic of his public appearances, and that as an opponent of falsehood, routine, and stagnation he fought for the noble virtues of his profession. In 1961, after a conflict with the leadership, he left the Union of Soviet Composers. In 1965, with the support of Shostakovich, he moved to Moscow and was admitted to the Moscow Union of Composers, where for several years he chaired the admissions committee. He was also one of the leaders of a seminar for young composers, remembered by Orlov as a witty, perceptive, tactful, and intelligent mentor.

Klyuzner built with his own hands, to his own design, a wooden house in Komarovo near Leningrad, on Pine Street. During its construction from 1956 to 1965 he was jokingly known as a "composer-carpenter." After moving to Moscow he spent every summer there, returning to work on the house, which became a local landmark. He died in Komarovo on May 21, 1975, from his third heart attack, and was buried in the Komarovo cemetery.

His music was performed by conductors including Yevgeny Mravinsky, Igor Miklashevsky, Kurt Sanderling, and Arvid Jansons, and by distinguished performers such as Moisey Khalfin, Mikhail Vaiman, Boris Gutnikov, Tatiana Nikolayeva, and Gidon Kremer. Composers including Alexander Vustin and Sergei Slonimsky dedicated works to his memory. Sofia Gubaidulina described him as a composer of the highest class, marked by great courage and uncompromising integrity, while Boris Tishchenko and Veniamin Basner emphasized the individuality and lasting value of his art.

Commentators described Klyuzner as a romantic by nature whose music combined passionate and nervous expressivity with dramatic intensity. Writers including Leonid Raaben, Sergei Slonimsky, and Grigory Orlov noted in his work links to Jewish national culture, Russian symphonic traditions, and European classical and late-Romantic models such as Brahms and Mahler, while also stressing his modern harmonic language, polyphonic clarity, declamatory style, and expressive orchestral writing. Although his music was mainly tonal, he also employed twelve-tone ideas and freer structural layers.

Among his principal works are the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies; the Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, Double Violin Concerto, and Concertino for Clarinet and Orchestra; the vocal-orchestral works The Seasons, Poem about Lenin, and the monologue Conversation with Comrade Lenin; and chamber compositions including two piano sonatas, two cello sonatas, a violin sonata, a piano trio, an arietta for violin and piano, and vocal cycles on texts by Eduard Bagritsky, Alexander Pushkin, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Emile Verhaeren. He also wrote articles, including a speech for the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviet Composers and an essay about Gnesin.