Elena Gnesina
Elena Gnesina was a Russian and Soviet pianist, teacher, composer, and music public figure, honored as Merited Artist of the Republic in 1925 and Merited Art Worker of the RSFSR in 1935. One of the Gnesin sisters, she was born in Rostov-on-Don into the family of the city’s official rabbi, Fabian Gnesin, a respected public figure and member of the city duma; her maternal grandfather, Shaya Flotzinger, had been a folk musician and violinist in Vilnius. Although she was born in 1872 according to the old style calendar, after the Revolution her date of birth was changed in official documents to May 31, 1874, and that date became the officially recognized one. She studied at the Catherine Gymnasium in Rostov-on-Don from 1883 to 1885 and then entered the junior department of the Moscow Conservatory in 1885, after which she lived in Moscow, at first with her elder sister Evgenia and their godmother T. V. Figurovskaya.
At the conservatory she studied piano first with Eduard Langer and from 1888 with Vasily Safonov, whom she regarded as her principal teacher. In 1890–1891 she also studied with Ferruccio Busoni and later wrote memoirs both about her lessons with him and about meeting him again during his later visit to Moscow. After her father’s death in 1891, and with Safonov’s support, she gave private lessons, taught during the summers at General Unkovsky’s Kazbek estate in Penza Province, and worked as a music teacher at the boarding school of the Arsenyeva Gymnasium. After Busoni left Russia, she continued her studies with Pavel Shletser and graduated from the conservatory in 1893 with the title of free artist and a small silver medal. Her other teachers included Anton Arensky in harmony, Sergey Taneyev in counterpoint, and Nikolai Kashkin in music history. Among her fellow students were Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin, with whom she maintained relations for many years.
On February 26, 1893, Gnesina was baptized in the Church of the Rzhev Mother of God on Povarskaya Street in Moscow. From 1894 she began an active concert career as a pianist. She was a regular accompanist of Pyotr Khokhlov and worked with him on the role of Robert in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, for which she spent extended periods at his Ustye estate. In 1895, together with her sisters Evgenia and Maria, she opened a private music school in Moscow, the future Gnesin educational complex; from 1901 their younger sisters Elizaveta and Olga also joined the work of the school. From that moment her life was devoted primarily to the family institution: she became its chief administrator, representative, and co-owner, while also teaching numerous piano students and, from 1899, directing first a women’s and then a mixed choir. In 1898 she was granted the status of personal honorary citizen. After moves to rented houses in Gagarinsky Lane and later on Sobachya Square, the schools’ location in the same house where the Gnesin family lived helped create the distinctive family atmosphere for which the institution became known.
The first graduation of the school took place in 1901, with two students from Gnesina’s own class, and the number of graduates then steadily increased. She was deeply involved in artistic and educational societies, including the Music-Theoretical Library, Free Aesthetics, and the Society for the Dissemination of Chamber Music, and maintained a wide circle of contacts among musicians, actors, historians, and writers. A close friend from the early 1900s was Reinhold Gliere, who was among the first invited to teach at the Gnesin school and whose family remained close to hers. From 1901 she regularly visited the Goncharov family estate at Polotnyany Zavod, where she took part in charity concerts and became acquainted with Anatoly Lunacharsky. From 1913 to 1917 the Gnesin sisters spent summers at Demyanovo near Klin, where they were in close contact with Modest Tchaikovsky. In 1905 she made her only trip abroad, traveling to Italy through Austria and Switzerland.
Her private life was marked by strong attachments to her nephews and godsons. The death in 1911 of her beloved nephew Shurik Vivien at the age of eight was a devastating blow, and later a similar place in her life was taken by another nephew and godson, Fabiy Vitachek. Beginning in 1917 she turned to composing for children, starting with her first collection, Little Etudes for Beginners, and thereafter regularly wrote educational works for young musicians.
After the Revolution she joined the Union of Music Teachers in 1918 and was active in public musical work, later also serving in the Music Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education from 1920 to 1922. In 1919–1921 she also taught music and choir in children’s labor colonies run by A. A. Lunacharskaya and at the First Kremlin School of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In 1919 the Gnesins themselves proposed the nationalization of their school, transferring all property to the state. Gnesina became head of the Second Moscow State Music School, and after the educational reforms of 1921 she served as director of the Third State Music Technical School, which included an attached children’s school and in 1923 received the status of a model institution. During the difficult 1920s she fought constantly for the survival of the institution, its teachers, and its students, mastering the practical art of petitions, official correspondence, and negotiations with higher authorities, and relying in part on the support of Lunacharsky. Despite severe conditions, the school developed successfully and earned a strong reputation. In 1921 two notable graduates of her piano class completed their studies there, including Lev Oborin, who would later become the first winner of the International Chopin Competition. In 1925 the institution’s thirtieth anniversary was solemnly celebrated, and it officially received the Gnesin name.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s Gnesina and the institution faced systematic attacks from the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. These pressures were heightened by Lunacharsky’s departure from office and by the anti-association stance of her brother Mikhail Gnesin, who had joined the school in Moscow. She was removed from the directorship in December 1929 and made head of studies, then later forced out of that position as well in 1931, while radical reforms threatened not only the institution but the existence of music schools themselves. Gnesina opposed these measures through repeated appeals to higher authorities. After the liquidation of the association in 1932, she was restored as director, and the expanding institution received additional space in the neighboring Khomyakov house. During the 1930s the scale of the Gnesin school continued to grow, new departments opened, including an experimental one for training radio music workers, and its standards rose so high that many graduates were admitted to the conservatory directly into the second or even third year. As other intermediate-level music schools were merged or closed, the Gnesin school became the largest in Moscow. The lack of space in its old mansions led her to begin the long struggle to secure the construction of a purpose-built new home for the Gnesin schools. Building began on Vorovsky Street, now Povarskaya Street, in 1937. In the second half of the 1930s the Gnesins also developed the idea of adding a higher educational institution to create a unified system embracing every stage of musical training, though the project was long resisted.
During the Second World War the Gnesin school continued to function under extremely difficult conditions, interrupting work only briefly after martial restrictions were introduced in Moscow in October 1941. Gnesina initially refused evacuation, though under pressure from the city authorities she was sent to Kazan in early November 1941 and worked there in a music school. She quickly obtained permission to return to Moscow on January 21, 1942, undertaking the winter journey back in severe frost. Despite wartime conditions, instruction continued not only in the school proper but also in the officially closed children’s division. Teachers and students organized many forms of support for the front, including hospital duty and concert brigades. Gnesina succeeded in getting the halted building project resumed in 1943, and in 1944 obtained a decree establishing the Gnesin State Musical-Pedagogical Institute and a special ten-year music school. In 1943 she had been granted the academic title of professor, and in 1944 she was appointed director of the new institute while also heading the department of special piano.
By September 1946 the first main stage of the new building was completed, housing the institute, the college, and the special school, which quickly reached a level comparable to the Central Music School. The same building also included an apartment planned for the Gnesin family, where Elena Gnesina lived from late 1948 until the end of her life. Under her, the Gnesin system united all stages of musical education, from childhood to higher study, and expanded both its specializations and forms of instruction, including the country’s first faculty of folk instruments, evening study, a large correspondence division, and a growing range of musical disciplines. By 1949 she remained director only of the institute, transferring leadership of the other schools to younger successors, many of them her own students.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s the institute again came under ideological pressure during campaigns against formalism and cosmopolitanism. Many teachers suffered unfair persecution, including her sister Elizaveta Gnesina-Vitachek, and the composition department was threatened with closure, avoided only at the cost of Mikhail Gnesin’s departure. Gnesina herself was pressured to resign because of her age, and denunciations were used against her. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, the campaign ended; Gnesina handed over the directorship to Yury Muromtsev, who had been her deputy since 1946, and remained as artistic director in a post created especially for her.
Her later years were marked both by honor and physical decline. Her eightieth birthday was solemnly celebrated in 1954 in the Great Hall of the Conservatory, and the event was filmed for a newsreel shown throughout the country. After a leg fracture in May 1955 she lost the ability to walk and thereafter used a wheelchair. She gave up heading the piano department in 1958, transferring it to Professor Tatyana Gutman, but continued teaching until 1965. In the postwar years, while living with her younger sister Olga, she regularly spent summers at the Arkhangelskoye military sanatorium, and from 1963 to 1966 at the composers’ creative retreat in Ruza. After Olga’s death in 1963, she became the last surviving one of the nine Gnesin brothers and sisters. In the 1960s she met figures including Van Cliburn, artists of La Scala, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, and Yuri Gagarin. In her final years she wrote many memoirs about her encounters with outstanding people and about the history of the institutions she had created; in 1964 her ninetieth birthday was celebrated at the Gnesin Institute Concert Hall, and during these years appeared her last collection for children, Duets for Little Violinists.
Gnesina retained throughout her life a fondness for humor, collecting curious letters and texts, writing comic verses, drawing caricatures, and enjoying games and literary amusements. Her health worsened in the mid-1960s. On May 19, 1966, she made her final public appearance, reading her recollections of Busoni at an evening dedicated to the centenary of his birth at the institute’s concert hall. After a leg amputation caused by gangrene on March 30, 1967, she died on June 4, 1967, in Moscow, in the clinic of the Institute of Prosthetics. She was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery alongside her sisters and her brother Mikhail. A monument designed by Lev Kerbel was installed on her grave in 1977. Gnesina was the founder and permanent leader of the Gnesin complex of musical educational institutions from 1895 until her death, and she remains one of the central figures in the history of Russian and Soviet music education.