Galina Ustvolskaya
Galina Ustvolskaya was a Soviet and Russian composer, born in Petrograd on June 17, 1919. She studied at the Rimsky-Korsakov Music School and entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1939, where she was the only student in Dmitri Shostakovich’s composition class. After evacuating with the conservatory to Tashkent in 1941, she resumed her studies in 1944 with Maximilian Steinberg and, after his death in 1946, continued with Shostakovich. She graduated in 1947.
From 1947 to 1977, Ustvolskaya taught composition at the Rimsky-Korsakov Music School in Leningrad. From the 1950s, she developed a distinctive, austere musical language marked by intense concentration, dramatic force, and spiritual searching. Her works began to receive performances in the early 1960s, starting with her Violin Sonata.
Her works include a Piano Concerto (1946), a Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano (1949), an Octet (1949–50), and six piano sonatas. She also wrote five symphonies, including the Second Symphony, True, Eternal Goodness (1979), and the Fifth Symphony, Amen (1989–90), as well as the three-part composition series Dona nobis pacem, Dies irae, and Benedictus, qui venit.
Shostakovich greatly valued Ustvolskaya’s work and sought her opinions and advice. He used a theme from the finale of her Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano in his Fifth String Quartet and in the ninth piece of his Suite on Verses by Michelangelo. He wrote to her that he, rather than she, was influenced by the other.
Ustvolskaya’s music gained wider recognition after it was performed at the Holland Festival in 1989. European concerts and festivals featuring her works followed, including events in Amsterdam, Vienna, Bern, and Båstad. The Sikorski publishing house acquired the rights to publish all her works. Performers of her music included Anatoly Vedernikov, Mstislav Rostropovich, Alexei Lubimov, Oleg Malov, Ivan Sokolov, Reinbert de Leeuw, Markus Hinterhäuser, Frank Denyer, Marianne Schroeder, and Antonii Baryshevskyi. She received the Heidelberg Prize for Achievement in the Arts in 1992 and was named Honored Artist of the Russian Federation in 1993.
Ustvolskaya lived reclusively and continued composing until her death in Saint Petersburg on December 22, 2006. She was married to composer Konstantin Bagrenin; their marriage was registered in December 1966. She was buried at Volkovo Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.