Gavriil Popov

Gavriil Popov was a Russian Soviet composer, one of the leading representatives of the Soviet musical avant-garde. He was born in Novocherkassk in the family of the teacher Nikolai Popov. From the age of six he studied music, first with his mother, Lyubov Popova, and later at a private conservatory in the piano class of M. Presman, a pupil of Vasily Safonov.

In his youth he also studied drawing in Rostov and attended Rostov University, where he was enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty, as well as the engineering and architecture faculty of the Don Polytechnic Institute. After the death of his mother in 1919 and the arrest of his father on a false denunciation in 1921, he had to earn a living and worked as a draughtsman in the Rostov railway workshops. At the same time, on Presman's recommendation, he worked part-time as an accompanist at the opera theater and entered the Don Conservatory, where he studied with the pianist and composer Vladimir Shaub. From 1922 to 1927 he continued his education at the Leningrad Conservatory with Leonid Nikolayev, Vladimir Shcherbachyov, and Maximilian Steinberg. In his early conservatory years he also combined study at the Polytechnic Institute's architecture faculty and at the Institute of Art History's literature department. Later he taught at the Central Music Technical School.

His graduation work at the conservatory in 1927 was an unusual septet for flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin, cello, and double bass, later retitled in 1971 as Chamber Symphony. The piece was highly successful and became one of his best-known works. His talent was compared with that of Dmitri Shostakovich. When Darius Milhaud visited Leningrad in 1926 and asked Boris Asafyev to introduce him to the most talented young composer there, he was introduced to Popov. Sergei Prokofiev also took notice of him in the late 1920s and later arranged performances of the septet in Germany and France, where it was warmly received and praised for its originality and the individuality of its author.

Popov wrote more than a hundred works, including six symphonies, with a seventh left unfinished, as well as instrumental concertos, chamber compositions, choruses, and the unfinished opera Alexander Nevsky. He was linked by collaboration and friendship with Vsevolod Meyerhold; they met during the creation of Meyerhold's 1931 production The List of Benefactions, for which Popov wrote the music. In 1928 he began his Symphony No. 1 in three movements, and by 1932 a draft full score had been completed. It received second prize at an All-Union competition marking the fifteenth anniversary of October, with no first prize awarded. The orchestral premiere was given successfully on 22 March 1935 by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Fritz Stiedry, but the very next day the work was banned from performance by the Repertoire Committee as allegedly reflecting the ideology of hostile classes. Public attacks followed, and despite letters in its defense from Prokofiev, Vissarion Shebalin, and Yuri Shaporin, the work was not rehabilitated at the time.

His Symphony No. 2, Motherland, written during the war in 1943, received the Stalin Prize, second class, in 1946. That same year he noted in his diary the completion of his Third Symphony for large string orchestra in five movements, originally conceived as a concerto grosso. He later changed the title to Symphony No. 3, Heroic, and dedicated it to Dmitri Shostakovich. In 1948 his music again came under severe criticism in connection with the Politburo resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party that launched another campaign against formalism, and this once more affected his creative work. He was named Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1947.

Popov began writing for theater and cinema on the strong recommendation of his teacher Vladimir Shcherbachyov, initially regarding such music as applied work and a means of improving technique. His first film score, for Esfir Shub's K. Sh. E. in 1932, prompted an enthusiastic telegram from Sergei Eisenstein. One of the peaks of his film work became the score for the Vasilyev brothers' Chapaev, especially the famous "psychic attack" scene, which was praised for its powerful emotional effect and for the striking union of sound and image. Over the years he wrote music for many films, including My Motherland, Moscow Builds the Metro, Bezhin Meadow, She Defends the Motherland, The Great Breakthrough, An Unfinished Story, Poem of the Sea, Tale of Tsar Saltan, and Yegor Bulychov and Others.

Like Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, who found refuge in poetic translation while writing their own works privately for years, Popov in effect "emigrated" into film music during difficult periods of his artistic life. He remained active from 1925 until his death in Repino in 1972.

Connections

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