Isaac Schwartz

Isaac Schwartz was a Soviet and Russian composer and film composer. He was born on May 13, 1923, in Romny, in the Ukrainian SSR, and became one of the most widely recognized authors of film music in Soviet and Russian culture. He wrote music for 35 stage productions and 125 films, as well as symphonic works, two ballets, two string quartets, a violin concerto, cantatas, and romances. He received broad popularity above all as a film composer, whose melodies in romantic melodramas were often remembered by audiences better than the films themselves.

Schwartz was born into an educated Jewish family. In childhood he and his older sisters, Sofia and Maria, were brought up with a love of reading and music. In 1930 the family moved to Leningrad, where he began piano studies at the House of Artistic Education for Children with A. S. Zamkov and later took lessons with Professor Leonid Nikolaev. In 1935, at the age of twelve, he won a young talents competition in the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1936 he also appeared in the film Beethoven Concerto, taking part in a scene at the Moscow Railway Station in Leningrad.

His youth was marked by tragedy during the Stalinist repressions. After the assassination of Kirov, his father, the philologist and Arabist Iosif Schwartz, a professor at Leningrad University, was arrested in 1936, sent to the camps, and executed in Magadan in 1938. In 1937 the family, deprived of its property, was exiled from Leningrad to the Kirghiz SSR. In Frunze, his mother worked in a garment factory, while the teenage Isaac gave private piano lessons to the children of local officials. In 1938 he began studying composition there with Vladimir Fere. Before the war he worked as a répétiteur at the Kirghiz State Theatre, and in a summer cinema in Frunze he improvised musical accompaniment for silent films, an experience later linked by researchers to his special feeling for the nature of cinema.

During the Great Patriotic War, Schwartz led the choir and orchestra of a Red Army song and dance ensemble of the Frunze military district. At the front he served as a sapper. In the spring of 1942 he was concussed during artillery shelling near Kharkiv and recovered in a hospital in Alma-Ata. In 1943 he married his childhood and youth friend, the pianist Sonya Polonskaya; soon their only daughter, Galina, was born.

After demobilization in 1945, Schwartz returned to Leningrad and, with the help of Dmitri Shostakovich, entered the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad State Conservatory. He studied with Boris Arapov and later with Orest Evlakhov, while also attending Shostakovich's classes. During his student years he wrote a Sonata in G minor for violin and piano, a string quartet, romances on poems by Pushkin, Tyutchev, Fet, Polonsky, and Heine, piano variations, and other vocal and chamber works. He refused to condemn Shostakovich publicly when party authorities accused both of “formalism in music.” In the summer of 1946 he learned the accordion and began spending his vacations in Siversky on the Oredezh River, a place that later became closely associated with his best works.

His first major success came with the Symphony in F minor, completed in 1954, a lyrical and epic four-movement work about a young contemporary. Its premiere took place on November 6, 1954, and in 1955 it was performed at the Eighth All-Union Plenum of the Board of the Union of Soviet Composers, after which Schwartz was admitted to the organization. In the theater, an important turning point came in 1956, when Georgy Tovstonogov invited him to write music for The Idiot. Schwartz went on to compose music for six productions at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre and in total for 35 plays. In the 1950s and 1960s he also wrote the Youth Overture for symphony orchestra and two ballets, On the Eve and In Wonderland, the latter staged by Leonid Yakobson at the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre.

From 1958 onward, cinema became the central field of his творчество. His first film scores were for Unpaid Debt, Our Correspondent, and Baltic Sky. He collaborated successfully with directors of different schools and generations, including Ivan Pyryev, Mikhail Romm, Iosif Kheifits, Vladimir Motyl, Sergei Solovyov, Aleksei German, Pyotr Todorovsky, Pavel Lungin, Vladimir Bortko, and others. Critics noted the compassion, humanity, melodic naturalness, simplicity, and sincerity of his film music, while Schwartz himself emphasized sensitivity and sentiment as essential artistic qualities, within the bounds of taste.

Schwartz became the author of music for more than 125 films, including many recognized masterpieces of Russian and world cinema. His greatest fame came through films by Vladimir Motyl and Sergei Solovyov, and his favorite genre was the romantic melodrama. Among the works most closely associated with his name are White Sun of the Desert, The Brothers Karamazov, The Stationmaster, One Hundred Days After Childhood, The Captivating Star of Happiness, Dersu Uzala, Melodies of a White Night, and Legal Marriage. The Soviet-Japanese film Dersu Uzala, directed by Akira Kurosawa and scored by Schwartz, received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1976.

A significant part of his legacy was created in collaboration with Bulat Okudzhava. Their artistic partnership produced 32 songs and romances, including Vereshchagin's song “Your Excellency...” from White Sun of the Desert, “The Cavalry Guard's Song” from The Captivating Star of Happiness, and the romances “This Woman at the Window” from Legal Marriage and “Love and Separation” from We Were Married Not in Church. Schwartz was named People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 1996, received the State Prize of Russia in 1997, and was a three-time winner of the Nika film award. He died on December 27, 2009, in Siversky, in the Leningrad Region.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.