Mikhail Goldstein

Mikhail Goldstein, born Moisey Mendelевич Goldstein, was a Soviet and later West German composer and violinist, also known as the author of musical mystifications. He was born on 1 October 1917 in Odessa and died on 7 September 1989 in Hamburg. He was the brother of the violinist Boris Goldstein.

He studied in Odessa with Pyotr Stolyarsky, and later at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolai Myaskovsky in composition, Abram Yampolsky in violin, and Konstantin Saradzhev in conducting. From 1948 he taught at various musical educational institutions in Moscow. Because of an injury to his left hand, he gradually shifted his focus mainly to composition.

Goldstein became especially known for musical hoaxes and stylized false attributions. Among the works he created were Symphony No. 21 by the fictional Ukrainian composer Nikolai Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, a Viola Concerto attributed to Ivan Khandoshkin, an Impromptu attributed to Mily Balakirev, and pieces attributed to Tartini, Reich, and Glazunov. These compositions were performed and recorded by prominent Soviet musicians, and some Soviet music critics tried to build careers on them.

In 1963 he won three prizes at the All-Union Composers' Competition for works for violin and cello; the pieces were submitted under pseudonyms. His own composing activity, especially of a mystifying kind, attracted negative attention from the Soviet authorities, and he was repeatedly interrogated by the KGB.

In 1964 he was permitted to emigrate from the USSR. He went to teach in East Berlin, then obtained the opportunity to move to Vienna as someone intending to emigrate to Israel. After that he settled in Hamburg, where from 1969 he taught at the Hamburg University of Music. He also actively collaborated with the Ukrainian émigré press and wrote articles on musical topics under the pseudonym "Mykhailo Mykhailovskyi". In his last years he lived in the town of Quickborn.

Goldstein's best-known mystification was the Symphony No. 21 of the invented composer Nikolai Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky. According to Goldstein's recollections, conversations with Isaak Dunaevsky and the theater scholar Vsevolod Chagovets prompted the idea. Goldstein wrote the piece as a stylization of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music and presented it as the work of a landowner-composer connected with Odessa. The symphony was performed by major Soviet ensembles; in particular, it was recorded by the Leningrad Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. Goldstein even invented a fuller biography for the fictitious composer, and an article about Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky entered major Soviet reference works before the hoax was publicly exposed in 1959.

Goldstein also wrote books and articles on music, including works on Tchaikovsky in Odessa, the Stolyarsky School, and later memoiristic notes by a musician. His career combined performance, composition, writing, and pedagogy, but his lasting notoriety rests above all on his sophisticated musical forgeries and their revealing place in Soviet musical culture.

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