Tamara Shaverzashvili

Tamara Shaverzashvili was a Georgian composer. She was born in Kutaisi on 14 October 1891 and died in Tbilisi on 18 September 1955. In 1946 she was named an Honored Artist of the Georgian SSR. She came from a musical dynasty: she was related to Alois Mizandari, one of the first Georgian professional composers, and was the sister of the composer Vasily Shaverzashvili. Other siblings who died young were also musicians.

As a child, Shaverzashvili sang in a church choir, began studying piano at the age of eight, and from the age of fifteen appeared in public concerts. After finishing school in 1910, she moved to Tiflis and entered the music school of the Tiflis branch of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, studying piano with Ilya Aisberg. She continued with him after the school was transformed into the Tbilisi Conservatory in 1917.

Her first attempts at composition date from 1919. In 1920, her romance “You Are a Reed,” on verses by Ioseb Grishashvili, was performed publicly. From 1921 to 1923 she taught piano at a music school, received a pianist’s diploma in 1923, and then taught at the conservatory until 1931. During these years she continued composing songs and romances, including settings of poems by Akaki Tsereteli, Ilia Chavchavadze, and Alexander Pushkin, among them “Do Not Sing, My Beauty, Before Me...” and “On the Hills of Georgia Lies the Darkness of Night.” In 1929 the conservatory hosted an author concert devoted to her music.

In 1931 Shaverzashvili re-entered the Tbilisi Conservatory to study composition with Vladimir Shcherbachyov, and she also studied with Iona Tuskia. From 1933 she was a member of the Union of Composers of the Georgian SSR. After receiving her composition diploma in 1935, she undertook three more years of postgraduate study with Pyotr Ryazanov and trained in Leningrad with Khristofor Kushnaryov. From 1938 she served as an assistant teacher at the Tbilisi Conservatory, from 1941 as a senior lecturer, and from 1944 as an associate professor.

Her largest work was the children’s opera “Lullaby,” completed in piano score in 1948 after a story by Iakob Gogebashvili. The opera was not performed during her lifetime because censorship considered unacceptable a plot episode involving the abduction of a Georgian girl during a Lezgin raid. A concert version was first performed in 1962 in an orchestration by Andria Balanchivadze, but the work was never staged.

Shaverzashvili also wrote an orchestral suite (1935), a suite for woodwinds (1938), a string quartet (1938), a suite for cello and piano (1949), and piano pieces. She is regarded as the founder of Georgian piano music for children. In 1947 she published the “Children’s Album,” a collection of 40 pieces, followed by “20 Piano Pieces” in 1952. Some of her works originally intended for adults also entered the pedagogical repertory, notably the “Nocturne” dedicated to the memory of her sister.

Connections

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