Georgy Sviridov

• 1. Introduction

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  Georgy Sviridov wrote the piece of music that millions of Soviet citizens heard every evening. Yet most of them never connected it to his name. His score for the 1965 film Time, Forward! supplied the opening theme for Vremya, the nightly Soviet television news broadcast. His nephew Alexander Belonenko later described visiting Moscow and hearing a Sviridov melody played in the tunnels of the Metro. The musicians who performed it almost certainly did not know who had written it. Sviridov died in Moscow on the 6th of January 1998, after a life spent at the center of Soviet and Russian musical culture. What shaped the boy from a small provincial town into a composer whose work became part of the fabric of daily life? And why does so little of that recognition extend beyond Russia's borders?

• 2. A Provincial Beginning

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  Sviridov was born on the 16th of December 1915 in Fatezh, a town in the Kursk Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Vasily Sviridov, was a Bolshevik sympathizer who died during the Russian Civil War when Georgy was just four years old. The family relocated to Kursk. There, the young Sviridov discovered music not through formal lessons but by picking up the balalaika and teaching himself to play by ear. His natural ability was evident early enough that he was admitted into a local orchestra of Russian folk instruments while still in elementary school. In 1929, he enrolled in a music school, where a teacher named M. Krutinsky would prove decisive. On Krutinsky's advice, Sviridov traveled to Leningrad in 1932 to study piano at the Leningrad Central Music College. He graduated in 1936 and immediately entered the Leningrad Conservatory, studying first under Pyotr Ryazanov and then under Dmitri Shostakovich. When Germany invaded in 1941, Sviridov was mobilized into the Red Army just days after completing his conservatory degree. He was posted to a military academy in Ufa, but poor health led to his discharge before the year was out. His Symphony No. 1, written during those conservatory years between 1936 and 1937, was eventually considered lost. The score was rediscovered only after his death.

• 3. Verse and Voice

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  In 1935, while still a student, Sviridov composed a cycle of lyrical romances drawn from the poetry of Alexander Pushkin. Those songs brought him his first taste of critical recognition. The pairing of music and verse would define the rest of his career. He set texts by Mikhail Lermontov as early as 1938, returning to Lermontov again in 1957. He set poems by Alexander Blok in 1941, by William Shakespeare across 1944-1960, and by Robert Burns in Russian translation in 1955. His critics agreed with his own assessment: vocal and choral music was his principal domain. The instrumental works were substantial, but the voice was where Sviridov lived.

  His Oratorio Pathetique of 1959 was built on texts by Vladimir Mayakovsky. It was praised as a masterful musical rendering of a poet beloved by the Russian Revolution. His oratorio To the Memory of Sergei Yesenin appeared in 1956, and the cantata Wooden Russia also drew on Yesenin in 1964. The song cycle Russia Cast Adrift returned to Yesenin again in 1977. He wrote one opera, Twinkling Lights, completed in 1951, though it occupies a smaller corner of his catalogue.

  Fyodor Tyutchev, Boris Pasternak, Nikolay Nekrasov, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Alexander Prokofyev also appear across his output. His choral textures drew on the traditional chant of the Russian Orthodox Church, including the deep register of the basso profundo voice. Eastern European folk music also shaped his harmonic language. Among nineteenth-century romantic composers, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a particular point of reference. His Hymns and Prayers, a setting of liturgical poetry for unaccompanied choir, grew across nearly two decades. The project ran from 1980 to 1997. His song cycle Petersburg, set to Blok's texts, took shape over more than thirty years. He began it in 1963 and was still extending it in 1995.

• 4. The Blizzard and Beyond

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  Sviridov scored the film Virgin Soil Upturned in 1939, while still a student at the conservatory. Over the following decades, he continued to write for film. His credits included Rimsky-Korsakov in 1952, The Great Warrior Skanderbeg in 1953, and Red Bells II in 1982.

  The 1964 film The Blizzard drew its story from Pushkin's Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. Sviridov's score for it became one of his most enduring film contributions. In 1975, he extracted three movements from that score to form an orchestral suite: "Romance," "Waltz," and "Winter Road." The suite became one of his most frequently heard works. "Winter Road," which closes the suite, later drew a plagiarism allegation. The claim was that composer Tappi Iwase had drawn on that melody for the theme of the Metal Gear Solid video game series. Following the allegation, the theme was removed from the fourth installment of the series onward.

• 5. State Prizes and Lasting Reach

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  In 1946, Sviridov was awarded the Stalin Prize for his Piano Trio. The Lenin Prize came in 1960, bestowed for the Oratorio Pathetique. The USSR State Prize followed in 1968 and again in 1980. He was also granted the title People's Artist of the USSR and received the Order of Lenin twice. In 1982, the Russian astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina discovered an asteroid and named it 4075 Sviridov in his honor.

  His nephew Alexander Belonenko described Sviridov's music as a "co-natural phenomenon" in Russia. The phrase suggests something so woven into the landscape that it can barely be distinguished from it. That depth of cultural presence within Russia coexisted with near-total obscurity abroad. Belonenko reached for a phrase from Alexander Blok himself to capture the effect: Sviridov's music had "sunk into the souls of the people." Blok was one of the many poets Sviridov set to music, which gives that judgment an unusual circularity.