Foolishness in the work of Galina Ustvolskaya

Beliunaite Lidiya Sigitasovna ORCID: 0000-0002-2438-5385 Postgraduate Student of the Music Theory Department at the N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory 190000, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Teatralnaya Pl., 3 belyunayte@mail.ru

"At the premiere of Composition No. 1 for piccolo flute, tuba and piano, the audience openly laughed. The laughter was angry, sarcastic, even mocking. When the composition ended, there was a rather thin applause, and then, thanks to the determined efforts of those who were shocked by this music. She came on stage: in a white blouse and a dark skirt. All her plastic resembled the movements of a mechanical doll. His face expressed almost childish incomprehension, but his eyes looked somewhere over the hall, as if they saw something that was inaccessible to us, the listeners. She bowed awkwardly and left the stage in complete silence (the applause had already died down). Then her exit seemed almost somnambulistic to me. Today, I understand that this is how the "blessed one", the fool, either a child or a prophet, showed himself to the world" [From I. E. Rogalev's lecture notes on Ustvolskaya at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (the synopsis belongs to the author of the article)].

For the first time, Polina Belyaeva drew attention to the connection of foolishness with the composer's work and life. In her article "The work of Galina Ustvolskaya in the context of the phenomenon of Orthodox foolishness", she notes Ustvolskaya's "indifference to external success, unwillingness to indulge pride, her adherence to the principles of merciless self-criticism" ^{[1, p. 19]}. These manifestations of the "passive" ^[6] side of foolishness are combined in the composer with the "active" ^[6]: "inevitably, an uncompromising position of the fool begins to form in Ustvolskaya's work, who tirelessly denounced the evil and injustice existing around him" ^{[1, p. 19]}, and in the 1970s, writes Polina Belyaeva, "during the triumph of universal atheism and Soviet anti-religious education, Ustvolskaya, as befits a fool, went against the tide and turned to God" ^{[1, p. 20]}. Of course, the life and work of Galina Ustvolskaya reveal striking similarities with the phenomenon of foolishness. At the same time, if we try to get deeper into the essence of Ustvolskaya's works themselves, we will hear in them, behind the aggressive pressure, a lyrical emotion, tragic in nature, because it is an emotion of mourning. It is this emotion, hidden behind protest and denunciation, that, in our opinion, constitutes the essence of the "active" side of foolishness in Ustvolskaya's work. Let us allow ourselves to develop Belyaeva's metaphor in this regard: the accusatory and protest pathos in Ustvolskaya's work are rather not a goal, but a protective means for the "inner", hidden, tragic content, just as a fool, according to Tatyana Nedospasova, "hides inner sanctity in the outer shell of a tramp and a bully" ^{[5, p. 35]}.

The desire to "hide" emotion is explained, in our opinion, by Ustvolskaya's desire for extremes, which has been repeatedly noted by researchers of the composer's work.  Viktor Suslin writes about Composition No. 1 as follows: "The dynamics are reduced to an almost baroque gradation, although it is precisely this that is characterized by extreme extremism...>with the sharpest contrasts of fffff and ppppp. Ustvolskaya's predisposition to extremes is expressed not only in dynamics, but also in the choice of a unique (unique) cast of performers...>" ^{[10, p. 145]}. Boris Katz wrote about the same composition earlier in his article "Seven views on one composition": "We have before us, as it were, a symphony in a synopsis that left only the most necessary and indicative: from orchestral timbres and registers — extreme, from dynamic gradations — extreme, from emotional states — polar" ^{[2, p. 10]}.

The graphic state, as if devoid of transitional "shades", peculiar to Ustvolskaya's musical narration, on the one hand, is akin to the perception of the world by fools. As Sergey Yurkov writes, "the area of extremes, extremism is the point of application of the ascetic's activity — compromises, ethical reconciliation are unfamiliar to him" ^{[13, p. 111]}. On the other hand, this uncompromising attitude is similar to a child's perception of the world, because in the eyes of a child, the world seems to be divided into "black" and "white".

Meanwhile, this desire for extremes hides, in our opinion, an extreme emotional tension, which Boris Katz drew attention to in the quoted article: "Ustvolskaya's music can give the impression of a certain mystery, even encryption. And at the same time, attentive listening reveals a naked feeling in her, almost a confession" ^{[2, p. 17]}. It is precisely this sharpness and nakedness of feeling that Tatyana Cherednichenko points out in her book "Musical Stock, the 70s. Problems. Portraits. Cases": "The fivefold forte of Ustvolskaya means a will exceeding conventional standards to the very essence of loud — to the true distance, to a perspective not limited by the scarcity of human ideas" ^{[11, p. 363]}. Just as the fool, according to Sergei Yurkov, "does not follow the "qualitative", external design of the content of his actions, his goal is their necessary expressive content, in which he reaches extreme exaltation" ^{[13, p. 118]}, so for Ustvolskaya five forte or five pianos, which seem impracticable Especially in piano music, it is a form of expression of emotional content.

Researchers of Ustvolskaya's work often write about the paradoxical nature of the composer's method. Sergei Korobeynikov, for example, in his article on the Sixth Piano Sonata writes the following: "Antinomies and paradoxes in Ustvolskaya's music have a systemic and style-forming character. Therefore, paradoxicity, as the ability to connect the unconnected, can be called one of the properties of the creative thinking of the St. Petersburg master" ^{[3, p. 80]}. According to the author of the article, this paradox manifests itself in a combination of incongruous elements, in particular, the intonation of lamento and percussion.

In our opinion, the collision of elements polar in their genre nature and expressiveness, known since the time of Johann Sebastian Bach and manifesting itself in what Tamara Livanova calls the "principle of one-time contrast" ^[4], in Ustvolskaya only seems to be a combination of incongruous extremes. This is more than the intrinsic contrast of the Viennese classics, because the composer combines thematic elements in spite of the centrifugal energy inherent in them, and therefore, as soon as the exposition structure ends, these elements rush forward with increasing energy, each along their own "route". So, in the First of the Twelve Preludes for piano, the following vertically converge: a motif of two multidirectional small sexts, a thematic element based on a progressive movement and appearing a little later, crying (fig. 1). Each of the motifs finds its fate throughout the work: a song motif, for example, being included in the general mechanical the flow of toccate movement loses its individuality, turning from an independent, extremely expressive element into a cell of a toccate "vortex" sweeping away everything in its path (fig. 2).

Fig. 1. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Twelve preludes for piano, the First prelude.

Fig. 1. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Twelve preludes for piano, the First prelude.

Fig. 2. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Twelve preludes for piano, the Ninth prelude.

Fig. 2. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Twelve preludes for piano, the Nintht prelude.

In our opinion, the paradox manifests itself not so much in a combination of incongruities, as in the expressive and genre ambivalence of the composer's intonation vocabulary. Thus, the lamentable motif of the beginning of the first part of the Fourth Sonata turns into a kind of folklore chorus (a kind of dance ditty). At the same time, if in the first case the repeated sound in the motif enhances its deplorable nature (fig. 3 a), then in its version the same repetition gives the motif a dancing character (fig. 3 b).

Ill. 3 A. G. I. Ustvolskaya. The fourth Sonata for piano, I part.

Fig. 3 A. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Fourth Sonata for piano, I part.

Ill. 3 b. G. I. Ustvolskaya. The fourth Sonata for piano, I part.

Fig. 3 b. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Fourth Sonata for piano, I part.

An equally obvious manifestation of ambivalence is how, in the Third Piano Sonata, the chorale turns into a dance due to rhythmic, dynamic and textural reinterpretation (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. G. I. Ustvolskaya. The third sonata for piano.

Fig. 4. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Third Sonata for piano.

This ambivalence is closely related to the main feature of the thematism of Ustvolskaya's works — the reliance on brief motifs, as pointed out in his article "From observations on the style of G. Ustvolsky" points out Kira Yuzhak: "... low volume makes pop songs formulaic and stingy. In them, the fret processes seem to be curtailed, and therefore these turns have a special expressive tension" ^{[12, p. 88]}. We find something similar in the speech of the fools.  On the one hand, as Alexander Panchenko writes, "their statements... they are always brief, these are shouts, interjections, aphoristic phrases" ^{[6, p. 395]}, and on the other hand, these statements in an extremely concise form convey the essence of what the "blessed one" wants to say: he does not explain anything, but only voices the result of his thought. The speech of the fools may seem meaningless at first glance, but when listening to it, you can discover an incredible depth of content. So, for example, the phrase of the fool, St. Michael of Klopsky "You are not a prince, but dirt" in its form (because of the rhyme) may resemble a child's teaser and at the same time the content of this statement is tragic.

In her monograph "The Man of reverse Perspective" Natalia Rostova writes the following: "A fool is someone who sees what other ordinary people do not see. For, having become ontologically dead to the world, he is "pushed" into a transcendent perspective and looks at the world from it" ^{[8, p. 112]}; "the fool is a different vision of the world, the opposite of that which is accepted in society" ^{[8, p. 114]}. A different vision of the world of the fool allows the researcher to compare it with an icon, which uses not a direct, but an inverse perspective. As Rostova writes, "the reverse perspective presupposes a multiplicity of points of view, multicentricity in images, when the drawing is constructed as if the eye were looking at different parts of it, changing its place, unlike the direct perspective, which comes from a single point of view" ^{[9, p. 107]}. In Ustvolskaya, such a "multiplicity of points of view", on the one hand, manifests itself in intonational ambivalence, which was discussed above, and on the other hand, generates on the basis of this duality of intonation a compositional method that could be defined as genre diffusion — the penetration of features of one genre into the "space" of another, often leading to the emergence of a third genre, sometimes paradoxically correlating with the original version.

Ustvolskaya's genre diffusion exists in two forms. The result of the first type is the mutual enrichment of the genres involved in this process. Thus, in the Third and Fourth Sonatas, crying, without losing its intonational expressiveness, acquires the features of a dance, but as a result, the dance acquires a tragic flavor. The second type of genre diffusion differs in that as a result of the conjugation of elements opposite to each other in genre nature, one of them dies. Moreover, such an element is often lyrical intonation, such as in the Twelve Preludes for Piano. This kind of diffusion is also found in the Fourth Sonata mentioned above, in which the lamentable motif, after its paradoxical transformation into a chorus, comes into contact with an alien sphere — the toccata. It is she who, in fact, kills this crying. The essence of this toccata could be illustrated by a quote from Andrei Platonov's novella "The Pit": "Voshchev went there with the gait of a mechanically retired man <...> He looked around <...> tiredly, the patience in the world lasted, as if everything living was somewhere in the middle of time and its movement: its beginning was forgotten by everyone and the end was unknown, but only the direction remained" ^{[7, p. 160]}. It is in this inexorable direction without a goal that the destructive function of mechanical movement is contained, destroying the "living", "breathing" intonation of crying. The result of this process is that in the fourth movement of the Sonata, its characteristic and expressive intonation "detail" — the "zone", which is a multiplication of the upper sound of this motif, disappears in the motif of crying. The rhythmic feature also disappears, which manifests itself, as noted above, in the repetition of the second sound of the motif (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. G. I. Ustvolskaya. The fourth Sonata for piano, part IV.

Fig. 5. G. I. Ustvolskaya. Fourth Sonata for piano, IV part.

Genre diffusion in Ustvolskaya's works most significantly embodies, in our opinion, the idea of the discrepancy between the "external" (form) and the "internal" (content) in Ustvolskaya's work, which was discussed at the beginning of the article. At the same time, on the one hand, this form can give a new meaning to the content, revealing and enriching it, and on the other hand, destroy it.

It is the mourning of the individual lyrical principle and semantic ambivalence that make up the essence of the phenomenon of foolishness in the work of Galina Ustvolskaya. Let us repeat, it is not just a rebuke or a protest, because Ustvolskaya is compassionate, as is the fool who realizes the tragedy of the existing world in its fundamental dissimilarity with "his" world. The fool "understands that the world is doomed. But he is not ruthless, he empathizes with the world, prays for its salvation, imbued with a common tragedy" ^{[13, p. 124]}. Ustvolskaya, as a brilliant artist, could not help but empathize with the world and pray for us. It is no coincidence that after the premiere of Composition No. 1, she gave the name to this work: "Dona nobis pacem", which translates as "Give us peace".