Aleksandr Lokshin

Early life

Composer's father Lazar Lokshin was an accountant, and his mother Maria Korotkina was a midwife. Lokshin's sister Maria was born in 1914. The family of the composer suffered from communist repression since Lokshin's father had been classified as a capitalist because of their small farm business. Their land and cattle were confiscated, and Maria was expelled from Medical School for a joke.

After the family moved to Novosibirsk, the young Lokshin was trained at school by excellent teachers who had been exiled to Siberia from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Renowned pianist Alexei Stein, former professor of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, laid the foundations of Lokshin's piano playing.

In 1936 Lokshin arrived to Moscow with Alexei Stein's recommendation letter, was examined by Heinrich Neuhaus (Russian: Генрих Нейгауз), Director of the Moscow Conservatory, and Lokshin was accepted as a student of the Moscow Central Music School and then, after 6 months, as a student of the Moscow Conservatory. He studied composition with the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky.

In 1941 Lokshin presented his symphonic work "Les Fleurs du Mal" (recording BIS, 2010^[1]) as his diploma work at graduation from the Moscow Conservatory. However, as the lyrics by Charles Baudelaire was considered as contradicting the communistic ideology by the censors, Lokshin was denied the Moscow Conservatory Diploma and was not allowed to take the state examinations. Nevertheless, he already was a member of the Composer's Union.

World War II

During World War II Lokshin was in Moscow and later back in Novosibirsk. In July 1941 Lokshin entered the people's volunteer corps but after a strong bout of stomach ulcers he proved to be unfit for military service. During the summer and the beginning of autumn 1941 he served as a fireman extinguishing incendiary bombs on the roof of Moscow conservatory during air raids; then he was evacuated to Novosibirsk. The arrival of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra in Novosibirsk, led to Evgeny Mravinsky conducting the performance of Lokshin's vocal-symphonic poem "Wait for Me" (lyrics by Konstantin Simonov). The piece received high praise from Ivan Sollertinsky helping Lokshin's return to Moscow after the end of the war. He was able to take the state examinations, obtained the Conservatory diploma with "Wait for me" as the diploma work, and then with Nikolai Myaskovsky's support Lokshin was hired as Assistant Lecturer in Instrumentation at the Moscow Conservatory. In this capacity he worked during 1945–1948, the only working position held by the composer during his entire life.

The Zhdanov purges

At the height of the anti-cosmopolitism campaign and music purges of 1948, directed by Andrei Zhdanov, Lokshin was expelled from the Moscow Conservatory for the popularization of what was considered the ideologically alien music of Mahler, Alban Berg, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich among his students.^[2] The efforts of Nikolai Myaskovsky, Maria Yudina, and Elena Gnessina to get him another job were in vain. For the rest of his life Lokshin supported his family by composing music for film and theater.

Accusation by Alexander Esenin-Volpin

After Stalin's death Lokshin was accused by Alexander Esenin-Volpin of being an informer for the Soviet secret police NKVD-KGB, responsible for the arrests of himself and Vera Prokhorova, who were incarcerated in the GULAG – accusations that have been unproven.^[3] However the composer's reputation was tarnished by rumours spreading across the Soviet cultural elite.

Performances of Lokshin's music

Performances of his music had become rare and were met with resistance from liberally thinking intellectuals, notably Gennady Rozhdestvensky who refused to perform Lokshin's music. Still, most of Lokshin's works have been performed and recorded occasionally. Among his compositions which were never performed there are Symphony No.6 on the verses by Alexander Blok and "The Cockroach" ("Tarakanishche"), a comic oratorio (on a poem by Korney Chukovsky, with anti-Stalin innuendo). Rudolf Barshai in collaboration with Viktor Popov prepared Symphony No.6 for performance, however the performance of this composition was prohibited by Communist party for the reason of being too mournful for the Soviet public. Among Lokshin's own compositions which he never heard performed are the cantata "Mater Dolorosa" (1977) on verse from Akhmatova's "Requiem", which was prohibited in the Soviet Union at the time. In 1981 Lokshin had passed the score of "Mater Dolorosa" abroad to Rudolf Barshai. However, it was impossible for R. Barshai to perform this composition in the West; otherwise the consequences for Lokshin could be unpredictable. The fact that Rudolf Barshai performed Lokshin’s Requiem on the closing of the IV International conference “Resistance in the Gulag” (Moscow, May, 29th 2002) was the first essential step on a way to posthumous rehabilitation of Lokshin.^[4]

According to Lokshin's son the composer was a victim of calumny, and the real source of the charge that Lokshin was an informer were not the former Gulag prisoners, but Stalin’s secret police themselves, which had employed a practice of deceiving its victims by redirecting their suspicions. Lokshin's son claimed that the aim of these efforts was to defend an acting agent of the secret police. The arguments and documents obtained by Lokshin's son^[5] persuaded Elena Bonner^[6] to stand up for Lokshin. On January, 8th, 2009 Elena Bonner wrote: "From a certain point I have no more relation to the museum [i.e. the Sakharov Center] … since I did not find Alexander Lokshin’s [i.e.the composer's son] address [I ask] to let him know that I asked a member of the Public Commission to ask the director of the museum to take away from the site the material mentioned by Alexander Lokshin. And more than that – I am always on my guard when I consider all the supposedly unmasking materials. And in the most part of the cases I do not trust them." It is also impossible to ignore the historical fact that Lokshin's Requiem has been performed at the closing of IV Conference "Resistance in Gulag" (2002).^[7]