The Mozart of Lokhvytsia

The amazing town of Lokhvytsia in the Poltava region… This legendary place is crowned with Cossack glory and war- and peacetime exploits of many generations. Sylvestr Kosiv, Ivan Mazepa, and Petro Kalnyshevsky used to lavish generous gifts on the town.

Lokhvytsia given Ukrainian culture a lot of famous names, including the choirmaster and pedagogue Nestor Horodovenko (1885–1964), the monumentalist, graphic artist, and art historian Mykhailo Dmytrenko (1908 – 97), the sculptor Hryhorii Pyvovarov (1908–42), and the composer Isaak Dunayevsky (1900–55).

At the end of the 19th century the city saw the formation of a semi-professional theatrical company, later headed by the talented stage director and musician Mykola Diakov. The company acquired a permanent stage in 1901, when a new People’s House was built in the style of a true theater. The troupe also had an orchestra composed of Lokhvytsia musicians. Only a few provincial towns could boast such good theatrical premises at the time. Therefore, traveling theatrical companies from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Poltava, Katerynoslav, and Odesa willingly came to Lokhvytsia. They put on dramas as well musical shows. It is in this salubrious atmosphere of theater and art that the talent of Dunayevsy was developing. Early in his childhood years, his parents noticed the boy’s flair for music and fully encouraged him to develop it. He took his first lessons from the amateur musician Hryhorii Poliansky, who also played at the People’s House theatrical orchestra. Little Isaak was often taken to the frequent productions and concerts. They left a lasting impression on his mind and helped him discover the immense world of art. It should be noted that local musicians possessed high musical culture. They performed the oeuvres of Frederic Chopin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt, Edvard Grieg, and other prominent foreign and national composers. The future composer was also able to hear all this.

Music buffs know Dunayevsky’s artistic life story only too well. Still, there are a number of little-studied pages in it. Here are the main landmarks. The boy went to a private Kharkiv music school at the age of 10 and received higher education at the local conservatoire in 1919. The young musician was brimming with energy, and his further lifetime was rather interesting.

Kharkiv made an indelible impression on the would-be composer with its multifaceted artistic life. There was a conservatoire, theaters, and an opera house here. Every year the local branch of the Russian Musical Society staged dozens of concerts and operas in the city, with Fyodor Chaliapin and Leonid Sobinov starring. Among those who wielded the conductor’s baton were Sergei Rachmaninoff and Sergei Taneyev. It is at that time that Dunayevsky began to dream of composing for a musical theater.

As the Civil War greatly aggravated the situation in the town, Dunayevsky moved to his native Lokhvytsia for a few months and plunged into the thick of cultural and artistic life. In particular, he contributed to the local newspaper Izvestia, propagating musical culture and urging his contemporaries to master comprehensive knowledge and take a respectful attitude to the artistic legacy of previous generations. As an organizer of the People’s University of Culture, he devoted himself completely to this institution by delivering lectures, etc.

Dunayevsky also took part in the productions of the local theatrical company. He even happened to play the part of Doctor Chebutykin in Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters.” The Lokhvytsia audience very much enjoyed the way their acclaimed fellow countryman played the piano. Incidentally, this almost-100-year-old musical instrument is now kept at Lokhvytsia’s Hryhorii Skovoroda Museum of Local Lore and History. The composer always kept in touch with his native land. He would write letters and furnish literature to the Lokhvytsia music school, which was set up in the postwar years and is now named after him. Grateful Lokhvytsia residents hold music soirees, concerts, and festivals to mark their fellow countryman’s anniversaries. A memorial plaque has been put up at the building where the composer was born. We know that Dunayevsky’s intensive creative life was associated with Kharkiv, Moscow, and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), as well as with cinematography, and musical theaters.

The composer fruitfully cooperated with the film director Grigory Aleksandrov, who was very well aware that Dunayevsky was a real “gold mine” for him. Aleksandrov was busy making utopia movies, Soviet Hollywood-style tall stories. The esthetics of “gigantomania” required, on the one hand, Stalin’s official order and, on the other, the “emotional foundation,” which Dunayevsky’s music amply furnished.

Yet, the composer’s creative life was not easy at all, although he basked in the rays of glory and the government showered him with high official awards. Indeed, Dunayevsky’s music reflected his epoch, which was heroic and dramatic at the same time. He gave all of his talent to the people and the country in which he lived and worked. His music was also of great educational importance, as far as that era’s values are concerned.

Very few knew, however, what was going on deep in the heart of the Mozart of Lokhvytsi, who knew only too well that the Stalinist repressive machine was claiming the lives of millions of innocent people, including many art and culture figures. Little wonder, he did not show boundless enthusiasm for writing a song dedicated to the tyrant Stalin?— it was just a demand of time. The “leader of all peoples” noticed this. After listening to Dynayevsky’s “Song about Stalin,” he said: “Comrade Dunayevsky applied all of his wonderful talent to make sure that nobody sings this song about Comrade Stalin.”  

There were years when the composer came under scathing criticism in the media which accused him of deviating from the “party line” and focusing too much on light music, which they said only catered to “bourgeois society members.”

Although the prime of the talented composer’s life coincided with an excessively ideologized time period (he had to take official orders almost always), Dunayevsky filled each of his new works with elated melodies that charged his contemporaries with energy and optimism. The list of these works is very long. Suffice it to recall that he composed music to 28 films a considerable part of which became classics of the Soviet and world cinema. The most popular of them are Merry Boys (1934), The Circus, Captain Grant’s Children (1936), A Rich Bride (1937), and Volga-Volga (1938). He also wrote 12 operettas that are still staged at Ukraine’s musical theaters.

About 100 songs, composed for choral performance, were constantly performed on stage and broadcast. Some of them can be heard out even now. In the last years of his life, the composer wrote the following songs, perhaps the best in his musical legacy: Roads; Fly On, Doves; The Way You Were; School Waltz; Guelder Rose in Blossom. Even today they enchant us with their lyricism, melodiousness, and an inimitable gamut of human feelings that run through the hearts of many music lovers. Fate decreed that the extremely gifted composer had to devote a great deal of time to writing songs and marches — to meet the daily requirements, so to speak. But he could have gotten down to major symphonic pieces. One of those who noticed this was Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975), who was impressed with Dunayevsky’s overture to the movie Captain Grant’s Children. This piece carried a mighty outburst of beautiful and dynamic music that could be compared — in terms of expressive power and technique — with some musical oeuvres of Wolfgang Mozart, Richard Wagner, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Edvard Grieg.

Dunayevsky mostly focused on light music and songs, which met the requirements of society at the time. If he had lived longer, he would have surely begun writing big symphonies, for he possessed a unique melodic talent. In films and operettas, the style of his music intertwined with the symphonic genre. Some fragments of the composer’s operettas are complete musical works and, therefore, they are often performed in concerts as a separate number. His works are distinguished through a complex melody line and refined harmony, and although they seem easy at first glance, they, in fact, in demand high vocal mastery and ample vocal resources from the singer. Shostakovich regretted that Dunayevsky, talented as he was, did not turn too often to symphonic works.

The composer was aware of this and wrote bitterly on Feb. 8, 1953, in a letter to I. Seraya: “I had a resounding success at the song concert the day before yesterday in the Hall of Columns (in Moscow – Author)… I am overjoyed with this success. But what does my joy mean in comparison with my sadness, my immense discontent?! I am no longer a creator. I still have some easy skill that keeps me a never-aging lion in song-writing. But if the same songs were enriched with my orchestral skills and ideas, they could have turned into cantatas, oratorios, poems, etc. However, I keep sitting here for years, producing essentially custom-made items. I am angry, very much angry with myself. And this anger is perhaps my only rescue anchor, the only hope for breaking loose from my artistic sweatshop…” Dunayevsky died in the prime of his creative life. Although his oeuvre unfolded well in line with ideologically-motivated factors, which, undoubtedly, restrained the composer’s great talent, his songs and inimitable melodies will always cause a great esthetic stir in the hearts of people and charge them with the power of an optimistic spirit.

Heorhii Shybanov is an Honored Worker of Arts of Ukraine