From Conducting Legacy of Alexander Melik-Pashayev
“On 13 June, 1931, at the USSR Bolshoi Theatre, the electric lights grew dim before the performance, and the orchestra pit got almost completely dark. Then, a young man walked between the rows of musicians and took his place behind the conductor’s stand. To a big surprise of his colleagues, he put the score aside and began to conduct Verdi’s Aida by heart.”
According to a contemporary, that was how Alexander Shamil’evich Melik[1]Pashayev debuted at the Bolshoi setting in his more than a 30-years music service to the leading music theatre of this country. “Melik-Pashayev did not ascend the stairs of glory. He began to shine and blazed up at once to remain a star of the first magnitude until his last day,” Boris Khaikin, one of his colleagues, wrote.
At that time, there were many, including Vyacheslav Suk, the oldest conductor of the Bolshoi, who predicted a brilliant future to “this boy”, but there were probably no one who could assume how firmly he would link his destiny with “his Bolshoi” identifying himself with its life, successes and failures, living every premiere and every conducted performance, among which he had not any habitual and routine ones. Entering the Bolshoi in the period of a true constellation of conductors, when Samuil Samosud, Nikolai Golovanov, Ariy Pazovsky and Boris Khaikin worked there, Melik-Pashayev became a sort of a creative pivot of the theatre long before he was appointed its chief conductor in 1953.
He had his ‘baptism of fire’ in the profession at the Tbilisi Opera Theatre. After two years as an accompanist during which he earned respect of his colleagues for musicality and erudition (he could accompany parts from dozens of operas by heart), Melik-Pashayev took his place behind the conductor’s stand at the age of 18. He had to conduct his first opera (Faust by Charles Gounod) without a single orchestra rehearsal. Soon, replacing a conductor who suddenly fell ill, Melik-Pashayev conducted Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns virtually at sight (he was given the score an hour before the performance). His phenomenal memory, musical intuition and ability to infect with temperament and lead the musicians allowed his conducting talent to reveal itself at a very young age – after five years at the Tbilisi Opera, his repertoire numbered more than twenty performances.
An already practising conductor, Melik-Pashayev went to study at the Leningrad Conservatory under Nikolai Malko (later on followed by Alexander Gauk). Being a classmate of future coryphaei of the northern capitol’s conducting school such as Evgeniy Mravinsky and Ilya Musin, the young musician polished his skills. Attending the concerts of the Leningrad Philharmonic Society, he happened to hear many famous foreign conductors, but the performances of Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer would remain in his memory for life. The proof of the fact that Melik-Pashayev learnt the lessons of the German conducting tradition so well was the 1954 staging of Fidelio. Hermann Abendroth who performed at the Bolshoi Theatre then expressed his admiration to the Bolshoi troupe and Melik-Pashayev personally for his conducting the opera “in a perfectly Beethovenian style.”
From the very first steps of his music career, Melik-Pashayev proved to be a fine interpreter of West European opera. Those who were lucky enough to listen to Aidawhen he conducted (he did it for more than 35 years [until his last month at the Bolshoi]) would never forget the magic and dramatic power of that performance. The first staging realized by Melik-Pashayev on his own at the Bolshoi was Othello by Verdi, and the last one was Falstaff. At the height of the Great Patriotic War, the premiere of Rossini’s William Tell drew a wide response, and the ensembles from The Barber of Seville sounded under his hand with so much vivacity and dynamism. He gladly conducted operas by Puccini at the same time loving La traviata tenderly. On 20 May, 1964 Melik[1]Pashayev conducted a rehearsal of this opera with enthusiasm and inspiration. He did not know he would not happen to appear behind the stand again… The conductor played French music with as much success – Carmen, Les Huguenots, Faust and Romeo and Juliet all had an inspired and emotional interpreter in him.
Melik-Pashayev’s talent in Russian classical opera unveiled at a slower and more gradual pace. In the 1940s-1950s, he was involved in remarkable productions and recordings of Ivan Susanin, The Demon, Cherevichki, The Queen of Spades (in 1961, he was invited to conduct the opera at London’s Covent Garden), Prince Igor and Boris Godunov – the last two ones received international awards. Finally, Melik-Pashayev was an ardent propagandist of contemporary composers. At the Bolshoi, he realized the premieres of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Shostakovich, The Decembrists by Shaporin and War and Peace by Prokofiev – its recording, which received a grand[1]prix of the French Charles Cros Academy, is still considered to be the best interpretation of this monumental opera.
Melik-Pashayev is not that well-known as a symphonic conductor. His colleagues and music critics repeatedly expressed their regrets that his appearances in this capacity were too rare. However, almost every performance was a symbolic event and remained in the listeners’ memory for a long time as it was the case with Beethoven’s Ninth and Verdi’s Requiem with the Bolshoi soloists, choir and orchestra.
“In his person we can have a superb symphonic conductor,” wrote Gauk in 1938 when Melik-Pashayev became a prize-winner of the All-Union Conductors Competition.
“A most prominent conductor, a master of perfect technique and high music culture,” reacted the French press after his concerts with the Orchestre Lamoureux of Paris. Appearing behind the conductor’s stand with different collectives, he most eagerly performed with his “home” Bolshoi orchestra achieving the highest artistic results with it.
Nevertheless, Melik-Pashayev’s comparatively small symphonic repertoire testifies for the breadth of his musical interests. Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and overtures, compositions by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, symphonic fragments from Wagner’s operas, overtures by Beethoven and Berlioz, as well as a significant number of works by Soviet composers such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Glière, Shaporin, Shcherbachev and others.
The featured recording made at the Big Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1960 unveils one of Melik-Pashayev’s main conducting qualities – harmoniousness and balance combined with meticulous attention to every detail, ability to reduce very different, even contradictory parts of a whole to a common denominator without simplification and leveling of any kind. Each of the two symphonies in B minor receives an expressly individual rendition, but at the same time the conductor clearly let us feel that such a concert programme is not accidental connecting Schubert and Tchaikovsky with invisible figurative and symbolic links. Although more than 70 years separate the two pieces, they sound like two sides of musical romanticism, Alpha and Omega of the musical 19th century. Dramatic contrasts and emotional anxiety so typical of Schubert’s music anticipate Tchaikovsky’s tragic figurativeness, and enlightened clarity and purity of lyrical fragments of Pathétique as if return us to Schubert’s melodic stream.
The Unfinished symphony is a reflection of a passionate romantic artist’s inner world with its inherent maximalism of mental states, and Melik-Pashayev makes it surprisingly finished and integral. As to the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the conductor believed it was one of his best achievements (according to his son, “a sort of a musical monument to myself”). In his interpretation, an autobiographic image of the “main hero” who stands before the face of death grows to a deep, Tolstoyan opposition of inhuman “force of Fate” to genuinely human forces of Light, Love and Beauty.
Boris Mukosey
