Galina Ustvolskaya (1919 – 2006)
Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya was born in Petrograd. She attended college at the Leningrad Conservatory during where she studied composition with Dmitri Shostakovich. The two composers formed an artistic relationship, commenting on and influencing each other’s works.
Despite the influence of Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya soon developed an extremely idiosyncratic style, often austere and uncompromising and informed by her religious beliefs. For these reasons, her music remained largely unperformed in the Soviet Union until the 1960s. Musicologist Alan B. Ho of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has written:
It is not difficult to imagine the disgust someone of Ustvolskaya’s temperament must have felt at having to filthy her hands with concessions to the Soviet Communist Party. Referring to her slab-like sonorities delivered with piledriving staccato attack, Dutch critic Elmer Schoenberger has called her “the lady with the hammer”. Perhaps more accurate would be “the lady with the flail”. The puritanical lashing fury of her music often suggests the image of Christ flogging the moneylenders from the temple, while several writers have remarked on the “Old Testament” vengefulness they hear in her work. There is a pounding masculinity in many of Ustvolskaya’s scores — few men, let alone women, have written music as violent as this — which bespeaks an affinity more for Jehovah than for Jesus, for the railing prophets of the Exile rather than the Gospel message of love. (Not entirely coincidentally, she dislikes having her music performed by women.)
Consequently, Ustvolskaya’s music is unlike anything else. Even something as innocently titled as Sonata for Piano No. 6 (1988) is terrifying in its stark aggressiveness:
Her Symphony No. 5, subtitled Amen, is her final work. It was composed in 1989–90 and features a man reciting the Lord’s Prayer, accompanied by violin, tuba, trumpet, oboe, and a percussion instrument constructed of wood and struck with mallets.