Page 311 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained
P. 311
CONTEMPORARY 309
CLOSE COMMUNION
WITH THE PEOPLE IS THE
NATURAL SOIL NOURISHING
ALL MY WORK
SPARTACUS (1956, rev. 1968),
ARAM KHACHATURIAN
he ballet Spartacus, known with ordinary people and their
IN CONTEXT best in its revised 1968 music, were key inspirations in
T version, is a spectacle on a his music. The hauntingly exultant
FOCUS grand scale. Unlike most ballets, its “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia,”
Ballet in Soviet Russia
theme is not romantic but heroic— from Spartacus, and the “Sabre
BEFORE a slave rebellion led by Spartacus Dance” from the ballet Gayane,
1921 Mikhail Gnessin, who against his Roman masters. have been widely used in television
later taught Khachaturian, The ballet won Khachaturian and film. The full 1968 version of
writes the opera Abraham’s a Lenin Prize in the year of its Spartacus remains a staple of
Youth, one of several works composition. The Soviet regime Russian ballet repertoire. ■
on Jewish themes. felt it symbolized the Russian
people’s victory against tsarist
1927 Backed by the Kremlin, oppressors. Others, however,
The Red Poppy, a ballet with now see it as referencing Soviet
music by Reinhold Glière, repression. In 1948, together
premieres at the Bolshoi with Prokofiev and Shostakovich,
Theatre in Moscow. Khachaturian had been denounced
for bourgeois “antidemocratic”
1940 Prokofiev’s Romeo and music, but he had regained official
Juliet is widely regarded as the favor, especially after Stalin’s
greatest ballet written during death in 1953.
the Soviet period.
Childhood influences
AFTER Khachaturian had grown up in
1976 Armenian composer Georgia, steeped in the folk music
Edgar Hovhannisyan bases of Armenia and the Caucasian
his opera-ballet Sasuntsi Davit region. The melodies and harmonic Aram Khachaturian, photographed
on a ninth-century Armenian inflections of the composer’s in later years at the height of his
epic poem. childhood, along with his fame, won worldwide acclaim for
his highly popular ballets, Spartacus
commitment to “close communion” and Gayane.
See also: The Nutcracker 190–191 ■ Romeo and Juliet 272 ■ Shostakovich’s
Fifth Symphony 274–279
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