Ə SECRETS OF THE L GEND MƏLIKOV, MAHLER, FIVE CHORDS AND THE DANCE OF TIME

BY SIMON HEWITT

ON 21 MARCH 2004 I took a train through the snow from Helsinki to Saint Petersburg, following in the railsteps of Lenin in April 1917 and those, a decade earlier, of Gustav Mahler.

On 3 November 1907 Mahler was returning to St Petersburg after a week in Helsinki (then part of the Russian Empire) which he described as ‘beautiful, superb… I could happily live here! ’

During his stay he conducted a concert at the University Solennitetssal, devoted to Beethoven (Fifth Symphony/Coriolan Overture) and Wagner (preludes to Tristan & Isolde and Die Meistersinger ), and hobnobbed with the Finnish cultural élite.

On October 31 Mahler heard two early works by Sibelius (his Valse Triste and Varsang symphonic poem) – dismissing them, a little harshly, as ‘kitsch.’ But he liked the conductor, Robert Kajanus (founder of the Helsinki Philharmonic), who had paid him a courtesy visit earlier that day. Kajanus was the foremost interpreter of Sibelius’s works (and, in the 1930s, the first to record his symphonies). He staged what were known as ‘popular’ concerts at Societetshuset Hotel (now City Hall) on the Helsinki waterfront, where Mahler was staying.

Gustav Mahler was introduced to Sibelius after the concert and found him ‘extremely pleasant.’ Sibelius, in return, described Mahler as a ‘very modest and most interesting person.’

They talked at length, swapping views about The Symphony.

‘The main thing is severity of style, and an underlying logic that links all the motifs like a hidden thread’ threw in Sibelius.

‘No it’s not’ chuntered Mahler. ‘A symphony should be all-embracing, like the world!’

Mahler dined that evening with Finland ’s most famous painter, Axel Gallen – who (Mahler wrote incredulously to his wife) ‘downed a dozen glasses of schnapps ’ before the soup arrived.

After sleeping them off Gallen took charge of Mahler ’s final day in Finland, arranging a three-hour boat-trip along the coast with architect Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950).

The trio then repaired by horse-and-carriage to Hvitträsk, a newly-built country-house above Lake Vitträsk, 18 miles west of Helsinki. That evening, by a roaring fire, Gallen dashed off a small oil portrait of Mahler.

Hvitträsk was built 1902-04, in a style influenced by Macintosh, as studio-cum-home for the avant-garde Architects ’ Bureau that Saarinen ran with Herman Gesellius (1874- 1916) and Armas Lindgren (1874-1929). The trio ’s last and most famous design was Helsinki ’s magnificent Jugendstil railway station.

I left it at 15:42 on the Repin . It was my first trip to Russia. The slowish train – six hours to cover the 275 miles to St Petersburg – had a dining-car with lace curtains and flowers on the tables. I was musing peacefully, as the only person in it, until a noisy group of Russians plonked themselves down across the aisle and ordered a carafe of vodka.

A portly gentleman with bald pate, few teeth and a disconcerting resemblance to Khruschov arrived in their wake and, instead of setting himself down in a quiet corner, shovelled himself onto the seat opposite me.

He ordered dried fish, looked at me with an evil grin, took off his shoe, banged it on the table, and bellowed ‘I wi ll bury you! ’

Well no, he didn’t of course. He ordered me to have some of his fish: it was mighty tasty, and reminded him of his childhood in and alongside the rivers near Novosibirsk.

More of Novosibirsk later.

The tableful of Russians – heading home from a conference in Stockholm – proved equally friendly. Dima, their leader, plied me with vodka.

Times change. Instead of arriving, like Lenin (and Mahler), at the historic Finland (exchange) Station, my Repin arrived at St Petersburg ’s glitzy new Ladozhsky (through) Station.

And today the Repin does not even exist. It was ditched in 2010 in favour of a faster (3½-hour) but charmless train, the Allegro . Music Over Art. MYSTERIOUS MARIINSKY DEBUT

I was staying just five minutes by foot from Finland Station but 25 minutes by car from Ladozhsky – in an enormous apartment block on Finlandsky Prospekt, erected in 1987 to house the city’ s musicians, and artists. My landlady Larisa had a grand piano that took up half the living-room. She was large and jolly, like her breakfasts. Bread, jam, ham, blini, eggs and a dictionary were piled on her kitchen table. She was keen to practise her English. I was keen to reply in a Russian that had lain untouched since A-Level. We spoke, slowly.

My first Petersburg priority was a ticket to the Mariinsky. I was delighted to see Casse-Noisette on the bill for March 23. Alas: sold out. I met Dima instead. He introduced me to his friends Andrei and Vlada. They promised to try and wangle me a Mariinsky ticket for the following night. I was to call them late next morning to check.

I couldn’t get through, much as I tried from the battered coin-boxes at Vitebsky Voxal, where I took an elektrichka to Pavlovsk, then a marshrutka to Tsarkoye Selo, for a day in post-imperial snow – making damn sure I was on the pavement outside the Mariinsky by 6:30pm, half an hour before curtain up.

No sign of Andrei or Vlada.

At 6:55 they arrived with three 250-ruble (£4.50) tickets for Box 4 in the First Circle (third tier).

There was barely time to buy a programme and see what we were in for. The Legend of Love . Never heard of it. The title hardly excited. ‘Music by Arif Melikov .’ Never heard of him either.

Our box contained six wooden chairs. We had one seat in the front row and two behind, from where Andrei and I could, with some contortion, take in about three-fifths of the stage, if we stood up. We did, though, have a goodish view of the orchestra. We were on the percussion side, and it looked to me like the largest array of percussion ever assembled in a pit, with a bass drum the size of a trampoline.

Like a giant mace summoning silence, five fat, dissonant chords, each spaced two seconds apart, shuddered through the auditorium.

They were as electrifying as the repeated notes on the death-march trumpet that start Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, or the Fate motif that opens Beethoven’s – although in each case four, not five, notes are involved. Melikov’s opening also made me think of the isolated chords that end Sibelius’s Fifth – although those are irregularly spaced, and there are six of them.

It would be many years before I learned why Melikov opened his ballet with five chords.

They were followed by a sinister skipping motif on the bassoon, swiftly developed by the flute then violins, as beturbanned courtiers crept out to pay exaggerated obeisance to a black-clad Vizier with a pointed beard, who swaggered around flapping his cloak like a cross between Mephistopheles and Freddy Mercury. A gong sounded and, to strains of plaintive brass, ladies-in- waiting poured on to the stage, swirling their headscarves in lamentation towards a bier in a recess at the back – where a Princess, covered in a white shroud, lay as still as a mummified Lenin. The Queen (her elder sister) stood before her in haughty profile.

Just 90 seconds since the first of those chords. Sensational start. DATE AND PLACE ?

I was still no wiser as to who Melikov was or when he had written his ballet. The massive sound, with its intermittent shrieks of dissonance, reminded me of an orchestral depiction of a Soviet factory by a composer whose name I couldn’t remember, though I had a feeling it began with M.

It did – but it wasn’t Melikov.

Alexander Mosolov wrote Zavod in 1926. The title is usually translated as Iron Foundry , but Steelworks would be more accurate: it was originally part of a ballet called Stal (as in Stalin).

Back on stage a hirsute Stranger in sackcloth – part Druid, part Sorcerer to Mickey Mouse’s Apprentice – had appeared, claiming he could save the Princess if the Queen sacrificed her beauty in exchange. The Queen nobly consented and was instantly disfigured (to spend the rest of the ballet in a mask or veil).

This ballet was not shaping out to be the soppy concoction its title threatened. The Stranger had bewitched the Queen with a quirky, tantric dance full of jerky elastic strides – the last sort of thing I had expected to see in such a haven of tradition as the Mariinsky. The Queen had vainly offered him gold – embodied by a dozen dancers in gold tops and tights, black mini-skirts and air- hostess hats, bouncing around sexily with their knees waist high, as if Pan’s People had hijacked an Aeroflot flight.

I was more confused than ever as to when this ballet could date from. It had the searing lyricism of the late Romantics, the muscle of Mosolov, the mood-swings of Mahler, occasional jazzy bits, the ostinato of Ravel, and the stridency of Prokoviev or Shostakovich – all with an Oriental seasoning that nodded to Khachaturian.

The Love interest had to wait till the second half of Act I: the Queen and Princess (now back to the pinkest of health) are walking in the palace gardens when they spot a handsome decorator painting an archway and simultaneously fall in love (or rather lust) with him. The young man not surprisingly prefers the Princess, who secretly returns to see him – launching into a courtship dance with fluttering, come-hither hand movements. They avoid physical contact, for now.

I spent the interval exploring the Mariinsky’s nooks, crannies, vodka and chandeliered opulence with Andrei and Vlada, a great music-lover and Mariinsky-goer. She was as taken aback by the ballet as I was, albeit a little less favourably: Scheherezade and Chopiniana were more her style.

Vlada and Andrei kindly allowed me to watch the rest of the ballet from the front of the box. Before lights dimmed I finally got to grips with my flimsy Mariinsky programme. It had nothing at all about the ballet’s history (not even the year it was composed). The Cast-List showed Yuri Grigorovich as choreographer, and had the ‘Stranger’ mysteriously named as Thereafter . The plot summary took up two of the four pages. Place and time were not stipulated: long ago Persia or Turkey, I supposed – at the court of a Queen (there was no king in this tale) with the unrememberable name of Mekhmeneh Bahnu .

Act II opens with an uproarious carnival, which the Queen watches indifferently from the back of the stage, seated in a lotus position. Snarling, crashing chords interrupt the festivities. She begins to dance. She is besotted with the decorator (called Ferkhad) and distraught that her lost beauty means she can never have him. Her sister, Princess Shyrin, dreams of Ferkhad in turn. He promptly enters her apartment. Their pas-de-deux climaxes in an erotic overhead splits every bit as explicit as the the ejaculatory trombone slides in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which so outraged Stalin in 1936.

Shyrin and Ferkhad elope. The Vizier alerts the Queen in another sensuous pas-de-deux , bearing her aloft. She dispatches him in pursuit of her ungrateful sister. At the Mariinsky (though not, I would learn, in every production) the Vizier (Ilya Kuznetsov) somersaulted four times diagonally across the stage like an Olympic gymnast as he led his soldiers after the couple.

Wave after wave of male dancers flood the stage as Shyrin and Ferkhad are encircled and captured. The auditorium plunges into fleeting blackness before three spotlights pick out the Queen and her prisoners. Although the stage remains crammed with soldiers, the trio appear isolated in a world of their own. (I knew this abrupt spotlight technique from Genesis concerts of the 1980s, when it was used to pick out the original three members of the five-piece band. Was this a clue to dating the ballet?)

Barbarous march music rudely interrupts the balletic trio. The big lights are switched back on as the army stomps around the stage. The Queen sets Ferkhad an impossible mission: to earn Shyrin’s hand he must cut a channel through the nearby ‘Iron Mountain’ to bring water to the people, who are dying of thirst because their spring has run dry.

Act III opens with Ferkhad alone on Iron Mountain, dreaming he has struck water and can see Shyrin’s reflection in it. Meanwhile the Queen dreams she has regained her beauty and that, after removing her veil, Ferkhad leads her through a torrid pas-de-deux , climaxing in a repeat of her sister’s aerial splits. Shyrin bursts in and, dancing to incongruous battletank music, persuades the Queen to come with her to the mountain. A delighted Ferkhad believes Shyrin has come to stay with him, but the Queen stipulates they may only be together if Ferkhad abandons his pick-axe. It sounds like a no-brainer but, in this proto-Soviet society, it amounts to moral blackmail: Duty, and the people’s well-being, are preferable to such bourgeois notions as Love. The curtain falls with Ferkhad chipping away at his mountain.

This Socialist Realist ending seemed contrived, but at least it helped date the ballet to the 1930s or later.

The ballet’s brazen eroticism, redolent of the Swinging Sixties, suggested it was later.

FRUSTRATING RESEARCH

The Legend Of Love was first performed on 23 March 1961 – 43 years and one day before I saw it – at the Mariinsky. Its ‘immorality’ had so shocked Soviet mores that the ballet prompted hot- under-the-collar discussion by the Leningrad Regional Communist Party Committee but, as Khrushchev was thought to like it, no action was taken.

Did the Swinging Sixties get underway in Leningrad, not London? It was only the second ballet choreographed by Grigorivich (after Prokofiev’s Stone-Flower in 1957) and forged his reputation. Three years later he was snapped up by the Bolshoi, where he would remain Artistic Director for over thirty years. The first ballet he staged after moving to the capital was: The Legend of Love .

This was a young man’s ballet: in 1961 Grigorovich was 34, composer Melikov just 28. How many composers are remembered essentially for a single work that was also their first? (Max Bruch and his Violin Concerto, perhaps – written when he, too, was 28. Mahler, incidentally, was 28 when he completed his First Symphony.) The Mariinsky première had Olga Moiseyeva as Mekhmene Banu, Irina Kolpakova as Shyrin and Alexander Gribov as Ferkhad. In-house politics and back-stage manoeuvering put paid to Grigorovich’s desire for Nureyev to dance the male lead – to Nureyev’s lasting regret (when he sought political asylum in France three months later, Ferkhad’s costume was found in his suitcase).

But my 2004 research into The Legend Of Love and Arif Melikov was not especially fruitful. Those were pre-YouTube days.

Very little of his work seemed to have been recorded; two or three symphonies, by the State- owned Melodiya – on LP, not CD; probably 33 RPM , possibly 78. I tracked down a Dutch record- collector who owned one of them, and wondered what I would like to swap for it. I decided not to bother. It was The Legend Of Love I was desperate to hear.

I wasn’t the only one. The internet was was full of plaintive requests from music-loving tourists (mainly American) who, having chanced upon The Legend on their group-trip to the Mariinsky, were now beseeching cyberspace to release the secret of its vinyl or polycarbonate whereabouts.

But there was no record. And a CD would be another decade a-coming.

There were other problems. The bland title did not make for easy googling. It was also erratic. Due to the absence of definite/indefinite articles in Russian, it has been translated as Legend of Love , A Legend of Love or The Legend of Love . As my computer did not, in 2004, allow me to type in Cyrillic, I could not google the title in Russian: Легенда о Любви (‘Legenda o Lyubvi’). To confuse matters further, the Russian preposition o is usually translated as about , not of .

Melikov was not much easier. Sometimes he was M elikov, sometimes M alikov. In Azeri, he’s MƏlikov, using a rotated e known as a schwa. My computer couldn’t type that either.

I ascertained that he was born a citizen of the USSR in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1933, and appeared to be still alive.

Azerbaijan had been independent since 1991 but, in 2004, was still pretty mysterious to anyone outside the oil business. It was not until 2011 that the country shot to fame by winning the eurovison song contest, with a ditty sung (in English) by Ell & Nikki, one of the country’s few blondes (and who, asserts wikipedia, lives in Enfield). Its catchy chorus-line I’m scared of breathing coz I adore you was, possibly, a tribute to Mr Melikov: it could have been sung by Ferkhad, or Princess Shyrin, or Queen Mekhmene Banu, had The Legend of Love been an opera.

BOLSHOI DVD

My luck changed in 2006, in Moscow. First, in May, I found a Legend of Love video (of the chunky old-fashioned variety) in the Conservatoire. The production was dismal – fuzzy images, grainy sound – but better than nothing. Then, in December, in one of life’s little eureka moments, I found a DVD of The Legend About Love (sic) at the Bolshoi’s second-string theatre, the Novaya Szena, during the interval of Shostakovich’s Socialist Realist ballet A (or The ) Bright Stream .

The DVD featured Maria Bylova as the Queen, Alla Mikhalchenko as Shyrin, Irek Mukhamedov as Ferkhad and Gediminas Taranda as the Vizier, in a performance conducted by Alexander Kopylov at the Bolshoi (not Mariinsky) on 18 October 1990. Grigorovich was still in charge, but elsewhere it was all change.

German reunification had just been declared. Three days earlier Mikhail Gorbachov had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – to the incredulity of Azerbaijanis, who were (and are) still seething about the brutal crackdown he had authorized in Baku nine months earlier. The Soviet Union was falling apart: Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Tajikstan all declared independence in 1990. Ferkhad was the last role for Irek Mukhamedov as the Bolshoi’s male lead before he quit Russia for London, teaming up with Darcey Bussell at the Royal Ballet.

The Bolshoi’s 1990 ‘Death-Throes Of Communism’ version of The Legend of Love is as good as it gets.

The orchestra deals adroitly with the abrupt shifts between major and minor, repeated bouts of biting staccato, and complex polyphonic orchestration that requires pinpoint ensemble playing to achieve Mahlerian clarity.

The Bolshoi troupe adjust superbly to the The Legend’s atypical demands. This is not a ballet of grace and gliding. Dancers must be razor-sharp. They skip, hop and swivel. Courtiers whirl like dervishes. The main trio are let loose to fly around the stage in giant leaps; every leap must hit the beat, mid-air. The Queen twice raises the palm of her hand to command instant silence: split- second synchronization with the conductor and orchestra is non-negotiable. The principal males perform extravagant lifts requiring superhuman strength and dexterity; the clinches, and the airborne movements of the heroines, anticipate top-level ice-skating by twenty years.

All dancers must, whenever possible, adopt the ‘Egyptian profile’ that constitutes the ballet’s visual theme. Even if their bodies face the audience, their arms must extend sideways with ‘broken’ wrists: The Legend of Love is possibly the only ballet where dancers have to think about their hands as much as their feet. On top of all this comes the logistical challenge of simultaneously inundating the stage with dancers by the swarm, all displaying instant rhythmic gusto, from wings that must resemble the Moscow Metro at rush-hour.

The Bolshoi DVD houses a performance of manic charisma by Gediminas Taranda as the Vizier – the Queen’s advisor-cum-enforcer (Premier and Army Chief rolled into one, like a 1940s Stalin). One second he is spinning on a sixpence, the next eating up the stage in hungrily aggressive strides – firing off peremptory commands, casting fiery glares to the left and the right and, on one occasion, shoving Ferkhad halfway across the stage.

Taranda trained as a boxer, and was later fired from the Bolshoi after squaring up to Grigorivich.

His rapport with Maria Bylova’s distant yet vulnerable Queen is founded on a violence, eroticism and ambiguity that reduces the Ferkhad-Shyrin idyll to the stuff of fairy-tale. In Act I, when Taranda approaches Bylova with insufficient deference, she chases him away with kung-fu kicks. He meekly hides behind her when the Stranger appears and they tip-toe back in horror. After the Stranger spurns the offer of gold, Taranda gleefully gestures to Bylova to cut his head off, but she reacts with disdain. In Act II the Vizier consoles the Queen for the loss of her looks in a sensuous pas-de-deux , before bearing her aloft in apparent triumph. But when he tries his luck by running his hand up her leg, she kicks him away and launches into a furious goose-step (complete with Nazi salute) to show just who is boss (I had to replay this scene three times before I could believe my eyes).

The Legend Of Love looks and sounds like no other ballet. Some commentators eschew the word ballet altogether, preferring to talk of ‘symphonic dance’ in deference to Melikov’s wall of sound. Its distinctive Oriental feel is influenced by mugham , a traditional Azerbaijani form of modal music imbued with the same yearning as what Leonard Bernstein described as the ‘weepy-waily’ Jewish tunes that coarse through Mahler’s symphonies. (Melikov learnt music on the tar – a sort of Azeri guitar, whose outline inspired the Baku Mugham Centre opened in 2008.)

Weepy-waily could be applied to much of the music in The Legend Of Love , which only relaxes into an unfettered Western idiom for Princess Shyrin, and her dances with Ferkhad. On these occasions Melikov skirts with a lush sentimentality that his Oriental yearning otherwise precludes. But the romantic mood never lasts for long: minor-key violence lurks at the end of every bar. Beauty is there to be shattered. Angst and urgency permeate the ballet.

Folk tunes. Bugle calls. Snare-drums. March and counter-march, with no enemy in sight. This is music with a Mahlerian stamp, equally at home in the grandiose and the prosaic.

Mahlerian ‘banality’ can be found, for instance, in the Azeri folk songs that pepper the tipsy carnival, or the strains of music-hall melodrama to which the Stranger approaches the Queen. Scything strings, rumbling brass and repeated notes in the lower woodwind inescapably bring to mind Mosolov’s Zavod when the two dance together.

Mahlerian grandeur includes the shimmering chord that heralds the Queen’s solo in Act I, echoing the impressionistic start to the finale of his Sixth Symphony. Melikov, like Mahler, makes sinister use of the tam-tam, an instrument Mahler associated with death: it heralds the arrival of the ominous Stranger in Act I, and is used to introduce Act III – much as it is used to start the final song ( Der Abschied ) in Das Lied von der Erde . There are, however, five swishes of Melikov’s tam- tam before the orchestra enters, and his tam-tam keeps swishing for another 45 seconds – like the insistent drum-beats at the the start of Brahms’s First Symphony (or the end of Mahler’s Third).

Yet Melikov’s percussion-powered score is relentlessly melodic. The hits, as Tony Blackburn loved to say, just keep on coming. You would be hard pushed to reduce The Legend Of Love to a highlights-only ballet suite like Romeo & Juliet or Sleeping Beauty . It’s worth more than one side of an LP. This is double-album material, to which the ballet serves as a full-length video. (Melikov, in fact, produced not one but three Legend of Love suites in the 1960s).

The visual appeal derives partly from the sets and costumes by Simon Virsaladze (1909-89), Chief Designer at the Mariinsky from 1945-62 before moving to the Bolshoi with Grigorovich. Like Melikov, Virsaladze hailed from the southern Caucasus (Tbilisi). His set centres on a giant book that opens and closes to reveal changes of scenery, with characters emerging from the centre of the book as if pouring from its pages.

A reference to Persian miniatures is often assumed – although, at the start of Acts I and III, the closed book is fronted by a shield with Arabic script, recalling the four pendentive shields beneath the dome of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia.

NAZIM HIKMET

This hybrid Perso-Turkish Orientalism is more than aesthetic convenience. Azerbaijani and Persian history are intermeshed; more ethnic Azeris live in north-west Iran (with Tabriz their capital) than in Azerbaijan itself. Mekhmeneh Bahnu, Shyrin and Ferhat exist in both Persian and Turkish legend. Mekhmeneh Bahnu’s designation as Queen ( Tsaritsa in Russian), rather than Sultana, points to a Persian setting for the ballet. But the ballet’s libretto was written by a Turk, Nâzim Hikmet (1902-63). A Ferhat Su Kanalı (Ferkhad Canal) exists in northern Turkey: a metre- wide channel cut through the Ferhat Dağı mountain 2,000 years ago to bring fresh water to the town of Amasya.

The differences between Hikmet’s libretto and the story’s literary origins merit analysis.

Hikmet’s play Ferhad Ile Şirin is one of Turkey’s best-known love stories. Mehmene Banu does indeed offer Ferhad Şirin’s hand in return for forging a tunnel through the Iron Mountain to deliver spring water to the disease- ridden inhabitants in the town below – but The Legend Of Love evokes only half the story. In Hikmet’s play, Ferhad has been toiling for ten years when Şirin suddenly arrives in the mountains to announce that Sultana Mehmene Banu has revoked his punishment and they are free to live at the palace. But Ferhad, who is too proud of his engineering feats to abandon them halfway through, suggests Şirin live with him in the mountains until he has finished. She refuses, revealing that Mehmene Banu has also decreed that, unless Ferhad returns to the palace forthwith, he will not set eyes on Şirin again until his watercourse is complete.

In the play there is no question of Mehmene Banu saving Şirin from death by sacrificing her beauty: this addition underpins the ballet’s pyschological drama with its eternal triangle, sisterly rivalry and Mehmene Banu’s anguished regret at the irreversible consequences of her noble gesture. And Ferhad is no mere decorator, but a skilled artist and mural-painter: the ballet libretto downplays him from the ranks of the intelligentsia to those of the proletariat. And, by describing Mehmene Banu as a Queen rather than a Sultana, the ballet removes the action from Turkey – where Hikmet and Communism were banned.

When Hikmet wrote the play he was in a Turkish prison for his Communist beliefs. By the time he wrote the libretto he was in Moscow as a political refugee, stripped of Turkish nationality (only restored, posthumously, in 2009). Ferkhad’s exile at the end of the ballet mirrored his own predicament.

Nâzim Hikmet may not be a name familiar to many Westerners today, but during his lifetime he was a cause célèbre .

Either side of briefly editing the Turkish Communist daily Aydinlik in Istanbul, he spent most of the 1920s in the USSR (mainly in Moscow and Baku), returning to Turkey in 1928 after an amnesty – to be promptly arrested and spend eight months in jail. After his release he published a torrent of literary writings, becoming known as the ‘Turkish Pushkin’ (although his youthful affinities lay more with Mayakovsky). From 1933-35 he was again imprisoned then, in 1938, handed a 28-year jail sentence. He was released in 1950 after an international campaign led by Picasso and Sartre, and made a co-recipient of that year’s International Peace Prize . He then fled to the USSR, where he was lionized. He died in Moscow in June 1963 and is buried in Novodevichy.

During his final prison spell Hikmet translated War & Peace and, in 1948, wrote Ferhad Ile Şirin . His libretto for The Legend Of Love dates from a decade later, and would prove one of his last works. It is a product of Khruschov’s Thaw. Even so, anyone involved in the arts still had to tread with the utmost care: Boris Pasternak was savaged by state media for the ‘anti-Soviet’ nature of Doctor Zhivago , which won the Nobel Prize in 1958.

POLITICAL CONTEXT

The Thaw extended to the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony in December 1961 (it had been completed 1936 but withdrawn under political pressure during rehearsals). But by December 1962 – when Khruschov exploded with rage at an exhibition of ‘unofficial’ contemporary art – The Thaw was effectively over.

In 1959 Khruschov and Nixon exchanged visits in a tentative foray into détente. In September 1960 Khruschov banged his shoe at the U.N. In August 1961 the Berlin Wall went up. In October 1961 Stalin was removed from the Red Square mausoleum.

The Legend Of Love premiered in Leningrad on 23 March 1961. That day the USSR (a) removed the need for foreign correspondents to submit reports to the State Censor for vetting, and (b) refused to report that cosmonaut Valentine Bondarenko had died in a training accident (mention of which was censored until 1980).

Confusing, turbulent times.

That context is reflected in both Hikmet’s story-line and Grigorovich’s choreography, although the two are so intermeshed that the Bolshoi’s 1990 DVD claims Grigorovich ‘revised’ Hikmet’s libretto, while its website today accredits the libretto jointly to both of them.

Dutifully downgraded from a skilled Artist-Calligrapher to a Painter & Decorator, Ferkhad wears a blue-grey costume resembling worker ’s overalls, sometimes with white dashes down the back to emphasize his spine. This hero of brawn over brain even ends his first dance by flexing his biceps.

Rather less politically correct – from a Soviet point of view – is the ballet’s feminism and eroticism.

There is no King (or Sultan). Princess Shyrin officially heads the cast, but Queen Mekhmeneh Bahnu calls the shots in one of ballet’s greatest roles. Barbarous marches – part Eisenstein, part North Korean parade, part Hollywood epic – evoke an Ottoman army tramping across the Balkans, but the more intimate scenes are played out in the oppressive atmosphere of the seraglio. Except that, in Melikov’s seraglio, the females are predators not victims.

The Queen toys with the feelings of her macho Vizier with sadistic relish. Riding roughshod over her sister’s feelings, Shyrin woos Ferhad and persuades him to elope. The Queen captures them and takes revenge: exile. Ferhad is set an impossibly demanding physical assignment – figuratively dispatched to the Gulag, consigned to hard labour at the equivalent of a Donbass Mine, Belomor Canal or Bratsk Hydroelectric Dam.

Had a man issued such an order, Stalin comparisons would have been inevitable. Investing supreme power in a female enabled the ballet to assume an anti-authoritarian stance without getting too close to the Soviet bone. Take the disdain with which Mekhmeneh Bahnu treats her Vizier, who spends most of his time posing and preening like a Duce or Führer – yet is reduced to infatuated adolescence in the Queen’s presence.

It is hard not to detect implied criticism of the gender-inequality of Communist politics. No woman ever headed a Communist state. The last female to rule Russia was Catherine the Great, who died in 1796 – a woman coincidentally renowned for her sexual appetite. The Queen and Princess Shyrin love Ferhad for his physique, like Oriental Lady Chatterleys (the unexpurgated D.H. Lawrence novel was published in 1960). For the sisters to ignore class difference was admirably Soviet – rather more so than their pursuit of pleasures of the flesh.

The ballet is imbued with just enough political correctness – above all by turning Ferkhad into a Stakhanovist hero who places the Good Of The People above his feelings – to ensure its political messages and erotic choreography escaped censorship… even if, as we have seen, it was a close- run thing.

THE BURDEN OF LOVE

Shyrin descends from her airborne splits in a crucifix position, as if symbolizing that love is a cross to bear. One is reminded of the words pronounced to Ferkhad by the Iron Mountain in Hikmet’s 1948 play: ‘You human beings love one another in such strange ways – with your hearts, your spirits, your minds… No wonder you are unhappy!’

Love, far from being the stuff of legend, is ridiculed in The Legend Of Love. Mekhmeneh Bahnu loves her sister enough to sacrifice her own beauty to save her – then spends the rest of the ballet regretting it, and trying to thwart her sister’s love for Ferkhad. Mekhmeneh Bahnu also loves Ferkhad – but sends him into eternal exile. Princess Shyrin and Ferhad appear to love each other to bits, yet meekly submit when the dictates of Duty and Authority call for their separation.

This ending, extolling the triumph of Communist ideals, will have rung hollow to anyone familar with the ancient tale of Shyrin and Ferkhad, wherein Ferkhad commits suicide before completing his watercourse after being falsely informed that Shyrin is dead. The painter compelled to abandon his brushes for a pick-axe will never succeed in bringing water to The People. Exchanging a life of creativity for one of physical drudgery proves pointless. All, in this story, is vanity.

‘Tragedy is the dominant motif’ admits Melikov. ‘But we must have faith that the future will be brighter. To counter the tragedy, the second theme in my music is love.’

The ballet is a tragic romance where nobody dies – but where love is less a legend than a myth. None of the characters are happier at the end of the ballet than at the start. The Stranger – this deux ex machina able to bring people back to life – emerges in retrospect as an agent of doom, whose meddling with Nature brings as much mayhem as Bulgakovian canine surgery. The Legend Of Love is a work of despair.

The conflict between Feelings and Duty is mirrored by the clash between East and West – a clash at the heart of Azerbaijan’s history and cultural identity, tellingly evoked in the country’s unofficial ‘national novel,’ Ali and Nino : another tale of lovers from almost irreconcilable backgrounds (albeit with religion, not class, as the sticking-point).

Ali and Nino opens in a Tsarist-era classroom in Baku, with a Russian geography teacher assuring his pupils that ‘it is partly your responsibility as to whether our city should belong to progressive Europe or reactionary Asia.’

For all its loving visual attention to Oriental detail, The Legend Of Love appears to come down on the side of Progressive Europe – as embodied by the Communist ideals of the USSR and the paramount importance of The People.

Yet the ballet’s dénouement appears so throwaway that the intended message of Hikmet, Melikov and Grigorovich must surely be construed as the opposite. The individuals at the heart of the story are swamped and submerged: physically battered by an endless procession of rampant marches, then psychologically crushed by the absurd demands of The State.

Not that The Legend Of Love advocates the Asian way of life as superior to the European. The beturbanned courtiers, with their exaggerated bows and obsequious arm gestures, seem to parody Islamic fundamentalists saluting their Ayatollah. Mekhmeneh Bahnu is only happy when she rids herself of the shackles of authority and imagines herself as a young girl in the arms of Ferkhad. Her authority is symbolized by the veil of ugliness which Ferkhad tears from her face: surely a reference to the constraints of religion in Oriental society. (The Soviet régime banned Azeri women from wearing veils.)

Although Shyrin officially tops the bill, she is the least appealing of the main characters: ungrateful, self-centred and spiritless. Small wonder that the part is invariably allocated to a ballerina far younger than the one playing the indomitable Mekhmeneh Bahnu.

TO AZERBAIJAN

I kept a look-out for performances of The Legend Of Love during the 25 visits I made to Russia over the decade that followed my first – in vain. Arif Melikov slowly receded to the back of mind.

Then, in January 2013, I was introduced to Aytan Mouradova by Countess Ekaterina de Rochambeau at the Brussels Fine Art & Antiques Fair. Aytan, a sophisticated Azerbaijani living in Paris, felt there was much in Baku to interest a culture journalist, and promised to help me with introductions.

A few weeks later she kindly arranged for me to visit the opulent Azerbaijan Cultural Centre near the Eiffel Tower, where I was graciously received by Ambassador Elchin Amirbayov and Cultural Attaché Hamlet Akbarov .

They bespangled me with magnificent books about Azerbaijan, and stylish boxed-sets of CDs, mainly of jazz and mugham. I knew nothing of Azerbaijan’s great history of jazz, but was soon learning: my embassy gifts included pretty much the entire lifework of Rafiq Babayev (1937-94), a supremely gifted pianist, composer and arranger whose death in the Baku Metro, caused by an Armenian bomb, cemented his legendary status.

But I drew a blank when I mentioned Arif Melikov. Perhaps the Ambassador didn’t know too much about him, or perhaps he didn’t particularly care for his music. Maybe the Embassy simply had nothing by or about Melikov they could give me. Or perhaps Mr Melikov was in disgrace. Was he too closely associated with unwanted memories of this new country’s Soviet past?

He would, in any case, be 80 years old by now. Was he still alive? If so, was he compos mentis ?

The Ambassador courteously offered to facilitate my visit to Azerbaijan – a prospect that would not rear into view until a year later, on 26 March 2014, when I received an e-mail from St Petersburg. It was from Anastasia Blokhina , my hostess on a visit to the city a few months earlier to report on Erarta Galleries, where she was head of PR. She was writing to me on her last day in that job: she had just accepted a ‘generous offer’ to become Director of Yay Gallery in Baku.

‘Hope we will manage to do something interesting together’ she concluded. That sounded promising. Anastasia made interesting things happen.

She had taken me to places most visitors to St Petersburg never see: a wild beach on the Gulf of Finland, hidden a mile through the forest from the nearest car- park; or the colossal outdoor set of Fyodor Bondarchuk’s blockbuster war movie Stalingrad , 20 miles from the city in the middle of nowhere. It was ringed by a tall wire fence; the metal gates had a sign with a grim warning about guard-dogs. Anastasia said there’d be a gap in the fence and the dog-sign was bull-shit. She was right. For half an hour we were alone in bombed-out Stalingrad with a copy of Romuald Iodko’s dancing children.

Yay Gallery was the commercial offshoot of Yarat Contemporary Art Space, which had swiftly been making its global mark. I interviewed its founder, Aida Mahmudova , at the ViennaFair in October 2014, when I also caught up with Anastasia.

She told me a press-trip to Baku was on the cards for 2015, when Yarat were planning to open a new Art Centre.

Coincidentally, a couple of months later, I was contacted by Hamlet Akbarov, now Azerbaijan’s Cultural Attaché in Switzerland. He invited me to visit the embassy in Bern, where I met the charming Ambassador Akram Zeynalli , and received some even more lavish books and CD sets.

I told them of my impending trip to their country, and mentioned my hope of meeting Mr Melikov. But I did not wish to press them about the matter.

I had every confidence in Anastasia’s ability to snare the Big Beast of the Baku Beat.

I raised the matter with her during the run-up to the press trip in March. ‘How do we proceed?’ she asked. ‘If you want me to call him than I should know what to tell him – are you planning to publish this interview somewhere? He is a bad-tempered guy, or so I was told, so I want to be prepared to answer his questions!’

‘I am sure you will be able to charm him’ I replied suavely. ‘Of course I wish to publish this interview. Arif Melikov is one of classical music’s greatest mystery men! In the West he is known almost exclusively for his ballet The Legend Of Love . His music is virtually unattainable and there has been no interview with him by an English journalist, at least none that I can trace. It has been my ambition to meet him ever since my first visit to St Petersburg in 2004, when I saw The Legend Of Love at the the Mariinsky.’

‘I will talk to Mr Melikov today when I have a minute’ Anastasia wrote back from the United Arab Emirates, where Yay Gallery had a stand at Art Dubai.

‘Unfortunately I will not be able to join you for the interview. With 250 Yarat guests coming to Baku it will be crazy. However, I will try to find you an interpreter from among my staff.’ BAKU

I flew from Geneva to Baku on March 20, and was met next day by Anastasia’s attractive Yay Gallery colleague Umay Mammadova . We visited the studio of Hüseyn Haqverdi (whose partner Fariza is the daughter of jazz great Rafiq Babayev), then drove to a builder’s yard on the city’s dusty outskirts where Hüseyn was working on a large sculpture for the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Umay (flanking Yarat boss Aida Mahmudova below, with Anastasia Blokhina to the left) kindly showed me the sights of Baku before we sat down to a late lunch in a restaurant tucked beneath the crenollated walls of the Old Town. It served Turkish beer and local cuisine. Smoke was billowing from its wonky metal chimneys.

‘Nastya sends her regards’ began Umay ‘and there’s good news about the interview.’

Umay, it transpired, was Anastasia’s Secret Agent in Matters Melikov.

‘It’s been difficult to arrange’ Umay continued matter-of-factly. ‘He doesn’t like to answer the phone. Usually it’s his wife.’

Umay paused and fiddled with her sunglasses. Her mobile rang.

‘As I was saying’ resumed Umay. ‘I rang a couple of times and got no further than his wife. Then I tried again and she thought I was their grand-daughter.’

Umay paused.

‘So she passed me on.’

I had trouble envisaging Umay as grand-daughter material. She exuded a blasé cosmopolitan sophistication that made her seem older then she actually was (23, I later learnt).

‘So I spoke to Mr Melikov and arranged the meeting.’

I felt like hugging her, but there was a table in the way.

‘12 o’clock Thursday. I’d better come too, if you don’t mind.’

After lunch we headed to Baku’s leading record shops in search of Melikov recordings, but emerged empty-handed.

A couple of days later, during the Yarat press-trip, I mentioned my upcoming meeting with Arif Melikov to Kommersant culture critic Elena Kravtsun, who told me The Legend Of Love was indebted to Kara Karayev – possibly even written by him.

I had never heard of Kara Karayev (he is not even mentioned in Daniel Jaffé’s 2012 Historical Dictonary of Russian Music ).

But I soon learnt he was Big News in Baku.

ARIF MELIKOV

On 26 March 2015, eleven years and two days after hearing him at the Mariinsky, I met Arif Melikov. Not, alas, with Umay – an ‘urgent trip to Istanbul’ had intervened – but with another of Nastya’s attractive Ya-Ya Girls, Farah Alekperli . We drove to the Baku Music Academy where Mr Melikov is Head of Composition.

The Academy is a handsome yellow Stalinist building designed in the late 1930s by Baku architect Mikayil Huseynov. On a high granite plinth at the foot of the steps stands a seated statue of Uzeyi Hajibeyov (1885-1948), who helped establish what was then the Azerbaijan State Conservatoire in 1920. It was named after him when he died: he is revered for establishing Azerbaijani music’s hallmark synthesis of East and West. He was just 22 when he wrote Leyla & Mejnun – the first opera of the Muslim world. His second opera, Sheikh Sanan (1909), ridiculed pre-arranged marriages. Women’s emancipation was a Hajibeyov leitmotif – one Melikov would take up. In 1927 Hajibeyov co-authored a Collection of Azerbaijani Folk Songs and, in 1931, helped launch an Azeri Folk Instruments Orchestra to play European classical music.

Hajibeyov and Arif Melikov both grew up in the ancient town of Shusha, ‘for centuries the bridge between Caucasian countries, Persia and Turkey’ ( Ali and Nino ), where Armenians and Azerbaijanis ‘lived in peace’ amidst the ‘green paradise’ of Nagorny Karabakh. Shusha has been in ruins since 1992, when it was smashed to bits by the Armenian army. Once it was a town of 40,000, with such a proud musical tradition it was dubbed the ‘cradle’ of Azeri music and ‘Conservatoire of the Caucasus.’ Melikov’s mother played the kamancha (a bowed string instrument) while her young son studied mugham.

The Academy steps lead up to a hexastyle portico with white columns three storeys high. There are more columns, and gleaming parquet floors, in the cream and white interior. Mr Melikov’s office was on the first floor. He was standing in profile: a stocky figure leaning on a walking-stick, silhouetted against the window. Images of Turner (and Mahler) flashed through my mind.

His ‘office’ was more of a classroom, dominated by two grand, black pianos with their lids down. There was an almost empty bookcase by the door, a glass-doored cabinet in the opposite corner, an adjustable music stand, ten matching chairs, a wide piano-stool and two large windows. One was open. Notes from a nearby piano came tinkling through.

One wall boasted a cheap clock; one a large painted portrait of Kara Karayev; a third two posters dating from March 2010 and April 2014 – advertising concerts at the Academy with music by Students and Teachers (the name of Melikov appeared each time at the top of the latter list).

Mr Melikov was wearing dark trousers, grey blazer and a full-length jersey zipped up to the top. He had steely grey hair, metal-rimmed glasses, a sallow complexion, lived-in face and strong voice. We sat down either side of a wide, empty desk beneath a framed, brown-and-white photograph of Uzeyir Hajibeyov.

Mr Melikov fiddled with keys with large, wrinkled hands. His welcome was gruffly affable. He needed no prompting to talk about The Legend Of Love .

It had been staged in 65 theatres around the world ‘in many different performances.’ He ‘found something new every time’ he saw it.

He was full of his week-long trip to Moscow in October 2014, when his ballet had been reprised under Grigorovich as one of the highlights of the Bolshoi’s 239 th Season – and beamed to cinemas around the world.

He had spent 18 months writing The Legend of Love . It was not a commission; he had submitted the score to the Mariinsky, who had agreed to listen to it. They auditioned a twin-piano version before accepting it.

‘I have no secrets!’ stated Mr Melikov on several occasions, à propos of nothing in particular.

I wondered if being so closely associated with a single work was frustrating, with the rest of his musical output comparatively neglected?

‘It may have been once’ he shrugged. ‘But now I’m happy. A million people have seen The Legend of Love .’ He pounded the desktop. ‘Not even Tchaikovsky had that sort of success!’

Thanks largely to The Legend, he reported, he had made hundreds of trips abroad, including a 22-hour flight to Brazil.

He seemed to like flying. He used to jet happily around the Soviet Union, everywhere from St Petersburg to Novosobirsk. During preparations for The Legend’s Mariinsky debut he would ‘fly up to Leningrad as and when necessary.’ The cities are 1,600 miles apart but he made it sound like a bus into town.

‘I can write music anywhere, even on a plane!’ he added, pounding the desk. ‘What else is there to do? Even in concerts, I make notes.’

He was so busy he hardly had time to sleep. ‘You have to keep up with all the new trends!’ he threw in. ‘The tougher things are, the better I write!’

He could have earned more abroad (I believe he had Turkey in mind), where they ‘wanted to buy my brain’ – but if he didn’t live in Baku he wouldn’t have students. And, he added, pounding the desk, ‘I still want to teach!’

Mr Melikov is 81.

I asked him who were his favourite composers.

‘Mahler, Bruckner, Prokofiev’ he shot back.

He often listened to Mahler at home. ‘Mahler one day, French music the next’ he breezed.

I threw in Mosolov but drew a blank. He spoke respectfully of Karayev but was dismissive of the idea of a ‘Baku School’ of classical music with a distinct Azerbaijani flavour, which I presumed was at odds with his all-embracing musical world view.

He spoke more affectionately of Shostakovich, ‘among the first to support The Legend of Love ’; of Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, a noted intrepreter of Bruckner and Mahler; and of Gennady Rozhdestvensky , who recorded Melikov’s Second and Fourth Symphonies for Melodiya.

When I expressed my frustration at the difficulties in tracking down recordings of his music, Mr Melikov fidgeted with his keys, banged the desk and issued some unexpected news: the Heydar Aliyev Foundation would soon be issuing a de luxe ensemble of his complete works (towards which he was ‘not paying a kopeck’).

It was a splendid note on which to end. We had been promised ‘30-40 minutes’ but spoken for 75. Mr Melikov showed no impatience but, after commemorative photographs, it seemed politic to leave. He donned overcoat and flat hat, picked up his walking-stick and led us down the stairs into the sun.

Young music students rushed past, too polite to stop or stare.

Or were they simply unaware that a Living Legend moved in their midst?

Arif Melikov has a forceful personality, but was a far cry from the ogre we had been half-led to expect. He doubtless makes a stern taskmaster: high standards expected, fools or slackers unsuffered. He has an ego and is entitled to one.

On the other hand, for a distinguished composer to view teaching as something he cannot live without – even in his eighties – suggests a deep-seated interest in others. Among former students he singles out Jeyhun Allahverdiyev, author of ‘two extraordinary symphonies and a Piano Concerto I value very much.’

A first meeting with an interviewee is seldom free-flowing, especially when an interpreter is involved – slowing the pace and undermining the personal, tête-à-tête rapport that can help interviewees unwind. Melikov did not always respond to questions directly but, even so, I came away with one startling piece of information: his favourite composer was Gustav Mahler.

Melikov grew up in Stalin’s anti-Semitic USSR. How did he come to know, let alone be influenced by, Mahler’s works?

And what were the secrets he was so insistent he didn’t have?

And what about Karayev? THE FIVE CHORDS

Invaluable information about Arif Melikov can be found in the archives of Azerbaijan International . I learnt a great deal from an autobiographical article by Melikov himself, published in 1995; and an interview with Melikov by his then-colleague Aida Huseynova for the Spring 2005 issue (at the time, Huseynova – armed with a PhD in Musicology from the Conservatoire in… St Petersburg – was Associate Professor of Musicology at Baku Academy).

The Legend’s first five chords, it transpired, represented the Mighty Handful responsible for the ballet’s Mariinsky debut: composer Arif Melikov , choreographer Yuri Grigorovich (top left) , designer Simon Virsaladze , librettist Nâzim Hikmet and conductor Niyazi Hajibeyov (front row left to right) .

The bonds between this team were uncommonly tight, helping make the ballet the work of ‘total art’ that has underpinned its enduring success.

Melikov and Grigorovich remain close friends to this day.

Melikov called Virsaladze Suliko – Georgian for ‘Soul’ (title of Stalin’s favourite song) – and enjoyed an almost filial relationship with Hikmet (30 years his senior), who had fled Turkey for Moscow while his wife was pregnant with a son he would not see.

Melikov revered Hikmet as a man and author.

‘The most important thing about Hikmet’s poetic works is that they always allow room for the reader’s interpretation’ he once wrote. ‘Every phrase compels the reader to think.’

Niyazi (1912-84) – nephew of Uzeyir Hajibeyov, the patriarch of Azeri classical music – conducted the first performances of ‘nearly all’ Melikov’s works. Melikov says he ‘insisted’ that Niyazi conduct his Leningrad debut – which, if true, suggests the young composer from the distant fringes of the USSR was just as assertive as his music.

It should, however, be noted that he and Niyazi had first met in Baku a couple of years earlier, when Niyazi was head of the Baku Opera & Ballet. For the 1960/61 season he was Chief Conductor at the Mariinsky and, one suspects, a valuable ally in helping a work by an unknown Azeri compatriot reach the Leningrad stage.

Niyazi was also an accomplished composer himself – renowned, like Melikov, for synthesizing traditional Azeri and Western classical music (his enchanting, Oriental-flavoured ballet Chitra dates – coincidentally or not – from 1961).

Arif Melikov would write just two other ballets: Two People on Earth (libretto by Robert Rozhdestvensky), premièred at the Mariinsky in 1969; and A Poem of Two Hearts (1981).

But he has written eight symphonies, ten symphonic poems and a plethora of film scores – even though he only works on films ‘if the concept is intellectually broad enough to support symphonic music: I prefer difficult films that inspire me to create sophisticated symphonic concepts.’ His magnum opus , in this respect, is the six-and-a-half hours of music he wrote for the Shahnameh trilogy – based on Ferdowsî’s epic Persian poem – filmed by Tajikstan’s Boris Kimyagarov (an Eisenstein student) in the early 1970s.

GERGIEV ’S FOUR SWISHES

I received some unexpected good news shortly after my meeting with Arif Melikov: a Legend Of Love CD was at long last being released – by Melodiya (now reinvented in Capitalist guise). And the performance was conducted by Valery Gergiev , no less.

Not, alas, the Gergiev who recorded a complete cycle of Mahler symphonies with the LSO between 2008-11, but the Gergiev in charge of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra in… 1988.

Gergiev’s newish Legend was due for international release in mid-May 2015 but, thanks to the wonders of Cyrillic googling, I found it had been available in Russia since February, and had a copy dispatched to me from Moscow – with admirable alacrity – by Alexander Militisky of Leningradskoye (nice touch) Chaussée.

Like many things in today’s neo-Pétainist, ultra-censorious Russia, the CD came with an age- restriction rating (16+). That the music should be deemed more adult than the ballet itself (age- restriction rating on Bolshoi website: 6+) suggested the censors had been at the vodka.

The young Gergiev gives the ballet’s first five chords the Sibelius 5 treatment, dragging them out over 16 seconds with a lengthening gap (2.4 – 3.7 – 4.4 – 5.2 seconds) between each one.

He conducts The Legend like a symphonic suite. Some of his tempi deserve a legendary Grigorovich ear-bashing: so exaggeratedly slow or fast you would never guess this was a ballet.

Perhaps that is a compliment to the versatility of Melikov’s music. It certainly suggests Gergiev wasn’t looking at the ballet when he conducted it which, given the faintly ludicrous idea of having a ballet performed by a radio orchestra, is not altogether surprising.

Gergiev’s Legend showcases the clarity of his orchestral handing, and he achieves a Mahlerian – if not Wagnerian – sonority. But he lacks lilt, blurs the sharp staccatos that underpin Grigorovich’s revolutionary choreography, and just doesn’t ‘get’ the Oriental mood: he plays The Legend as if it were written by Khachaturian.

To patriotic Azerbaijanis this must feel akin to crime (exacerbated by Gergiev’s stint as head of the Armenian Philharmonic from 1981-85).

Worst of all, the Gergiev recording shunts Act III’s tam-tam-swishing introduction to the start of Act II, with the tam-tam swishes down from five to four, equally spaced and with each swish louder than the last.

This alteration is nonsense from both a narrative and musical point of view. Act II starts at the palace. The tam-tam swishes, though, herald a weepy-waily portrayal of women bearing empty water jars up into the mountains – where all of Act III takes place.

The tam-tam swishes at the start of Act III echo the chords at the start of Act I: so there should be five of them, not four, with each swish or chord the same volume and distance apart.

My disappointment at Gergiev’s Legend prompted me to take a closer look at the conductor on the Bolshoi’s 1990 DVD: Alexander Kopylov .

Kopylov was born in 1924 and studied in Tbilisi under Alexander Gauk – a promoter of Mahler and Shostakovich in 1930s Leningrad – and, in December 1961, became the first man to conduct The Legend Of Love after its Mariinsky debut. This performance took place in… Novosibirsk, where Kopylov had been head of Opera & Ballet since 1953.

He was appointed Chief Conductor at the Bolshoi soon after, and led The Legend’s legendary Moscow première in 1965.

Historic credentials. No wonder he knew the score better than Gergiev.

BACK AT THE BOLSHOI

The Legend had been performed in Baku (under Niyazi) in July 1962, and made its foreign debut (Prague June 1963) by the time it reached the Bolshoi.

The Moscow cast included Grigorovich’s wife Natalia Bessmertnova as Shyrin, a young Māris Liepa as Ferkhad, and Maya Plisetskaya as Mekhmene Banu.

Plisetskaya – who died on 2 May 2015, the day this article was finished – had replaced Galina Ulanova as the Bolshoi’s top diva in 1960 and was, according to Khruschov, ‘our n°1 ballerina and the finest in the world.’

She called her role in The Legend Of Love ‘one of the best parts I ever danced. Mekhmene Banu is a unique character: Juliet and other ballet heroines may sacrifice their lives, but she sacrifices her beauty. Living, acting and dancing this character was an incredible experience.’

The ballet’s 2014 revival at the Bolshoi featured Anna Nikulina as Shyrin, Denis Rodkin as Ferkhad and Svetlana Zakharova as Mekhmene Banu. Zakharova (an ex-pupil of Olga Moiseyeva, the rôle’s original Mariinsky intrepreter) called the part ‘very powerful and unusual,’ observing: ‘I have to suffer and worry all the time. I do not smile once.’

In 2014, an incredible 53 years on, an unsmiling Yuri Grigorovich was still cracking his choreographer’s whip. According to the Bolshoi’s Artistic Director, Sergei Filin, ‘most dancers did not get through his tough auditions. Many more were changed during rehearsals.’

Arif Melikov attended the 2014 dress-rehearsal and première, saying ‘The Legend of Love is about the 1960s… this was our youth. Yuri Grigorovich and I have been friends all these years. I am happy that A Legend of Love still strikes a chord. It means we guessed right all that time ago, and created something people can still relate to.’

Melikov did, however, regret that lead dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze had left the company the year before – as ‘his Ferkhad was so inspired he could have painted three palaces and broken through three mountains in his spare time.’

Tsiskaridze had played Ferkhad in both the Bolshoi’s 2002 revival of The Legend Of Love and the ballet’s 50 th anniversary performance under Gergiev in 2011 – when it opened the White Nights Festival in St Petersburg.

Tsiskaridze had not gone quietly, blasting Bolshoi top-brass for favouritism, bad taste, and the theatre’s vulgar renovation. He was promptly snapped up by St Petersburg and made Rector of the prestigious Vaganova Academy (established in 1738 as the Imperial Ballet School), where Grigorovich had learnt his trade in the 1940s.

SUPREMELY SOVIET

As a musician, Arif Melikov had ‘no complaints about the Soviet era. Houses of Creativity facilitated opportunities for composers to work productively. Young composers received support to take part in international festivals. These days we miss such opportunities. How can we deny it?’

Melikov even had a brief political career in the USSR: from 1986-91 he was a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet. He is perfectly open about this, but less clear about his rôle. As a ‘well-known composer whose works had been performed worldwide’ he says the authorities ‘couldn’t touch’ him – implying he was a critic of the Soviet régime. But this is hard to verify: whatever opinions he may have voiced were – as he admits – ‘never included in the official bulletins recording the sessions of the Supreme Soviet.’

Melikov was unlucky to become embroiled in politics just before Azerbaijan was plunged into war with Armenia and the USSR came crashing down. From 1988-92 he ‘did not write a single note. Something broke in my heart.’ In 1994 he wrote I Blame : a book about the war with Armenia and Baku’s ‘Black January’ of 1990, when Moscow sent Soviet troops into Azerbaijan and hundreds were killed.

‘There has always been the sound of tragic sadness in my symphonic music’ declares Arif Melikov. ‘For artists, it is the tragic essence of life that provides the strongest creative force. Even when a ray of sunshine appears amidst the darkness, it is always framed in black. Take Shostakovich. Aren’t all of his 15 symphonies tragic?’

Melikov’s 33-minute Eighth Symphony, however, is better described as elegiac. It is scored for orchestra, piano, and a mezzo-soprano with astonishing range: Rashida Behbudova’s performance (accessible on YouTube ) at the May 2004 première in Baku’s newly renovated Philharmonic Hall, accompanied by the Azerbaijan Symphony Orchestra under Rauf Abdullayev, is stupendous.

The idea of a ‘vocal symphony’ – Melikov uses 20 th century Turkish and Azeri verse by Nâzim Hikmet and Almas Ildirim – is indebted to Shostakovich ( Babi Yar ) and Mahler, whose Das Lied von der Erde is a symphony in all but name (Mahler spurned the term for superstitious reasons, as it would have been his Ninth).

Melikov’s Eighth Symphony is, by any standards, an extraordinary work – proof not only that he was far from being a ‘one-hit wonder,’ but that his creative powers span more than forty years.

The symphony is subtitled Eternity and dedicated to the late President of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev (1923-2003).

Heydar Aliyev (shown above giving Melikov some flowers) once called Melikov ‘one of the masters of Azerbaijani culture’ and ‘a national treasure… heir to an Azerbaijani musical tradition that includes the great composer Glière.’ He invited Melikov to join him on a visit to Mecca in 1994.

Azerbaijan is a secular state and Melikov, while nominally a Muslim, had never thought of visiting Saudi Arabia ‘because it has no symphonic tradition.’ Yet, in Mecca, Heydar Aliyev suggested the ‘unique atmosphere’ would inspire him to write a ‘large symphonic piece.’ This was tantamount to a royal command, and followed up by further Presidential prodding. But it took Melikov years to take up the idea. By the time his symphony was ready, Aliyev was dead.

‘I have never written music related to politics’ declared Melikov in 1995. ‘You can see that in my list of works: there’s not a single piece that glorifies or praises Communism.’

This is not strictly true. His Fourth Symphony (1977) was commissioned by USSR state television to mark the 60 th anniversary of the October Revolution.

He is equally disingenuous in asserting that ‘the water Ferkhad brings to his people symbolizes freedom. The Legend Of Love is about freedom as well as issues related to love and death.’

Yet Ferkhad does not bring water to his people, and is never likely to. They will die of thirst.

KARA KARAYEV

Melikov’s attitude towards the USSR seems more ambivalent than that of Kara Karayev (1918-82), whose memorial I slithered across when seeking to find the Belle Epoque building, on the snappily named Avenue of the 28 th of May (formerly Avenue of the 28 th of April), where my Paris-based Russian teacher Salvina had lived as a child.

Separating it from the majestic Stalin-era Nizami Cinema lies Baku’s tribute to Karayev, who had also lived nearby.

This grandiose memorial occupies an entire square, paved with shiny, red marble plaques inscribed with notes from his works, surrounding a zany 10-foot relief of Karayev by sculptor Fazil Najarov that looks straight out of the Soviet ’70s.

Not quite. The monument was inaugurated by Azerbaiajani President Ilham Aliyev in February 2014, at a low-key ceremony where Arif Melikov was one of the speakers.

Karayev was a Soviet prodigy. He was a teenage pupil at the Azerbaijan Conservatoire before moving to Moscow to study composition with Shostakovich, and had won the coveted Stalin Prize twice by the age of thirty: in 1945 for the opera Vatan (Homeland), co-written with Jovdat Hajiyev; and in 1948 for his symphonic poem Leyla & Mejnun . In 1949 Karayev succeeded Uzeyir Hajibeyov as Rector of the Conservatoire, where Arif Malikov studied from 1953-58.

Karayev’s 1953 ballet The Seven Beauties was based, like Leyla & Mejnun , on a Persian epic by Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209), whom the nascent Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic adopted as ‘national poet’ in the late 1930s – with Stalin issuing a ‘bright, deep and scientifically correct directive’ explaining that Nizami wrote in Persian only because he was not allowed to use Azerbaijani (Ganjavi lived in Ganja in what is now western Azerbaijan, though his father came from Qom in Iran, and his mother was a Kurd). Jubilee celebrations of the 800 th anniversary of Nizami’s birth were planned in Baku for Autumn 1941 but postponed, because of the war, until 1947. That year Fikret Amirov composed a symphony To Nizami’s Memory , while Afrasiyab Badalbeyli wrote an opera called Nizami in 1948. Karayev’s choice of Nizami subjects, then, was politically and patriotically opportune.

Nizami wrote five epic poems in all, collectively known as the Khamsa – including Khosrov & Shyrin (a Persian version of The Legend Of Love ) which inspired an opera by Niyazi in 1942.

In Nizami’s version Khosrov (a 7 th century Sassanian King from what is now central Iraq), not Mekhmeneh Bahu, is the main protagonist, and it is he who sends Shyrin’s lover Farhad (a sculptor) into exile – tasked with carving steps into the frighteningly arid Mount Behistun (now in western Iran). Farhad commits suicide after being misinformed about the death of Shyrin – who is Khosrov’s wife, and the niece (not sister) of Armenian queen Mahin Banu .

Karayev’s choice of subject-matter in the late 1950s continued to be politically correct. His ballet Path of Thunder was based on an anti-Apartheid novel by the coloured South African author Peter Abrahams, about a doomed love affair between a black teacher and a white girl. Soon after its 1958 Mariinsky première, Karayev was named a People’s Artist of the USSR . His ideological reliability was considered so unbreachable that, in June 1961, he was selected – along with his effective ‘boss’ Tikhon Khrennikov, the timeserving President of the Soviet Composers’ Union – to represent the USSR at the first International Los Angeles Music Festival (where the Los Angeles Times called Path of Thunder ‘tepid’ and ‘ultra-conservative’).

Karayev’s compositional style became more adventurous in his later career, with recourse to the twelve-tone technique considered dangerously ‘formalist’ in Stalinist times, but he remained in good odour with the authorities all his life. In 1979 he was one of six signatories to a letter denying the authenticity of Solomon Volkov ’s Testimony (portraying Shostakovich as a closet critic of the Soviet régime). A nother former Shostakovich pupil, Georgy Sviridov, refused to sign.

Melikov praises Karayev’s ‘encyclopedic knowledge about almost everything related to life and art, science, music or literature’ (he could have added soccer – like Shostakovich, Karayev was a lifelong fan) and refers to him as his ‘mentor and teacher.’

But Karayev was not on speaking terms with Melikov’s friend Niyazi, the first conductor of The Legend Of Love – or with the composer Fikret Amirov. When Karayev, Niyazi and Amirov were invited to represent Azerbaijan at the 1980 Transcaucasus Music Festival in Tbilisi, it took a five- hour head-bashing session with Heydar Aliyev (then Chairman of the Azerbaijan Communist Party) for them all to agree to go. When the train drew out of Baku, however, Karayev was nowhere to be seen. Shortly after he left Baku for Moscow, where he died in May 1982.

No one can be blamed for avoiding the Baku-Tbilisi express: when I took it on 26 March 2015, the 350-mile trip lasted 15 hours, and made my Repin to St Petersburg feel like a rocket. But why was Arif Melikov not deemed important enough to go instead of Karayev, who was known to be in poor health? Is it a coincidence that Melikov was only made Head of Composition at the Baku Academy in 1982, after Karayev’s death? Why was Melikov so keen to deny the existence of a ‘Baku School’ that would effectively classify him alongside Karayev?

Melikov was planning a ballet based on Anatoly Zokhrabbekov’s Страна Oгней ( Land of Fire , the patriotic motto emblazoned on the Azerbaijan-sponsored shirts of Atletico Madrid, Sheffield Wednesday and Racing Club de Lens) when Karayev passed Hikmet’s on to him libretto in 1959. Maybe Karayev was too busy to use it. Perhaps he thought it had little potential, or was reluctant to revisit a story explored by Niyazi’s opera of 1942. It could also be that he had no wish to be involved with the Turkish equivalent of the Shyrin & Ferkhad love story, for fear of undermining his association with Nizami Ganjavi – who had penned the Persian (or ‘Azerbaijani’) version.

The Bolshoi were so pleased with The Legend Of Love , reports Melikov, that they promptly commissioned him to write another ballet, based on the Islamic tale of Joseph the Handsome . But, back in Baku, he discovered that Karayev was also planning to use the theme for one of his own works – ‘so I broke off the agreement with the Bolshoi.’

Melikov recalls the episode with detachment, but for a young composer to give up a once-in-a- lifetime commission from the Bolshoi after being ‘lent on’ by a senior colleague must have left a sour taste – all the more so as Karayev ‘unfortunately never completed this work.’

Rather than build on his success, Melikov did not write another ballet until 1969.

It is impossible to draw definitive conclusions about Karayev’s musical influence on Melikov without a detailed study of all Karayev’s pre-1960 compositions, but The Legend Of The Love clearly has greater musical affinities with The Seven Beauties and Leyla & Mejnun than Path Of Thunder or Karayev’s 1960 suite Don Quixote .

In one instance, Melikov appears to display more than mere affinity: The Legend’s Shyrin-Ferkhad love theme is lifted directly from the Adagio horn solo in the The Seven Beauties.

Homage or plagiarism?

‘Borrow, don’t copy’ advised Shostakovich. ‘There’s a huge difference.’

THE GREAT GLIERE

The influence of various composers can be detected in The Legend Of The Love . Azerbaijan’s 20 th century Classical composers were brought up to meld local and Western musical styles. The art of synthesis was virtually in their blood. The Legend Of The Love reflects this tradition.

Possible Azeri influences include the music of Uzeyir Hajibeyov, Karayev, Nyazi, Fikret Amirov, Jovdat Hajiyev and Hajibeyov’s cousin Afrasiyab Badalbeyli , who studied composition at the Leningrad Conservatoire from 1934-38 before writing the first Azerbaijani ballet, Giz Galasi (Maiden Tower), in 1940. From slightly further afield: Adnan Saygun (1907-91) – ‘an incredible giant’ (Melikov) ‘who was to Turkey what Sibelius was to Finand’ ( The Times ). Saygun’s first three symphonies, from the 1950s, display stylistic similarities with The Legend Of The Love.

Chief among the Russian composers encouraged to show a fraternal interest in the USSR’s ‘Oriental’ republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus were Alexander Mosolov , Nikolai Roslavets (who wrote a 1932 ‘Uzbek’ ballet entitled Cotton ) and Heydar Aliyev’s ‘great composer’ Reinhold Glière (1875-1956).

Glière came from Kiev but was of German descent, and spent three years in Berlin (1905-07) under Oskar Fried – a stay that coincided with Fried’s performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony (with Mahler in the audience) and the Berlin première of Mahler’s Sixth. So it is hardly surprising that Glière’s most famous work, his 80- minute Third Symphony (1911), is Mahlerian in length, mood and orchestration.

Glière’s pupils included Myaskovsky, Khachaturian, Mosolov and the young Prokofiev. Although he also toured Buratya (on the edge of Mongolia) and Uzbekistan, Glière’s closest links were with Azerbaijan. A study of mugham and Azeri folk songs led to his opera Shakh-Senem , seen as a watershed in the process of Western/Azerbaijani musical cross- fertilization that would ultimately spawn The Legend Of Love . It premièred in Baku in 1927 (in Russian); an Azerbaijani version (given a Socialist Realist slant) was performed in Baku in 1934.

Shakh-Senem also anticipated The Legend Of Love by broaching the issue of feminism. Shevket Mammadova, who interpreted the title rôle, saw the opera as a ‘protest against the powerlessness of women in the Muslim East’ as they ‘strove for love and freedom, progressing from the darkness of the past to a brighter future.’

Glière set Melikov another example – by writing a Soviet ballet, Red Poppy (set in China), which premièred at the Bolshoi in June 1927.

A decade later, when preparing for the 1938 Azerbaijan culture festival in Moscow, Baku big-wigs remembered Glière so fondly thay hired him to produce a new version of the 1935 opera Nargiz by the recently deceased Müslüm Magomayev (1885-1937).

Magomayev is a peripheral figure in today’s Azerbaijani musical pantheon – partly because he was born in Chechnya, but mainly because Nargiz glorifies Communism (through no fault of his own – Soviet authorities forced him to transform his romantic heroes into uncompromising revolutionaries). Magomayev’s first opera Shah Ismayil , which premièred in Baku 1919, fused mugam with European operatic styles. In 1927 he co-authored A Collection of Azerbaijani Folk Songs with the illustrious Uzeyir Hajibeyov, whom he had first met at the Gori pedagogical seminary in 1900 (the two men were, coincidentally, born on the same day).

SOVIET MODERNISTS

The muscular might of Melikov’s music owes much to Soviet modernism as epitomized by Mosolov, Roslavets and Arseny Avraamov , whose Siren Symphony , performed in November 1922 on the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, involved guns, whistles, foghorns, ships’ hooters, factory sirens, massed choirs and the entire Soviet Caspian Fleet, all directed by flag- waving, pistol-touting conductors stationed along the Baku waterfront.

But the individual work that comes closest to the The Legend Of Love’s combination of power, dissonance and melodic splendour is Popov’s First Symphony, premièred by Fritz Stiedry with the Leningrad Philharmonic on 22 March 1935.

In the words of New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Popov ‘constantly undercuts his lyric flights with murmurs of disaster.’ Ross could just as easily have been talking about The Legend Of Love .

Not many remember Gavriil Popov (1904-72) these days, but for a few years his Leningrad light outshone Shostakovich’s. In 1927 he shot to prominence on the back of his avant- garde Chamber Symphony, which Prokofiev arranged to have performed in Paris and Leipzig, and in 1929 he founded the Society for New Music & Culture, to discuss works by Mahler and other modernist composers.

Popov’s First Symphony was six years in the making (1928-34). It opens with a single crashing chord similar to those at the outset of Melikov’s ballet. The première was a great success. Shostakovich declared himself an ‘ardent admirer.’ Next day it was banned.

An indigant Popov stormed off to Moscow – accompanied by Shostakovich – and got the ban banned. Yet the symphony was not performed again during his lifetime and, although one of the great orchestral works of the 20 th century, remains so obscure that the 28 year-old Popov does not even qualify for the dubious epithet of one-hit wonder.

His symphony, though, retained cult status among Leningrad musicians – and was a powerful influence on the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies of Shostakovich.

SHOSTAKOVICH

There were close ties between Shostakovich and Arif Melikov, too. Shostakovich dubbed him his ‘musical grandson.’ Melikov dedicated his 1970 Second Symphony to Shostakovich. His Third Symphony was recorded for Melodiya by Shostakovich’s conductor son Maxim.

Shostakovich and Melikov first met during the 1950s, when Melikov was a young man studying music, and Shostakovich a frequent visitor to Baku. He came in April 1952 for a concert of his own works; in December 1952 for the première of Karayev’s Seven Beauties ; and in March 1956 for an Assembly of the Azerbaijani Composers’ Union.

He also came in 1953, for other reasons.

Shostakovich secretly dedicated his Tenth Symphony to a pretty Azerbaijani pianist and budding composer who began lessons with him in 1947, when she was 19: Elmira Nasirova . Her name is picked out by a note sequence (E La Mi Re A , in a combination of French and German notation) on the horn in the symphony’s third movement. When Elmira was invited to the Moscow première on 28 December 1953, she ‘felt the composer’s gaze upon me during the entire performance.’

Soviet works might be dedicated to Lenin or the Party, but certainly not to young ladies, and the only person Shostakovich told about his Elmira motif (partly inspired by Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde ) was Elimira herself. She kept silent until she emigrated to Israel in 1990 – also revealing that, while Shostakovich was composing his Tenth, they ‘met frequently, went for long walks, and listened to symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler.’

Shostakovich, then, was the link between Arif Melikov and Gustav Mahler – to whom we keep returning like deer led back to doh.

I had always thought Mahler ’s mood-swings and emotional drama well-suited to the ‘Russian soul, ’ and been surprised never to see his works on the concert bill during my trips to Moscow and St Petersburg.

But there was a time when Mahler ’s music was better known in Russia than anywhere else.

I was again indebted to Kommersant ’s Elena Kravtsun (right) for inspiring a line of research when we met in Baku.

She told me that the young Shostakovich was introduced to Mahler ’s music by a musicologist whose name escaped her.

I would learn that Mahler was not just a hero to Shostakovich, but the musical idol of interwar Leningrad – before being consigned to outer darkness during the second half of Stalin’s reign.

THE RUSSIAN MAHLER

Mahler was fascinated by Russia, not least because his favourite author was Dostoyevsky. He even went there for his honeymoon (and, unless I am very much mistaken, evoked the distinctive sound of Russian church bells in a frenzied bout of glockenspiel at the end of his Seventh Symphony).

Mahler made three trips between 1897-1907, spending a total of five weeks in St Petersburg, one in Helsinki, and five days in Moscow, conducting seven concerts – with Wagner in all of them, Beethoven (3 rd and 5 th symphonies, Egmont/Coriolan overtures) in six, and Russian composers (Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff) in four.

Mahler’s first trip to Moscow was in March 1897, for a concert in the Hall of the Nobility (now Dom Soyuzov ) where both Lenin and Stalin later lay in state.

In March 1902 he made a three-week visit to St Petersburg with his wife Alma; they left Vienna on the night train, just hours after their marriage in the Karlskirche. They stayed at the Hotel Angleterre and were chaperoned by Mahler’s cousin Gustav Frank , who had been living in Petersburg since 1890. They visited the Hermitage – where Mahler expressed his love of Rembrandt (whose Nightwatch would help inspire the second movement of his Seventh Symphony) – and dined with Duke George of Mecklenburg , founder of the Mecklenburg Quartet, in his mansion beside the Fontanka Canal. Mahler conducted three concerts in what is now the Philharmonic Hall (later home to Shostakovich symphony premières). The last was meant to end with Bruckner’s Fourth but, when Mahler was told Bruckner had scant following in Russia, he replaced it with Haydn’s 103 rd . Bruckner’s Fourth would have to wait another 18 years for its city debut (under Hermann Abendroth.)

Mahler had such fond memories of St Petersburg that he chose as it as his first port of call after leaving the Vienna Opera in Autumn 1907. And St Petersburg had such fond memories of Gustav Mahler that he was invited to perform one of his own symphonies. He chose the Fifth, performed with the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Conservatoire (down the road from the Mariinsky) on November 9.

Two famous composers were in the audience. The elderly Rimsky-Korsakov (63) was bemused, scoffing that Mahler seemed ‘totally unware of what the next bar will contain.’ But the young Stravinsky (then 25) wrote that ‘Mahler’s personality and conducting made a great impression on me.’

Alexander Ossovsky , in Slovo , described Mahler the conductor as ‘Michelangelesque… implacable… overpowering and awesome… an eagle surveying his prey,’ and felt an ‘echo of ancient Egypt…somewhere between Rameses III and Sesostris the Great.’ He also evoked the ‘beauty of Vesuvius… something that comes from the psychology of Dostoyevsky... all he interprets he has lived through in the flesh… not the slightest wish for gratuitous effect.’ Ossovsky would later prove an important Mahler advocate as Artistic Director of the Leningrad Philharmonic (1933-36).

To Isaiah Knorozovsky , writing about the symphony in Teatr i Isskustvo , ‘everything was so unusual, so new… crushing the audience with its monumental forms and a gigantic complexity’ that reflected the ‘exhaustive plenitude of man who feels things profundly and embraces them from different angles simultaneously.’ He added that Mahler was ‘an ominpotent master’ of instrumentation.

OSKAR FRIED

This was not, however, the first performance of a Mahler Symphony in Russia. In November 1906 Oskar Fried (shown with Mahler below) had conducted his Second Symphony at the Philharmonic Hall, in a concert sponsored by the Schröder Piano Factory.

Fried wrote to Mahler afterwards that he felt the concert was ‘a beacon in my life.’ It certainly lit the way towards appreciation of Mahler’s works in St Petersburg, with Fried a key figure.

Oskar Fried (1871-1941) is another man now largely forgotten, but his life was opera material. After eking out an existence as a dog-trainer, painter and circus clown, he studied composition under Engelbert Humperdinck; conducted the Resurrection Symphony in Berlin, after a chance meeting with Mahler a few months earlier; led a complete cycle of Mahler symphonies in Vienna in 1920; became the first foreign conductor to visit the Soviet Union, performing Beethoven’s Ninth at the Bolshoi in 1922; discussed the Bolshevik approach to music with Lenin ; made the first-ever recording of a Mahler symphony (again the Resurrection) in 1923; conducted Vladimir Horowitz’s first concert in the West after his defection from the USSR; fled Germany for Tbilisi in 1934; conducted the USSR State Symphony and Radio Orchestras; became a Soviet citizen; and died in Moscow on 5 July 1941, extremely coincidentally, two weeks after the Nazi invasion of the USSR.

Fried adored Russian musicians – who could ‘achieve more than good orchestras in the West after just a few hours’ rehearsal’ – and performed in venues across the country, from Kharkov to Kislovodsk and from Sverdlovsk to… Baku. Among his concerts in Leningrad were a Beethoven’s Ninth in 1924 that left a powerful impression on the 17 year-old Shostakovich; and, as head of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, two works by Mahler: his First Symphony in November 1932, and Das Lied von der Erde in March 1934.

INTERWAR BOOM

The last Mahler symphony heard in imperial St Petersburg was the Seventh in 1913, conducted by Artur Bodanzky – a former Mahler assistant at the Vienna Opera. The first in post-Revolutionary Petrograd was the Fifth in 1922.

Over the two decades between the end of the Russian Civil War and the Nazi invasion, Mahler symphonies (including Das Lied ) were performed 50 times in Russia by 19 different conductors (five of them Russian). All his symphonies were performed except the Sixth (whose overt despair hardly endeared itself to Soviet aesthetics) and the logistically overwhelming Eighth. A whopping 42 of these concerts were in Petrograd/Leningrad – a city that, as Russia’s capital until 1918, retained a keen sense of its cultural importance, and a spirit of intellectual independence that irked Stalin.

Mahler symphonies were religiously studied in interwar Leningrad, often in reduced piano arrangements (Shostakovich taught composition using a four-hand version of Mahler’s Fifth). Peter the Great’s ‘Window on the West’ was over thirty years ahead of the West when it came to Mahler. His Second Symphony premièred in St Petersburg in 1906 – in London, not until 1931. His Fifth was premièred in St Petersburg – under Mahler himself – in 1907, but not performed in London until 1945. Mahler’s monumental Third, first heard in Leningrad in 1927, was not played in London until 1961.

Who were the heroes who kept Mahler’s flame burning – in provincial Russia of all places – between the two World Wars?

The first was Emil Cooper (1877-1960), born in Kherson (Ukraine) of British extraction. He conducted Mahler’s Fifth twice during the 1922/23 season with the Petrograd (soon Leningrad) Philharmonic, which he had help re-launch in 1921.

Cooper’s reputation was established before World War I. He conducted the première of Glière’s celebrated Third Symphony in 1912, and worked for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – giving the first UK performance of Boris Godunov (starring Fyodor Chaliapin) at Drury Lane in 1913. In 1918 he led a gala performance at the Bolshoi (attended by Lenin) to mark the first anniversary of the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks’ favourite symphony – Beethoven’s Ninth – topped the bill.

In May 1924 Soviet authorities granted Cooper six months’ leave to tour abroad (notably to Buenos Aires) but he never returned, explaining that he could could ‘find no rest’ in a country where ‘material conditions were getting worse by the day.’ In 1939 he settled in the USA. In 1958, at the age of 81, he conducted the American première of Shostakovich’s Baku-Beauty- inspired Tenth Symphony. Some swansong.

FRITZ STIEDRY

After Cooper’s shock defection – imitated in 1929 by his next-but-one successor as head of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Nikolai Malko – no Russian conducted Mahler in the USSR until January 1932, when Alexander Gauk drove the Leningrad Philharmonic through a Kindertotenlieder/First Symphony double-header – two months after Gauk had conducted the première of Shostakovich’s Third. He also played Mahler’s Fifth in March 1934.

Gauk apart, between 1924-34 Mahler symphonies were played in Leningrad 25 times – under eleven foreign conductors. Among them were three of Mahler’s closest acolytes – Bruno Walter (1927), Otto Klemperer (1929) and Alexander Zemlinsky (1931) – as well as Heinz Unger (1924, 1930 & 1931), Clemens Krauss (1928), Joseph Rosenstock (1931), William Steinberg (1932), Oskar Fried (1932), Jascha Horenstein (1932) and Václav Talich (1933). Most were heads of German provincial orchestras who later fled the Nazis to the United States. The colourful Krauss – a cousin of Mayerling victim Mary Vetsera – was a notable exception: he was head of the Vienna Opera under the Nazis, inaugurating the celebrated Vienna New Year concerts in 1941.

But by far the most prolific Mahler conductor in interwar Russia was Fritz Stiedry (1883- 1968), who worked under Mahler at the Vienna Opera before landing a plum job in Dresden, on Mahler’s recommendation, alongside Ernst von Schuch. Stiedry can be classed alongside Walter, Klemperer and Zemlinsky in Mahler folklore as a front-line conductor who knew Mahler personally, watched him at the podium, then promoted his works. Yet – doubtless because he promoted Mahler mainly in Soviet Russia – he has been consigned to music-historical semi-obscurity, and is granted only fleeting mentions in Henry-Louis de La Grange’s three-volume magnum Mahler opus.

These do, however, include Stiedry’s superb pen-portrait of Mahler the conductor, in his 1920 article Mahler und Schuch .

The Mahler Stiedry knew in Vienna was ‘very calm, economical of gesture, elbows tucked in, head up, chin in the air… as immobile as a statue.’ His ‘revolutionary negation of all previously accepted values gave his performances incomparable artistic magic.’ He conducted with ‘amazingly sharp accents, strident dynamic nuances, a stubborn refusal of anything too smooth or sweet, and a predeliction for sharp rhythms, suddenly explosive allegros and spiky staccatos.’

Gustav Mahler would have gone to town on The Legend Of Love .

Today Stiedry is remembered principally for rehearsing Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony in 1936 before it was withdrawn – because, some say (notably Ian MacDonald in his otherwise excellent The New Shostakovich ), Shostakovich felt Stiedry was not up to the job.

That explanation is laughable. Stiedry had premièred Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto in his debut concert as head of the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1933 (with Shostakovich at the keyboard). Earlier in 1936 Shostakovich had praised Stiedry’s reading of Khachaturian’s First Symphony for bringing out the work’s ‘bright orchestration and joie de vivre .’

Stiedry was a pre-eminent champion of modernist music. On his first visit to Leningrad, in 1927, he had conducted Ernst Křenek ’s avant-garde First Violin Concerto, written in 1924 during Křenek ’s brief marriage to Mahler ’s daughter Anna (and played in Leningrad by the source of that brevity, the Australian virtuoso Alma Moodie – whose emergence from rural Queensland to fleeting European celebrity was perhaps the oddest musical oddyssey of the 20 th century). In 1929 Stiedry became head of the Berlin section of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (International Society for Contemporary Music) and, while in Berlin – where he succeeded Bruno Walter as head of the Städtische Oper in 1930 – conducted works by Schönberg, Alban Berg and Kurt Weill.

Shostakovich must have held Stiedry in high esteem as the man who, between 1926 and 1937, regaled Leningrad with no fewer than 14 Mahler concerts – the first seven as a visiting conductor, the rest as a successor to Cooper and Gauk as head of the Leningrad Philharmonic. And this at a time when Mahler concerts were a rarity anywhere else (there were, for instance, just six performances of Mahler symphonies in interwar Paris – two of the First, four of the Fourth).

Stiedry never played a Mahler symphony later than the Fifth (and this only once, in 1929), although he twice played Das Lied von der Erde (1932/1936). His favourite was the Resurrection (Second) Symphony, performed six times. It was the first Mahler symphony he performed in Russia (in March 1926), and he returned to it in 1935, when he gave two performances each in Leningrad (the first, perhaps not uncoincidentally, five weeks after Kirov’s murder) and Moscow. The Fourth Symphony – frowned on by atheist Communists due to the Heavenly vision of its final movement – marked Stiedry’s Russian farewell. It was performed twice in January 1937, then again on April 29: defiantly chosen to close the last concert Stiedry conducted in Leningrad before being forced out of the USSR at the height of Stalin’s Terror.

ECLIPSE THEN REVIVAL

Two other Jewish conductors in charge of Russian orchestras (both, coincidentally, born in Budapest) met a similar fate: György Sebestyén (1903-89), head of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1931; and Jenő Szenkár (1891-1977), head of the Moscow Philharmonic from 1934.

Sebestyén, who had worked at the Munich Opera under Bruno Walter in the early 1920s, conducted the first Russian radio performance of a Mahler symphony – the First – on 19 September 1934.

Szenkár had succeeded Klemperer as head of the Cologne Opera in 1924, giving the German première of Prokofiev’s For The Love of Three Oranges and performing Mahler Symphonies 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8. He specialized above all in Mahler’s epic Third Symphony: he conducted it with the Wiener Philarmonik just before moving to the USSR where, in 1936, he performed it twice – not in Moscow, where he was professionally based, but in musically sophisticated Leningrad.

After the foreigners had been kicked out, Nikolai Rabinovich (1908-72) took up the indigenous Mahler baton from Gauk, under whom he had studied at the Leningrad Conservatoire. Between April 1938 and November 1940 Rabinovich conducted Mahler six times: twice each his First Symphony (once for the radio), his Third, and Das Lied von der Erde (once in Moscow). On 8 May 1943 he performed Mahler’s First in Novosibirsk – the west Siberian city where the Leningrad Philharmonic had taken wartime refuge. Rabinovoch later conducted works by Kara Karayev and Shostakovich’s film music for The Gadfly and Hamlet .

Evgeny Mravrinsky , Stiedry’s successor as head of the Leningrad Philharmonic and best known for premiering six Shostakovich symphonies, conducted Mahler’s Fifth three times in Autumn 1940.

Meanwhile Karl Eliasberg , head of the Leningrad Radio Symphony Orchestra, played Mahler’s First twice: on 28 October 1940 in the concert hall, and a month later on the radio. Eliasberg would nudge enduring fame by leading a starving rag-tag orchestra through the Leningrad première of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in August 1942.

Rabinovich’s First, away in Novosibirsk, was the only Mahler symphony performed on Russian soil between the Nazi invasion of June 1941 and Stalin’s death in March 1953.

The minute the culture-vulture tyrant had been fastened down in his glass sarcophagus, Eliasberg unleashed Mahler’s First on Moscow then, a few months later, ushered the USSR State Symphony Orchestra into the studio to record his Fourth.

It was the start of a tentative Russian Mahler revival – centred, this time, on Moscow. Natan Rakhlin, who had succeeded Alexander Gauk as head of the USSR State Symphony Orchestra in 1941, performed Mahler’s First in 1957 – the same year he premièred Shostakovich’s Eleventh. He followed up in 1960 with Mahler’s Fifth, again in Moscow.

In 1958 Rabinovich returned to Mahler for the first time since Novosibirsk, conducting Das Lied von der Erde .

György Sebestyén, now known as Georges Sébastian and based in Paris (where he gave the first French performances of Mahler’s Third and Eighth Symphonies), returned to the Soviet Union in April 1961 when – just a fortnight after the Leningrad première of The Legend Of Love – he gave two performances of Mahler’s First in Moscow.

Mahler’s Second Symphony returned to Russian concert halls in 1962, under Gennady Rozhdestvensky – the same man who would restore The Legend Of Love to the Bolshoi repertoire forty years later.

In 1973 Bolshoi superstar Maya Plisetskaya performed Roland Petit’s Rose Malade choreography to the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth. She was still performing it in 1983, aged 58 – nearly twenty years after her interpretation of Queen Mekhmene Bahnu had helped make Arif Melikov the stuff of legend.

Kyrill Kondrashin – who had become friends with Shostakovich while working in Leningrad in the late 1930s, and conducted the much-delayed première of his Fourth Symphony in 1961 – raised Mahler’s profile further during his 1960-75 stint as head of the Moscow Philharmonic.

Leningrad’s Mahlerian tradition, meanwhile, was reignited by Kondrashin’s protégé Yuri Temirkanov , who first conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony in 1973, took charge of the Mariinsky in 1978, and succeeded Mravinsky at the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1988 – a year which also witnessed the overdue Russian première of Mahler’s Eighth under Leningrad-born Dmitry Kitayenko (Kondrashin’s successor as head of the Moscow Philharmonic)… and Valery Gergiev’s recording of The Legend Of Love.

IVAN SOLLERTINSKY

Leningrad’s Mahlerian tradition owed most to Ivan Sollertinsky (1902-44), who was born in Vitebsk but grew up in St Petersburg, where his father worked at the Justice Ministry. He was back in Vitebsk from 1919-21, at the same time as Chagall, Malevich and El Lissitzky. He attended lectures and concerts by Nikolai Malko, and got to know the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who taught at the Vitebsk Conservatoire.

Sollertin sky moved back to St Petersburg in 1924 and, in 1927, began to work part-time for the Leningrad Philharmonic (where Malko was now Chief Conductor) – initially delivering the on- stage, pre-performance introductions (which remain a charming feature of many Russian Classical concerts to this day). Sollertin sky propelled the genre to erudite heights, eventually giving over 250 ‘mini-lectures’ – whose importance in helping the audience to appreciate the complicated and unfamiliar works of Mahler can scarcely be under-estimated.

Sollertinsky subsequently served as the Leningrad Philharmonic’s Head of Repertoire, Chief of Publications and, ultimately, Artistic Director. He also taught at the Leningrad Conservatoire.

He got to know the 20 year-old Shostakovich in 1927 and became his ‘closest and dearest friend. ’ His suspicious death in Novosibirsk, at the age of 41, would leave Shostavokich distraught. ‘I owe all my education to him ’ he acknowledged. The pair shared an interest in drinking, intellectual conversation and Mahler – of whom Sollertinsky was an eloquent advocate and ardent promoter.

Interwar Leningrad offered fertile soil. True to the city’s cosmopolitan heritage (Sollertinsky, for instance, spoke over 20 languages), musical bodies were in close contact with the West – especially with the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik and the Austrian music publishers Universal (which helped Leningrad musicians gain swift access to new scores). Reflecting these ties, the Vienna periodical Musikblätter des Anbruch – which championed modernist music (and included the German critic Paul Brekker among its contributors) – brought out special issues entitled Russia (1925) and USSR (1931).

Paul Bekker’s Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (1918) provided a springboard for Mahler’s cause in Soviet Russia by anointing him the final descendant of Beethoven – who to Lenin (and therefore all Communists) was the most revolutionary, and consequently greatest, composer who ever lived. Bekker followed up in 1921 with a hefty tome analysing Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien.

The 1924 publication in Vienna of two movements from Mahler’s uncompleted Tenth Symphony aroused keen interest in Leningrad: Shostakovich got hold of facsimiles of the scores, from which he arranged four-hand piano versions. An analysis of Mahler’s annotations to the Tenth Symphony’s Purgatorio (third movement) by Austrian musicologist Richard Specht appeared in a revised version of his Gustav Mahler in 1925. Next year saw the publication, in Leningrad (not Moscow), of a Russian translation of Bekker’s The Symphony from Beethoven to Mahler – proof that the city’s interest in Mahler extended far beyond the concert hall.

In 1929 Mikhail Bakhtin’s study, The Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Creative Art , drew similarities between Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare in the ‘all-embracing’ nature of their works – a concept which, as we have seen, Mahler had propounded à propos the symphony to Sibelius 22 years earlier. Sollertinsky’s article The Problem of Soviet Symphonism also appeared in 1929, arguing that Mahler’s symphonies reflected a collectivist vision in line with Marxist doctrine. Sollertinsky’s own 74-page book on Gustav Mahler , published in Leningrad in 1932, combined detailed musical analysis with tendentious Marxist interpretation – which Sollertinsky can only have proffered for reasons of political expediency. Mahler’s admiration for Dostoyevsky – he is even dubbed the ‘Dostoyevsky of Music’ – is said to reflect concern for the poor and downtrodden. Mahler’s music ‘preached social compassion amidst the cruel laws of Capitalist reality’ which, in Mahler’s grotesque scherzos, ‘bared its terrible teeth.’ The eight horns that start the Third Symphony have a ‘superhuman strength’ evoking ‘columns of workers marching on May Day.’

Mahler’s use of ‘banal’ melodies, meanwhile, reflected his wish to ‘democratize’ musical language and protest against ‘aristocratic individualism.’ His symphonies were built on popular songs for the same reason. His abrupt contrasts between fortissimo orchestra and gentle ensemble-playing reflected the dichotomy between the collective and the individual. His assertion that ‘Tradition is Schlamperei ’ (slovenliness) was fully in keeping with Bolshevik revolutionary ardour.

Sollertinsky, writing just a few months before Hitler became German Chancellor, also portrayed Mahler as the antithesis of Wagner – that ‘ideological predecessor of German imperialism, whose cult is being revived by the Nazis’ with ‘anti-Semitism spreading among the Germany bourgeoisie with fatal speed.’ He also compared Mahler favourably to his most famous contemporaries, including the ‘messianic’ Scriabin; the ‘sensation-seeking’ Richard Strauss – of whom Mahler was the ‘musical and socio-philosophical opposite’; and Igor Stravinsky, ‘the most anti-Beethovenian figure of the modern music world.’

Mahler, on the other hand, shared ‘Beethoven’s ideas of human brotherhood’ and ‘opposition to the horrors of labour exploitation in imperialist Europe.’ His Eighth Symphony was a latterday version of the Communists’ beloved Ode to Joy , reflecting Mahler’s idealism and ‘romantic utopianism.’

These repeated references to the Beethoven tradition were influenced by, and sought justification from, Lenin’s exhortation that Communists ‘critically appropriate’ their ‘classical heritage.’

Sollertinsky followed Bekker in identifying Mahler as the last great symphonist of West European tradition. It was ‘impossible to create a heroic Beethoven symphony in the modern capitalist world’ thundered Sollertinsky. Bourgeois culture no longer ‘contained a great social idea, capable of serving as the symphony’s philosophical foundation.’ The ‘new’ symphony could only derive from the ‘Proletarian Revolution and destruction of class society.’

There were pressing reasons for Sollertinsky’s stridently political approach. In April 1932 the Association for Contemporary Music – to which he and a number of modernist composers (such as Shostakovich, Popov, Roslavets and Mosolov) belonged – was, like its philistine rival, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), abolished as part of the Stalinist mainmise on culture. Under the RAPM, which contained few decent musicians but enjoyed disproportionate political clout, the ‘new Soviet Symphony ’ had become a one-movement work climaxing in a Marxist choral finale (Shostakovich ’s Second Symphony is a classic example).

In 1932 Sollertinsky ’s closest musical friends, Popov and Shostakovich (who would disown this Second Symphony, and spent much of the late ’20s/ early ’30s writing opera and ballet music), were contemplating Mahlerian symphonies that in no way conformed to the proletarian template.

Sollertinsky’s Mahler book was a manifesto not just for Mahler, but for the right of Leningrad ’s brightest musicians to compose symphonies as they thought fit. It was also a bid to redefine the ‘Soviet Symphony ’ in Mahlerian terms.

Sollertinsky lost this battle: Popov ’s Mahlerian First Symphony, and Shostakovich ’s Mahlerian Fourth, were destined for years of oblivion. But he won the war.

Shostakovich ’s equally Mahlerian Fifth, completed a year after his Fourth, cemented his reputation at home and abroad.

Quoting Sollertinsky almost verbatim , the Soviet Musical Encyclopedia would affirm until the USSR’ s dying day that ‘the Beethovenian symphonic tradition of great ideas and feelings was lost to the West at the start of the 20 th century, and reborn in Soviet Music on a new, ideal basis.’

Mahlerian folk tunes, dances, banality, irony, dynamic contrast and collective vision would echo down the Soviet symphonic century… and permeate the ‘symphonic dance ’ music of The Legend Of Love .

JASCHA HORENSTEIN

1932 was a momentous year in Russia, politically and musically. For Mahler fans in Leningrad it was an annus mirabilis . On top of Sollertinsky’s book came a spate of Mahler concerts that must have made their ears water.

In less than 12 months, Leningrad enjoyed performances of four Mahler Symphonies (First, Fifth, Seventh and the Russian première of the Ninth), plus Das Lied von der Erde and Kindertotenlieder.

Mahler’s Seventh Symphony was conducted by William Steinberg on March 24. It made such a big impact on Shostakovich he kept a copy of the score on his piano when composing his Fourth.

Mahler’s Ninth was performed in Leningrad on 22 April 1932 under Jascha Horenstein (1898-1973), one of the greatest Mahler conductors who ever lived.

Horenstein was born in Kiev, grew up in Königsberg and Vienna, and began his musical career under Furtwängler in Berlin. He first conducted Mahler (the Fifth) in 1922 with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

He was head of the Düsseldorf Opera at the time of his 1932 visit to Russia – engineered by the German Cultural Society to help improve bilateral relations.

The tour began with Mahler’s Fifth in Moscow on April 17. Then Horenstein travelled up to Leningard on the overnight train, accompanied by Sollertinsky and Shostakovich. They spent all night in the restaurant-car talking about Mahler.

In Leningrad Horenstein found a ‘big community of Mahler and Bruckner fans – neither composer was as appreciated in Moscow.’

Horenstein believed that his 1932 Russian Mahler concerts – allied to Oskar Fried’s performance of Mahler’s First in Leningrad that November – greatly influenced Shostakovich, especially his Fifth Symphony (Horenstein would not, when he made this comment, have known Shostakovich’s Fourth).

‘Shostakovich’s adoration for Mahler can be gathered from his own works’ added Horenstein.

No doubt as a result of Sollertinsky’s and Shostakovich’s glowing reports of his Moscow concert, Horenstein was invited back in December 1932, to bring his Mahler’s Fifth to Leningrad. He was happy to accept.

Horenstein loved conducting in Russia, partly because of the high playing standards – ‘Soviet orchestras can only be compared with the very best in the USA’ – but, above all, for reasons of artistic freedom. ‘The marvelleous thing about the Russian music business’ he noted ‘is the complete elimination of the profit principle. That’s the key to everything. When I was asked to compile a programme by the manager of the Leningrad Philharmonic [presumably Sollertinsky], I answered jokingly: The best thing would be to bring out five or six living composers – Hindemith, Křenek , Roussel and so on . Any other manager would have kicked me out: who would pay for it? But this one answered coolly: All right! And the programme was carried through.’

Although Horenstein quit Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933, he performed in Russia each summer from 1934-37. In summer ‘the Leningrad and Moscow orchestras came to Baku with all their material, instruments and huge libraries… a train journey of five or six days’ he recalled.

In Azerbaijan Horenstein ‘conducted concerts featuring the music of Albert Roussel, Vladimir Vogel, Arnold Schönberg and Gustav Mahler in front of the native population, who showed deep understanding of these difficult works.’

Mahler in Baku. From Russia with love.

‘There is no knowing where a lost seed will germinate’ mused Mahler once, after conducting one of his symphonies on the outer fringes of the Habsburg Empire.

A quarter of a century later, Mahler seeds would flutter from the Baltic to the Caspian.

And, a quarter-century further on, blossom into a Legend.