Aram Il’yich Khachaturian (1903-78), an Eastern Armenian, was born in Kodzhori (Kojori), a temperate village south-west of Tbilisi (Tiflis), capital of Georgia. Composer, conductor, educator, cultural ambassador and Deputy of the Supreme Soviet, Khachaturian, was brought up in the most vibrantly colourful of folk environments, and came to music relatively late, at the age of 19 – a decision reinforced as much through hearing Paliashvili’s opera Abesalom da Eteri premiered in 1919 (he was 15 at the time), as his days vamping the songs of new communism on the so-called ‘propaganda’ trains which used to run between Tbilisi and Yerevan. Like the slightly younger Shostakovich, an active witness to the birth of the Soviet nation, Khachaturian settled in Moscow in 1921, living with his elder actor-brother, Suren, a disciple of Stanislavsky. A competent pianist (he also played tenor-horn and learnt the cello), Khachaturian enrolled at the Gnessin Institute (1922–29), from 1925 studying composition with Mikhail Gnessin, a Jewish disciple of Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov. In Gnessin’s estimation he was ‘a rough diamond’, his knowledge largely determined by Romantic Russian and Slavonic models. He finished his training underMyaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory (1929–37).

Khachaturian’s life was a roll-call of triumph and popular success, marred only by the censure and ‘formalistic’ accusations of the post-war Zhdanov years, a subject he felt privately ‘should not be taken too seriously’ yet which to the end he remained reluctant to talk about. Considered an already ‘leading Soviet composer’ by the late 1930s, he was, early on, central to the hard-core of the Soviet Establishment. Prokofiev encouraged him. Shostakovich admired the First Symphony (his graduation exercise from the Conservatoire). In 1939 his dedication was recognised with the deputy presidency of the Organising Committee of the Composers’ Union and the Order of Lenin. The folk ballet Gayane (music of ‘animal vigour’, with Dudinskaya in the title role; USSR State Prize), two further symphonies and a Cello Concerto for Knushevitsky confirmed his supremacy worldwide. In 1950, Khachaturian took up a professorship at the Moscow Conservatoire. Four years later the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet created him a People’s Artist of the USSR, the ultimate accolade.

Following the success of Spartacus towards the end of the 1950s (with Maya Plisetskaya in the original Leningrad role of Phrygia, choreographed subsequently for the Bolshoi by both Moiseyev and Grigorovich; Lenin Prize), he applied himself increasingly to conducting, teaching, bureaucracy and travel. He toured widely, visiting, among other places, Britain (1955, 1977), Latin America (1957) and the US (1960, 1968). Space was even was found for a korzinka of new works and revisions, three Concerto-Rhapsodies for Kogan, Rostropovich and Nikolai Petrov (USSR State Prize) and a Piano Sonata dedicated to the memory of Myaskovsky heading the list. A late unaccompanied string ‘sonata’ flowering appeared in the mid-1970s: the Sonata-Fantasia for cello (1974), Sonata-Monologue for violin (1975), and Sonata-Song for viola (1976, based on the legend of Tamar ‘jewel of the world’, the Armenian princess who loved a commoner and lived on the isle of Akhtamar, Lake Van).

Khachaturian identified strongly with the Armenian people, notably acknowledging Komitas – his ‘greatest teacher’ in absentia – among his predecessors. His ‘urge to invent, to think up new forms’, to reconcile Western practice with Eastern idiom, forged an unmistakable style. ‘Take my passion for the interval of the second, major and minor … This dissonant interval that haunts me comes from the trio of [Caucasian] folk instruments consisting of the tar [plucked lute], kamanche [spike fiddle] and tambourine [single-headed shallow frame drum with jingles]. I relish such sonorities and to my ear they are as natural as any consonance … My penchant for static bass lines, too, comes from [the pedal drones of] Oriental music.’

‘I accept every one of my compositions though I have not written the completely ideal one. The fact is, however, that you cannot deny your own compositions. You cannot say “this I wrote a long time ago and it’s no good now”. If you put your heart into a work you cannot deny it later, just as you cannot deny your children. If I didn’t like my own music I wouldn’t let it out of the room … If I felt I was losing my own style, I wouldn’t write any more. I’d sell fruit! The most important thing in a composer is his personality, his aura. Shostakovich once paid me a very great compliment when he said that you could recognise a piece of Khachaturian from the first two bars. If this is true, it is grand, marvellous. When I’m dead, everything will become clear.’¹

‘Mouthpiece of the entire Soviet Orient’ (Marina Frolova-Walker), Khachaturian’s gift was one of rampant imagination, his legacy a Pandora’s box of unfettered melody, rhythm and technicolour. In 1991, with the restoration of independence, Armenia claimed him back for its own. ‘He disproved our myth of fewness’, the poet Hamo Sahyan famously eulogised, ‘he became the symbol of measuring our small people with great ones … our certificate of civilisation.’

Seven Recitatives and Fugues

No 1 Allegro, ma non troppo/Moderato  No 2 Moderato/Allegro giocoso

No 3 Allegro giocoso/Adagio  No 4 Allegro vivace/Allegro non troppo  No 5 Allegro non troppo/Allegro moderato

No 6 Allegro poco sostenuto/Andante sostenuto  No 7 Allegro non troppo/Allegro marcato

‘Under Mikhail Gnessin … I wrote seven [apprentice] fugues for piano, which must have been far from perfect. Now [circa 1970] viewing them with the eyes of a mature musician after the lapse of more than four decades, I have rewritten some of them while noting with gratification that many contain intonations I have been partial to all my life’ (Articles and Reminiscences, Moscow: 1980). Early in genesis (1928–29), late in finalisation (1966–70), still broadly terra incognita,² the Recitatives and Fugues were published in Moscow in 1974.

The substitution of recitatives (added later) for preludes places the collection in a formal genre predominantly its own. Here secco, there accompagnato, oscillating between aria and adornment – they’re Baroque/Classical only in label. Speculatively, they conjure rhetorical, bardic stories related impromptu by ashugs: as much the collective ‘table music’ polyphony of male-dominated Kakhetian shepherd life in the hills and valleys, as the voice of Tbilisi’s riotously counterpointed alleyways that was the backcloth to Khachaturian’s childhood. ‘The people lived virtually in the streets’, he recalled, ‘the doors were never locked and the comings and goings of friends and relatives, weddings, family joys and sorrows took place in full view of all the neighbours.’ Everyone sang, from artisans to vendors, each with ‘an individual melody of his own, an expressive motif … And what a world of musical impressions assailed one in the market place!’ ‘Singing,’ says one of Georgia’s modern elders, Andro ‘Baba’ Simashvili, ‘lights you up. It makes you a better person. It elates you and brings you to success. In human relationships singing is hope and belief. Singing is a great support … it holds an invincible power, it passes on to us.’ Khachaturian’s recitatives may seem random and raw in places, dysfunctional even. Knowing their cultural DNA, the vocabulary of life distant and first-hand that seeded them, explains something of their persona.

Diatonically grounded, their dialogue encourages frequently extensive elaboration as well as polytonal diversion and coloration: the tritonal D♭/G major seasoning at the start of Recitative I is an obvious example, similarly passages of II. Rhythmically, these pages, unsurprisingly, yield a freely inventive harvest. Specifically, in the headlong drive of III, the dotted cells (contrasted against at least two other well-marked patterns within a bi-metric framework) of IV, the folk manner of V, and the granite escarpment of VI,ghosts of longdead men rising out of the quarter-note ostinato D's pulverising the texture. If rhythm, regular and irregular, was Khachaturian’s engine; melody was his soul, ‘speaking’ ornament, his monogram and caprice. The simple but telling quasi  cello/viola left hand of II, cantabile espressivo, sets the former on a pedestal. The decorous central fantasy of VII – not so much Chopin roulade as tumbling arabesque, the fluttering hand symbology of some Kalmyk dance from the Caspian fleetingly before us – lets fly the latter.

One way or another, fugue in the Russian tradition – from Tsarist through Soviet to Federation, before Tchaikovsky to beyond Shostakovich (Kabalevsky, Shchedrin, Rekhin, Kaputsin, Koshkin more recently) – has always been a particular indicator of application and attainment. Khachaturian’s paraphrastic essays descend from the leaner side of Bach more than the monumentalism of Beethoven, Reicha, Mendelssohn or Schumann. Ranging from two- (V) to three- (II, IV,  VI, VII) to four-part voicings (I, III), five come with ‘real’ answers, two (III, V) with ‘tonal’ ones. Though they open routinely enough, there are twists. Expositionally, for instance, suspending expectations, the six multi-voice examples of the set all delay the third (subject) and fourth (answer) entries, none maintaining regularity or phrase length. The key sequence – polarised around D, C, D, G, C, E♭ , F – hovers between modes major, minor, Dorian and Aeolian, facets of all four constructs meeting in the codas of II and V.

Children's Album I

No 1 Andantino No 2 No Going for a Walk Today No 3 Lyado Is Very Ill No 4 On a Birthday No 5 Etude

No 6 Musical Picture No 7 The Cavalry No 8 Invention No 9 In the Folk Style No 10 Fugue

The Children’s Albums (completed 1947, 1964–65) belong to a canon of writing for or about children reaching back to Bach, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Bortkiewicz, not to mention the klavierschule manuals of individuals like Türk and Hummel. Ideologically, music was a powerful tool in Soviet education: in 1968, according to Kabalevsky – generalissimo of a pedagogic programme from Stalin to Brezhnev – there were more than 4,800 day and evening schools for children across the Union, each following Sukhomlynsky’s manifesto that ‘music education does not mean educating a musician, it means first of all educating a human being.’

Eight numbers from the first album, Pictures of Childhood (omitting Nos 8, 10) were published in New York in 1948 as The Adventures of Ivan, prefaced with the opinion of the editor, Alfred Mirovitch, that ‘the refreshing originality of mood, harmonisation and pianistic invention in these easy, amusing, but provocative compositions … will act as a stimulus and a challenge to all alert students and teachers.’ Several titles were modified. No 1 'Ivan Sings'; No 2 'Ivan can’t go out today' [Scherzo]; No 3 'Ivan is ill' [alternatively 'My friend is unwell']; No 4 'Ivan goes to a party (Waltz)'; No 5 'Ivan is very busy (Étude)'. No 6 'Ivan and Natasha' [Legend]; No 7 'Ivan’s hobbyhorse'; No 9. 'A tale of strange lands' [Gallopade]. Nos 1, 8 (the Adagio from Gayane, familiar from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), and 10 (Fugue a 2), date from 1926, 1942 and 1929 respectively, the last appropriated from the fifth of the Recitatives and Fugues.

Children's Album II

No 1 Skipping-Rope  No 2 An Evening Tale  No 3 Eastern Dance  No 4 Barsik on the Swing  No 5 Playing the Tambourine 

No 6 Two Funny Aunties Argued  No 7 Funeral March  No 8 Rhythmic Gymnastics  No 9 Toccata  No 10 Fugue

David Z Kushner understandably observes ‘Khachaturianʼs fondness for mixing, matching, and altering works of his own from different time periods in his career’³. Like its companion, the second album, Sounds of Childhood, is a mix of chronologies, three of the movements dating from the late 1940s, and one, the closing Fugue, from 1928, adapted with minor variation (principally an extended last line) from the second of the Recitatives and Fugues.

The three ‘pillars’ of Soviet music teaching adumbrated by Kabalevsky (About the Three Whales and Many Other Things, 1972) – song, dance, march – permeate these volumes. Both showcase Caucasian mountain dances; both present simple songs in simple ways; both trigger elements of Russian fairy tale. Each has a measure of virtuoso aspiration – especially the 'Etude' from the first, and the bickering 'Funny Aunties' (back to Mussorgsky’s Limoges and his ‘French women quarrelling violently in the market place') and Toccata from the second: folios transiting briefly from schoolroom to Schumann’s ‘adult reminiscences for adults’. One exalts a lone Funeral March in Chopinesque B♭ minor, its pained dissonances and adieu ornament standing the night watch between Mahler and Shostakovich.

A grown-up remembering childhood and the make-believe of children.

© 2021

¹ Interview with the present writer, Dorchester Hotel, London 27 January 1977.

² The UK premiere, three months after Khachaturian’s death, was given by Allan Schiller (City University, 7 August 1978), programmed during MusicArmenia 78 – a week-long ‘celebration’, instigated by Loris Tjeknavorian, that brought to London a remarkable Cold War gathering of the composer’s Soviet Armenian ‘brothers’, including Babadjanian, Haroutiunian and Mirzoyan.

³ Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts ,Vol 5/iv, October 2018.