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Vasyl Barvinsky: A Composer Without Boundaries

The Claquers

Imagine a renowned European composer of the 20th century, suddenly banned from creating or even living in his homeland. His friends are forced to renounce and betray him, he is unjustly branded an “enemy of the people” and imprisoned for 10 years in a concentration camp.

The name of the composer is erased, his musicforbidden for decades, and his manuscripts are immediately and publicly burned right in the courtyard of the music conservatory he had led for 33 years.

If you were to tell contemporary European musicians that this story actually took place in Lviv, they simply wouldn’t believe you. Some might even vehemently deny it: “Oh no, even the German Nazis didn’t do such things. Yes, they destroyed books, but to throw music, songs, and scores into the fire in the 20th century? That’s barbaric.”

Vasyl Barvinsky

Yet such barbarism did indeed happen just 60 years ago to a brilliant composer who endured all these devastating losses — Ukrainian artist Vasyl Barvinsky. A musical figure of not only European but global significance, Barvinsky, like many repressed Ukrainian artists, was personally destroyed by Stalinist terror. Until the end of his life, he sought to restore his burned compositions, despite his memory damaged by brutal interrogations and hearing loss in one ear from the beatings.

In his later years, the elderly Barvinsky bitterly summed up his creative life with a painful confession, quietly saying, “I am a composer without scores.”  We remember the life and work of this remarkable musician, whose name and works, after being suppressed by the Soviet regime, are slowly being rediscovered by the international music community.

A Knight of Noble Lineage

Vasyl Barvinsky was a man of extraordinary musical talent and can be regarded as a founder and organizer of the musical life in Galicia during the first half of the 20th century. Alongside Levko Revutsky, Borys Liatoshynsky, and Viktor Kosenko, he was one of the central figures in the development of Ukrainian musical culture at the time.

A descendant of a dynasty of priests on both sides of his family, Barvinsky came from the noble Polish Ukrainian Barwa family and the knighly coats of arms of the Ruthenian Voivodeship — Jastrzębiec and Achinger — dating back to the 15th century. Barvinsky spared no effort in using his leadershiptalent that he inherited from his father Oleksander Barvinsky, ambassador and representative of Ukrainian interests to the Austrian Sejm and the Vienna Parliament, Minister of Education and Religious Affairs of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and advisor to Emperor Franz Joseph.

His mother Yevheniia Liubovych was the sister of Hermina Lyubovych (later Shukhevych), the grandmother of the legendary UPA Commander Roman Shukhevych. Yevheniia was a famous artist and activist of the women’s movement in Galicia: she directed an ensemble at the women’s charitable society Sisterhood in Ternopil, as well as the Boyan choirs in Ternopil and Lviv, and was the first music teacher in the life of the outstanding opera diva Solomiya Krushelnytska. The founder of the Mykola Lysenko Higher Music Institute Anatole Vakhnianyn enthusiastically called Yevheniia the “Nightingale of Podillia.”

Innovations and Achievements: From Prague to Tokyo

Barvinsky’s contributions are unique in the history of Ukrainian music. The Soviet authoritarian musicological elite in the capital city of Moscow persistently refused to acknowledge his accomplishments or even to mention them:

⇒ Barvinsky was one of the pioneers of clustering (playing the piano keys with a clenched fist or palm) in his piano piece The Frog Waltz (1910). Around the same time, American composers Henry Cowell, George Antheil, and Charles Ives began experimenting with this technique in search of new, sonorous sounds. Cluster sounds are also heard in the piano sonata in Cis-dur and other works by the composer.

⇒ Barvinsky was an accompanist and participant in Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythmics lessons during his courses in Prague in the 1910s, which were a revolutionary innovation in the European artistic space at the time. It was Barvinsky who first brought the method of rhythmics to Lviv and introduced it to the classes of the Lysenko Higher Music Institute, for which the composer wrote didactic music for violin and piano (the piano version of the play The Snowstorm rewritten by the concertmaster has been preserved from the original score that had beenburned).

⇒ Barvinsky was the first Ukrainian composer whose works were published in the United States and Europe — by Edition Peters and Universal Edition. His Ukrainian Dance from the piano cycle Six Miniatures on Ukrainian Themes was released in 1931 by the Japanese publishing house Nakamura in a collection along with works by Debussy, Scriabin, Schubert, Bartok, Chopin, Busoni, and Grieg.

The introduction of Barvinsky’s music to Japan is credited to Leo Sirota, an outstanding pianist and teacher of Jewish origin from Kamianets-Podilskyi, who was a co-founder of the modern Japanese piano school and conducted master classes at the Karol Szymanowski Lviv Conservatory from 1921 to 1924.

⇒ The Sonata Cis-dur (1910), the first Ukrainian piano sonata of the twentieth century, is worthy of special attention. Grand in scale and virtuosity, the composer uniquely synthesized the classical sonata structure with an ancient dance suite. For example, in the first movement, the rhythmic intonation and pentatonic core of the siciliana develops in a very modern and monothematic way, and the finale ends with a phenomenal double (!) fugue.

In its only Soviet edition in 1988, the typesetters made a staggering 57 mistakes. The editor of the Sonata, Ukrainian musicologist Stefania Pavlyshyn, was unable to persuade the publishers to make any corrections — “Either we publish it with mistakes, or we don’t publish it at all.” To this day, the workawaits a revised and corrected edition of its score.

⇒ Vasyl Barvinsky is considered the founder of the cello repertoire in Ukraine. Notably, the composer wrote one of his last works, the Cello Concerto (1956), under the harsh conditions of the Gulag.

The work was dedicated to his son Ivan Sebastian (one of his four children), named after Johann Sebastian Bach, who was a very talented cellist, but his fate was also tragic. Musicologist Liliia Shevchuk-Nazar recounts in her article:

“From the composer’s concentration camp letters to his wife from 1956–1958, we learn that he often dreamed of children, especially Ivan, and therefore began working on the Cello Concerto. One can only imagine the horrible conditions in which this work, one of the composer’s most dramatic pieces, was written. Halyna Zhuk, a researcher of Barvinsky’s cello works and the first performer of the concerto in Ukraine, compares this work to another twentieth-century concentration camp piece, Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet At the End of Time, which was written by the artist in prison.”

There is unique film footage from Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1940 propaganda film Liberation, which features Vasyl Barvinsky, as well as his son Ivan Sebastian and one of his daughters. The father and son are playing music in a circle of students, while the daughter stands leaning on the piano (video 19:31–20:07).

The Phoenix From Argentina, in the Key of F Minor

Vasyl Barvinsky’s Opus Magnum is his Piano Concerto in F minor. The composer had been writing the work for 20 years, and first heard it in March 1939 at the Shevchenko Concert in Lviv, where the conductor was Mykola Kolessa, the founder of the Ukrainian conducting school, and the soloist was Barvinsky’s student Roman Savytsky. The work became popular: it was performed in 20 concerts in Lviv, and then in other cities of Ukraine. Its later history is worthy of a detective film.

For many years, the manuscript of the concerto was considered missing or even burned in the courtyard of the Lviv Conservatory along with other works by Barvinsky. However, on the 30th anniversary of the composer’s death, on June 6, 1993, copies of the score were sensationally found in Buenos Aires, in the archives of the Galician emigrant pianist Severin Saprun Jr.

Vasyl Barvinsky once wrote in a letter from prison to his student Halyna Hrabets:

“Never lose hope. The musical path, though often strewn with roses, still has thorns that repeatedly wound the hands, drawing blood. And only those are true musicians who love this art and, despite failures, do not give up.”

 

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