Who was Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya?

The two Viennese musicologists Tatjana Marković and Andreas Holzer initially faced considerable problems in their search for conclusive answers: Information about the Russian composer's life is extremely scarce. Ustvolskaya spent a reclusive life in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, gave virtually no interviews and shunned all contact with the public. Nevertheless, Marković and Holzer have created a vivid picture of the dazzling artist from profoundly researched and often contradictory biographical snippets of various origins, which the Swiss composer Edu Haubensak has also supplemented with a trenchant essay.

Born in Petrograd in 1919, Ustvolskaya studied composition at the Leningrad Conservatory for ten years from 1937 before devoting herself exclusively to her own work. One of the qualities of this biography is that it thoroughly and soberly discusses phenomena such as the harsh separation that Ustvolskaya later made from her then close teacher Dmitri Shostakovich. Truths about the composer's personality and work are thus presented for discussion by the authors rather than being fixed. Marković and Holzer also provide illuminating descriptions of the social, political and aesthetic contexts that were essential for Ustvolskaya. And they also consider these in their detailed musical analyses of Ustvolskaya's small oeuvre - an oeuvre that the composer wanted to be neatly divided into two compositional layers throughout her life: one of the "typically Soviet" pieces and one of the "actual" pieces. The CD accompanying the book contains the latter; Marković's and Holzer's multi-layered musical analyses can thus also be understood and compared acoustically.

Andreas Holzer and Tatjana Marković, Galina Ivanovna Ustvol'skaja. Composing as an obsession, 299 p., with CD, Fr. 39.90, Böhlau, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21031-1