To write this overview of Galina Ustvolskaya’s work, we must first disregard her desire expressed in a letter written on 17 May 1988:

Those who are in a position to judge and analyse my compositions from a theoretical point of view must do so in a monologue with themselves. Those who cannot do this must simply listen to my compositions — this is the very best way.¹

The truth in her work is not to be found in its structures, in the order it creates, in the discourse it evokes, or in the knowledge it promises. Rather, it is to be found in listening, which, as Ustvolskaya teaches, reflects the essence of a spiritual existence and resembles what one might consider an act of faith. Put another way, great knowledge does not bring great wisdom.

Next comes the question of what is to be done with the rare public statements Ustvolskaya did make, most of which are recorded in two interviews with Olga Gladkova and letters to her publisher.² These statements are so acute, so straightforward, that one is tempted to reproduce them indiscriminately, almost as a kind of incantation. For this reason, they tend to shape almost any writing about her music and set the parameters of its reception.

Finally, we should counterbalance the temptation to view her work simplistically, for instance under a schema in which she delivered socialist realism under Stalin or Brejnev while keeping her so-called spiritual compositions under wraps, only to reveal them later, once the Berlin wall had come down. To an extent, the texts she set to music bear witness to this program. She set Russian popular poetry in The Dream of Stepan Razine (1949), a work faithful to an ideology that required artistic forms to come from the people. Symphony No. 1 (1955) is based on a text by the Italian Communist poet, writer, and journalist Gianni Rodari, translated into Russian; it describes the capitalist world, with its unemployed masses, difficult working conditions, and miserable pay, too little to go to the carnival. Her three last symphonies, written between 1983 and 1990, draw from religious writings, again translated into Russian, by the eleventh-century German monk Hermannus Contractus (so named because he suffered from paralysis), who spoke only with great difficulty but wrote treatises on mathematics, astronomy, and music, as well as prayers and hymns to the Virgin Mary. However, one should be careful in drawing this kind of trajectory through her work, for the progression becomes far less clear when analyzing her scores, though there was certainly a perceptible reorientation in the early 1960s.

Another important point is that there were often significant lapses of time between a work’s composition, its publication, and its first performance. Piano Sonata No. 1 was written in 1947, but premiered in 1974. Her Trio and her Octet, were composed in 1949 and 1949-1950, respectively, but premiered on 11 January 1968. Twenty years separate the composition and the premiere of Piano Sonatas No. 2 and No. 3.

“I write only when I am in a favourable mood,” Ustvolskaya observed in a letter dated 4 February 1990.

Then the composition is left to rest for some time, and when its time comes I give it its freedom. If its time does not come, then I destroy it. I do not accept commissions. The whole process of composition is accomplished in my head and in my soul.

These delays blur any chronology one might identify in her work. It is as if history were suspended and all that remained were the feelings and sensations it engendered or which traverse it. Alongside this emotion is an existential dimension that wholly implicates Ustvolskaya in each of her works; she was, as she explained in a letter written on 22 October 1989, one of those artists who “puts [their] whole soul into every individual piece.”³

It is with the above conditions in mind that I trace the course of Ustvolskaya’s compositional career, from her first musical memory (a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin that she recalls bringing her to tears), through her enthusiastic discoveries of Mahler’s symphonies while studying at the Leningrad Conservatory, her painful distancing from Shostakovich after the war, all the way to her slowly growing idealism and even fanaticism⁴ about creating art that, as Boris Tichtchenko remarked, aimed for “the maximum expression using the minimum of resources.”⁵ Accordingly, the words Espressivo and Espressivissimo appear repeatedly in her scores.

With the exception of The Dream of Stepan Razine (1949), the Sports Suite (1958), renamed Suite for Orchestra, and the symphonic poems Lights in the Steppe (1958) and The Hero’s Exploit (1959), which were later retitled with the more abstract Symphonic Poems No. 1 and No. 2, the works that fell into line ideologically with the socialist realist canon were later destroyed, disowned, or removed from her catalogue. Subsequently, Ustvolskaya authorized the publication of only twenty-one scores, from Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra, and Timpani (1946), under the already distanced influence of Shostakovitch, to the ascetic Symphony No. 5, “Amen” (1989-1990). This last piece is characterized by austere, unadorned density; in a letter dated 16 April 1990, Ustvolskaya requested that it be conducted by an instrumentalist rather than an orchestra conductor — here, again, employing the minimum of external attributes and outside authority and the maximum of internal attributes.

These works seem to bear the stigmata of what composer Viktor Suslin called “the black hole” of Leningrad, that epicenter of Stalinian oppression, battered by the atrocities of the Nazi siege. This suffering is what stands out in a letter Shostakovitch wrote to Isaac Glickman about her on 3 November 1960:

Yesterday, I learned of Yuri A. Balkachin’s death in a letter from my sister, and today, in yours […]. I was not close to him, but I liked him a great deal for his vast culture, his true musical sensibility, his kindness, his big heart. Galia [Ustvolskaya] must be very affected by this loss. Actually, it is probably now that she feels she loves him. She loved him when he was alive, but would not marry him. ‘It’s not you I am in love with, but your suffering.’ That Dostoevsky-like aspect of her character dominates her entire existence. I imagine things must be hard for her right now. I fear for what the future will bring.⁶

Avoiding suffering, trying to escape it, would be living in the greatest possible illusion, without freedom. Suffering runs through Russian literature and thought. Though Ustvolskaya preferred Gogol, the words of the early twentieth-century writer Vassili Rozanov, in Solitaria, seem fitting: “In the suffering of mankind there is something more significant, darker, deeper, more terrible, more portentous, but without doubt it is deeper than any joy.”⁷

In Ustvolskaya’s work, the origin of all history’s martyrs, individual and collective, is Job’s lament, rising like a far-off echo as he “argues his case with God” (Job, XIII, 3) and cries out for what was taken from him to be returned. Horrified by his words, Job’s friends reply, “You who tear yourself in your anger — shall the earth be forsaken because of you, or the rock be removed out of its place?” (XVIII, 4). But Job curses his friends precisely because they are his friends, and they wish to soothe his suffering, as much as they can. If it is impossible to help him, it is better not to console him.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, Ustvolskaya expressed in her music an intense spirituality, which she differentiated from religion as a practice. Her music is based on the religious writings of Hermannus Contractus, but it is non-liturgical — although, as she concedes in a letter dated 17 May 1988, the acoustics and the symbolism of a church would do justice to its expression. And although she frequently invoked God, whose will it was for her to compose — “If God gives me the opportunity to compose something, then I will do it without fail” (letter, 4 February 1990) — this spirituality, not to say mysticism, is in no way theological. It precedes the Cross and dogma, and identifies the sacred as a source of fascination and terror. This is why war, enthralling and devastating, belongs to it as well. Spirituality in her work also manifests in prayer: Symphony No. 2 (1979) is subtitled True and Eternal Bliss; her Third (1983), Jesus Messiah, Save Us!; the Fourth, Prayer; the Fifth (1989-1990) is subtitled Amen and includes the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Eloquently, the brief motifs in Compositions No. 1 and No. 2 (1970-1971 and 1972-1973) present the six notes and the four notes corresponding to the unpronounced syllables Dona nobis pacem and Dies irae, their respective subtitles.

Her fascination with extremes seems to translate the gap between man and God. Her Concerto for Piano, Strings, and Timpani opens with extreme contrasting rhythms, long and short. In the Duet for Violin and Piano (1964), she explores the outermost registers, moving between ultra-high and deep ranges. She also employs an extreme dynamic spectrum, from pppp to ffffff, opening up a rich world of subtle graduations.

As lines of modal counterpoint thicken into clusters, the overflow created spills out across a kind of chromatic blotting paper, creating a sense of expansion. Moments of radical energy give way to absolute stillness, as in the rest at the end of Piano Sonata No. 4 (1957). This interplay of motion and suspension lies at the heart of a dialectic inherent in the sacred: an alternation between corruption and purity, where transformation becomes our means of purification.

In Composition No. 2 and Symphony No. 5, distinct percussive sounds — such as a block of wood being struck or the pianist hitting the keyboard with their fist, palm, or arm, producing the audible impact of bone against the surface, as explicitly required by the score — are used in attempt to batter down the walls of reason. Yet, no matter how forceful, these blows will never entirely succeed. “In this music, one hears the heavy footsteps of Time and the ominous breath of Eternity.”⁸

Speaking of her Octet, for two oboes, four violins, timpani, and piano (1949-1950), Ustvolskaya exclaimed: “It is the beats you should play, not the notes!” Similarly, her Grand Duet for Cello and Piano (1959) is to be performed “with extreme energy and great force.” The use of canon and chorale, as in the fourth and ninth movements of Piano Sonata No. 5 (1986), along with the four pianissimo chords that close Composition No. 2, echo Johann Sebastian Bach’s model of the strength of the human soul.

In Ustvolskaya’s works, the sacred seeps in through pathos and excess: clusters, dramatic ranges in dynamics, accentuations, and extreme rhythms create an overwhelming sense of chaos that peaks in the Dionysian ferocity of Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988). However, this violence is tempered by spirituality, which prevents it from being merely arbitrary. The chaos represents rebellion against eternal laws, but it is ultimately encompassed by God, judged by divine truth, subdued by divine power, and transformed by grace, which leads it back to unity. To miss this reality is to misinterpret Ustvolskaya’s music as mere frustration or a mechanical response to the futuristic and experimental artistic currents that had shaped Russian art since Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Such a reading overlooks the profound spiritual dimension of her work.

Let us illustrate these theses with a few remarks on her three Compositions, for piccolo, tuba, and piano (No. 1), for double bass, percussion, and piano (No. 2), and for flutes, bassoons, and piano (No. 3). These works mark a pivotal moment in her output, preceding and serving as a model for her last three symphonies and her last two piano sonatas. The unusual instrumentation in these pieces raises an intriguing spiritual question: does the number three denote the Trinity — the principle, origin, and source of life, the indivisible manifestation of three essences, or hypostases, to borrow the vocabulary of Russian Orthodoxy? Composition No. 1, features three instruments that are rarely used together, or even paired — and three movements.

Ustvolskaya’s musical structures are normally shaped around the numbers ten and its half, five, as seen in her Octet and Grand Duet for Cello and Piano. Ten is the number of sections in Piano Sonata No. 5, where the tenth reprises the first, leading to the eternal recommencement of the work. Ten appears again in the asymmetrical sections of her Composition No. 2.

Her music oscillates between these two numbers, three and ten — between the Trinity and Pythagorean perfection, between Athens and Jerusalem, to borrow the title of Leon Shestov’s philosophical study of the tensions between rationality and revelation.

Dona nobis pacem, the last prayer of the Latin mass, is the litany in the first movement of Composition No. 1. The music is built around a single initial motif, inscribed within a minor sixth and first introduced in an accentuated version by the tuba. The motif then undergoes chromatic alterations ending with a glissando; variations are created through inversions, dense sound clusters, and layers of derived figures (notably the chromatic embellishments in sixty-fourth-note triplets in the piccolo’s upper register) shaped through amplification, reduction, compression, and splintering.

The slow second movement centers on the tuba, again with chromatic alterations, and on the piano in chromatic or diatonic clusters. The third movement, interrupted by a sudden fffff espressivissimo that recalls the beginning of the work, lays out three harmonies on the piano (a minor third, a fifth, and a major third). The tuba becomes immobilized on a low F-sharp and traps the piccolo in diminished fourths and major thirds, an inversion of the minor sixth of the first movement’s motif.

Similar composition principles appear in Composition No. 2 “Dies Irae” — a title reflecting Orthodox Christianity’s deep sensitivity to the tremors of the apocalypse, whether heralded by historical tragedy, the trumpet of the seventh angel, a rain of bombs, or the rumblings of the End Times — and in Composition No. 3 “Benedictus, qui venit” (1974-1975). In these pieces as elsewhere in Ustvolskaya’s music, especially in the sonatas, the piano resonates as powerfully as a full orchestra. She emphasized that her music is not chamber music: “None of my music is chamber music, even when it is a sonata for only one instrument. […] I'm not talking here about the number of performers, but about the essence of the music itself.”

The instruments cry out harshly: fffff and even fffff sf in the fourth, eighth, and tenth sections of Composition No. 2. This vertical cry is insensible to others; it offers no consolation, no sentimentality or soft pity for the suffering freedom brings. No soloist can escape it: the eight double basses of Composition No. 2 are sometimes divided into two quartets or placed in ephemeral duets, but for the most part, they remain inexorably unified, bolt upright in their priestly throng.

The same is true of the four flutes and four bassoons in Composition No. 3, although in the first part, the first flute does effect a rhythmic escape from a four-note chromatic motif — to which it then returns to complete at a quarter-note’s distance. This cry is the music of misery, of a miserably stalled fate, an affront to reason. Authentic, wholly implicating its creator — mere experimentation was alien to Ustvolskaya — this music illustrates the stubborn solitude toward which she tended, in her compositions and in life.

The only things that mattered, in her words, were calm, silence, and nature. Or the narrow walls of an apartment she hardly ever left. A now well-known anecdote confirms this: following a concert, she sent her musicians Olga and Josef Rissin a letter saying, “I regret not being almighty, otherwise I would have offered you an island, an old castle or a windmill.”

Similarly, the singularity of her work holds her at a distance from any one tradition: “There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead,” she claimed in a letter written on 17 May 1988.

One last point: in her three Compositions — and as early as 1949 in Piano Sonata No. 2 — there are no bar lines, except to mark the end of one section and the beginning of another. This intentional omission upholds the rhythmic asymmetry of Ustvolskaya’s writing. As Tichtchenko pointed out, it is the idea, and not the measure, that controls how a piece is accentuated. The obsessive, hammering, hypnotic reiteration of an idea, whether a rhythmic value, a harmony, or a single note (such as the D-flat at the center of the keyboard in Sonata No. 5), creates a framework within which rhythmic simplicity can shift and contort. This interplay conveys both a sense of freedom and an underlying interior order. As a result, her music unfolds slowly, repetitively, and meditatively.

And a coda: “My music is not easy to understand.”

^{1. Letter to Viktor Suslin, published in “The Music of Spiritual Independence: Galina Ustvolskaya,” “Ex oriente…” Ten Composers from the Former USSR, ed. Valeria Tsenova, Berlin, Ernst Kuhn, coll. “Studia Slavica Musicologica,” 2002, p. 109. ↩}

^{2. All quotations in this article are drawn from these interviews, which appear in Olga Gladkowa, Galina Ustwolskaja: Musik als magische Kraft [1999], Berlin, Ernst Kuhn, coll. Studia Slavica Musicologica, 2001; or in her letters to Viktor Suslin, op. cit. (note 1), p. 99-114. ↩}

^{3. Letter to Viktor Suslin, op. cit. (note 1), p. 108. See also Ustvolskaya quoted by Simon Bokman in Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya, Berlin, Ernst Kuhn, coll. “Studia Slavica Musicologica,” 2007, p. 17. This text relates numerous conversations with Ustvolskaya about her work at the Professional School of Music of the Leningrad Conservatory. ↩}

^{4. This “fanaticism” is also expressed with regard to musicians. In a letter dated 5 July 1992, and despite her gratitude to Oleg Malov, Ustvolskaya shifted her enthusiasm to Reinbert de Leeuw, demanding that he be the only musician allowed to record her music. His performances “give me life,” she wrote. In another letter, this one dated 20 April 1994, she added, “He shows a deep understanding of my music and plays it with marvelous truth, more than any other musician.” ↩}

^{5. Quoted in Suslin, op. cit. (note 1), p. 100. ↩}

^{6. Dmitri Shostakovitch, Lettres à un ami: Correspondance avec Isaac Glikman, Paris, Albin Michel, 1994, p. 163. [The English version of this book was unavailable, so this is a retranslation from the French.] ↩}

^{7. Vassili Rozanov, Esseulement [1912], followed by Mortellement, Lausanne, L’Âge d’homme, 1980, p. 37. English translation available online here: https://extravagantcreation.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/vasily-rozanov-from-solitaria-and-fallen-leaves/ ↩}

^{8. A. Sanin, quoted in Frans C. Lemaire, La Musique du xxe siècle en Russie et dans les anciennes Républiques soviétiques, Paris, Fayard, coll. “Les chemins de la musique,” 1994, p. 362. ↩}