Boris Liatoshinsky

Boris Lyatoshinsky was born on 3 January 1895 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. His parents were both teachers and taught their son to play the piano and violin from an early age. At the age of 15, he composed his first works for musician friends, but initially began studying law in Kiev after leaving school. There he made contact with Reinhold Glière, with whom Sergei Prokofiev, four years his senior, had also studied composition, and transferred to the Kiev Conservatory. His music was initially influenced by Peter I. Tchaikovsky and late Romanticism in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century (Alexander Borodin and Alexander Scriabin). In 1935, Lyatoshinsky, who was highly recognised in his home country, became a professor of composition at the Kiev Conservatory. At the same time, he taught at the Moscow Conservatory until the early 1940s. His students included Jevgeni Stankovich, Valentin Silvestrov and Leonid Hrabowski. Lyatoshinsky received numerous honours for his work, including state prizes from the Soviet Union in 1946 and 1952. From 1956 until his death on 15 April 1968, he held a leading position in the Soviet Composers' Union.
Lyatoshinsky wrote five symphonies. As early as 1917, he began work on his 1st Symphony op. 2, the first movement of which he premièred as ‘Lyrical Poem’ before the work was completed. The 2nd Symphony op. 26 dates from 1935/36, a time when the composer was already being criticised by Soviet cultural ideologues. He had established a reputation as a creator of pessimistic, morbid works and was accused of his Second Symphony being too modern and painting ‘a chaotic, gloomy picture of Soviet life’.
Boris Lyatoshinsky then moved away from his avant-garde musical language again and, in the years of the Second World War, found his way to a style ‘which subjected melodies with a romantic, song-like colouring to a polyphonic treatment and favoured dark sound palettes, which by no means excluded atonal passages.’ (Volker Tarnow in a programme about Boris Ljatoschinski on Deutschlandfunk, 2022).
With this attitude, he set about composing his 3rd Symphony op. 50 after the war, which historically and stylistically has played a central role in the musical history of Ukraine to this day. The work, which is as sombre as it is dramatic and bears the subtitle ‘Peace will conquer war’, was composed during Stalin's lifetime and premiered on 23 October 1951 with the Kiev Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Natan Rakhlin as part of a concert organised by the Ukrainian Composers' Association. Because the composer was subsequently accused of having interpreted the war theme ‘not as a Soviet peacemaker but as a bourgeois pacifist’ and of lacking triumphant outbursts and a positively orientated finale in his work, Lyatoshinsky reworked the last movement. This new version of the 3rd Symphony was premiered four years later in 1955 in Leningrad under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky. The audience's reaction was euphoric. The success of the work was certainly also due to the fact that it skilfully incorporated motifs from Ukrainian national music.
Boris Lyatoshinsky died on 15 April 1968 in Kiev, where he was buried in the Baikove cemetery.

Biography can be reprinted free of charge in programme booklets with the following credits: Reprinted with the kind permission of the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes/Sikorski