Alexander Moiseevich Veprik

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Alexander Moissejewitsch Weprik ( Russian Александр Моисеевич Веприк ., Scientific transliteration Aleksandr Moiseevic Veprik * June 11 jul. / 23. June  1899 greg. In Balta , Russian Empire ; †  13. October 1958 in Moscow , Soviet Union ) was a Russian-Jewish Composer.

Life

Weprik grew up in Warsaw . His parents came from Jewish Orthodox families, but in their early youth they were enthusiastic about new, progressive ideas and rebelled against the traditional Jewish way of life. After the parents' marriage broke up, the mother fled the anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland with the children to Leipzig in 1909 . Alexander Weprik studied at the Leipzig Conservatory in the piano class of Karl Wendling as a child until he returned to Russia with his mother and siblings after the outbreak of the First World War . He worked as a silent film pianist and was able to continue his piano studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Nikolai Dubassow. There he began to study composition with Alexander Zhitomirski (1918–1921), which he completed with Nikolai Mjaskowski at the Moscow Conservatory (1921–1923). From 1923 to 1943 Weprik himself taught at the Moscow Conservatory, from 1930 as professor, from 1938 as dean .

In Moscow he was a leading member of the Moscow Society for Jewish Music. He was also involved in reforming higher education in music in the Soviet Union. For this purpose he was sent to Germany, Austria and France in 1927 on behalf of the People's Commissariat for Education under Anatoli Lunatscharski , where he met Arnold Schönberg , Paul Hindemith , Maurice Ravel and Arthur Honegger . Weprik was an internationally successful composer at the time, his works were performed in Western Europe and the United States; Many of his compositions were presented in Berlin in the late 1920s, Hermann Scherchen performed dances and songs of the ghetto in Leipzig in 1927 , and Arturo Toscanini conducted this work in New York's Carnegie Hall in 1933 .

In 1936 Weprik refused the smear campaign against Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and was one of the few composers who defended the work. In 1940 Weprik was sent to Kyrgyzstan, where his opera Toktogul was written , which was premiered that same year in what was then Frunze . In 1943 he and other Jewish professors at the Moscow Conservatory were dismissed without notice.

In the course of the anti-Semitic attacks under Stalin he was arrested in 1950 and deported to a Gulag camp in the Urals on charges of being a “Jewish nationalist” - one of the “pieces of evidence” was a letter from Toscanini to Weprik from the 1920s. After Stalin's death, he was released in 1954.

His work includes an opera, cantatas, orchestral, vocal, chamber, piano and film music. Emotional intensity is a stylistic feature of his compositions; together with Mikhail Gnessin he was one of the classics of Jewish Soviet music. His long forgotten work was increasingly rediscovered and performed - u. a. by Jascha Nemtsov , Tabea Zimmermann , Dmitri Sitkowetski , David Geringas and Swetlana Steptschenko.

Works (selection)

  • Totenlieder for viola and piano, op.4 (1923)
  • Rhapsody for viola and piano, op.11 (1926)
  • Kaddish for soprano, tenor and chamber ensemble (1926)
  • Dances and songs of the ghetto for orchestra, op.12 (1927)
  • Sonatas for piano 1–3, (1922, 1924, 1928)
  • Symphony No. 1 (1931)
  • Symphony No. 2 (1938)
  • Toktogul , opera (1940)
  • The people as hero , cantata (1955)
  • Two poems for orchestra (1957)
  • Improvisation for orchestra (1958)

Film music

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Jascha Nemtsov:  Veprik, Aleksandr Moiseevič. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 16 (Strata - Villoteau). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1136-5  ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
  2. ↑ a b Jascha Nemtsov: Alexandr Veprik - A portrait of composer . In: Friedrich Geiger (Ed.): Composers under Stalin - Aleksandr Veprik (1899–1958) and the New Jewish School . Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism V., Dresden 2000, ISBN 3-931648-28-1 , p. 43, 44 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e Inna Barsova, Detlef Gojowy:  Veprik, Aleksandr Moiseyevich. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
  4. ^ A b Levon Hakobian: Music of the Soviet Era: 1917-1991 . 2nd Edition. Routledge, London, New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-4724-7108-6 , pp. 105, 366 .
  5. ↑ a b Short biography on Musica Judaica
  6. ↑ a b c Text on the Weprik Symposium 2018 by Inna Klause and Christoph-Mathias Mueller
  7. ↑ a b c Boris Yoffe : In the flow of the symphonic . Wolke, Hofheim 2014, ISBN 978-3-95593-059-2 , pp. 197 f .
  8. ↑ Jascha Nemtsov: "I am already dead". Composers in the Gulag: Vsevolod Zaderackij and Aleksandr Veprik . In: Manfred Sapper, Volker Weichsel, Andrea Huterer (eds.): Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and the processing of the gulag . Eastern Europe 6/2007. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8305-1219-6 , pp. 315-340 .
personal data
SURNAME Weprik, Alexander Moissejewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Veprik, Alexander; Веприк, Александр Моисеевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-Jewish composer
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Balta
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1958
Place of death Moscow