Russian Melody

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov

On June 5, 1930, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, a composer whose works were performed in Paris and New York, was born - Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov, the son of a Tver musician, conductor, violinist, singer, composer and artistic director of the Kalinin Philharmonic (1948-1960) - Nikolai Mikhailovich Sidelnikov.

Among Soviet composers, Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov remained as if obscured in a common black and white photograph: here in the first row is Shostakovich with Prokofiev, behind them Schnittke, Gubaidullina, Sviridov and Khrennikov stood up at the side, and somewhere in the far corner stands a figure in a simple jacket... Always wearing the same one.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov during his years of study at the Moscow Conservatory,
photos taken from the collection. articles "In memory of the composer Nikolai Sidelnikov.
To the 85th anniversary of his birth." Tver: Guide, 2017, electronic resource).

From his place in the shadow of N.N. Sidelnikov looked over his head; he was not limited by the conventions of being a public favorite, especially in recent years, or by government orders. Perhaps that is why it is in his works that a musically associative language first appears - what art lives by today. It is impossible to write music, leaving Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Chopin, Mussorgsky behind you. When you sit down at the instrument, you will invariably take them with you to work, they will stand in a tight circle behind your back and will look at the still blank sheet of music. And there is nothing wrong with starting to speak in their words.

Such a statement leads the listener through a musical labyrinth, familiar images appear to you every now and then, but in fact these are just shadows created by the composer. To play this game, the author must be fluent in the culture, as if it were a language he mastered from early childhood. The listener will have to stand on tiptoes to reach the composer, who so easily deals with the entire world cultural heritage.

in the office of N.M. Sidelnikova.
On the left - Nikolai Mikhailovich, in the center - 9-year-old Kolya Sidelnikov,
1939-1940

The future Nikolai Nikolaevich, for now simply Nikolasha, will begin studying under the guidance of his father at the age of five - and no discounts for age. Daily repetitions for four or even five hours will be exhausting and boring for the boy. Then grandmother Elena Georgievna, stepmother of Sidelnikov Sr., who came from Penza to help a young musical family, in which both father and mother are endlessly busy in concerts, will hide Nikolasha from lessons in the closet.

Nikolai Mikhailovich will come from the Philharmonic, he will be surprised that his son is not at the instrument, Elena Georgievna just shrugs her shoulders - and she herself, as soon as Sidelnikov Sr. leaves, makes holes in the closet with nails on the back wall so that Nikolasha doesn’t feel stuffy. So Nikolai Nikolaevich sits in the closet, waits out classes and looks into small holes. It’s dark in the closet, it’s cramped, and the light seeps in like pasta through a colander, but I still don’t feel like working out¹.

By the age of seven, Sidelnikov Jr. will already be solving harmonic problems from Arensky’s collection, a reference book for theoretical students. Nikolai Nikolaevich will simply get used to his father’s discipline with age.

Often his father will force six-year-old Nikolasha to copy orchestral scores by hand, to draw out huge sheets of music on which each group of instruments is written in its own key. Imagine that you have to think in one language, write in another, and read what is written in a third. This is what writing scores consists of, when you write down the melody that sounds in your head with different notes, otherwise the horn player, thinking five notes below the treble clef, will play dissimilar music, which he may not even notice.

Since then N.N. Sidelnikov will even type letters to his family and only sign them by hand. But his love for clear lines will forever remain in him, and in the manuscripts of his works, Sidelnikov Jr. will often leave small black and white drawings, emblems of ideas, enclosed in a rigid frame of figures and strokes, like a graphic artist.

Nikolai Nikolaevich will compose without an instrument - and why would a person with perfect pitch need a piano? He will hastily draw the staff on any piece of music and, before the melody escapes, enclose it in a cage of lines and bar lines; he will play it only at the end, already completed, to check whether he made a mistake in the “musical dictation.”

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov during his years of study at the Moscow Conservatory

One day Nikolai Nikolaevich will celebrate with his family his nephew’s admission to college. There will be a general bustle of pies, salads and glasses in the apartment, and suddenly, among all this, the clink of a champagne flute will be heard. “A-flat” - Sidelnikov Jr. will categorically answer the sound. He will go up to the piano and check - indeed, it is A-flat.

class O.M. Brodskaya at the Kalinin Music College,
photos taken from the collection. articles "In memory of the composer Nikolai Sidelnikov. On the 85th anniversary of his birth." Tver: Guide, 2017)

Nikolai Nikolaevich will graduate from the Kalinin College of Music in three years and already in 1950 he will become a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In the closed Soviet musical space of the 1950s. to get a record of such an American and at the same time from the roots of the folk-Russian I. Stravinsky was the same crime as reading Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn.

One of the students at the Moscow Conservatory reported that Nikolai Nikolaevich and his friend Andrei Volkonsky were playing piano transcriptions of banned authors - Stravinsky and Hindemith. The result of an urgent search in the conservatory dormitory was the disappearance of Schoenberg's "Enlightened Night" and seven pairs of long johns from the suitcase of student Marutaev, also a friend of Sidelnikov, but the Komsomol meeting took place anyway.

The main question to N.N. Sidelnikov was: “Why are you interested in such terrible music?” To which Nikolai Nikolaevich, already sharp-tongued, replied: “It is still unknown whether this music is good or bad - history will judge. But please tell me why seven pairs of underpants disappeared from student Marutaev’s suitcase, which, in my opinion, did not fit you?”²

Amid laughter and thunderous applause, Sidelnikov was nevertheless expelled from the conservatory for a year, and for the second semester of 1952, student N. Sidelnikov, the future author of a fascinatingly large-scale symphony “After reading the Dialectics of Nature” by F. Engels, the first part of which is called “Monument. For the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Lenin,” the mark “mediocre” was marked on “Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism.”

N.N. Sidelnikov during his years of study at the Moscow Conservatory

By the time he graduated from the conservatory, Sidelnikov’s personal card became striped with reprimands, each of which resulted in the revocation of penalties, justified by excellent studies. As for Stravinsky and Hindemith, history has indeed judged.

Nikolai Nikolayevich was forced to spend 1952 and 1953 on academic leave in his hometown, still far from the thaw. Times in Kalinin brought Sidelnikov Jr. together with pianist Grigory Khaimovsky, who at that time worked at the music pedagogical school, and Nikolai Nikolaevich was hired there to teach theoretical disciplines.

“Okay, I was sent here,” I say when a couple of hours later we went outside, “and what are you doing here?”

He, flashing vigilantly and evilly: “And I have been exiled...”. My glance, apparently, forced him to clarify: “To dry out, to breathe in the native breeze... The cons thought that I stank of modernity... For a year for now...” answered Sidelnikov Jr.

Perhaps some of the “modernism” really disappeared from the student N. Sidelnikov, because in 1956 his description said: “Some passion for modernist music, which was noticed 2-3 years ago, now he has overcome it - the works receive an interesting melodic and harmonic design, they are clear in structure; He pays special attention to polyphony, which he masters fluently and with great imagination.” To return to the conservatory, Nikolai Nikolaevich was given a condition - to get rid of his harmful avant-garde addiction.

The name of Tver friend G. Khaimovsky again surfaced for N.N. Sidelnikov only during perestroika, it turned out to be a light for him in someone else’s window - a window to America, and at the same time revealed Sidelnikov the composer to the Western public. G.S. Khaimovsky and his band performed several works by Nikolai Nikolaevich in New York.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov

In 1971, the first Soviet composer stood at the UNESCO Tribune in Paris - it was Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov. Among the many contemporary works submitted to the competition, the Council selected the ten best, worthy of being performed on European radio stations. At that time, the head of the Council was Yehudi Menuhin. The unspoken selection criterion was the cosmopolitan relevance of the work - a sort of “Oscar” among composers. Therefore, N. N. Sidelnikov spent a long time and carefully cleaning the manuscript of the score of his “Russian Fairy Tales” sent to the competition, trying to make them correspond to modern musical trends - sonorica, avant-garde, the lag from which in the main line of Soviet music was acutely felt. G. Sviridov’s “Kursk Songs”, sent together with “Russian Fairy Tales”, purely indigenous, local, understandable only in Russia, did not receive a single vote.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov returned from Paris as a winner, but the Union of Composers and the newspaper “Soviet Culture” were in no hurry to congratulate him.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov was the author of music for many films; one of the first films was “The Overcoat” based on the story by N.V. Gogol. In 1966 there were “Three Fat Men,” the same “Three Fat Men” from Soviet childhood, where a funny doctor, more like the absent-minded one from Basseynaya Street, was always arguing with the unsurpassed Rina Zelena over galoshes. According to the laws of convention, the little viewer believes the movements of a doll in a white dress, whose true appearance is a secret that only he and the author know about. And above all this is fabulous music, as if written specifically for toy instruments from a music box. And then there was “Djamilya” by Chingiz Aitmatov.

The wife of Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov, Helena Yuryevna Araya, was also involved in the world of cinema, and she introduced her husband to Andrei Tarkovsky. Nikolai Nikolaevich worked closely with the director and even wrote a fragment of music for the future “Nostalgia”, an overture in the style of the 18th century, but, alas, Tarkovsky

he never returned from filming the film to the USSR. The Italian film about the Russian composer Sosnovsky, whose prototype was M. S. Berezovsky, itself remained without the author of the music: in the “composer” column in all sources about it there is only a dash or mention of Verdi and Beethoven, whose works are heard in the film.

They won’t just say about Sidelnikov Jr. that he is a man of incredible erudition, “there will be legends about his extraordinary education”: “he knew Russian philosophy, the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran perfectly well” . Not to mention his brilliant knowledge of the history of music - from Dutch polyphonists to jazz stars."³.

Among the books in the parental library there is also “Bar-by-bar analysis of Beethoven's symphonies” by an unknown author. Nikolai Mikhailovich, Sidelnikov Sr., will often choose Beethoven's works for performance in concerts of the Kalinin Symphony Orchestra, and Nikolai Nikolaevich will devote most of the time allocated to teaching students to the analysis of Beethoven's works. He will feel that it is only from Beethoven that an artist can learn. Sidelnikov Jr. will learn a lot from him himself. He will turn Beethoven's achievements into a "new concept of the finale." In the last parts of his works (“Russian Fairy Tales”, “The Rebellious World of the Poet”, “Romansero about Love and Death”) he will use “a completely different style” that does not fit all the previous parts, as if you were wearing beach shoes with your wedding suit slates, although today, of course, this will not surprise anyone.

Nikolai Nikolaevich will write music until the very end, despite his illness, and devoted student Ivan Sokolov, like a personal secretary, will edit the notes and write the teacher’s last words from dictation. Only the second part of the imaginary New York concert, Nikolai Nikolaevich’s dream, will never be written - “Russia is my pain.”

Nikolai Nikolaevich Sidelnikov with children

The author of the article is
artist of the chamber orchestra "Russian Camerata"
and graduate of the Literary Institute 
Kristina Martynova

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¹ From the memoirs of N. V. Belyaeva, the composer’s niece
² Sokolov I. Behind the mask of irony and bravado he hid his tragic face // Musical Academy. 2001. No. 1. P. 114
³ From the memoirs of V. Tarnopolsky