Tikhon Khrennikov

Tikhon Nikolaevich Khrennikov, composer and administrator: born Yelets, Russia 10 June 1913; married 1935 Klara Vaks (died 2001); died Moscow 14 August 2007.

Tikhon Khrennikov was one of the great survivors of the 20th century. Appointed Secretary to the Union of Soviet Composers by Stalin's cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, in 1948, Khrennikov was still occupying the post - the dark spider at the centre of an all-encompassing web - when the Soviet Union collapsed around him in 1991.

In the West, Khrennikov became something of a hate figure for the apparent willingness with which he attacked Shostakovich, Prokofiev and some other composers at a party congress in 1948; and he continued to bedevil later generations of Soviet composers. It's easy for commentators in liberal democracies to take the moral high ground in the face of such apparently opportunist behaviour: we don't have to make the bitter compromises necessary for survival in a totalitarian regime. Indeed, in post-Soviet Russia Khrennikov was at pains to exculpate himself for his earlier actions - but even though it seems that he was not quite as black as he was painted in the West, he was undeniably a willing cog in the repressive Soviet machinery.

Tikhon Nikolaevich Khrennikov began life as the youngest of 10 children in a family of horse-traders in the historic city of Yelets, in the central Russian province of Lipetsk. His first musical instruction - on guitar and mandolin - came from members of his family; he began to play the piano at the age of nine and by 13 he was composing. Within three years he showed enough promise to be sent to Moscow, where he enrolled at the Gnesin Academy of Music, studying with the composer Mikhail Gnesin, two of whose three sisters had founded the school in 1895.

In 1932 Khrennikov moved on to the Moscow Conservatoire, where his obvious talent allowed him to skip the first year; he joined Vissarion Shebalin's composition class and the piano class of Heinrich Neuhaus, whose later students would include Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. Khrennikov's perky First Piano Concerto - his Op 1 - dates from his student years (1932-33), and in 1936 he submitted his First Symphony (1933-35) as his graduation work.

He was beginning to make a name for himself. The Vakhtangov Theatre presented a production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing with Khrennikov's incidental music (1935-36; he fashioned an orchestral suite from the score in 1936). Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who ran the Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre then suggested that he attempt an opera: Into the Storm, based on Nikolai Virta's novel Loneliness - hardly an innocent choice of subject, since Stalin was known to be fond of the book. After three years of work the opera was finally staged in October 1939.

By then the characteristics of Khrennikov's style were well established: a mood of buoyant optimism, a spontaneous melodic gift and a high charge of rhythmic energy. Before the 1930s were out he had written incidental music to five plays, including I'm the Son of the Working People, and the first of what would be 22 film scores, The Struggle is Still On. Patriotic songs joined his early output of art-songs. Khrennikov knew where favour lay, and it wasn't long before Stalin's apparatchiks had identified him as someone likely to be of use in their constant efforts to recruit music to Communist goals.

In 1947, as Stalin's delusional paranoia gradually worsened, the Agitprop Department decided it was time to whip Soviet composers into line, and a series of meetings and conferences early in 1948 denounced Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky and Shebalin as "formalists" - a meaningless charge in artistic terminology but a potentially lethal one in real terms. The charges were read out by Khrennikov, now Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers (that Shebalin had been his teacher was of no importance):

Enough of these symphonic diaries - these pseudo-philosophic symphonies hiding behind their allegedly profound thoughts and tedious self-analysis. Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and popular decadence.

After the performance of Into the Storm Shostakovich had sent Khrennikov a friendly letter, pointing out, colleague to colleague, what he perceived to be some problems in the work. Khrennikov took it ill; now it was pay-back time. (Shostakovich got his own back posthumously, lampooning Khrennikov in Rayok, a satirical chamber cantata discovered after his death in 1975.)

In his post-Soviet memoirs, That's the Way It Was, published in 1994, Khrennikov argued that he was as much a toy of the forces at work as anyone else. But he soon weighed in at Shostakovich off his own bat, and was to become a thorn in the flesh of many later composers. He refused permission for the planned first performance of Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony of 1972 to go ahead, and was furious when he was outwitted by Rodion Shchedrin, in charge of the Moscow branch of the Composers' Union, who allowed it to be played in Gorky, in his own fiefdom, in 1974; he banned it thereafter. As Schnittke's international fame grew, he received invitations to performances abroad; Khrennikov vetoed them all.

The Estonian conductor Eri Klas, who managed to get a second performance of the First Symphony past the officials in Tallinn, tells of attending the Kiev festival in 1985 with Schnittke and his wife Irina when Schnittke suffered a massive stroke, the first of the series that was eventually to kill him. They managed to get him to hospital where Schnittke, lying completely paralysed on a stretcher, refused to respond to any stimulus. Klas leaned over and said forcefully into Schnittke's ear: "Khrennikov!" Schnittke's sharp grunt of a laugh was the first sign he was still alive.

The bloody-mindedness continued: when the next generation of Soviet composers - Vyacheslav Artyomov, Edison Denisov, the husband-and-wife Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov (both now resident in St Albans in Hertfordshire), Sofia Gubaidulina, Alexander Knaifel and Viktor Suslin - began to be performed outside the Soviet Union, they, too, ran foul of Khrennikov, who banned their music from the concert hall.

Behind the hard-line façade Khrennikov was less of an absolutist than he liked to appear in public. The composers attached in the 1948 decree lost their means of support, but when Rostropovich whispered in his ear, he had food sent to the embattled Prokofiev; Mira Prokofiev, the composer's second wife, recalled Khrennikov's kindnesses after her husband's death in 1953. He supported Shostakovich and Prokofiev for Stalin Prizes in the 1950s.

At that 1948 conference, as Stalin's final anti-Semitic drive was gathering pace, Khrennikov extolled the First Sinfonietta of the Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg - a work with Jewish melisma threaded through it. (Khrennikov's own wife, Klara Vaks, was also Jewish: he must have known that he was walking through a minefield.) And when in the 1960s the composer Alemdar Karamanov was exiled to the Caucasus for refusing to temper his fundamentalist Christian utterances, Khrennikov sent him commissions for film scores.

Khrennikov's own composing continued apace despite his official duties, and enjoyed another surge of energy in his eighties. A series of comic operas, operettas and ballets gave regular rein to his natural tunefulness, expressed in the popular manner that endeared his music to audiences. His contacts with the leading Soviet instrumentalists - Rostropovich and Leonid Kogan among them - and his own virtuosity at the keyboard led to a series of concertos: four for piano (the most recent in 1991), two for cello, two for violin. In the 1970s he even returned to the concert hall, performing the first three piano concertos in public.

Two more symphonies (1940-42 and 1973) joined the First, No 3 tentatively experimenting with the serialism he had condemned in earlier times. Intriguingly, a year earlier, in 1962, Khrennikov had been instrumental in inviting Stravinsky, whose music he had previously damned, to revisit his native land.

The Soviet state showered its faithful servant with decorations, among them three Stalin Prizes (1942, 1946 and 1951), a State Prize of the USSR in 1967 and a Lenin Prize in 1974. He was made a People's Artist of the USSR in 1963 and was "elected" to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1974. He retained his prestige even after the demise of the system which had elevated him: when Vladimir Putin recently bestowed a further award on him, it seemed yet another sign that Russia was returning to its recent past.

Martin Anderson