From The Times

August 20, 2007

Tikhon Khrennikov
Pianist, composer and secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers
As the first secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers for more than 40 years, Tikhon Khrennikov exercised a powerful and, some would
argue, baleful influence over Russian music in the second half of the past century.

Personally appointed by Stalin in 1948, he was a guardian of orthodoxy and was highly critical of leading avant-garde contemporaries,
including Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, whom he castigated for the crime of “formalism”.

A pianist and a composer in his own right, Khrennikov wrote three symphonies, several operas and concertos and composed prolifically for
both stage and screen.

Paradoxically, perhaps, in his role as first secretary Khrennikov cared enough about his art to ensure that Soviet musicians had a high
profile on the international stage and claimed that, unlike members of the Writers’ Union, none of his members ended up in front of a firing
squad. And even his most implacable enemies would have to concede that, under his command, the Composers’ Union was relatively
tolerant — but that tolerance invariably came on his own terms.

As a composer his music continued to find a limited local audience after the fall of communism. His earlier works abound with flag-waving “folksiness”, while in later pieces
he strove towards a more sophisticated musical language, even to the point of using a 12-note theme. However, he was not at ease with serialism — which he had
denounced vociferously — and the results were unconvincing.

While Khrennikov had jumped on a bandwagon in his criticism of Shostakovich, he was at the forefront of those ready to assail Prokofiev. In a notorious speech at the
second plenum of the Composers’ Union in 1948, Khrennikov seized on Prokofiev’s unguarded remarks of 1934 about “provincialism” and a new “grand style”, demanding to
know how this foreign formalist dared lecture loyal Bolsheviks on composing music for a revolution he had run away from (Prokofiev had been mainly living in Paris from
1922-36). His charges included complacency, extreme formalism, “anti-melodicness”, distortion of the image of the Soviet hero and erecting a barrier between himself and
“the collective”. After this character assassination, the composer never again wrote anything of value.

Personally appointed by Stalin to be first secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1948, Khrennikov was soon consolidating his power base and enforcing his master’s
requirement for ideological conformity down to the last quaver. He was the trusted servant of a system that sent millions to their deaths in labour camps while underpinning
one of the most creative eras in Russian music with money, honour and privilege.

His word was law. He was the sole arbiter of taste. He decided whose music was played, when it was played, whether it would be published and if it might be recorded. In
short, he was one of the most powerful and feared men in the cultural life of the Soviet Union. He could — and often did — veto composers’ requests to travel to the West to
hear their music performed.

In terms of autocracy, in the pantheon of Soviet musical history he comes a close second to Stalin’s notorious friend and cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, whose
mouthpiece he was until the latter’s death in 1948. Nevertheless, Khrennikov remained in awe of Stalin and reputedly soiled his trousers after being on the receiving end of
one of the dictator’s sinister stares. According to Volkov, he later suffered a nervous breakdown under the strain of the Stalin years.

In the more relaxed ideological climate of the Khrushchev era, Khrennikov continued in his critique of avant-garde composers, telling Schnittke to his face that he had no gift
for composition and ensuring that the composer’s First Symphony was premiered in the provinces and not Moscow. Schnittke kept a private list of the 19 occasions
Khrennikov refused him permission to travel abroad. Many held him responsible for Schnittke’s early death, as indeed they did for Prokofiev’s premature demise on the same
day as Stalin in 1953.

In another notorious incident, at the end of the 1970s, he argued in public against composers who were unrepresentative of what he called “the real face of Soviet music”.
The face in question bore a striking resemblance to his own craggy features.

It took the death of the superpower to dethrone this hardline autocrat and patriarch of Soviet music. “When the Soviet Union collapsed, I walked out of my office and shut the
door behind me,” he said. “And with that the Union of Soviet Composers ended as well.”

The tenth and youngest child of a salesman from the provincial town of Yelets, Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov showed an early interest in music and from 1929-32 studied
composition under Mikhail Gnesin. Meanwhile, his father and two brothers were purged by Stalin.

At the Moscow Conservatoire he made a name for himself as a promising pupil of the composer Vissarion Shebalin and the pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, but he was already
doing the bidding of the party thanks to Stalin’s admiration of his film scores.

Khrennikov’s first substantial works, a piano concerto and a symphony, were heard in 1933 and, like most of his output, employed a melodic style. In 1939 he finished his
first opera, Into the Storm, which was based on Nikolai Virta’s Loneliness, a book much admired by Stalin.

He composed sporadically during his long career — always adhering to the ideological requirements of “Socialist Realism” — and in retirement produced a ballet, Napoleon
Bonaparte, which had its premiere in 1995. Khrennikov also wrote prolifically for film, scoring music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and for Ivan Pyriev's Six
o’Clock in the Evening After the War.

As chairman of the internationally respected Tchaikovsky Competition, a role he continued to play in the post-Soviet era, he enjoyed enormous powers of patronage which
he deployed to his advantage.

He grew contemptuous of the difficulties facing the arts in post-communist Russia, noting the abolition of subsidies, the slipping of standards and the dearth of the world-
class violinists and pianists whom his country once produced, and claimed to have suffered himself by being denounced by musicians who had publicly expressed their
friendship. But he would not name names. Khrennikov, who knew more of the intrigues of Stalinism than most, took his secrets to the grave.

He received numerous honours from the Soviet, and later the Russian, government, including People’s Artist of the USSR and Hero of Socialist Labour.

Khrennikov’s wife, Klara Vax, predeceased him and he is survived by their daughter.

Tikhon Khrennikov, composer and secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers 1948-91, was born on June 10, 1913. He died on August 14, 2007, aged 94

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