"Composing for the Drawer": Galina Ustvolskaya's Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano

I wrote these programme notes for a friend of mine, Cayenna Ponchione, who organised this concert in Oxford for International Women's Day 2016. I was in the second year of my undergrad, and taking a course in women composers. Elena Nalimova, who teaches at my old school, wrote her PhD dissertation on Ustvolskaya, and some of my pals feature in its ethnographic sections.

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) spent most of her working life in Leningrad. After entering the conservatory to study under Dmitri Shostakovich in 1937, she moved to St. Petersburg in 1947, retaining ties with the conservatory by continuing to teach there for over thirty years. In order to make a living, she had no choice but to compose party-approved, publicly accessible music, but she never attributed these pieces opus numbers in what the critic Elmer Schönberger described as a “quasi-Stalinist step of erasing them from her personal history”. Her output of modernist works is consequently small, and she only has 21 opus numbers to her name. She would often talk of “composing for the drawer”; the Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano was kept in a desk-drawer for nineteen years, not receiving its premiere until 1968.

Ustvolskaya cultivated an intensely reclusive public image: she would reportedly “rather have her teeth pulled than be photographed”. This, along with a few letters, has provoked a great deal of conjecture about the nature of her relationship with Shostakovich. He evidently admired her work, writing: “I am convinced that the music of G. I. Ustvolskaya will achieve worldwide renown, to be valued by all who perceive truth in music to be of paramount importance.” Yet while her music exhibits scant influence from him, he called her his "musical conscience" and submitted his scores for her approval. Their liasons clearly ended acerbically, with her later writing that "a seemingly eminent figure such as Shostakovich, to me, is not eminent at all, on the contrary he burdened my life and killed my best feelings."

Ustvolskaya's Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano was written in 1949, two years after she left Leningrad. In wake of the infamous “Party Resolution” of 1948, she dedicated the piece to “the memory of friends who died during the war”—a subheading that was censored in published editions. The piece is in three movements: the first, marked “Espressivo” features two themes: a hushed, introspective melody introduced by the clarinet alone which scholar Elena Nalimova identifies being in the dorian mode, despite it encorporated all twelve semitones. Fragments of the melody are played very low in the piano by way of later accompaniment and developed to introduce a second theme played by the violin, which is high, loud, and makes dramatic use of dotted rhythm. The three voices are not heard all together until much later on, when the violin and clarinet swap material.

The second movement is a slow “Dolce”, characterised by a series of intense duets which culminate in a, extremely long, suspended G-B𝄫-D triad in the violin and piano, which introduces the intense “Energetico” third movement. Its material is treated fugally between the piano and violin, before the clarinet enters with a melody strongly resembling the second theme of the first movement. A hushed B section marked pppp sees the fugue melody re-imagined more lyrically by the clarinet over suspended cluster chords which evaporate to make way for a cadenza-style clarinet solo redolent of the piece's very opening before the coda builds tension again with the piano “hammering” increasingly loud, low clusters under its suspended right hand.. Shostakovich borrowed the clarinet theme for two of his works, the Fifth String Quartet (1952) and the song “Night” from Suite on Verses of Michelangelo (1974), perhaps suggesting that he retained respect for her in spite of her feelings.