Modern music: Alexander Knaifel

Composer monologues ** "Visiting the Ural Old Believers." Tell the Old Believers of the city of Nevyansk (Sverdlovsk region)

Composer Alexander Knaifel (Petersburg):

“By what laws does art exist in time? I once still imagined that beauty is a moment of such burning, absolute combustion, and this impossibility, unbearable fire, energy, divine fire, in order to exist in our earthly time, freezes in the form of beauty. That is, beauty is a certain form of existence of divine energy in our earthly time, that is, it must somehow freeze, somehow exist. And when we see this, we see it as a kind of beauty. Relatively speaking, you listen to the symphony of Mozart - fine, any person who comes to the Philharmonic, Estete or not Estetes hears that this is great. But this beautiful consists of moments of intolerable. Do you know how the mermaid is when she could not walk on the ground, remember, an underwear mermaid? The condition of her earthly life was an unbearable pain, she was given her legs, she fell in love and wanted to have her legs, and she was the condition for this inconsistency of walking. So, in fact, this is the same non -resistance, impossibility, unbearable. And she, this unbearable, maybe at any moment - Bach, oh, how I listened to it, it seemed to me that it was beautiful, but it suddenly turned into a piercing non -resistance, where, well, the cross, the impossibility of our earthly continuum.

What am I talking about this? There are two things, a slightly different order of origin: “Spring Spring” by Stravinsky and, say, the eighth symphony of Shostakovich, two powerful phenomena. I'll start with the eighth. You imagine - this is a thing just monstrous, paid by blood and your own, and, if it is allowed to say, blood for everyone. Everything that happened in civilization, that opened in the center of World War II, opened. There are no more monstrous. This was all captured there. And in a sense, it seemed that each performance requires your incredible readiness. I remember Mravinsky, to whom this composition is dedicated, which was the first to perform this thing, performed it in the declining years, somewhere in the very last years of his life. I was at this concert. It sounded like a symphony of Haydn: there was beauty. There was nothing close to unbearable, there was a perfect Bakhi type in an inner feeling of music. She somehow contracted and transformed into what I told you about. It was just a perfect work of musical art. He paid for this with his life, with his liveliness and in the declining years, thanks to his personal creative biography, it happened. I was just struck by this fact. That is, I saw this process and the fact that it will always exist. As long as art will exist on Earth, it will exist in this beautiful form.

The American orchestra laughed. "Why are you laughing?" “It’s very funny - horses are jumping, they have never heard this.” “Horses jump? Or maybe it is in the chambers are broken through water pipes? "

Many Western people are not able to understand the best way to understand what gives birth to Shostakovich's music. When they are told, they nod their heads or smile condescendingly because they do not know this. I remember that G. Rozhdestvensky cited as an example: at the end of the second part of the fourth symphony, there is such a characteristic, very unusual rod. And some American orchestra laughed. "Why are you laughing?" “It’s very funny - horses are jumping, they have never heard this.” “Horses jump? Or maybe it is in the chambers of the chambers of water pipes? ” “Why curl in water pipes?” "How to communicate with each other?" "There are phones." What to talk about further? And another example. Igor Markevich two weeks before his death, he toured until the last days, it so happened that we were witnesses of how he came, he also constantly played his conscious “sacred spring” all his life. He brought the “Spring Spring” along with some kind of Symphony Haydn. He is a frenzy, just a symbol of the twentieth century in brilliant insight, when all the matter is presented on his hind legs, simply splitting frenzy, and “spring” was sounded like a symphony of Mozart. Everything was transformed into some kind of plastic, and it turned out to be just a perfect thing. I can refer, it may be immodest, but I have such an Agnus Dei thing, it is really unimaginable, absolutely borderline, like an “invitation to execution”, when the question is whether this can be the subject of art at all. Impossible thing. It’s all the same, as if to live, say, blocked Petersburg, that is, an attempt to take on himself, so it is - the Lamb of God, that is, to take on everything in life possible. 20 years have passed, one Belgian ensemble very good suggested that I fulfill it and write it on a record. I came to them in one of the first performance. They performed very well. After the concert, two elderly women approached, in their eyes there was complete enlightenment. They said that "perfectly, amazingly beautiful, thank you very much, such enlightenment, just very beautiful." At first I was dumbfounded, because it is with what really is, such a distance, that is, it is another pole in general. It is not like beauty, there is simply a matter of survival, literally “to be or not to be” - that is, all circles of hell, immersion in the very waters of this sin and horror. They say beautifully. As I heard it “beautifully”, I just took me a dumb.

Beauty is always, of course, a consequence. Consciously make beauty how possible? It can only be done when ... these are very simple things, here you do not need to cloud.

Then I began to think, then I remembered these two examples. I do not want to compare - this is to the question of the secret of art, because it is really mysterious, but it has this phenomenon. Beauty is always, of course, a consequence. Consciously make beauty how possible? It can only be done when ... these are very simple things, here you do not need to cloud, you can’t create anything at all. The author is only one, with a capital letter author. When a person, one of us turns out to be a kind of activity transparent for this, then it becomes a revelation, and that’s all. If he does what he considers necessary, then no one except him needs it, therefore there is no other. If he is transparent, then this becomes God's revelation, in which everyone is equally the same, because they feel that it is them, this is not his, but this is common, everyone has it. He was sent, and thanks to him for the fact that he became, as through the prophet, a property. Everything is actually simple. As soon as this channel is overlapped, he says "I." Okay, please. Humility. There is some kind of transparent internal chaste position, it suddenly turns out that it is so strange. I really appreciate such things as the Venochka Erofeev, I think this is Mozartianism, such a pure source. It seems to be complete chernukha, and the pure light comes, the cleanest. This is only from a position, he does not claim, he does not insist, he says that I am not. This is what decides in art at all. ”

"Visiting the Ural Old Believers"

Tell the Old Believers of the city of Nevyansk (Sverdlovsk region)

A few words about the Old Believers. This phenomenon is associated with the split of the Russian Orthodox Church in the middle of the XVII century. The then Patriarch Nikon, in general, without affecting the foundations of Orthodoxy, introduced innovations into liturgical practice: instead of Jesus, they began to write Jesus, the biaples of the Cross were replaced by three -passion, etc. The tragic fate was waiting for the reforms. Historians see in split the desire of Rus', the Empire: for this, the king and church were looking for rituals that would arrange not only the Russian Orthodox. Culture historians say that a conflict between two cultural traditions was manifested in the split: East and Western. Philologists emphasize that in Rus' they saw the icon of Orthodoxy in the language. (B. Uspensky wittily notes that in Russia the word is about sin, a derivative of sin, meant a mistake in the text). Church historians write about the features of the XVII century, the centuries of "lost balance, a century of feverish oblivion, with nightmares of visions." (Prot. George Florovsky).