Chilanga • lepoemedufeu: Roslavets- Meditation for Cello...

lepoemedufeu:

Roslavets- Meditation for Cello and Piano (1921)

Roslavets’s is one of the most beautifully lyrical and profoundly chilling voices to hail from Soviet Russia, and also one of the most under-appreciated. Unlike his contemporaries, who managed to find ways around the Central Committee’s draconian enforcement of ideological homogeneity in music, Roslavets found himself at the receiving end of an assault on his “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary” works. He would never recover from the blow dealt by the Soviet censor, with his works being universally banned and on many accounts purged from Soviet archives.

Following his death, his apartment was raided and much of his work would have been lost had his wife not succeeded in hiding many of his manuscripts to protect them from destruction. His name did not appear in Soviet musical dictionaries until the late 1970s, some thirty years after his death, and even then his name was mentioned only in statements such as “Roslavets is an enemy of the people”, and “Roslavets’s work is not worth even the paper it is written on”.