Mstislav Rostropovich is considered one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century. His art has inspired numerous composers around the world to write works for the cello – including Prokofiev for his Cello Sonata op. 119. When preparing our new Urtext edition of this sonata, I was therefore all the more surprised to discover that, alongside Rostropovich, another musician played a very important role in the genesis and dissemination of this work – albeit in a completely different way: Levon Atovmyan, who is also the sonata’s dedicatee. Reason enough to take a closer look at this man in the background!
Atovmyan, a trained musician active on various committees of the Soviet cultural apparatus since 1930 had – as Prokofiev biographer Simon Morrison so nicely puts it – a decidedly turbulent career, even by the chaotic standards of the Stalin era, in which positions of state power alternated with loss of office and forced labour. As chairman of the All-Russia Society of Soviet Composers and Dramatists, he became acquainted in 1932 with Prokofiev, who was living in Paris at the time, providing him not only with composing commissions and concert appearances in the Soviet Union, but also – as officially desired – persuading him to return permanently to his homeland.
Sergey Prokofiev, 1936
Whereas Prokofiev rose, as of 1936, to become a highly honoured Soviet state composer in Moscow, Atovmyan was transferred by the Central Committee to Turkmenistan, where in 1937/38 he became embroiled in a bureaucratic scandal, resulting in a sentence of ten years’ forced labour in the northern Urals. After his unexpected rehabilitation in summer 1939, Atovmyan assumed in 1940 management of Muzfond, the promotional organisation of the Soviet Composers’ Union, as well as later also a leading position at the state music publishing house Muzgiz. This made him a central figure in the Soviet Union’s musical life, as he was responsible for providing composers with paid commissions for their works, organising the performances before state committees required for publication and, finally, overseeing the works’ publication – including the sale of printing licences to the West for hard currency.
The extensive correspondence between the composer, evacuated to Alma-Ata during the war years, and the Moscow music functionary impressively demonstrates the extent to which Atovmyan was personally committed to Prokofiev, whether, besides these official matters, procuring music paper or providing for his family remaining behind in Moscow. At the same time, he increasingly became Prokofiev’s artistic assistant, producing piano reductions of his stage works – the printed publication of which in turn represented an important income source.
In the foreground: Sergey Prokofiev (left), Levon Atovmyan (right),
illustration from Simon Morrison: The People’s Artist. Prokofiev’s Soviet Years, 2009.
After the war, the tide turned once again: the restrictions of the Stalinist cultural industry increased, while at the same time Muzfond became embroiled in a major financial and political scandal in 1948, in which Atovmyan lost his post – he was accused of having favoured certain composers with lavish commissions, interest-free loans and advantages in finding accommodation. These composers included Prokofiev, whose previously esteemed works were now pegged as decadent and disappeared from the stage.
This was the situation when in seclusion at his country house in Nikolina Gora, Prokofiev completed his cello sonata for the young star cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in May 1949. In December 1947, the 20-year-old had so impressed the composer with a performance of his early cello concerto that Prokofiev subsequently promised him a work tailored to his abilities. Rostropovich later recalled that he received Prokofiev’s sonata in the summer of 1949, together with an invitation to Nikolina Gora “to play through the new work and let him know what had occurred to me while studying it”. So, he travelled with Atovmyan to Nikolina Gora in June 1949, where several changes were apparently made to the cello part while Prokofiev and Rostropovich were playing together. Unfortunately, these interventions are not recorded in the extant, full-score autograph – but can be recognised from a comparison with the first edition of the work published in 1951.
Cello Sonata op. 119, first edition,
Minsk, National Library of Belarus
This comparison reveals first of all – unsurprisingly – that the changes did not concern fundamental compositional aspects such as the thematic form and musical shape of the sonata, but rather aspects of tonal colour and practical playing matters such as octave position and chord figuration. For example, the autograph score at the end of the first movement (from m. 231) did not originally show the sophisticated combination of two plucked and two bowed notes in the repeated C major sound on beat one and simply a trilled sustained note g1 instead of the harmonic tremolo.
1st movement, mm. 231–end
above: original version according to the autograph
below: final version according to the first edition
In the second movement, too, shortly before the end in the coda, the fourth harmonics of the cello entering as a ghostly counter-voice over the main theme in the piano, were not initially intended by the composer. Instead, Prokofiev notated a simpler accompaniment in high register starting earlier.
2nd movement, mm. 105–110
above: original version according to the autograph
below: final version according to the first edition
While such effects clearly increased the solo-part’s virtuosity, the cellist also made things easier in other places: for example, by changing the chord fingerings in the first movement, where initially notated in m. 23 was the combination C sharp/A sharp/f sharp/c sharp1, which is much more difficult to finger.
1st movement, m. 23
above: original version according to the autograph
below: final version according to the first edition
The alternative solution for the end of the sonata was likewise developed in consultation with Rostropovich, resulting also in an altered piano part. This version is already sketched in the autograph full score. Interestingly enough, though, Prokofiev left the decision to the first performers (Rostropovich and Richter) as to how this should be presented in the printed edition – as is again documented by his correspondence with Atovmyan.
In March 1950, Rostropovich successfully premièred the sonata in Moscow, together with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter – although in the absence of the composer, who had suffered a stroke and was then in hospital. The work was now to go into print, for which Prokofiev received from Rostropovich the performance material (now lost) that was supposed to serve as engraver’s model – but was completely unsuitable for this. Prokofiev was horrified to discover that there were contradictory entries and unclear changes between the score and the solo part, including the end of the sonata. “How does the sonata end?”, he asked Atovmyan in June 1950. “You know, I wanted two variants, i.e. ossia. Now: if the 1st variant is completely unsuitable, then it’s not worth publishing. Let Rostropovich + Richter decide this. […] Unfortunately, I’m unable right now to deal with the corrections and tidying up, so I ask you, as a sufficiently experienced publisher, to put the Sonata into decent shape.”
Over a year and a half, until the first edition could finally be published in autumn 1951, Atovmyan fulfilled this responsible task with admirable energy and meticulousness, not only by producing a clean engraver’s model within a week, but also by coordinating the various rounds of corrections with the ailing composer and the cellist, who was meanwhile now travelling internationally. We can judge the quality of his work today by the fact that only comparatively few errors in the first edition had to be corrected in our Urtext edition. Rostropovich was the first performer to make the sonata world-famous – but we have Atovmyan to thank for the fact that it appeared in print on both sides of the Iron Curtain as early as 1951/52, thus quickly becoming a centrepiece of the cello repertoire. No wonder that the composer thanked him for this by dedicating the sonata to him.