Georges Catoire: Seine Musik, sein Leben, seine Ausstrahlung (review)

On 13 May 1924, Georges Catoire’s Violin Sonata No. 2 was played by Dmitry Tsïganov and Samuil Feynberg as part of the inaugural concert of the Association for Contemporary Music (ACM) in Moscow. Anyone who knows anything about Soviet music will recognize the status attaching to those performers and that event, and the only surprise might be that a composer as conservative and apparently insignificant as Catoire should have been among those featured. But that surprise comes from a misunderstanding of terms. ‘Contemporary’ at that time and in that place carried little or no implication of exclusivity or experimentation, and ‘conservative’ loads the dice unfairly against music that has many shades in its background influences and foreground styles. As Anna Zassimova rightly asserts, the Sonata is ‘perhaps the most beautiful of Catoire’s works’ (p. 176); among its four recordings to date is one made in 1948 by David Oistrakh and Alexander Goldenweiser, two more legendary names from the Russian pantheon.

Zassimova makes somewhat heavy weather of her commentary on the ACM event. Shebalin is given the first name Viktor instead of Vissarion; the Association is described as persecuted by the regime (it was arguably so by its rival RAPM, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, but that’s another matter); and she claims that ACM was banned and dissolved in 1932 (but so too were all such organizations, including RAPM, and in any case ACM had effectively fallen apart years earlier). Furthermore, her glowing opinion of the Second Violin Sonata is almost the only instance in the book of her engaging with Catoire’s music at the level of critical or stylistic appreciation, even though its many echoes of Tchaikovsky (especially the Piano Trio) and Franck cry out for investigation.

Thetitle conceals the fact that this is essentially a documentation rather than a life-and-works study. Zassimova begins by telling us that ‘Catoire’s music always remains individual, with a character and language all its own’ (p. 1). But at no point does she actually probe how it does so. Nor does she back up her assertions that Catoire’s works ‘contain characteristics that are interestingly always outside the trends of his time’ and that he might be considered one of the founders of a Russian Jugendstil (p. 2). In fact her only musical examples—given without cues, captions or annotations, and with some clefs handwritten onto scanned copies—appear between pages 354 and 359, as part of an essay on the Second Violin Sonata that is fairly elementary in its musical observations. Nor is this a case of the biography having overwhelmed a study of the works. Catoire’s life story is narrated in a mere eight pages (pp. 9–16). And it was not exactly uninteresting, being marked by a privileged upbringing (though his circumstances were much straitened in the Soviet era), by contacts with a galaxy of major figures in Russian musical life from Tchaikovsky to Myaskovsky, by mysterious nervous illness, and by two weeks of detention in the Lyubyanka (it would have been useful to have had a cross-reference to pp. 54–5, where Catoire’s son Pyotr relates the background to this bizarre story). Almost the entire remaining 400 pages consist of documents with commentary.

And yet the book is valuable as a conscientiously researched reference tool. For those interested, the Catoire family background is presented in great detail, including documents dating back to the thirteenth century. His personality and activities are revealed through reminiscences, those of the composer’s son being especially valuable, and through correspondence and reviews, all of which are meticulously annotated and corrected where necessary. The work-list, discography, and bibliography are all more comprehensive than anything previously available, and published scores are listed with helpful details of major libraries containing them. Maddeningly, as so often in this series, there is no index; the lack is only partially redressed by the...