Aleksandr Lokshin

An admirer of Mahler and Alban Berg, he created his own musical language; he wrote eleven symphonies plus symphonic works including Les Fleurs du Mal (1939, on Baudelaire's poems), Three Scenes from Goethe's Faust (1973, 1980), the cantata Mater Dolorosa (1977, on verses from Akhmatova's Requiem).

After the family moved to Novosibirsk, the young Lokshin was trained at school by excellent teachers who had been exiled to Siberia from Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

He was admitted to the Moscow Central School of Music and then, six months later, was accepted as a student at the Conservatory, where he studied composition with the composer Nikolay Myaskovsky.

However, as the lyrics by Charles Baudelaire were considered by the censors to be contradictory to communist ideology, Lokshin was denied the Moscow Conservatory Diploma and was not allowed to take the state examinations.

During the summer and the beginning of autumn 1941 he served as a fireman extinguishing incendiary bombs on the roof of the Moscow Conservatory during air raids; then he was evacuated to Novosibirsk.

The arrival of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra in Novosibirsk led to Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting a performance of Lokshin's vocal-symphonic poem Wait for me (lyrics by Konstantin Simonov).

[2] Efforts by Nikolay Myaskovsky, Maria Yudina, and Yelena Gnesina to get him another job were fruitless, and for the rest of his life Lokshin supported his family by composing music for film and theater.

Among his compositions which were never performed are his Symphony No 6 on verses by Aleksandr Blok and The Cockroach (Tarakanishche), a comic oratorio (on a poem by Korney Chukovsky, considered to contain anti-Khrushchev innuendo).

Among Lokshin's own compositions which he never heard performed are the cantata Mater Dolorosa (1977) on verses from Akhmatova's Requiem, which was prohibited in the Soviet Union at the time.