Aram Khachaturian

The year 2003 is declared the year of Aram Khachaturian by the UNESCO, an honor that only outstanding personalities with remarkable contributions to the world’s culture and arts have earned. Aram Khachaturian made a unique and historical contribution to the music. This contribution is important and complex. He foreshadowed a rapid rise of the Armenian national music and its transformation to a new professional level, and it is largely due to him and his talented creations that the Armenian music is known as an original part of the universal world of music.

This is not the only achievement of Aram Khachaturian, who has left a deep legacy of innovation and organic synthesis of the Oriental and Western musical cultures. That is his main achievement. As a famous Russian composer, Rodion Schedrin put it, “Khachaturian was the source of the modern and original approach to the folk and artistic components in a composer’s skill.” As such, his accomplishments are reflected in the music of all the schools of composing in the world. Khachaturian belongs to Armenia as much as he does to Russia and the rest of the world.”

Khachaturian’s works are deeply rooted in the Armenian people, arts, and culture. At the same time, they are embedded professionally in the European and Russian musical classics. The integral contact between his ethnic roots and broader musical traditions on the background of his rare artistic gift gave Khachaturian an opportunity to express himself in music in a bold, even daring manner, with limitless energy and vital force.

Aram Khachaturian’s path to the world of music was unordinary, and his artistic biography can be considered unusual for a famous composer. He was raised in a family of a humble book-binder who could boast of no professional musicians among his ancestors, yet the household stood out for its love of arts, singing, and folk music. The main artistic environment was the city of Tbilisi where he grew up and spent his adolescent years.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Tbilisi was a lively city with multiethnic population, with organic cohabitation of several cultural and artistic traditions of the peoples of the Caucasus, including the Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Russians, and Jews. The Khachaturian household included four brothers. The elder brothers were seriously engaged in theater, and, in fact, the elder two later became professional actors. The junior sibling – Aram – had a clear preference for music. He played in a percussion ensemble at school, picked up tunes and songs heard elsewhere on his father’s old piano, and beat up ingenious rhythms on the chairs. The many musical voices of the urban life – the singing of the minstrel “ashughs,” the sazandar’s tunes, the city park orchestras – nurtured the ear and imagination of the would be composer. The first visit to the opera was shockingly stirring for the youth.

Recognizing Aram’s giftedness, his elder brother Suren who had by then become a theater producer in Moscow helped the eighteen-year-old Aram relocate to Moscow, to expose him to a world of opportunities, and, indeed, Aram had gone through rapid development. The young Aram Khachaturian had initially enrolled as a biology student at the Moscow University School of Mathematics and Physics, and immersed himself in the capital’s artistic environment. Music’s attractive force was, nevertheless, irresistible and the youth bid farewell to a career in biology and transferred to the Gnesin’s School of Music, in the class of cello. Following the advice of an experienced instructor and composer Mikhail Gnesin, he took up his composition class. Recognizing the genius of the young musician, Gnesin referred to him as ‘an unpolished precious stone.’

Four years later the twenty-three-years old Khachaturian entered the Moscow Conservatory, beginning his formal composition education at an age when most students neared graduation. Yet his creative potential was enormous. In his first years at the Conservatory, he created pieces that sound original and fresh today, such as the Dance for Violin, Poem Song, and a Poem and Toccata for the piano, Dancing Suite, Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano. His First Symphony forcefully announced his graduation from the Conservatory in 1934, enshrining his name next to other famous graduates, such as Rakhmaninov, Taneyev, and Skriabin.

Enrolled as a graduate student, Khachaturian wrote chamber pieces, the score to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Armenian-produced movie Pepoe, and Piano Concerto, a masterpiece that earned him worldwide fame. The Concerto stood out for its ingenuity and colorful virtuosity that endear it to the performers and guarantee its vitality. The musical piece began to be performed abroad as well, and was universally acclaimed.

With name recognition under his belt, Khachaturian masterfully created other works, and scores for movies and plays, such as Lope de Vega’s Valencian Widow, and Masquerade. These masterpieces were followed by the Symphonic Poem with Chorus and Concerto for Violin dedicated to David Oistrakh. Both Concerto for Piano and Concerto for Violin gained worldwide recognition and were performed by the violinists around the world. Simultaneously, Khachaturian composed the ballet Happiness, which was first staged in Moscow in 1939, during the Art of Armenia event. This score would later be used as a basis for Gayane.

World War II was an extraordinary influence and inspiration on many composers, and some of their best works were created in those years, such as Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No 7. Khachaturian, who had already become one of the top three Soviet composers, created his Symphony No. 2, or Symphony with Bells. According to Shostakovich, Symphony with Bells was ‘the first of Khachaturian’s works to raise the voice of the tragic to such a level, yet it is also deeply optimistic and jubilatory.’ His Symphony No. 3, written in 1947, was a hymn to the victory.

Khachaturian became quite an authority, and as a Professor at the Moscow Conservatory taught a class that would school other famous composers from Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Romania, and Japan. Khachaturian’s composition class cultivated individuality, not just professional skills. In addition to creating music, the Maestro led an active civic life and was also a conductor, visiting many foreign countries as well.

In 1956, Khachaturian completed his next, and probably the best-known masterpiece, Spartacus, which earned such accolades as ‘feast of music.’ Dmitri Kabalevski said no other composer could have called to life this story the way Khachaturian had done. The flamboyant and emotionally broad music of Spartacus lives on and brings joy to its listeners.

Khachaturian continued to be acclaimed all over the world, and received many awards for his invaluable contributions to musical art. Yet he continued to create until the very end. In 1960’s, Khachaturian composed three Concerto-Rhapsodies for violin, cello, and piano with orchestra, and in 1970’s, he composed three sonatas solo. Khachaturian intended to compose an opera, but he could not finish it. He passed away in 1978, a month before his seventy-fifth birthday.

His body laid in state in the Moscow Conservatory that had been his home, and was then transferred to Yerevan where it was laid to rest at the City Pantheon of Armenian Artists. Thousands of fans bid farewell to their favorite composer to the tunes of his immortal and invigorating Masquerade rather than to a traditional tragic march.

When Khachaturian’s tunes are playing it seem like the Mother Earth is expressing itself. He lived and created for the people and he wanted to be heard and understood. While many twentieth-century composers rambled in a search for an “original” language, Khachaturian composed music that was clear yet not primitive, comprehensible yet complex. His priorities were a quick thought, colorful and expressive melody, and clear musical expression, and that is why he had been given the joy of a popular acclaim and of an Artist’s contact with a grateful listener. His music, like that of any other classic, will forever bring the gift of the fine, emotional, poetical, and colorful world.

excerpt from Margarita Ter-Simonian