Ustvolskaya’s Sixth Piano Sonata

Galina Ivanova Ustvolskaya was born in 1919 in Petrograd and has lived there throughout her life.1 She had her formal musical training in the Leningrad Conservatory between 1937 and 1950, where she studied with Shostakovich. 2 Later she worked as a teacher in the same institution for most of her life. Although the Soviet Union possessed an elaborate system of music education (Schwarz, 1965, p. 278), the Stalinist era imposed harsh limitations to the actual creative work of composers. The 1948 Decree that laid down the principles of Socialist Realism required composers to produce music of accessible nature, ‘understandable’ by the people3, with thematic in accordance to the political scene of the day. “Like any other artist in the USSR, [Ustvolskaya] needed to live, and to live she had come to an agreement with the state” (MacDonald, 1995). Even though she wrote many pieces in the Socialist Realism tradition, later in the nineties she withdrew them all, in an attempt to “clean up” her past and her catalogue of works. Due to her resistance to fully compromise and submit herself to the official compositional guidelines, Ustvolskaya became largely ostracized during the Soviet period. The life and career of a Soviet composer was basically determined by the Union of Composers, the institution that managed commissions, performances, concerts, recordings and so forth. For example, only two of her works were recorded in the Soviet Union by 1970, and these two pieces are among the ones she came to reject in the 1990s (MacDonald, 1995). Some of her ‘formalist’ pieces—the word ‘formalist’ was highly pejorative within the official Socialist Realism discourse—remained unknown for