Arts and Letters

Poets like Kristan Jaak Peterson in the early nineteenth century, and Heiti Talvik in the twentieth century represent the finest Estonian literary talents. We often forget Estonia's composers, especially those who left their country under stress, or even duress. Nikolai Lopatnikoff was born in Reval in 1903 and moved to St. Petersburg in 1914 where he began his musical studies at the Conservatory there.

Political circumstances had a way of forcing cosmopolitanism on Estonians. They were able to preserve their past by an economy of memory while existing in a constant flux of cultural ambivalence. With the outbreak of the Revolution the Lopatnikoff family fled to Finland. The Russians had taken over Estonia—that Estonia that lost her political independence to the Danes and Germans in the thirteenth century, to Swedes, and Germans again later, and finally to the Soviets who ruled there until 1918. Then for twenty-two years it treasured its sovereignty. But by 1920, Nikolai Lopatnikoff had settled in Heidelberg where his studies with Ernst Toch were important. After this, in order to support himself, he attended the Karlsruhe Technological University until 1927, receiving his diploma in civil engineering. It was in this period that conductors like Bruno Walter and Serge Koussevitsky performed his first orchestral works with great success. There was a lean strength in this music, and the contrapuntal and harmonic muscularity of the musical athletes of the nineteen twenties and early thirties, and the orchestral virtuosity of the imaginative craftsman. His works were soon heard at the leading European contemporary music festivals. In the United States, Koussevitsky and Gabrilovich performed his works regularly.

But in 1933 Hitler and Nazism forced him to resume his "travels," as he liked to call them. He returned to Finland where, through the intervention of Jan Sibelius, he was able to secure a residence permit. But this would not last long. His reputation as composer-pianist grew, and soon he was invited to London where his appearances were glowingly appraised. In 1939, when war seemed imminent, he came to this country. Shortly after his arrival, the insidious secret Soviet-Nazi agreement decided Estonia's fate, and it was annexed by the Soviets. I remember still Lopatnikoff's bitterness and his pain.

Unlike many of his colleagues who suffered difficult times here until employment was found for them, Lopatnikoff's years here were secure both as teacher and composer. Koussevitsky and Steinberg performed him with enthusiasm, and his distinctive chamber music was appreciated and respected. His first years here he taught at Tanglewood, and in his last years he brought distinction and accomplishment to his professorship at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. There he often invited composers for lectures and programs of their music. Although I met Kolya upon his arrival here, and saw him often on his trips to New York or Boston or Pittsburgh, it was not until an invitation from him to appear on his Composers' Series in Pittsburgh in the early sixties, that I was able to assess the unusual human being he really was. I say unusual in more than the usual sense, for we are all, really, unusual, come to think of it. But Nikolai Lopatnikoff had the blessing of spiritual obedience, a kind of asceticism-in-faith which sustained his admirably dedicated life. In that scholarly mind I felt the nature of one man and his music, and suddenly, as I sat writing this memorial tribute to him, some of his great heritage, so magically transvalued in his music, spoke to me in the poetry of Heiti Talvik which another Estonian poet had sent to me only a few weeks before Kolya's death.

It is our duty to force into a slender line
the blind rage of nature.

How well, it seems to me, these words sum up the life and music of Nikolai Lopatnikoff.