How three provincial sisters created the main musical school of Russia

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Gnesinka is one of the most famous musical educational institutions in Russia. Many, trying to decipher the abbreviation, call the academy “named after Gnesin”. In fact, it bears the name of not one man, but several women, and their story is a real illustration of the advice according to which, if life gives only lemons, you just need to correctly adapt them on the farm.

Girls who grew up at the piano

In the sixties, when they got to Gnesinka and heard the name of one of the teachers, the students joked - did they name the lady in honor of the university? Actually, the university is in her honor, the old-timers replied. More precisely, in honor of her too. And her sisters. And the newcomer looked with different eyes at the old, very old pianist, always very neat, collected and, as it was now clear, with pre-revolutionary manners.

In the fifties, the surname of Elena Fabianovna did not cause any questions among students. Then she was still running the institute, and this fusion of a person and an educational institution looked so natural that what difference does it make whether the institute bears her name or she calls herself by the institute … In fact, the first was only partially true. After all, the institution was named after the three founding sisters. Like a fairytale.

There were even more sisters in the family: Gnesin Sr. was a rabbi, and such fathers usually have many children. When he was still young, he married the beautiful singer Beila Fletzinger, and she gave birth to twelve children from him, one after another. Nine - five girls, four boys survived. Seven of them were to remain in history. Largely due to the fact that Beila did not abandon music. Her husband bought her a piano, and the children grew up listening to their mother's playing, and then they themselves learned to run their fingers over the keys.

Beila Gnesina very quickly realized that she had passed on her musical talent to most of her children by inheritance, and persuaded her husband to pay for the lessons of the visiting teachers. But under the supervision of tutors, the children quickly reached the ceiling of their homework. And then … the parents let their fourteen-year-old daughter Evgenia go from Rostov-on-Don, where they lived, to Moscow alone. Enter the Moscow Conservatory. So what? Once their father came on foot from a village near Minsk to study in Vilnius.

There was a small quota for the admission of Jews to educational institutions. Eugene passed. And a couple of years later, in the same way, one, the younger sister Elena came to enter - and went through too. Needless to say that soon the walls of the conservatory saw both the third sister, Maria, and the fourth, Elizabeth? And only the fifth, Olga, received her brilliant musical education in the wrong place.

Thirty people will come first, then a hundred

When Rabbi Gnesin died, the daughters were still too young. Eugenia is twenty-one, Elena is seventeen, Mary is fifteen, Elizabeth is twelve. The youngest of the girls, Olenka, is only ten, and there was no chance that without paternal support she would not only enter the same conservatory as the older sisters, but would also be able to study there (without a scholarship, without dormitories, with tuition fees). But she was gifted no less than her elders …

In the situation the girls were in distress. Fortunately, their talent was highly appreciated at the conservatory. Together, the teachers were able to find the elders. Elena found a place as a music teacher at the gymnasium. Eugene was interrupted at first by private lessons, but she was also found a place in a music school. All four sisters lived very modestly, saving on everything, but the younger ones could continue their studies. But what does the future hold for them? The same scampering in removable corners, in private lessons?

Elena watched every day how the lessons in the gymnasium were arranged. She developed her own methodology in order to convey musical literacy to children, in order to teach them everything that she herself knows. Unlike the conservatory, where talented students were taken immediately, Elena had to think about how to develop the most ordinary children. All this gave her an idea. Why not open your own music school?

The older sister considered the idea almost insane, but the teachers of the conservatory sided with Elena. Yes, they said, there is a lot of competition - there are a lot of private tutors, there are enough private schools. But such a talent of girls like you is to look for. There are already pedagogical developments, the teaching staff, count, too - three sisters are not one, but there the youngest will catch up. “Feel free to get down to business and open a school! First you will have thirty students, then sixty, and then one hundred! And the girls decided.

From the piano room to the state university

At first, the school actually consisted of a small living room in the sisters' rented apartment. There was exactly one piano, and exactly three teachers taught: Eugene, Elena and Maria. Elena developed her own "Piano Alphabet", which is still used in music schools. Almost all the money earned was put aside - for expansion. It was expected after the release of Elizabeth, who was supposed to teach the violin class. She was the only sister who was not a pianist.

When, finally, the opening of the school of the Gnesins' sisters (which so far was not a “name”, but simply theirs) took place, the eldest, Eugenia, was already twenty-five. The youngest, Elizabeth, is sixteen. Some of the students were Elizaveta Fabianovna, a school teacher, of the same age! After all, the course of the school was unusual - not only children who started from scratch were taken here. Using the reputation of strong musicians and, most importantly, the recommendations of their professors from the Moscow Conservatory, the sisters prepared adolescents who had previously studied at home for admission to their alma mater.

The youngest of the sisters, Olga, studied and graduated from this particular school - the school of her own sisters. And immediately joined the ranks of the teaching staff. The establishment was still pulling and pulling. However, it already gave financial independence and the ability to support the mother and younger brothers.

The fates of the Gnesins' sisters developed in different ways, although they were invariably intertwined with the fate of the brainchild. At thirty-one, Evgenia married Savin, a professor at Moscow University, three years her junior. She organized the first children's choir in music schools in Moscow and raised the issue of a separate children's repertoire, becoming one of the founders of the genre of children's songs in Russia. In the twenties, for the People's Commissariat for Education (the then analogue of the Ministry of Education), she developed a unified training program for children's music schools of the RSFSR. She died a year before the outbreak of the war, at the age of seventy.

Elena Gnesina not only taught, but also gave concerts a lot. In 1919, she reached Lunacharsky with a demand … to nationalize her school. This step definitely saved the institution - in a few years the maintenance of a private school would have been impossible. She not only becomes the head of the now state school, but also actively cooperates with all possible organizations related to education; takes patronage over provincial music schools, travels to teach in children's labor colonies, participates in the creation of new educational programs and manuals. Her most famous student, by the way, is Aram Khachaturian. She lives safely to ninety-three years old.

Initially, they did not expect much success from Maria Gnesina - as a pianist she was weaker than her sisters and, probably, easily entered the Moscow Conservatory due to the fact that the teachers were already sympathetic to the Gnesins in general. But she had a huge pedagogical talent, and this is more important for the school. She sang pleasantly, wrote poetry, did artistic needlework, but the main thing for which her children loved was she was very kind, artistic and witty. Alas, she died in the fall of 1918, seriously ill. She was only forty-four years old.

Elizaveta Gnesina married twice. At twenty-two, for the violinist Vivien, and at thirty, for the violin maker Vitacek. Both her husbands were very talented people, to match Elizabeth herself. She survived a maternal tragedy - an eight-year-old son died in her arms from his first marriage. But the son from his second marriage lived a long life and showed himself as a typical representative of the Gnesins - musically gifted.

After the war, during the "fight against cosmopolitanism" at the Gnesins Institute, they suddenly remembered that Elizabeth was Jewish, and organized a real persecution of one of the Institute's founders. If Elena was able to survive this period without any special losses, then Elizabeth leaves the institute, falls ill from stress and dies - at the age of seventy-three years.

Olga Gnesina loved painting and theater, painted in oils and took part in theatrical performances, but she devoted her life to teaching children music. She married the chemical scientist Aleksandrov, and together with him raised her adopted daughter Lisa, who also became a music teacher. Lived to the sixties. And the school, which they once raised with their sisters, has now turned into the Gnessin Academy.

Sometimes it seems that there are people for whom there is no impossible or too difficult: How people settled on the world's smallest island.