Serhiy Eduardovych Bortkevych (16 (28) February 1877, Blahodatne - 25 October 1952, Vienna) was a prominent Ukrainian composer of Polish origin, pianist and teacher.
Biography
Childhood. Studying in St. Petersburg and Leipzig
Serhiy Bortkevych was born in Kharkiv in 1877 to Eduard Bortkevych, a Polish nobleman from Vitebsk and owner of a distillery. The Bortkevychs lived in Kharkiv on the corner of Sumska Street and Myronositska Square. They also had a small estate in the village of Artemivka (now the city of Merefa), where Eduard Bortkevych bought a distillery (today the Artemivsk Distillery). His mother, Sofia Kazymyrivna Bortkevych, graduated from a music school in Kharkiv. She organised the Society for the Care of Needy Students of the Kharkiv Music School and became its chairman. As a gymnasium student, she performed several pieces in a concert for the royal family of Alexander II, who was visiting Kharkiv at the time. It was Sofia Kazymyrivna who gave her four children their primary musical education: Volodymyr, Yevheniia, Serhii and Vira. The composer later recalled: "As a child, I was taken to symphony concerts, and I had the opportunity to get acquainted with some of the greatest works of musical art, which were then performed at our home on a four-hand piano." Meeting Anton Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky had a great influence on Serhii.
Sergiy studied at the 3rd Kharkiv Gymnasium and at the music school of Ilya Slatin. Later, he entered the Law Faculty of St Petersburg University and, at the same time, the St Petersburg Conservatoire, where his teachers were Anatoly Lyadov and Glazunov. He was unable to complete his studies: the authorities closed the university due to revolutionary sentiments among the students. The administration extended his studies for one year, and Bortkevich decided to leave the university. Since he needed to do military service to obtain permission to travel abroad, he volunteered for the Alexander Nevsky Regiment. In the autumn of 1899, he began his military service in St. Petersburg, which did not last long. A few months later, he fell seriously ill and was treated for a long time in a military hospital. After recovery, he was discharged from military service and left St. Petersburg in the spring of 1900.
Bortkiewicz continued his musical education in Germany at the Leipzig Conservatory with Franz Liszt's pupil Alfred Reisenauer. From 1902, he performed concerts and toured. In the same year, he received the Schumann Prize after graduation.
He married in July 1904 to Yelizaveta Heraklytova, a friend of his sister Vira. They had no children. He moved to Berlin with her.
The first Berlin period (1904-1914)
He moved to Berlin with his wife, where he taught at the Clingworth-Scharwenk Conservatory in Berlin from 1904 to 1914. There he met the Dordrecht pianist and composer Hugo van Dahlen (1888-1967), with whom he remained friends until his death.
At this time, he took his first steps as a composer. Bortkiewicz destroyed his first piano concerto (Op. 1) after its premiere in 1906. The second work was not published, and the Opus 3 was published by Daniel Rather in 1906 in Leipzig.
The First World War and refugee in Constantinople
In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, he was expelled from Germany and returned to his native Kharkiv, where he gave private piano lessons and performed in a duet with violinist Franciszek Schmitt (Frank Smith).
After the Bolsheviks came to power, he was arrested by sailors as a representative of the "bourgeoisie". The family factories and the father's house at 28 Sumska Street, which had served as the composer's home for over 40 years, were nationalised, and the estate was looted. In November 1920[9], for the safety of his family, he was forced to leave for Constantinople via the Crimea and thence to Germany, carrying only a suitcase with music and $20 (~1.5 million karbovanets). In Constantinople, he began giving concerts and private lessons. Together with Odesa pianist Barshchansky, he opened his own music school. Despite the good living conditions in Constantinople, Bortkevych wanted to live in Europe. In August 1921, he wrote to van Dalen:
"Of course, I long for Europe, music, culture, and art with all my heart. In this respect, things are very miserable. Only the place and climate are good."
Thanks to the help of the Yugoslav ambassador, the composer and his wife received a Nansen passport and were able to obtain a visa to Yugoslavia. Bortkiewicz and his wife arrived in Sofia via Belgrade, where they had to wait for some time before obtaining an Austrian visa.
In 1922, he settled in Vienna. Thanks to his friend from St. Petersburg, Paul de Koon, he became acquainted with the Viennese musical community and publishers. He also helped the couple obtain Austrian citizenship in 1925.
During the bombing of Berlin in 1945, a bomb hit his house, and since then it was believed that both of Bortkiewicz's symphonies were lost along with many other works, but their manuscripts were later found in a California library by English enthusiast Melcom Ballana.
He died in Vienna in October 1952. Yelizaveta Heraklytova-Bortkevych - 9 March 1960. Both are buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Creativity.
Bortkiewicz called himself a romantic and melodist and was disgusted by what he called modern, atonal and cacophonous music. Bortkiewicz built his musical style on the sound of Chopin and Liszt, with the undeniable influence of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, early Scriabin and Blumenfeld. Like Metner, the main characteristics of his style were already present in his early compositions from around 1906, although from 1925 onwards his works became increasingly personal and nostalgic. Due to the nature of his music, the composer is called the "last romantic" and is considered a representative of the so-called neo-romanticism in music.
In an interview with Welt am Abend on 26 June 1948, Bortkiewicz said:
"I have often been called an epigone of Tchaikovsky, but this is not true: I certainly compose music in the atmosphere of Tchaikovsky and can well be classified as a romantic, but I have retained my own personal character. Today, people tend to consider all melodists to be epigones. Of course, this is very often wrong. For me, romanticism is not a bloodless intellectual devotion to a programme, but an expression of my deepest mind and soul."
In 1922, he received an order for a concerto for the left hand from Paul Wittgenstein. The pianist commissioned works with the right of exclusive performance, so they were not published during the musicians' lifetime. Wittgenstein gave many concerts with this work. In particular, we know that he performed this concerto in Kyiv in 1930. After the success of the piece, Bortkiewicz wrote another work for this pianist, the Russian Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, op. 45. Unfortunately, the work has not yet been published and is in the possession of the new owners of the Wittgenstein Archive. Later, Bortkevych rewrote his Russian Rhapsody for two hands.
Sergei Bortkevich's oeuvre comprises 74 pieces, 15 of which are still considered lost. Many of the pieces were recovered, in particular, thanks to the efforts of Melcom Ballan (UK), Bhagwan Nebhraj Thadani (PhD, University of Bombay), who now lives in Winnipeg and has been studying Sergei Bortkevich for over 30 years, and Walter Kalktman (Netherlands).
Thanks to Hugo van Dahlen, a close friend of the composer, we can still enjoy Bortkiewicz's music and learn about his life through the many letters he sent to the pianist. When van Dahlen died in 1967, his family bequeathed the manuscripts of several compositions, his written autobiography Erinnerungen, as well as a number of letters and printed scores to the City Museum in The Hague, a collection that was later transferred to the Nederlands Muziek Instituut in The Hague.
Performance.
During the Soviet era, Serhiy Bortkevych's work was almost unknown in his homeland. However, since 2000, thanks to Mykola Sukach, a conductor and Bortkevych's fan, and the Philharmonia Symphony Orchestra he created, his name has become known. The premiere of the First Symphony in D major, op. 52 "From My Motherland" by Serhiy Bortkevych, composed in 1935-1936, was premiered in Ukraine in mid-May 2000. The premiere of Serhiy Bortkevych's first concert in Ukraine took place in May 2000. At the time, it was an author's project by Mykola Suk, a Kyiv-based artist and Honoured Artist of Ukraine who now lives in the United States. He also "got" the score of the unpublished First Symphony for the Chernihiv Philharmonic Orchestra (artistic director and conductor Mykola Sukach, Honoured Artist of Ukraine). The Philharmonia Orchestra performed the third movement of the piano concerto at the National Palace "Ukraine" in October 2000. "Day" (No. 83, 15 May 2001) reported on the return of the composer's music to Ukraine. And it would be absolutely illogical not to continue the fascinating study of the work of the remarkable composer, whose name is practically unknown not only to Ukrainian music lovers, but also to musicologists. Thanks to the publication, two more works by Sergei Eduardovich return to Ukraine: Concerto No. 3, op. 32 for piano and orchestra and Russian Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, op. 42.
In 2018, the Ukrainian pianist Pavlo Hintov recorded Bortkevych's chamber music.
The list of works
See more: List of works by Sergei Bortkevich
Highlights.
Bortkiewicz's Second Piano Concerto for the left hand (Op. 28) was written for the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right hand in the First World War. The concerto was premiered in 1923 in Vienna.
He and his wife had a Sheltie dog named Bobby.
