Mikhail Gnesin - Later Career

Later Career

Gnesin, like many artists of Jewish descent, faced increasing discrimination in 1930s.

The position of Jews in the Soviet Union has always been a difficult one in that, unlike other ethnic minorities, Jewish culture has never received official backing, except in the 1920s...For example, the five volume History of Music of the Peoples of the USSR gives information on very small ethnic minorities, while the Jews, number around three million, are ignored. After the late 1930s, mention of Jewish music disappears from Soviet reference books altogether. It is significant that the 1932 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia devoted eight-two pages to Jews; the 1952 edition has one page (devoted to Jews)! In the bibliography to that meager article is a classic anti-Semitic text from Germany.

Gnesin was forced to abandon both his "progressive tendencies" and his interest in music with "an overtly Jewish theme". His teaching career also suffered. While he would retain his position as titular head of the Gnessin Institute until his death, in the late 1940s, Gnesin's sister, Elena, was compelled by Communist Party stalwarts to dismiss him from his teaching duties.

Apart from the Conservatoire, other educational institutions incurred repressions; as a consequence of the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign, the Gnessin Music Institute received commands and notices from higher bodies to fire various members of staff, the most distinguished being the composer and teacher Mikhail Gnessin. Yelena Fabianovna Gnessina felt how differently her relations changed with the Committee of Arts. She discovered the intimidating reports and slanderous letters given against her and Mikhail Fabianovich. Sadly, there was no other course but to release her brother from his teaching duties so as to avoid a worse fate.

Gnesin's teaching career, and the discriminatory politics of his era, also meant that his compositions were less prolific after 1935.

Gnesin counted Aram Khachaturian and Russian composer Tikhon Khrennikov among his pupils.

He died in Moscow on 2 February 1957.