Mikhail Gnesin - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Gnesin was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the son of Rabbi Fabian Osipovich Gnesin and Bella Isaevna Fletzinger. Each of the Gnesin children appears to have possessed musical talent, and Gnesin's three elder sisters, Evgenia, Elena and Maria, all graduated with distinction from the Moscow Conservatory. His sisters went on to found the Gnessin State Musical College (now the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music), an elite music school in Moscow in 1895.

Gnesin studied from 1892 to 1899 at the Rostov Technical Institute. In 1901, he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory where he studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov. In 1905 he was expelled for taking part in a student strike during the Revolution of 1905. He was reinstated the following year. In 1908 his early work Vrubel won the Glinka Prize. That same year he helped found, along with Lazare Saminsky and others, the Society for Jewish Folk Music. During this period Gnesin continued to take part in Socialist activities, teaching music to factory workers at workmen's clubs.

Among Gnesin's other early works was a 'symphonic fragment' (his Op. 4), based on Shelley's poem Prometheus Unbound. But much of his work at this time, and in the future, was associated with Jewish traditional musical styles which had become increasingly popular in Russia prior to 1914.

Just prior to the Revolution, Jewish music and musicians in Russia were experiencing a nationalist boom. Figures such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Stasov were actively encouraging the establishment of such a school...both Tsarist and Soviet authorities were not too happy about this development, and gave grudging permission for the folk side of Jewish culture to be established, rather than an openly Jewish nationalist compositional movement. Paradoxically, the number of Jewish performers within Russian culture was huge, and included many world-famous names.

In 1911, Gnesin traveled abroad, studying in Berlin and Paris. He then spent a year (1912-1913) studying at Vsevolod Meyerhold's studio in St. Petersburg. In 1913, Meyerhold opened a small theatrical school known as Dr. Dapertutto's Studio. In return for a nominal fee students were provided classes in theatre history, commedia dell'arte, Scenic Movement, and practical music and speech. The latter class was taught by Gnesin.

Actors in Dr Dapertutto's Studio in St Petersburg learned 'musicality', and the voice and speech work was incorporated into a course called 'The Musical Interpretation of Drama', taught by the composer Mikhail Gnesin. Gnesin included in his classes simple and complex forms of choral speech and plenty of singing, and indeed he analysed speech as song, so that actors often sang longer speeches for an exercise.

Later that year Gnesin returned to Rostov, where he continued to teach. He remained there until 1923.

Composer, Igor Stravinsky, who knew Gnesin prior to the Revolution of 1917, described him years later:

Gnessin himself was a striking character. He dressed as an Orthodox Hebrew, but at the same time was identified with radically anti-sectarian political and social views. I once sent him a note, after we had dined together, saying that I was delighted by our "sympathetic understanding." He answered me in a surprised and slightly shocked tone saying that he was sorry but I had been mistaken; he had felt no such sympathy. That was typical of Gnessin and, I suppose, it explains why I remember him.