Dr Graham Griffiths on the life of Leokadiya Kashperova

Until very recently Leokadiya Kashperova was remembered solely as Stravinsky’s piano teacher. However, research carried out since 2014 has revealed that she was not only a brilliant pianist (Glazunov’s and Balakirev’s preferred interpreter) but also an original and impressive composer in her own right. Her wide-ranging output – including a symphony, a piano concerto, choral works, chamber music, piano solos and art-songs – establishes Kashperova as Russia’s foremost woman composer of the first half of the Twentieth Century. At the height of her career, she enjoyed a truly international reputation.

Kashperova was born in 1872 and graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1895 with a performance of her cantata Orvasi to texts by the symbolist poet Merezhkovsky. (She conducted the premiere herself despite Rubinstein’s dismissive ‘Women conductors? Just a farcical idea!’) Over the next twenty years all Kashperova’s major compositions were premiered; and many were published.

Kashperova as a student entering the St Petersburg Conservatoire. She graduated in 1893 and was awarded the Schröder Pianoforte Prize as the outstanding Conservatoire pianist of her year. (Image courtesy of The Russian National Museum of Music)

In 1916 Kashperova’s steady professional ascendency was dramatically interrupted by her impulsive, indeed unlikely, marriage to her pupil Sergei Andropov, a Bolshevik revolutionary and close associate of Lenin. While living in London and operating undercover as an Iskra (‘Sparks’) agent he had been active printing anti-Tsarist propaganda, but by 1916 he was back in Russia, and married to Kashperova within six months of his return! Clearly the outbreak of Revolution on 8 March 1917 had a major impact on Kashperova as she had formerly circulated amongst the more cultured, educated society of Imperial Russia. From that moment, I believe that Andropov helped his wife navigate some extremely dangerous waters, particularly in 1918, when he had engineered the couple’s flight from Petrograd to the Caucasus and throughout Stalin’s infamous purges in the 1930s. Indeed, it is likely that he protected her until her death in 1940.

When they first met she was in the process of applying for the post of piano teacher at the Smolny Institute, founded in the 18th century by Catherine the Great to offer education to ‘noble maidens’, the daughters of the Russian nobility. Yet, correspondence I located in the Central State Archive revealed that no sooner had ‘Mlle Kashperova’ been received into this noble milieu than she was hastily writing again to resign her post before she had even taken it up.

At first, I thought that she must have been coerced into this resignation by her husband who would clearly have been horrified at the thought of explaining his wife’s new employer to his Bolshevik colleagues. But now I sense that Andropov might have had a premonition, if not inside knowledge, that impelled him swiftly to extract his wife from this potentially dangerous association, and by doing so he surely saved her life. It was at the Smolny Institute that Lenin established his headquarters. From its balcony he declared the successful outcome of the Revolution. It was there, too, that Kirov would be assassinated in 1934.

I offer two striking examples of how the upheavals of those years affected women in Russia at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Both images move me profoundly and illustrate the desperate sadness of those desperate times… First, a witness-account of morning prayers at the Smolny Institute on the day after the Tsar’s abdication. For the first time in over two centuries there was to be no prayer for the Tsar and his family. The young student chosen to lead the assembly in prayer that morning broke down, unable to pronounce ‘Let us pray for the Provisional Government’ provoking all pupils and staff present to join her in tears and sobbing. Secondly, I recall the image of Orthodox priests in Moscow’s Red Square blessing the newly-formed ‘Women’s Battalion of Death’ -– soon to be sent to the front line in a ploy designed to shame the Russian army into more manly, more patriotic action. Both accounts are poignantly expressive of that immense social upheaval, of such violence prevalent in so many forms amid the chaos caused by the impact of three simultaneous conflicts: revolution, civil war and world war.

That Kashperova, forgotten for over a century, should now feature in BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week historic platform, is indeed an honour. I extend my gratitude to the many BBC producers and performers (including the BBCSO, BBCCO and BBC Singers) involved in this immense project nationwide. There are as yet no CDs – everything has been done in-house to the highest standards. My most cordial thanks are reserved for Donald MacLeod who has skilfully written the five one-hour programmes. Immeasurable thanks are also due to producer Luke Whitlock who has dedicated the past two years to recording all of the catalogue in several BBC venues around the UK. On behalf of Leokadiya Kashperova and in her immortal memory I salute and thank one and all.

I believe that I speak for everyone who has contributed to Kashperova’s return journey when I say that, after a century of neglect this excellent composer thoroughly deserves her restoration and the opportunity, once more, to enchant musicians and concert audiences – this time, in perpetuity and around the entire musical world.

Dr Graham Griffiths is an honorary visiting research fellow in Musicology at City, University of London and is on the editorial board of St Petersburg Conservatoire’s Opera Musicologica. He is the editor of the Kashperova Edition (Boosey & Hawkes) and the author of Leokadiya Kashperova: Biography, ‘Memoirs’ and ‘Recollection of Anton Rubinstein’ (Cambridge University Press, 2023 - forthcoming). Other publications include Stravinsky’s Piano: Genesis of a Musical Language (CUP, 2013) and a collection of 35 short essays, Stravinsky in Context, ed. (CUP, 2021) both recently re-published in paperback.