From Russia to Love: The Life and Music of Viktoria Mullova

By Eva Chapman

The great violinist Viktoria Mullova's story is one of striking contrasts and huge challenges. As a young musician she was a bright star in the Soviet musical firmament, but she stunned the world when she escaped the KGB and fled to the West, leaving behind her family, friends and all she knew. And in her flight from Finland, Viktoria also abandoned on her hotel bed the priceless Stradivarius she'd played during her triumph at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. From Russia to Love recounts the journey of a remarkable woman. Armed only with her violin bow and her exceptional talent, Viktoria went on to conquer the West. As her new life unfolded, first in America and then in Europe, Viktoria met fellow exiles Nureyev and Rostropovich, fell in love with conductor Claudio Abbado and learned to throw off the shackles of her Russian training. Granted unparalleled access to her subject, Eva Maria Chapman paints an intimate, truthful and sensitive portrait of a unique artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Robson Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849544559

Book preview

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Imet Viktoria Mullova and her husband Matthew Barley at a music festival in Norfolk in 2008. Viktoria and I immediately formed a strong connection because of our common Ukrainian Russian past. She read Sasha & Olga, my memoir about my parents, and was moved by its echoes of her own history. I attended her concerts and was thrilled by the exquisite mastery of her violin. She was inspired by my book to find and reconnect to her relatives; I was inspired by her musical gift to research and write her story, much of it in her own words. It has been a privilege to have done so.

As we embarked upon this journey together we discovered astounding similarities in our backgrounds. She was familiar with the peasant songs my mother sang to me and even the punishments doled out. To our surprise, our mothers came from Ukrainian villages only seventy-five kilometres apart. They and their immediate families suffered the brutalities of Soviet suppression of the peasantry. Several of our forebears died of starvation in the man-made famine of 1932–33, my own grandmother cradling her son Trofim as he wasted away in her arms. Many of our family members were sent to the gulags for stealing a few morsels of food for their starving relatives, including my aunt Anna, uncle Ivan and Viktoria’s grandfather Nikolai and great-aunt Dasha. Both Viktoria and I had faced great danger escaping the Soviet totalitarian regime, me with my mother Olga at the age of three, she as the last great musical defector, aged twenty three. The families we left behind suffered as a result and were forced to endure censure from the KGB. My long-lost uncle Leonty was still afraid to talk about any of it when I finally tracked him down in 2000. Both Viktoria and I carried with us a legacy of the great terror that was wrought upon the Ukrainian people. My mother Olga could never escape it and succumbed to psychosis, spending the last seventeen years of her life in a mental hospital, never free of the fear that the KGB would come and find her.

It was the healing of the bitter 33-year rift with my father Sasha, who as a result died a happy man, which moved Viktoria to forge a closer relationship with her own father Yuri. As she said at the time, ‘I admire you so much for your strength and will to heal your family and go through all that hard work. I myself give up very easily on my relationships and you really inspired me.’

But she did not give up. On the contrary I have seen her relationships deepen as she has moved from fear to love. One of the great pleasures of writing this book has been watching Viktoria’s interaction with her father develop. The utter love and devotion that blossomed between them has been inspiring and humbling to witness.

Other highlights have been hearing Viktoria play so many different kinds of music, ranging from sublime renditions of Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ and jaunty interpretations of Vivaldi, to spirited jazz, pop and folk tunes with the Matthew Barley Ensemble. Her soulful performances of the Russian songs ‘Yura’ (for Yuri) and ‘Ochi Chernye’ (Dark Eyes), one of my mother’s favourite songs, I find especially moving and personally healing.

Eva Chapman

CHAPTER 1

VIKTORIA MULLOVA

TURNS FIFTY

Viktoria could have had a very flashy superficial career based on the rather romantic story of the girl who defected. But she’s too good a musician to settle for that. She just goes for the core of the music, and I like that very direct approach. She is also a very warm human being who enjoys life tremendously. Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen

Agroup of people stands in front of Viktoria Mullova’s house in a tiny street in Holland Park. They have been asked to be at the door at precisely six o’clock. This group is one of fifty birthday surprises which Matthew Barley has arranged to be presented to his wife over three days. Matthew, a devilish glint in his eye, beckons the guests in. They pad across the larchwood floors and up the stairs to an elegant sitting room with handsomely crafted antique furniture. Here Viktoria (Vika to her friends), flushed with happiness and a glass of sparkling champagne, is chatting with other groups of ‘surprises’.

She can’t wait to tell her new arrivals of her first surprise, who arrived at midnight on her birthday. Her son Misha dashed in fleetingly from Cambridge University, where he is in his first year, studying music. Misha is the son she had with Claudio Abbado, and is her first-born. Her voice is warm as she speaks of him. It is the first time he has lived away from home, and the fact that he was able to come down, even briefly, is truly special for her. Her other two children, Katia, vivacious at fifteen, and Nadia, sparkly at eleven, have been planning these surprises for weeks. Katia is wearing a red dress and with her long hair parted down the middle looks remarkably like her mother as a young woman. Nadia cartwheels effortlessly across the wooden floor in her ballet outfit. She is a proud weekly boarder at the Royal Ballet School. With dimples and shining brown eyes, she bubbles with excitement. As guests sip champagne, the party unfolds. Exquisite food is arranged downstairs in the basement kitchen, and more bottles of champagne are popped. Candles flickering from containers illuminate flowers, arranged simply in glass tumblers.

It is the last evening of the three-day party and there is one more special surprise in store, the grand finale. This has been shrouded in great secrecy, and judging from the barely suppressed hysteria of Viktoria’s daughters it is obvious that something big is about to happen. As people gather around a large wooden table in the kitchen and sample the sumptuous array of food, various muffled noises, door bangings and stifled shrieks are heard in the background. The guests have been asked to keep Viktoria distracted. She, her cheeks pink with bon vivant and champagne, seems oblivious to the drama unfolding behind her.

The final fiftieth surprise has been tricky for Matthew to arrange. He has secretly flown in one of Viktoria’s favourite performers, comic violinist Aleksey Igudesman, from Vienna. Aleksey accepted the undertaking on the condition that another violinist acts as his foil. The only one Matthew can find at short notice has been touring in Canada, but has flown back to London this very evening. The muffled sounds are Matthew smuggling these musicians and their instruments in through the front door, down the stairs, past the kitchen and into the music room at the front of the house. Fortunately Viktoria, humming with happiness and social interaction, does not notice a thing. At ten o’clock all are ushered into the spacious music room, a Steinway piano gracing the corner. Viktoria is placed on a giant soft leather beanbag in the centre of the room, her eyes wide with expectation at what could possibly happen next. Aleksey, violin aloft, leaps out in front of her. Astonishment and joyous shock flood her face. She can’t believe that she has Aleksey Igudesman in her own house. He is a rare breed, a stand-up comic with violin who performs hilarious concerts. Viktoria’s kids love watching him on YouTube. All laugh uproariously. Aleksey, as well as being a good violinist, has the kind of wacky Russian humour that chimes with Viktoria.

The lavish life that Viktoria Mullova has created is a far cry from where she was born fifty years earlier: grim, wintry, 1950s Moscow. Viktoria’s mother, Raisa, in the throes of early labour, had to travel to a maternity hospital in the city in the dead of night, bracing herself and her unborn child against a temperature of minus forty degrees. She had to travel alone on the long trek from the suburb of Zhukovsky forty miles away, first on a rattling train then a change to the metro. Raisa’s husband Yuri, an aeronautics engineer, was not able to take time off from work. Then a few days later, Raisa had to pick her way down the icy road from the hospital, carrying her newly born child, bundled up against the arctic winds of early December. Old women in scarves and boots swept the ice and snow off the pavements with straw brooms as mother and child headed towards the metro and the tedious journey home. Home was a badly heated, tiny, one-room flat.

Then twenty-three years later this child had grown up, and, during a particularly frosty era of the Cold War, escaped through an iron curtain of man-made ignorance and cruelty to the West. Defection from the USSR was a deadly serious affair, courting great danger from one of the grimmest regimes of all time. Viktoria Mullova was the only solo violinist who tried. The young and beautiful heroine carried her worldly possessions, including her violin bow, in a plastic bag. The dash to freedom – containing high drama, KGB guards, a Georgian boyfriend, secret accomplices, aliases and disguises – was fraught with peril.

Viktoria’s life has been like that: full of extremes. The impoverished young woman with just her bow has become a doyenne in the world of classical music. From practising in the corner of a tiny apartment in a soulless Moscow suburb, she now lives in a stunning house which she herself has designed and decorated. This woman is full of grit and determination, fashioned by the circumstances in which she honed her exceptional technical skills. She is an inspiration. When Viktoria escaped from the USSR, she left her family and friends behind, believing she would not see them again. Now she is reconnecting with many of them. She has nurtured her relationship with her father Yuri, whom she thought she might never see again when she defected. She has reconnected with his family, who live in Irkutsk, Siberia, and has found long-lost relatives in St Petersburg.

She has travelled back to her past, to her roots, to her humble peasant origins. Being a peasant was frowned upon in Communist Russia; peasant farmers or kulaks were accused of holding back the revolution and were hounded, murdered, imprisoned and starved. Raisa, Viktoria’s mother, jumped from being a poor peasant girl straight to university. Yuri Mullov’s maternal grandmother had never gone to school in the Ukraine, yet Yuri leapt to being an aeronautical engineer in a prestigious Soviet military establishment. Even though the leap landed them both in a little box on the edge of Moscow, they felt they were part of a glorious historic revolution, and at least they had an inside toilet. As dutiful citizens they were now educated Soviet professionals, and banished any peasant antecedents from their psyches. Their daughter, however, has leapt into a unique stratosphere of her own, having become a highly acclaimed solo artist on the classical world stage. But now Viktoria Mullova is determined to reclaim her humble beginnings.

In her 2011–12 ‘The Peasant Girl’ concerts, Viktoria explores music with folk and gypsy overtones to recapture a peasant past, a time that was severely disrupted by totalitarian regimes. In these concerts, the accompanying recordings and film, she plays a selection of music with her cellist husband Matthew Barley and his Ensemble which expresses the beauty and simplicity of the land and is full of peasant humour, romance and spontaneity – all aspects frowned upon in Viktoria’s training at the Moscow Conservatoire.

Viktoria is one of the top violinists in the world today and commands that position by dint of her outstanding technical virtuosity and adventurous spirit, unafraid to venture into unknown realms both past and present. Now fifty, her life falls into two radically different halves – the first in a repressive Soviet system and the second in the comparative freedom of the West. How she has combined those antithetical experiences musically, emotionally and spiritually makes for a fascinating story.

Viktoria is also on a journey to love. As she says,

I was so single-minded when I was growing up. The fact that everything was aimed towards one goal – to succeed as a violinist – made me very tough. I was continually told by my mother to be very careful with people, because they all wanted something from me. She insisted that I must never trust anyone. Basically she herself didn’t believe in unconditional love and human kindness, and that’s what she passed on. It was impossible for me to trust people so I became a loner with no friends, not that I had a lot of time for them anyway.

When I was a teenager and started to think for myself a big crack appeared in my relationship with my mother, which grew wider in the years to come. It seemed impossible for her to let me grow up and separate. The more I rebelled against her, the more she would say, ‘you are cruel’ and ‘nobody loves you’. The more she said those words, the more I believed I was a bad person. As a consequence I became harder and harder.

I barely knew my younger twin sisters and had no idea what they were up to. There wasn’t any time to be with the family, since each day was taken up with four hours’ travel to and from school and violin practice. I saw little of my father, who was working very hard to support the family.

I didn’t feel much love in my family, not very much love for them nor for myself. The only thing they talked about was my successful future as a violinist. Who I was as a person was never important. Later on, when I was in the West, I started to crave love. I wanted to have children. I wanted to love someone unconditionally. That was the most important thing for me.

And when it happened it changed my life and I began to become a different person. I began to open up.

Viktoria says that among the most sublime moments in her life is when she is playing Bach and the audience is totally with her. As Tim Ashley of The Guardian has said, ‘To hear Mullova play Bach is, simply, one of the greatest things you can experience.’

A comment after a video of one of her Bach concerts on YouTube reads, ‘I remember how she played and won in the Tchaikovsky competition which was broadcast on American television all those years ago … she was so pretty and what a talent. Here is the finished artist in her own true voice.’ Viktoria is certainly playing more with ‘her own true voice’, but she is not ‘finished’ as an artist. Far from it.

Viktoria was twenty-two when she won the Tchaikovsky gold, the most prestigious prize in the classical world, an honour which recognised her technical mastery. Now she plays Bach in a completely different way, aiming to reflect more accurately the original ‘true voice’ of Bach, and her interpretations continue to evolve.

She has moved breathtakingly quickly from the confines of the Russian style of classical music. She has conquered one of the most sophisticated of musical art forms, mastering the core repertoire of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. However, she keeps moving, broadening her skills and techniques to embrace music and herself in greater depth. She has excelled in the extraordinary variety that music in the West has to offer, changing her phrasing and learning subtleties of interpretation – for which she has won countless accolades. Not content with that, she has returned to an earlier incarnation of her instrument, using gut strings, changing the pitch and wielding a shorter bow – all in a new exploration of Baroque music. And she is delving into the music of twentieth-century composers and improvising.

Due to her adventurous nature she is willing to brandish her virtuoso musicianship in unusual directions. With the Matthew Barley Ensemble, which features jazz pianist Julian Joseph and her husband Matthew on the cello, she plays jazz and pop classics first performed by the likes of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Alanis Morissette, the Bee Gees and the Beatles in clever arrangements. Her music keeps evolving into new and exciting directions.

Whether in eliciting the depth of Beethoven’s emotion from a gut string, or improvising around peasant melodies and pop tunes with her husband, or meditating on the intricacies of Bach with her bow, or being a selfless mother to her children, or Skyping her sick father in Moscow, or feasting with her family in Siberia, Viktoria Mullova is on a journey to love, working her way towards a 21st-century future which combines all the good, bad and ugly of the last century.

To understand this we have to go back to her roots.

CHAPTER 2

RYABUKHI

There is something deep in Viktoria’s basic aesthetic of how she relates to the world, and more importantly to the music she loves and plays. She loves simplicity, and emotional directness and power, as well as the virtuosity that comes from the heart and for the heart. While I was musing on all this, we listened to ‘The Peasant’ by Weather Report, and it occurred to me that this was the key that I’d been searching for! Just two generations ago, Viktoria’s ancestors were living off the land in a tiny village in the Ukraine, and it was this peasant quality that is so deep in her – of course not in any pejorative sense, but in the sense of a deep, calm honesty and simplicity. Matthew Barley, 2010

Up until a couple of years ago, Viktoria knew very little about her past. Her parents didn’t mention their early lives. Her mother was ashamed of her peasant origins and never spoke about them. Viktoria on the other hand, is not. ‘I am not ashamed at all. I am very proud of being a peasant girl. I want to discover as much about my roots as I can.’

As this history is uncovered it has become understandable why it has been hidden. Viktoria’s past is steeped in tragedy, humiliation and persecution. Viktoria’s maternal grandparents, Marusia and Nikolai Ivanenko, were born at the start of the First World War and their daughter Raisa during the Stalinist purges of 1938. They came from the tiny Ukrainian village or selo of Ryabukhi, Marusia and Nikolai being children just as the new Bolshevik regime began its long, lethal war against the peasants. Both Nikolai’s and Marusia’s parents were branded kulaks, peasants who dared resist the regime. When Raisa was born, no one was safe in the USSR and people became extremely secretive and were forced to obliterate normal human feelings. As Viktoria says, ‘there are many things we will never know; so many of my family were killed. We were kulaks who were hated by the Soviet regime. But I am so happy now to start to know; to know something.’

With more information gathered from surviving relatives by Viktoria and myself, a picture emerges which puts a frame around this rare woman who straddles an era of repressive terror and an era of boundless liberation, her sublime music weaving its common thread through both.

One of the people approached is Viktoria’s mother Raisa. She is divorced from Viktoria’s father and now lives in Italy. Viktoria Skypes her to gather information about her past. Her mother is a fair-haired, youthful-looking woman in her early seventies who can be very sharp and to the point, as witnessed immediately when Viktoria introduces me as her biographer. ‘I don’t understand why this person is writing your story. I should be writing it, not her.’ Viktoria sighs apologetically. ‘This is typical of my mother. She thinks she knows everything about me and the way I feel.’

When Viktoria tells her that my family, the Nesterenkos, came from Tarasivka, a village only a short distance from her own, she softens a little.

‘Can you say something about your grandparents?’ Viktoria asks, hoping to get over this hiccup. Raisa seems reluctant to answer but does say that her grandmother Lydia was a healer and midwife in Ryabukhi, her grandfather Konstantin Palaus had a small plot of land from which to feed his family and that her mother Marusia was the seventh of thirteen children, and enough other details to build up the picture. It starts during a time of relative calm in the Ukrainian countryside, before the explosion of the First World War and other drastic events which would change the lives of the people in Ryabukhi forever.

Lydia Palaus led the sickly horse gently through the old orchard her husband’s grandfather had planted, and headed out towards the woods, two of her five children trailing behind. She and the children were singing their favourite ‘going to the woods’ song:

‘Pashli detki tam gulyat, lat lat

Shtob svitochki tam narvat. vat, vat’

(Come on children let’s go wander, wander, wander

Picking flowers yonder, yonder, yonder.)

The horse belonged to her neighbour, who was convinced someone had cast the evil eye on the animal and had asked Lydia to bring it back to health. On the edge of the woods, in a sunny clearing, she let the horse graze while the children ran off to gather wildflowers. As the horse foraged, she spoke to it soothingly, gently stroking its mane. Lydia knew the animal would instinctively find the grasses and herbs it needed in order to be well. Her healing knowledge was revered in the selo of Ryabukhi, nestling on a tributary of the Dnieper river in Eastern Ukraine. Lydia stretched up and breathed in the clear air that blew across the steppe, admiring the undulation of the grasses which shimmered like a vast inland sea in the summer heat. She patted her hand on her stomach where her sixth child was beginning to grow. Little Dasha, a delightful little girl, came running up and gave her some wildflowers and clutched at her skirts. Lydia looked down affectionately at the sweetest of smiles dimpling Dasha’s apple cheeks.

‘Yes I remember my great Aunt Dasha,’ says Viktoria. ‘We visited her in Ryabukhi when I was a child, and she was always such a happy old lady, despite the dreadful hardships she suffered in her life.’

The horse regained its strength, and pulled the wooden plough once again, making deep furrows in the rich black earth. Wheat and rye sprouted forth abundantly and, at the end of each summer, men and women cut the hay with scythes, singing in harmony as they worked. Another child was born to the Palaus family and took its place on top of the alcove above the stove which was the warm heart of their thatched, whitewashed cottage. Lydia’s husband Konstantin, the proud owner of a few goats and chickens, tended their fruit orchard and grew potatoes and vegetables on his own patch of earth to feed his growing family. Life was tough but much better than in olden times when their grandparents were yoked by serfdom. The ground was rich, the river bubbled forth fresh water and in spring, when the warm sun melted the snow, the orchard sprang into a glorious symphony of blossom. Konstantin made samogon, a kind of vodka which was drunk on feast days, when travelling troubadours came to play on their balalaikas and skrypki and sang. Life was simple, harmonious and direct.

In 1914, Lydia gave birth again and called her child Marusia. But the rhythm of the land was rudely disrupted and was never the same again. War! All the men went off to fight. Not many knew who or what they were fighting for. A variety of foreign armies joined the fray. Soldiers came to the Palauses door with terrible injuries. Lydia didn’t even have time to sing lullabies to the new baby Marusia; lullabies she had always sung to soothe her other babies to sleep. Marusia was overlooked as chaos swirled around her.

‘My babushka Marusia was definitely neglected,’ Viktoria observes. ‘She always seemed so bitter and unhappy, not like my Aunt Dasha at all.’

Then came the Revolution! The country was in breathless upheaval. Trumpeting voices proclaimed that the centuries-old rule of the House of Romanov had fallen. The Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky graphically described what had hit his country:

Everything was disrupted in a mighty gust of wind that changed direction chaotically, and spread like wildfire. It was a hunt-a-hunt for Whites and Reds, for the ghosts and for the living. The wounded with their insides out charged forward, and none believed himself dead. The cries for vengeance or freedom made calls for mercy too feeble to hear. The mice of yesterday were the tigers of today, and rabbits laughed like hyenas.

Independence for Ukraine was proclaimed in Kiev. Samogon flowed freely as peasants in Ryabukhi feasted and cheered. But independence, like cherry blossom, was short-lived, trodden underfoot by the Bolsheviks, who demanded loyalty for the newly formed Soviet state. After four years of being embroiled in a world war, the countryside was now plunged into brutal civil strife, soaking the steppe in blood. Any men left in Ryabukhi were even more confused about who to fight for. Reds, Whites, Blacks, even Greens? All armies vied for recruits to join their bedraggled forces. Marauding bands grabbed anything they could lay their hands on: horses, stored food, even the boots fresh off any hapless peasant’s feet.

Konstantin Palaus just wanted to stay home quietly and tend to his goats, cut his hay and sow his garlic before the frosts set in. Lydia was pregnant again. She feared for the child within, gripped by fear of what the future would hold for