Russian Garden Gazette

On September 25, Dmitri Shostakovich would have turned 120.

That same day the musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra went on strike. At risk was the last major European tour of Franz Welser-Möst — the music director closing a twenty-five-year era this season. On September 27 the two sides reached agreement, and the tour was saved.

The Shostakovich connection is no accident. Welser-Möst’s final season opened with his Eighth Symphony. And the orchestra’s own history became entwined with Shostakovich’s fate ninety years ago.

On January 31, 1935, at Severance Hall, Artur Rodziński conducted the American premiere of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. A year earlier he had heard the opera in the Soviet Union, met the young Shostakovich, and resolved to bring the score to Cleveland whatever it took.

It became something of an adventure. The American ambassador, William Bullitt, helped, and at the Leningrad border a guard took the set designs for plans of military fortifications — the conductor had a lot of explaining to do. But Shostakovich’s music crossed the border and was heard in Cleveland, and then in New York.

In March 1936 a young European conductor, George Szell, appeared in the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. Only weeks earlier Pravda had printed “Muddle Instead of Music” — and the opera America had just welcomed became, at home, a potentially deadly charge against its composer.

Szell had no connection to Cleveland yet. He would take over The Cleveland Orchestra in 1946 — and nineteen years after that, return to the same Leningrad hall.

Almost everything had changed in between: the Great Terror, the war, the siege, a Europe destroyed and rebuilt. In two decades Szell had made The Cleveland Orchestra one of the great orchestras of the world. Now an iron curtain stood between America and the Soviet Union — and the music had to pass through it.

The trip took about three years to prepare. As early as October 1963, The New York Times reported that Szell would take his orchestra to the Soviet Union.

From April 14 to May 20, 1965, the orchestra played in Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Sochi and Leningrad. Officially it was cultural diplomacy. In practice it came down to people. When the luggage with the concert clothes was delayed in Moscow, musicians of the Moscow Philharmonic lent their guests their own tailcoats. After concerts, the Americans were invited home. In Kyiv the Clevelanders discovered, to their surprise, how distinct Ukrainian culture and its language were.

And in Leningrad the same hall was waiting for Szell. The orchestra’s general manager, Beverly Barksdale, later called it the best hall of the entire tour.

The story almost composes itself.

But a great orchestra is more than a conductor and a sound. It is about a hundred musicians who spend decades together, and a perennial question: where does the conductor’s authority end and the orchestra’s own voice begin?

Szell demanded near-absolute precision and discipline — and also won year-round employment for his musicians. He demanded a great deal from the orchestra, and a great deal for it. But there were conflicts: in 1967 the musicians struck for seven days.

Szell died on July 30, 1970. Almost at once came a 41-day strike — over pay and pensions, but also over auditions, seating, and whether the orchestra should have a say in choosing its next leader.

The musicians made their view clear: in an informal vote almost all of them backed István Kertész; Lorin Maazel received two votes. The board chose Maazel. He was an outstanding conductor and kept the orchestra’s standard high, but relations stayed difficult, and in 1980 the musicians struck again. A great conductor and a great partnership between conductor and orchestra are not the same thing.

Under Christoph von Dohnányi (1984–2002) the orchestra had a Salzburg residency, played in China for the first time, and was named the best orchestra in America by Time. And eighteen years passed without a single strike. When Dohnányi died in 2025, the orchestra’s president, André Gremillet, described his relationship with the musicians in three words: deep mutual respect.

In 2002 the era of Franz Welser-Möst began. He kept the famous Cleveland precision and transparency and, in the orchestra’s own words, added warmth and flexibility. And one number matters especially:

More than half of today’s orchestra joined under him — so its sound is the product of a quarter-century of shared work. Under Welser-Möst the musicians struck only once, for one day in 2010, after the financial crisis. Seven days in 1967, 41 in 1970, two weeks in 1980, one day in 2010: this year’s strike was the fifth, not the second, as some early TV reports said.

That is why the dispute of 2026 was about more than pay. Welser-Möst is leaving, no successor has been named, and the musicians asked: who will decide who joins the orchestra? For twenty-five years “the music director’s decision” meant Franz’s decision — a man they knew, played with and argued with. Now it meant the powers of someone nobody knows yet.

In 1970 the musicians asked what voice the orchestra should have in choosing its conductor. In 2026 the question was reversed: what voice should the musicians have when the conductor chooses their future colleagues?

The strike began on September 25. Concerts in Ann Arbor and at Severance were canceled; instead of the Saturday concert, the musicians played for the public free of charge at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. On September 27 a new three-year contract was ratified: base pay rises 5 percent a year, from $165,516 to $191,620. The music director keeps the final word — but no candidate can reach it without the approval of a majority of the musicians on the audition committee.

Neither side said the deal was made for Welser-Möst’s sake, and he deliberately stayed out of the talks. But the context is plain: by the end of the season he will have given more than 1,200 performances with the orchestra — in 93 cities, 26 countries and 15 states.

On September 29 The Cleveland Orchestra left for Europe.

Four days earlier, this tour might not have happened at all. Now fifteen concerts in nine countries lie ahead: Hamburg, Dortmund, Luxembourg, Paris, Brussels, Bratislava, Linz, Budapest, Vienna, Ljubljana, Thessaloniki, Athens.

On October 2 Franz Welser-Möst will walk onto the stage of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie with The Cleveland Orchestra. And the first symphony of this last European journey will be the same music with which his final Cleveland season began — Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony.

The Eighth was written in 1943, at the very center of Europe’s catastrophe, and ends not in triumph but in a quiet, almost impossible continuation of life. Perhaps that is why it fits this story so well.

After Szell, a sound remained. After Dohnányi, respect. After Welser-Möst there will be an orchestra more than half of which he assembled, and a slightly different balance between conductor and musicians. The next music director will inherit one of the great orchestras of the world — and almost eighty years of experience: of discipline and resistance, conflict and compromise.

Some works enter history helped by their author’s name. And then there is the music of Vladimir Vavilov.

One of his best-known pieces has been performed around the world for decades as the Ave Maria of Giulio Caccini — an Italian composer who died three centuries before this music existed.

Another became one of the most recognizable Russian songs of the late twentieth century. Most people know it as “Gorod zolotoy” — “The Golden City” — sung by Boris Grebenshchikov. The words are by Anri Volokhonsky. The melody came from a record on which it was credited to another Italian, Francesco da Milano.

At the center of both stories stands one man: a Leningrad guitarist and lutenist who lived only forty-seven years and did something paradoxical. He hid his name so well that his music outlived him — and became famous under other people’s names.

Millions know Vavilov’s music, yet his biography still fits into a few paragraphs.

Born May 5, 1925, in Leningrad. Studied. Fought in the war. Was wounded. After the war, became a guitarist and lutenist.

We too began by repeating this short entry. Then we stopped at one word: fought.

Vavilov was sixteen when the war began. He lived in Leningrad. Where was he during the siege? When was he called up? In which unit did he serve? Where was he wounded? How did the war end for him?

We decided to try to find out. The search took far longer than we expected. We went through military databases, tried different spellings of his name and birth date, and cross-checked records from the Memory of the People database and the Book of Memory of Besieged Leningrad. At first some of the digital record cards only added confusion: abbreviations of military units are easy to misread, and details taken one by one, without checking them against each other, sketched an entirely different life.

But gradually several documents added up to a much more concrete story. Records of the Frunzensky district military enlistment office in Leningrad give Vladimir Fyodorovich Vavilov’s place of service: the 45th Reserve Rifle Regiment of the 44th Reserve Rifle Brigade. The same records note a severe wound, treatment in an evacuation hospital, and demobilization on June 5, 1945. And one more small detail suddenly turns an archive card into a human document: his mother’s name — Nadezhda Nikolaevna.

Behind a few lines of military paperwork appears a very young Leningrader who came through the war and a severe wound — and returned to music.

Here it is important to draw a line between what we could establish and what the documents do not say. We cannot reconstruct his war day by day, and we should not invent for the archive what is not in it. But instead of the stock phrase “served in the war, was wounded,” we now have a few real coordinates of his life.

And that may be especially fitting in the story of a man whose name met the opposite fate: his own coordinates gradually faded, while the music he created traveled the world under other names.

After the war Vavilov studied guitar and composition, played the seven-string Russian guitar, then took up the lute and became one of the notable figures in the Soviet revival of early music.

But he did not only perform early music. He composed it — and gave the authorship away.

In 1970 Vavilov recorded an album for Melodiya, Lute Music of the 16th and 17th Centuries. The title promised old European music, and the sleeve did indeed carry the names of old masters. But over time it emerged that much of this musical past was most likely created by Vavilov himself.

One piece he credited to Francesco Canova da Milano, the great Italian lutenist of the sixteenth century. Another he prudently labeled simply “Anonymous.”

That was the Ave Maria.

Caccini’s name was not on the record. This detail matters. We are used to saying, “Vavilov wrote an Ave Maria and attributed it to Caccini.” The story is subtler: in Vavilov’s lifetime it was published as the work of an unknown composer.

Vavilov died in 1973. By 1975 the Ave Maria had appeared in a recording by Irina Bogacheva — under the name of Giulio Caccini. Who first attached that name is still not known; some popular versions of the story do not survive a simple check of the dates. In 1988 Irina Arkhipova recorded it, again as Caccini. Worldwide fame came in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union — above all after the recording by the Latvian soprano Inessa Galante.

Giulio Caccini is a real and major figure of the early Baroque: Florence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the new monody, the birth of opera. The famous Ave Maria simply has nothing to do with him. There is no seventeenth-century manuscript, no early edition, no performance history leading back to his time. There is a twentieth-century recording by Vladimir Vavilov.

And yet the borrowed name proved astonishingly durable. It became a kind of passport for this music. With it the piece set off into the world — in vocal, choral and instrumental versions, in concert programs and recordings by famous performers.

And a paradox arose: the more famous the piece became, the further its real author receded.

We met Italy in our previous issue. Now it returns in a completely unexpected way: a Russian composer wrote music the whole world took for Italian.

But that is only half the story. On the same record was a “Canzona” credited to Francesco da Milano.

The piece is not among Francesco’s published works. Scholars have found a related melody in a sixteenth-century Netherlandish collection printed by Pierre Phalèse, where it appears as a pavane derived from an even earlier French song. So the “Canzona” may indeed have a Renaissance ancestor. But the piece as the world knows it is Vavilov.

And it was this record that the Leningrad poet Anri Volokhonsky heard.

In November 1972 a melody from Vavilov’s record was running through Volokhonsky’s head — the very “Canzona” he believed to be by Francesco da Milano. In the studio of the artist Boris Axelrod — “Axel” — a text took shape, beginning with the words “Above the blue sky…”

Volokhonsky himself linked the song’s imagery to the atmosphere of that studio and the artistic world being made there. And so a piece that already had an invented Italian author acquired Russian verse.

The first to sing it was Alexei Khvostenko. Vavilov died on March 11, 1973, at forty-seven — just as the song was beginning its life.

The song made its way through Leningrad’s unofficial culture, passed from singer to singer, and eventually reached Boris Grebenshchikov. He changed the famous first word: Volokhonsky’s city was “above the blue sky,” Grebenshchikov’s — “beneath the blue sky.”

The change seems tiny, but the song’s space becomes different. For Volokhonsky the city lies above the sky, almost in a metaphysical realm. For Grebenshchikov it is beneath the sky — as if it could be looked for here.

Later Sergei Solovyov’s film Assa made the song known to millions. And once again the public knew above all the performer — not the whole chain of people through whom the song came into being and reached them.

Vavilov’s two stories fit together.

He composes an Ave Maria; the record lists the author as unknown; later the music is given Caccini’s name; the world remembers Caccini.

He records a “Canzona” under the name of Francesco da Milano; Volokhonsky writes words; Khvostenko sings it; Grebenshchikov makes it famous.

Each time the music passes through a new door — and each time Vladimir Vavilov’s name stays somewhere behind.

You can call it a hoax. Or a strange form of authorial self-effacement. You can guess at practical reasons for such attributions. But we have no reliable word from Vavilov himself explaining why he did it. We know the result. We do not know the motive.

Vladimir Vavilov died without knowing what lives these melodies would lead. His Ave Maria crossed countries, languages, faiths and concert halls — under the name of a man who never wrote it. His “Canzona” became Volokhonsky’s poem, Khvostenko’s song, then Grebenshchikov’s — and part of the memory of several generations.

And here the theme of this whole issue unexpectedly returns. In 1965 The Cleveland Orchestra carried music through a real Iron Curtain: the State Department, the Soviet authorities, visas, planes, trains, an enormous organizational machine. Vavilov’s music traveled from Leningrad to an Italy that never figured in its origins — and from there, around the world. Practically on its own.

I think it was 1996.

I was writing a paper on Brodsky at the time, and for some reason I decided I absolutely had to talk to Pyotr Vail.

Today I can no longer say for certain at which of Moscow’s “thick” literary journals we met — Novy Mir or Znamya. But memory keeps insisting on Znamya.

I did not go alone. I went with my beloved mother-in-law, Alevtina Anatolyevna.

The conversation soon went where a conversation about Brodsky almost inevitably goes — to Venice.

By then I had been to Italy several times and was reading Brodsky’s Fondamenta degli Incurabili over and over. Brodsky’s Venice was not a literary backdrop for me: I already knew that strange experience of seeing a city with your own eyes first, and then, after reading, finding you look at it a little differently.

But from Brodsky’s Venice we unexpectedly moved to Vail’s Venice — to stories that were already taking shape as the world of his future book Genius Loci.

One story stayed with me especially. Vail told us how he had been received in an old Venetian palazzo belonging to Count Girolamo Marcello.

The combination alone — a Venetian palazzo, a count, a family that had lived there for centuries — sounded almost like a fairy tale to us then.

And Vail’s own genuine amazement was especially funny and touching: here in front of you is an aristocrat whose ancestors owned this very palace for hundreds of years, where you are now a guest; around you is a space where family history is measured not in decades but in centuries — and the conversation flows naturally, cheerfully and easily, as with friends and colleagues.

No museum solemnity. No distance between “history” and the person who lives inside it.

Alevtina Anatolyevna was a very tactful and very well-read woman. She certainly took part in the conversation — but with that rare delicacy which does not try to take up space, yet does not stay outside the conversation either.

We were both completely enchanted by Vail.

Not only by his erudition — I have met plenty of erudite people. Vail had something else, a much rarer combination: depth and a merry mind. The ability to see in an instant the connection between things that had seemed utterly remote from each other — and to tell you about it without professorial self-importance, lightly and almost with relish.

The Severyanin chapter of his book Poems About Me captures this perfectly. The title itself is very much Vail: it seems to be about other people’s poems, and turns out to be about his own life.

Vail begins with an army “cultural landing party”: a regimental ensemble performing at the club of a factory outside Riga. The soloist steps out before the audience in a lilac plush jacket and a cream shirt with a jabot and begins to sing Igor Severyanin — “In a rustling dress of moiré…” The evening nearly ends in a brawl.

Over the next few pages, the filmmaker Juris Podnieks, soldiers’ life, Leo Tolstoy, Bryusov, Severyanin’s emigration, Estonia, the war and the memory of youth come together quite naturally. And then again — a warm night, young soldiers, girls from the assembly shop, and Severyanin read aloud.

That, perhaps, was the essential thing about Vail: culture never lay under glass for him. The lofty did not demand a solemn face. Poems were part of life — funny, coarse, tragic, beautiful, sometimes completely indecent. And that made them not smaller, but larger.

But today I understand one more reason I remember those three hours thirty years later.

For me Pyotr Vail was, and remains, one of the very few writers and people of culture I would call a moral compass.

That does not mean he divided the world into black and white. Quite the opposite. Vail saw the many layers of history very clearly. He noticed paradoxes, contradictions, unexpected connections; he could look at a single phenomenon from several cultural and historical perspectives at once.

But his ability to see complexity never turned into the convenient formula “it’s not so simple.”

For him, complexity did not cancel moral coordinates. One can understand historical context, see causes, weigh different points of view, be ironic even about one’s own convictions — and still keep the ability to tell the human from the inhuman, dignity from baseness, freedom from unfreedom.

It is here, I think, that Vail is closest to Brodsky for me. Not because they saw the world the same way, but because for neither of them was intellectual complexity an excuse for moral vagueness.

In one book Vail tells about himself through other people’s poems. In the other, about people through places.

And our Moscow meeting seemed to arrange itself on the same principle. Brodsky led us to Venice. Brodsky’s Venice led to Vail’s. Vail’s Venice — to the Marcello palace. Marcello — into several centuries of Venetian history.

And all of this took place in Moscow, in the office of an old literary journal, with two women who came to talk about Brodsky and ended up talking with Pyotr Vail for about three hours.

On September 29 Vail would have turned seventy-seven. But the date is only a reason to open the door of memory.

I want to remember that conversation now because, for Vail, culture was not kept — it was lived. Severyanin lived in a factory club outside Riga. Brodsky, in Venice. Venetian history, at Count Marcello’s table. And thirty years later that conversation unexpectedly continues in Cleveland.

The project to complete the entry plaza of the Russian Cultural Garden received final approval from the Cleveland Landmarks Commission on September 24.

For a project of modest scale, this is an important milestone. It is not about creating a new garden or radically rebuilding an existing space, but about finishing something that stayed architecturally unfinished for years: the entry plaza, which should mark the edge of the Garden more clearly and tie it more neatly to the landscape already there.

The project completes the stone framing of the two flowerbeds on either side of the central walk. The new masonry will continue the existing retaining wall along the outer and back sides of the beds, leaving open the sides along the walk, where the plantings and the curve of the landscape have already settled in. The new wall will rest on a 9-inch bed of crushed limestone.

This is a case where the architectural intervention should be almost invisible: not adding one more freestanding object to the Garden, but completing the composition that is already there. The entry plaza should look as if it had always been meant to be this way.

The Landmarks Commission’s approval completes an important part of the review process. Now the project can move from drawings, renderings and hearings to its next stage — building it.

After this issue’s stories — of music crossing borders, of Brodsky’s and Vail’s Venice, of the genius loci — this small piece of news turns out to be unexpectedly fitting. The Cultural Gardens exist precisely because people brought to Cleveland the memory of other countries — and turned it into a real city landscape.

Almost immediately after the Landmarks Commission’s decision, the whole extended family of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens will gather together.

On Saturday, October 3, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation holds its annual Gala at La Villa. This year the evening celebrates the 110th anniversary of the Cultural Gardens — a uniquely Cleveland project that the Federation calls an open-air museum telling of the contributions of many ethnic communities to a shared culture.

The reception begins at 6:00 p.m., with the program and dinner at 7:00. The keynote speaker is Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne. The Federation will honor Dan and Debbie Hanson for their contributions to the Cultural Gardens; volunteer awards go to Paul Burik and Tom Corrigan. The program also includes international performances.

But this year the Gala looks forward as well as back. The funds raised will support a new visitor center the Federation is creating in the former Stonebrook Montessori building on East Boulevard, across from the Italian Cultural Garden.

The future center will be about 1,000 square feet. The Federation plans to use it for school tours, teacher programs and work with visitors and volunteers — so that the Cultural Gardens are not only a place to see, but a place to learn and understand more.

For our issue, this is an almost perfect final point: from Shostakovich and Szell, from Leningrad and Venice — back to Cleveland, where the memory of many cultures becomes part of one city.