In memory of music critic Pyotr Pospelov

On August 30, a farewell ceremony will take place in Moscow for music critic and composer Pyotr Pospelov, the legendary author of Kommersant in the 1990s, head of the culture departments of the Russian Telegraph (1997–1998) and Vedomosti (2005–2017) newspapers. And also the head of the long-term planning department of the Bolshoi Theater (2001-2002), the editor-in-chief of the Composer publishing house (2018-2023), the winner of the Golden Mask (2023). And a man without whom it is impossible to imagine the latest history of Russian cultural journalism and the academic musical life of the last thirty years. He is remembered by the former editor of the culture department of Vedomosti Oleg Zintsov.

Petya and I sat at neighboring editorial tables for fifteen years and during this time wrote not only thousands of reviews and columns (sometimes jointly), but also dozens of obituaries. On the one hand, a newspaper writer must always be ready to step back from emotions, focus and find capacious words, observing the laws of the genre and not breaking the deadline (underlined in this case as if by a double solid line). On the other hand, the task of writing an obituary almost always takes you by surprise, and if you know a person personally and for a long time, especially if you are friends, the words instantly scatter somewhere, disappear, as if they are dying themselves, leaving the computer screen blank. Then they have to be collected for a long time, taking out each with a piece of memory, gesture, smile, and again trying to arrange in the right, beautiful and exact order.

Having now opened the list of Petya’s texts in Vedomosti, I realized that the last thing written there was just an obituary – Petya recalled Alexander Timofeevsky, whom, like all his friends, he called simply Shura. Shura died just as unforgivably early, at 61, and who would have thought that Petya – always Petya for friends – would overtake him so soon and at the same age. I am rereading this textre-admiring the perfect balance of depth, sincerity and mischief, for an obituary that would seem inappropriate, almost indecent, but very accurate in relation to – now – both of them, Shura and Petya.

I imagine how Petya writes, how he sits down at the computer and, without being distracted by anything, funny and quickly types with one finger. I remember my professional envy – while I painfully composed two paragraphs, erased and wrote again, unhurried Petya gave out a finished text that could be typeset without looking – there were exactly as many words as required, and they all stood in the best order.

Friends will still write about Petya the composer and Petya the director, Petya the organizer of musical life; that is why writing came so easily to him, at least from the outside point of view.

At the same time, even in short notes, he thought in terms of concepts, always clearly understanding from what position he speaks, analyzes and evaluates art. In the musical theater, he often scolded theatricality, stating that directors (especially those with a worldwide reputation) only spoil everything with their ambitions and interfere with the singers. Yes, and to the drama theater I was ruthless from the same musical point of view (I remember the scandalous title of the review of Macbeth by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, declared by other critics an unconditional masterpiece – “A log and two chords”). But, sometimes looking at Petya, I recalled the Jewish idea of ​​“the theater for myself”, living everyday situations as games and performances (he even sang the ringtone for the phone to himself). The same was true for the profession.

Petya’s favorite mask was conservatism – he wrote strictly, sometimes academically, put pathos above irony, but every now and then he took off the mask for a second and seemed to wink at the reader. And smiled like the Cheshire Cat. And it was not a different Petya – great, how true wrote Alexey Tarkhanov, and homely, cozy, incredibly soft: all this was combined in him in perfect harmony.

Everyone was surprised that a sage and a child, a deep connoisseur of musical culture and a playful teenager, a conservative and avant-garde artist, lived in it at the same time. But it seems to me that there is no contradiction here, all these are the facets of Petya’s endless love of life.

One day I let him listen to an electronic track, asking what I thought was a tricky question: was it a human or a computer? “Of course, a man,” Petya struck me, instantly finding familiar structures of musical thinking in the intricate mechanical repetitions. I don’t know why I took this out of my many memories now, what metaphor and thought for the sake of it, why that little dialogue seemed symbolic to me. Perhaps the fact is that an ideal ear for music is not very common, but much less often – an impeccable ear for a human. And their combination is quite, probably, a miracle. And this miracle we easily called Petya.