Sergei Bortkiewicz: his life and music.
Introduction.
Welcome to the Bortkiewicz website!
Here you find information about the life and works of the Russian (nowadays Ukrainian)-Austrian composer Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877-1952), whom a kind destiny gave all the gifts to be happy and make others happy: a wonderful musical talent, which enabled him to pour out freely a flood of the most beautiful melodies up to old age, and an extraordinary pianistic talent, which brought him great triumphs during his concert tours which he undertook in his early years. However an unkind fate did not let him rejoice in these unusual talents and heaped many a misfortune on him in the second half of his life. Sergei Bortkiewicz was an important outstanding personality both as a musician and as a person. This expressed itself in his entire outward appearance, in his proud upright attitude and his always evident dignified earnestness, which he at times softened with a friendly smile, but hardly ever with a merry laugh. A gentle melancholy also formed a basic feature of his character, which also echoed in his music and gave it a special charm.
Bortkiewicz style was very much based on Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, early Scriabin and Russian Folklore. He was unaffected by the music trends of the 20th century - the composer never saw himself as a modernist. The outstanding individual quality of his compositions, the melodic richness and mastery of form characterize all of his works. He wrote in a style very much his own that can be immediately recognised as tipically Bortkiewicz. As well as beautiful lyricism there is also frequently an atmonsphere of deep nostalgia, a longing for past joys. The emotional effect of this, blended with his strong melodic gifts, makes his music attractive and appealing to many listeners.
Thanks to Hugo van Dalen, his close friend, we can still enjoy Bortkiewicz's music and learn about his life from the many letters he sent to the Dutch pianist. When van Dalen died in 1967 his family bequeathed the manuscripts of several compositions, a written autobiography Erinnerungen, plus a number of letters and printed scores to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, a collection which was transferred later to the Nederlands Muziek Instituut in The Hague. The Netherlands Music Institute has the only existing copy of the manuscript of the second pianosonate opus 60, which is one of Bortkiewicz's masterpieces.
If you want to do research on Bortkiewicz you should visit the Netherlands Music Institute in The Hague, The Netherlands
Fifty years after Bortkiewicz' death, musicians from all over the world are rediscovering Bortkiewicz' music and his music is now being played in Ukraine by the Chernihiv Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Mykola Sukach. Mykola Sukach works tirelessly to rekindle interest in the composer and seeks wherever possible to protome Bortkiewicz' music (see for more information Revival of Bortkiewicz' music in Ukraine on this website). In recent years pianists like Stephen Coombs (Hyperion), Klaas Trapman (Nederlands Muziek Instituut) and Jouni Somero (FinnConcert Records) have contributed to the rehabilitation of the music of Bortkiewicz.
However, Bortkiewicz still is a misterious person. Despite the information that is available, we don't know much about his life and a lot of his unprinted works (such as his opera Akrobaten, opus 50, his pianotrio opus 38 and his Six préludes for piano opus 66) are still missing. If you have any information about the life, the music or the missing scores of Bortkiewicz please let me know.
Wouter Kalkman
Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: wolak@xs4all.nl
