In Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, Soviet Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) describes the agony of the playwright, who must always depend on others--censors, a theatre, a director, actors--to bring his creation to life. What torments Bulgakov's playwright-hero Maksudov are the incessant changes and creative compromises he must make in order to get his play on stage. Such compromises were especially difficult in the totalitarian society of the USSR in the 1930s, when Iosif Stalin's paranoia created a suffocating system of censorship. If a Soviet playwright refused to accept "suggestions" made by a theatre's political administration, he could find himself at best black-listed and at worst arrested, imprisoned or even dead. The playwright's plight in many ways resembles the composer's. Like a playwright, a composer is dependent on others--impresarios and musicians--for the fulfillment of his artistic labor. Sometimes the composer, too, is asked to make changes in his work to please censors--or even the potential audience. All three composers represented on this disc--Mikhail Glinka, Dmitri Shostakovich and Jakov Jakoulov--have confronted this moral dilemma in the course of their careers. As Russians, they have also been forced to come to terms with an oppressive autocratic government (whether Tsarist or Communist) that regarded all creative people, including composers, with a bizarre mixture of reverential awe and envious suspicion.

Glinka (1804-57), Shostakovich (1906-75) and Jakoulov (born 1958) are united by something else, too: their love for the viola. This ugly duckling instrument--with its mellow, melancholy sound--has never inspired the kind of attention lavished by composers on its more operatic relative, the violin. Even today, the violist has a notably small body of solo literature from which to choose. In Russia, where western-style "classical" music developed much later than in Western Europe, this paucity is even more pronounced, since with the exception of Glinka and Shostakovich, none of the country's leading composers (Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev) produced any music for solo viola. Even so, the Russian school of viola playing has produced a significant number of great performers over the years.

When Mikhail Glinka came upon the scene in the 1820s, Russia still had no conservatories. Composers imported from Italy, France and Germany controlled the musical world, which centered around the Tsar's court in St.Petersburg. From his early years, Glinka received serious instruction in the piano from private teachers. He later studied composition with distinguished pedagogues in Berlin and Italy, where he also became acquainted with Bellini and Donizetti. Their bel canto influence is clear in Glinka's two operas: A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Ludmila. An accomplished performer both as pianist and singer, Glinka undertook systematic study of folk music of various cultures, and knew many of the great European composers of his day. Liszt called Glinka "a genius," and even devised an improvisation on themes from his operas. Berlioz also thought highly of his Russian contemporary and praised his ability as a "novel and vital" orchestrator.

The Sonata for Viola and Piano was written early in Glinka's career, between 1825 and 1828, before his European sojourn. The work was left unfinished; only the first two movements of the projected three were completed. In his Memoirs, Glinka describes the first movement allegro, with its attractive main theme, as "cleaner" than other attempts at composition from that youthful period. Besides being an excellent pianist, the composer could also play the viola--well enough, in fact, to try out the solo part of the first movement with a pianist friend. The second movement adagio was composed somewhat later. The unrealized third movement was projected as a Rondo, "whose theme in a Russian style I still remember to this day," wrote Glinka a few years before his death. The composer subsequently used that theme in a polka for children. Glinka's Viola Sonata was finally published only in 1932, in Moscow, in an edition by V.Borisovsky.

Glinka believed the Viola Sonata to be the most successful of his pre-Italian compositions, and remarked that it had "some quite clever counterpoint." Charming and accessible, with a certain touch of Russian melancholy, it has won a permanent place in the viola repertoire, and is especially effective as the first piece on a recital program.

150 years later, Dmitri Shostakovich added another major work to the viola literature. Unlike Glinka's youthful Sonata, however, Shostakovich's is the product of a composer's maturity; it was, in fact, the last piece Shostakovich completed, just weeks before his death. One could even say that if Glinka's sonata represents the beginning point of the classical Russian viola tradition, then Shostakovich's represents the end. Like all of Shostakovich's late works, the Viola Sonata is dominated by the theme of death. To understand the sources of Shostakovich's aesthetic, which strikes some Western observers as impossibly gloomy and hopeless, one must remember the personal and national cataclysms he endured in his remarkably eventful lifetime. In many ways the long-suppressed tragedy of the composer's life and career symbolizes the greater tragedy of the now-defunct Soviet system. Indeed, very few other artists of Shostakovich's generation who remained in the USSR survived as long, produced as much, or remained as defiant as he did in the face of overwhelming oppression and sycophancy.

Born just 11 years before the Bolshevik Revolution carried off the Romanovs and established the world's first socialist state, Shostakovich grew up with Soviet communism. As a student at Petrograd--later Leningrad--Conservatory, he witnessed the wild economic speculation and utopian hopefulness of the 1920s. As a young composer, he experienced first-hand the growing cultural repression enforced by Stalin and his cultural goons. As a mature artist, he lived first through the terrifying purges of the late 1930s and then the unspeakable brutality of World War II. After Stalin's death, already exhausted and tormented, he was revived by the hopes of the Khrushchev "thaw." But this brief period of liberalization was followed by a long era of stagnation and renewed repression of dissidents under the corrupt Brezhnev regime.

Much of this painful history found its way into Shostakovich's music. This is not to say that every bar in every symphony or quartet is a specific response to a specific political or ideological event. But (as Mikhail Bulgakov learned) it was virtually impossible for any serious artist to avoid reacting to the demands of Party censors on the one hand and to the horrors endured by their fellow Soviet citizens on the other. In his own (sometimes inconsistent) musical response, Shostakovich mirrored the terrible moral choices he and his countrymen were forced to make each and every day of their lives. Like them, Shostakovich was not always a hero, and sometimes gave in to the demands of his implacable patrons. But he always strove to retain his individuality in a closed world that demanded (and lavishly rewarded) gray and evil conformity. In his best music, that personality comes through with shattering clarity, utterly confounding those who believed they could control and dictate every last word and every last note.

Without question, Shostakovich's Sonata for Viola and Piano is one of the most eloquent and profound statements of the composer's most intimate thoughts. Throughout his life, Shostakovich used chamber music (his fifteen string quartets are the best example) as a vehicle to express--even confess--his private concerns, the feelings that were more difficult for him to express in his large public symphonies. Often, as is the case in the Viola Sonata, the chamber works contain coded musical references to his own music and to the music of other composers he loved and admired. For Shostakovich, chamber music was an intricate and elaborate private language, and an arena in which he felt himself most free from public opinion and official guidelines.

When Shostakovich began writing the Viola Sonata in July, 1975, he had been in ill health for years, and was confronting yet another stay in the hospital. Throughout the composing process, he consulted with Fyodor Druzhinin (born 1934), a distinguished Soviet violist and member of the Beethoven Quartet, which had given the premieres of most of Shostakovich's string quartets. Druzhinin later recalled (as recorded in Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, by Elizabeth Wilson) that the composer told him he could hardly write down the notes because his hand was shaking so badly.

Shostakovich also described the inner content of the new Sonata to Druzhinin: "'The first movement is a novella, the second a scherzo, and the Finale is an adagio in memory of Beethoven; but don't let that inhibit you. The music is bright, bright and clear.' Evidently, Dmitri Dmitryevich wanted to emphasize that the music was not morbid and should not be regarded as a funeral march." The first movement (Moderato) observes straightforward sonata form; the main theme unfolds in broken arpeggios in open fifths. This oddly simple motive serves as a sort of unifying idea for the entire work, which is unusually transparent, severe and dry in texture. The second movement is another one of the wild dances found in several of the string quartets, with a folksy, even gypsy character and plenty of bravura writing for the soloist, including quadruple stops. Like most of Shostakovich's late works, it also contains self-quotation, in this case some music from the unfinished opera The Gamblers, heard in the opening measures. But the final movement is the most unusual and celebrated. It is structured around extensive quotation from the "Moonlight" Sonata (No.14 in C# minor) by Beethoven, a composer with whom Shostakovich had always felt a strong creative and personal affinity. Jakov Jakoulov has observed that both Beethoven and Shostakovich existed in absolute emptiness: because of his deafness, Beethoven could not hear, and because of the totalitarian society that surrounded him, Shostakovich could not speak. In the third movement of the Viola Sonata, Shostakovich uses the familiar broken arpeggios of the accompaniment in the "Moonlight" Sonata, which also refer back to the first movement of the Viola Sonata. Again, the writing is extremely spare and quiet, finally disappearing into nothingness (morendo) at the end, as though the composer had been drained of any remaining energy or feeling. Shostakovich finished proofreading the score on August 6, 1975, when he gave it to Druzhinin, to whom the piece is dedicated. Three days later, on August 9, the composer died.

Jakov Jakoulov admits that he may have had Shostakovich's Viola Sonata somewhere in the back of his mind ("remember that viola sonatas are few and far between," he told me) when he came to write his Sonata for Viola and Piano, completed in 1995. The most obvious resemblance between the two works is found in the opening, in the broken arpeggios of the main theme. But Jakoulov's Sonata is completely unique and original, and an excellent example of the diversity and quality of music produced by Soviet/Russian composers born after the death of Stalin. First in the USSR, where he lived until the late 1980s, and subsequently in the United States, where he now resides (in Boston), Jakoulov has worked in a wide variety of genres, from ballet and theatrical music to large choral works and string quartets. Both of the works recorded on this disc show a very strong sense of theatricality and drama. The Viola Sonata combines traditional sonata form (in the first movement) with non-traditional use of harmony and rhythm. In the tiny second movement (Andantino), Jakoulov creates what he calls a "tango in a madhouse." He finds that the tango, with its unstable rhythm, provides a marvelous "sense of imbalance and instability, with melancholic associations--it suits the Russian soul well." Somewhat surprisingly, the tango was always very popular in the USSR, perhaps because, says Jakoulov, it "represented a hidden opposition to the squareness of official music, like marches and waltzes." In this tango, the instruments start off together, but gradually lose each other. For the third movement, Jakoulov drew upon the Rumanian gypsy heritage of his mother, who grew up in Bessarabia and sang in gypsy ensembles. The viola imitates the sound of the human voice, or of a pan flute, as found in the doina, a popular form of improvisation in Rumanian folk music.

The stylistic reminiscences of Glinka's Valse-Fantaisie, completed in 1997, is a set of fanciful variations on one of the most popular tunes ever created by a Russian composer. Throughout the piece, the tune remains almost unchanged in harmonic and melodic contour; Jakoulov simply exaggerated certain elements already present. Because Glinka was very strongly influenced by Western composers, Jakoulov provides stylized, often humorous, imitations of these influences: "Jazzy," "Debussy" (representative of the loss of orientation in Russian culture of the fin de siecle), "Samba," "Beethoven" (again!).

The climax (marked "with false sentiment") is a sort of bacchanale. Here, Jakoulov says he wanted to express the uniquely Russian phenomenon of poshlost, or vulgarity, a favorite theme of Russian writers and composers, including Dimitry Schostakovich. In the closing measures, the pianist is instructed to play on a string muted with his finger, as if strangling and breaking the sound.

Jakoulov dedicated both the Sonata for Viola and Piano and the "Stylistic Reminiscences" to Mikhail Zaretsky.

HARLOW ROBINSON is Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages at Northeastern University. He is editor and translator of The Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev (Northeastern University Press, 1998).