The composer of Sabre Dance had no musical training until he was eighteen
Aram Khachaturian arrived in Moscow in 1921 with no formal music education and enrolled at a music institute anyway, starting on the cello. Within fifteen years his Piano Concerto had made him famous far beyond the Soviet Union, and his frantic Sabre Dance would later echo through popular culture worldwide.
Khachaturian was born into an Armenian family in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, in 1903, the youngest of five children of a bookbinder. The city was the multicultural hub of the Caucasus, and he later wrote that the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian songs of street festivals and folk bards shaped his musical thinking from childhood. After the region came under Soviet rule he followed his eldest brother, a stage director at the Moscow Art Theatre, to Moscow.
He entered the Gnessin Musical Institute in 1922 while also studying biology at Moscow State University, then trained in composition under Nikolai Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory. His graduation symphony impressed Shostakovich, and the Piano Concerto of 1936 established his name. A Violin Concerto first played by David Oistrakh won a Stalin Prize and entered the international repertoire. In 1939 he spent six months in Armenia collecting folk tunes, an experience he called a second conservatoire, which fed his ballet Gayane, premiered in wartime Perm in 1942, home of the Sabre Dance. The ballet Spartacus followed in 1954.
Official favour did not protect him. In January 1948 Andrei Zhdanov summoned composers to the Kremlin, and Khachaturian was denounced alongside Prokofiev and Shostakovich for formalism, music branded too difficult for ordinary listeners. The musicologist Blair Johnston argues his administrative role in the composers' union, rather than his accessible music, put him on the list. He apologised in March, changed nothing about his style, and was rehabilitated later that year.
From 1957 until his death in 1978 he served as secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, while touring Europe, Latin America and the United States as a conductor. He wrote the first Armenian ballet, symphony, concerto and film score, and Armenia regards him as a national treasure.
Source: Aram Khachaturian
