Kyiv, Ukraine- May 30th, 2025

Borys Liatoshynsky’s Third Symphony

Borys Liatoshynsky’s Third Symphony undoubtedly ranks among the most famous works of the composer, as well as among the peak achievements of 20th-century Ukrainian art.

The work on the Third Symphony in total lasted more than a decade. From the recollections of the composer’s contemporaries, we know that the idea for the future composition was crystallizing during World War II, and the first drafts of the symphony was completed by Liatoshynsky at the end of the summer of 1948. That same year, a nationwide campaign against "formalism" and “anti-people" elements in music was a regular practice in the Soviet Union.  These euphemisms were used to mark unacceptable works and justify further persecution of their authors. The Communist Party demanded that art serve solely as a tool for propaganda, reinforcing the state’s ideological agenda. Artistic value was not considered.

During the aforementioned 1948 campaign, Borys Liaatoshynsky was labeled as "the main representative of the formalist trend in Ukraine." To avoid further attacks from the state, the composer postponed orchestrating the Third Symphony for almost three years; only in 1951 was the work completed in full score. Its premiere took place in Kyiv on October 25, 1951, conducted by Natan Rakhlin. The composer appended the epigraph “Peace Shall Defeat War” to the symphony, the meaning of which was not immediately obvious to us but had a clear connotation in the Soviet Union of the early 1950s.

At that time, the Cold War had already emerged in its main contours. The Soviet Empire, through numerous military provocations, loudly proclaimed its "peaceful" intentions and launched an extensive propaganda campaign "for peace in the world" ("for long-lasting peace," as another dictator says today). The phrase "peace will conquer war" was one of its main slogans, as widespread as it was meaningless (given the state’s policies that voiced it).

It’s important to understand why Borys Liatoshynsky chose this formula as the epigraph to his symphony. I assume the composer, aware of the aesthetic—and even ethical—gap between the music of the Third Symphony and the Bolshevik demands for creativity, hoped in this way to shield the new work from a flood of ideological attacks. His reasoning might have been this: since the work deals with a topical and "relevant" theme, the complex musical language would be forgiven this time. At the same time, this meaningless epigraph did not align with the conceptual direction of the Third Symphony, and thus the reaction of the officials was, unfortunately, entirely predictable.

Immediately after the premiere, the Third Symphony was subjected to a near-unanimous judgment: "a direct challenge to Soviet musical aesthetics," as it was called by Tikhon Khrennikov, the long-time general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers. After a public "autodafé," a long Soviet-wide campaign began to discredit the composer in the press. Liatoshynsky was once again accused of so-called "formalism" and "anti- people"; charges of "bourgeois pacifism" and "distortion of the party's understanding of the struggle for peace" were also leveled against him.

To the democratic “Never Again” was opposed the claim of wars being just and unjust. Despite the losses the Soviet Empire had suffered during World War II, it was considered acceptable to sacrifice another twenty million of its own citizens for a "just" war. It is hard for the people of the democratic world to believe this and impossible to understand, but in the USSR, the interests of the individual were completely disregarded in favor of the interests of the state: education, the press, and the arts cultivated total submission and readiness to join the fight at the first call of the Party.

The humanistic pathos of Liatoshynsky’s Third Symphony, the composer’s acute attention to glaring contradictions and conflicts, the most painful human experiences and feelings, and the resolute condemnation of wa as a phenomenon made the conceptual direction of the work foreign to the state's artistic doctrine. After the criticism of 1951, the fate of the Third Symphony was decided—there was no place for it in Soviet art, and the composer had little choice but to accept it.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

– Joseph Stalin

Less than two years later, in the spring of 1953, Joseph Stalin died, and signs of a softening of the ideological situation began to emerge in the country. This event likely inspired Liatoshynsky to hope for the possibility of rehabilitating the Third Symphony, and so, during the summer of 1954, the composer made a second revision of the work. After its premiere in Leningrad under the baton of Yevgeny Mravinsky, the symphony was warmly received and soon called "a significant achievement of Soviet music as a whole." Until the collapse of the USSR, only the second version of the Third Symphony was known.

The attempt to revive the first version of the work became possible only after Ukraine’s declaration of independence on August 24th, 1991. On December 15, 1991, Ihor Blazhkov performed the fourth movement in the first version. Since then, it has been established that the difference between the versions of the Third Symphony lies only in the fourth movement, while the first, second, and third movements are identical. However, in the composer’s letters published today, I happened to come across a letter to Reinhold Glière, in which Liatoshynsky detailed the changes he made: "During this summer, which passed so quickly, I did manage to finish my unfortunate Third Symphony. I almost didn’t touch the first part, made some cuts in the second, replaced the trio in the third (scherzo), and the finale was completely redone, so that no more than ¼ of the old score remains."

Thus, during the work on the second revision, each movement underwent changes. To be sure of this, it was necessary to work with the known autographs of the Third Symphony. Upon reviewing them, I was able to identify numerous corrections that previous performers had ignored, but most importantly—to find a number of previously unknown pages of the score. The realization of these corrections led to the creation of the reconstruction of the first version of Liatoshynsky's Third Symphony.

During the work on the reconstruction, I sought to get as close as possible to the original work. It is now confirmed that Liatoshynsky made changes to every movement, not just the last one. Significant changes also took place in the second and third movements. At the same time, there were instances where I had to make my own decisions regarding certain details of the score. It seems that the first version of the symphony, authentic in every way, was lost to the world forever due to Soviet "cultural policy."

Nevertheless, there are reasons for sincere joy, as finally, everyone who wishes will be able to hear Liatoshynsky’s uncensored expression, and the work, completed as early as 1951, will finally speak to an unbiased listener.

In offering the Third Symphony of Borys Liatoshynsky to the American listener, I would least like to present yet another crime of the Soviet Union against humanity—there will be enough for a dozen Nuremberg tribunals without Liatoshynsky’s symphony. Instead, I invite you to hear the expression of a well-known Ukrainian composer who has something new, striking, and fresh to say to the world.

It is probably important to remember that this score emerged immediately after the end of World War II. However, if we approach the epigraph "peace will conquer war" too naively, we might listen to Liatoshynsky’s work and find it almost reminiscent of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The resolution of the Fifth Symphony’s conflict appears entirely understandable, justified, and beautiful from the perspective of European Enlightenment ideals: with unwavering certainty in the power of reason and humanity's ability to rationally comprehend and organize the world.

To interpret the first version of Liatoshynsky’s Third Symphony in such a way (I emphasize: fundamentally different from the second version) would mean completely misunderstanding it. This work fully belongs to the mindset of the 20th century, with all the relativism inherent to it.

It seems that the conceptual complexity of the masterpiece by the Ukrainian classical composer is precisely conditioned by the issues that World War II presented to humanity, and to which, I dare say, we have still not offered convincing and exhaustive solutions. Therefore, the Third Symphony is, without exaggeration, addressed to each of us who shares universal humanistic values.

Like any major artistic work, Boris Liatoshynsky’s Third Symphony is neither an answer to the problems that arose after World War II nor a prescription for action. At the same time, it reminds us once again of questions that each of us is obliged to remember and seek answers to.

Hlib Fareniuk

May 30, 2025
Kyiv