Vladimir The Ballet “Anyuta”: How Gavrilin Wrote It Without Knowing
Imagine you are a composer, sitting at home, and suddenly you learn from the news or from colleagues that you have written an entire ballet! That is exactly what happened to Valery Gavrilin.
The composer never set out to write the ballet Anyuta. The whole story is a pure gamble by the director Alexander Belinsky. Belinsky dreamed of making a television ballet film after Chekhov (the story “Anna on the Neck”) for the great ballerina Ekaterina Maximova. But he had no music.
One day the director heard a chamber piano waltz that Gavrilin had written for an old film. Belinsky was struck: “But this is a real, authentic Chekhov waltz!” He rushed to Gavrilin with an offer to write a ballet, but the modest composer flatly refused and even sent an official letter of refusal.
So Belinsky and the choreographer Vladimir Vasiliev resorted to a trick. They took Gavrilin’s already published, scattered works (pieces, excerpts from oratorios, instrumental sketches) and literally assembled a mosaic from them. The conductor Stanislav Gorkovenko helped orchestrate these fragments, joining them into a single score. When Gavrilin saw the finished musical canvas, he was astonished: his motley music fitted the Chekhov story like a glove. All that was left for him was to bless the masterpiece.
How was the “Grand Waltz” created?
The famous “Grand Waltz” (also called the “Chekhov Waltz”) became the backbone and leitmotif of the whole work. Gavrilin wrote it long before Anyuta. This music was not festive or pompous, like the waltzes of Khachaturian or Tchaikovsky.
Gavrilin created a unique musical substance: his waltz is a “melody of dead youth.” In it swirl provincial longing and aching sadness, light irony and anguish. When the choreographer Vladimir Vasiliev first heard this recording on a cassette, he could not sleep all night and the next morning phoned Belinsky: “The music gives birth to stunning, piercing images. Let’s dance!” To this music Anyuta, danced by Maximova, literally rises above the vulgarity of the small town, enchanting high society.
Why did the whole world line up for the film?
When the ballet film Anyuta reached Soviet television screens on May 1, 1982, it caused a cultural explosion. Soon the film was sent to international festivals, and real madness began: the broadcast rights were bought by as many as 114 television companies from around the world!
Why did absolutely everyone want Anyuta?
1. A new film language (“montage choreography”)
Belinsky and Vasiliev did not simply film a stage production. They used cinematic effects: close-ups of Ekaterina Maximova’s face, rapid cuts, flashbacks. The viewer saw the ballerina’s eyes, her tears, her smile, which you cannot make out from the back rows of a theatre.
2. Complete clarity without words
Chekhov’s psychology was conveyed through the language of the body so brilliantly that a foreign viewer needed no translation. The tragedy of a poor girl who sold herself to save her family was clear from Tokyo to Paris.
3. The worldwide triumph of Maximova and Vasiliev
The couple were already legends, but in Anyuta they surpassed themselves. Ekaterina Maximova created an image of incredible dramatic depth.
The film won the prestigious Grand Prix of Intervision. Its success on world television was so enormous that in 1986 the international theatre community demanded… that it be moved to the stage! Funniest of all, the theatre premiere of Anyuta took place not in the USSR but at the famous Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and only after that was the ballet brought to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
