Khachaturian, "Spartacus" – Adagio

Inside the party headquarters and with a tenacity worthy of a better cause, comrade Mikhail Mikhailovich was taking pains to discover among hundreds of crotchets and eighth notes the bourgeois and counterrevolutionary character of Aram Khachaturian's music. By his side, Vassily Vasilievich was trying to do the same with other scores of the composer.

As he was about to invite his comrade to take a break, Mikhail Mikhailovich was surprised by Vassily Vasilievich's jubilant exclamation:

–Here it is! I've got it!

Mikhail Mikhailovich left his desk and hurried over to Vassily Vasilievich's, who victoriously brandished the autograph pages of the composer's last work. Indeed, in measures 34 to 57, it was possible to appreciate, even for a child, the composer's marked bourgeois tendencies.

Mikhail Mikhailovich felt pity. He had known Khachaturian since his entrance to the Moscow Conservatory in 1929 and had always thought him a nice guy.

Aram Khachaturian was twenty-six years old at the time. Born in Armenia, he was the youngest of five children and his love of music began by hearing his mother sing and listening to street musicians. Five years after his entrance to the Conservatory, he graduated and began an ascending career in the field of symphonic music and ballet, to which he incorporated ancestral motifs of Armenian folk music.

The comrade

Khachaturian joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1943. And there he was quietly until 1948 when he had the ill-fated idea of composing a symphonic poem without dedications. That was when Mikhail and Vassily came into the picture. As a result of their diligence, Shostakovich and Prokofiev also fell from grace. Along with them, Khachaturian had to incriminate himself as "formalist" and "anti-popular".

Aram Khachaturian (1903 - 1978)

The atonement

But soon after Stalin's death – coupled with the fact that the three composers were already recognized worldwide – they were vindicated. The three authors returned to the stage, literally, and in glory and majesty.

Comrade Khachaturian resumed his work composing dozens of symphonies, concertos and ballets, as well as numerous soundtracks for films, while his music was requested by directors such as Kubrick to be included in his films —the Adagio of his ballet Gayane is part of the soundtrack of 2001 Space Odyssey.

"Spartacus" Ballet

In 1954, during an informal conversation with friends that included Mikhail Mikhailovich and Vassily Vassilievich, now elderly and close friends of Aram, an idea arose for a ballet that would pay homage to the struggle of the proletariat against the Tsarist regime. The story of the slave Spartacus against his Roman oppressors was a perfect fit. Aram set to work and at the end of the year, he received the Lenin Prize for his ballet Spartacus.

The premiere took place in Leningrad in 1956. Two years later, with a change of choreography, it was performed at the Bolshoi Theater. From that date until today it remains one of the best known and most prominent works of Aram Khachaturian, also constituting a milestone in the history of ballets with a male protagonist, a role in which the Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta has stood out remarkably.

The Adagio of Act II is presented below, a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet, choreographed by Yuri Gregorovich, with Carlos Acosta as Spartacus and Nina Kaptsova as his smitten Phrygia.