In the eternal language of music

‘Opera is my life and my love’, said Sergei Cortez. In music, his name stands alongside masters such as Alfred Schnittke, Giya Kancheli and Yevgeny Glebov. While being a treasure of the Belarusian composer school, Cortez remains a global phenomenon, a rare pearl, a man who managed to unite disparate cultures — Latin American, European and Belarusian — in his compositions. In life, he embodied sincerity and loyalty, love and devotion to the land where he was destined to create, and which he served throughout his life with the same boundless honesty with which he served art.

Line of fate

The 20th century gifted thousands of people with fantastic destinies and biographical twists. Sergei Cortez is the grandson of a White Russian émigré, a staff captain of railway troops, anti-fascist and classic of Argentinian literature, Pavel Shostakovsky. His grandmother was the talented singer, Yevgenia Krichevskaya, who was forced to leave the stage in emigration. They fled Russia in 1920, after learning that Pavel Shostakovsky was threatened with arrest: walking across the ice of the Gulf of Finland, pulling their young daughter Lyudmila on a sledge. Their only luggage was a stack of sheet music, his wife’s repertoire...
After wandering around Europe, observing the morals of the émigré community and seeing how fascism was raising its head, the family moved to Santiago. Lyudmila (nicknamed Lyulenka at home), against her parents’ wishes, married the Chilean adventurer, Alberto Cortez, at the age of 16 and left Santiago with him: eight years of unhappy marriage to a gambler seeking easy money and million-pound winnings, back-breaking work, four children, life in extreme poverty, without a home of their own... Due to blackmail from her ex-husband, who threatened to take away the children, the Shostakovsky family moved to Argentina and finally lived happily, despite all the difficulties of émigré life.
Despite its neutral status during the Second World War, Argentina openly and covertly supported Hitler, and the ‘intelligentsia’ part of the émigré community also dreamed of returning to their homeland on the shoulders of the Wehrmacht and SS legions. It was a different matter among the working-class émigrés, many of whom were Belarusians who had left before the revolution. It was they who suggested that Pavel Shostakovsky — by that time already a well-known Argentinian writer and translator — head the Slavic Committee, which collected aid for Soviet soldiers. The youngest ones from the Shostakovsky family, including Sergei Cortez, also became activists in this committee.
As soon as the Soviet embassy appeared in Argentina, the family began to collaborate with it, and as early as 1948, the Shostakovskys submitted documents to return to the USSR, but they only received permission in 1953.

“The letter granting us permission to return was signed by Voroshilov,” Sergei Cortez recalled. Minsk was designated as the place of residence for the Shostakovskys and they settled there two years later.

The Bear opera. Popova the Widow — Olga Berezanskaya, middle-aged landowner Smirnov — German Yukavsky.
Boris Pokrovsky Chamber Musical Theatre, Moscow, 2009

Books, music, theatre…

Sergei Cortez grew up as a bookish child. The Shostakovskys, barely making ends meet, gave their last penny to build up a library — it was these books, multilingual (everyone in this family spoke several languages), lovingly selected, that shaped the personality of the future composer. He inherited musicality from his grandmother, with whom he listened to recordings of Feodor Chaliapin and Enrico Caruso, radio broadcasts of operas, and visited the famous Buenos Aires theatre, Teatro Colón. And certainly, the Shostakovsky family found a way to provide the boy with music lessons.

From childhood, he played music at home concerts, and at the age of 12 he was already playing with the Argentine radio orchestra. When the Shostakovskys travelled from the Argentine shores to the Soviet ones on a ship for a month and a half, they took with them… Seryozha’s piano.

At the Belarusian Conservatory, Cortez’ teachers were Nikolai Aladov and Anatoly Bogatyrev. Another of his teachers was composer Lev Abeliovich, of whom Cortez always spoke with great affection.
In 1961, Sergei Cortez, who was graduating from the conservatory, was already in charge of the musical department of the Theatre for Young Spectators in Minsk. Throughout his life, he was drawn to the theatre; it was a sincere and overwhelming passion that defined the composer’s entire creative path. Subsequently, he headed the musical department of the Russian Theatre (Maxim Gorky National Academic Drama Theatre), and from 1966 — the Kupala Theatre. In 1972, Cortez became a musical editor, and in 1981 — the chief musical editor at the Belarusfilm studio. In 1991, during a very difficult time at the turn of the years, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he took over the leadership of the National Academic Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theatre of the Republic of Belarus.

Scene from Who am I? ballet. Production by the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus. Minsk, 2015

Lifelong pursuit

“Idleness and inconstancy kill the muse of inspiration. For me, creativity is always a challenge, first of all, to myself. Will I be able to create something that will captivate me, fascinate me, give me new ideas for reflection?” said Sergei Cortez.

He debuted as a composer in the 1960s with vocal works, of which there are many in his legacy. The grandson of a writer, Cortez had great reverence for the artistic word. He composed to the verses of various poets — from Yakub Kolas to William Shakespeare, from Federico García Lorca to Maksim Tank, Boris Pasternak, Yulia Drunina and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The vocal-symphonic poem Ashes for soloist and orchestra, dedicated to all those who died in fascist concentration camps during the Great Patriotic War, was composed to the verses of Eduardas Mieželaitis: ‘I raise heavy, sightless eyes / And I can’t take them away from the sky, / With all my being I appeal to man, / Squeezing human ashes in my fist’. Cortez had a special love for the melodic poetry of Yanka Kupala, to whose verses he composed the oratorio Memory of the Poet in 1972.
He composed music for dozens of theatrical productions and films. His filmography as a composer includes Adventures in the City That Doesn’t Exist by Leonid Nechayev, I’ll Take Your Pain and The Black Castle of Olshany by Mikhail Ptashuk, Scattered Nest by Boris Lutsenko, Flight to the Land of Monsters by Vladimir Bychkov, as well as music for cartoons. The most precious music for the author was I’ll Take Your Pain. For this work, he was awarded the State Prize of the BSSR in 1982, along with Ivan Shamyakin, whose novel formed the basis of the screenplay, Mikhail Ptashuk, and Vladimir Gostyukhin, who played the main role.
Sergei Cortez presented his first opera, Giordano Bruno, in 1977, and the première took place on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre of the BSSR. Then came Mother Courage based on the play by Bertolt Brecht, staged by famous Semyon Stein, Visit of the Lady, The Jubilee opera dilogy and The Bear based on Chekhov’s joke plays, the world première of which was successfully held in Switzerland. 
Another treasure of world music is The Last Inca ballet, composed in 1987 commissioned by the Cuban National Ballet and its artistic director Alicia Alonso and dedicated to the life of Túpac Amaru, the last ruler of the Inca people, who fought against Spanish colonisation. “I am endlessly grateful to the Belarusian land for becoming my home. I have lived most of my life here and feel a close connection with its traditions,” admitted Sergei Cortez. When he was asked if he felt like a Belarusian composer, he puzzled in response, “What other composer could I be? I have achieved everything here.”

By Irina Ovsepyan