On June 12, 1940, Paris officially became an “open city,” which meant that it was given up to the Germans without a fight. On the same day Arthur Vincent Lourié (1891–1966), a Russian composer of Jewish origin who had lived in Paris since 1923, left the city in panic with his latest romantic companion, Elizaveta (Ella) Belevskaya-Zhukovskaya. The previous day Lourié still believed that there was no reason for him to abandon Paris and his beloved piano on 11 avenue Mozart. By the time he realized that remaining in the city was not an option, there were no more trains to take; he left with stuffing a few shirts into a suitcase and drove out of the city in the car of his companion’s daughter.
The journey was ardous. They spent the first night in the open field, anxious about spies. They were searched, beaten, and feared for their lives. The trip to Vichy, the first city in which refugees were allowed to stay, took a week. Lourié and Ella reached Vichy on June 19. The next morning the Germans arrived in the city. On August 18 authorities began to expel all foreigners, independent of their nationality. It is unclear to which category Lourié belonged in the eyes of the Vichy government: French citizen of foreign origin (he had been a French citizen since April 1926), Russian or Jewish. Influential friends helped with advice, money, and eventually with obtaining an American visa that enabled Lourié to escape to the United States.
Lourié’s escape from France was no more difficult than that of other refugees. Yet the experience was significant because it was the first time in his life when he had to throw in his lot with other Jews. Lourié, who had converted to Catholicism in 1913 to marry his first wife, the Polish Catholic Yadviga Tsïbulskaya, seems to have cared little about his Jewish identity. In his youth he tried to hide it by changing his name from Naum Izraílevich Lur’ya to Arthur Vincent Lourié. He was born on May 14, 1891, in Propoysk, a small town in Belarus in the Pale of Settlement, which emcompassed territories in Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, and the eastern part of Poland, and beyond which Russia’s Jewish population could not move without special permission. Lourié believed that his name was Sephardic and his ancestors were related to the famous sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac ben Solomon Luria, Ha-Ari (1534–1572). There is little evidence to support Lourié’s assertion of his family’s Sephardic origin. Most Louriés (with various spelling as Lourie, Lurje, Loria, Lurja) from the Pale of Settlement were Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestry could be traced to Germany or Eastern Europe.
From Propoysk Lourié’s family moved to Odessa, the fourth largest city in the Russian Empire which had a mixed population, more than thirty percent of which was Jewish. In Odessa Lourié attended the Nicholas I Commercial High School. In 1909 he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, an institution that, under the directorship of Alexander Glazunov, admitted a much higher number of Jewish students than any other institution of higher learning in Russia. At the time of Lourié’s entrance, almost half of the Conservatory’s students were Jewish. Insufficiently prepared for his entrance exam, Lourié was placed into the lowest piano class and assigned to Vladimir Nikolayevich Drozdov as his piano teacher. Mariya Barinova, who became Lourié’s piano teacher in 1912, remembered Lourié as one of her most original students.
Although he never received his diploma from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Lourié turned himself into the musical authority in the city’s avant-garde circles in the 1910s. Instead of winning gold medals and attending classes, he joined St. Petersburg’s artistic elite, the Symbolists, Acmeists, Futurists, and Cubo-Futurists, absorbing artistic trends and filtering them between various media. He shaped his music not according to the outmoded, rigorous professional standards taught at the Conservatory, but according to new ideas he picked up from artists of all stripes.
His early works in St. Petersburg suggest the influence of Chopin, Scriabin, Debussy, and later Schoenberg. Scriabin’s influence, like Symbolism in general, never faded. Debussy’s legacy also remained central in his music. Lourié was more concerned with timbre, register, and contrasts in color than with pitch and rhythm. He loved extremely low registers that turned pitches into noise and blurred harmonic implications, and overpacked textures in which volume and density obscured the clarity of lines. Schoenberg’s atonal experiments inspired his extra-tonal explorations. Dissonant clusters, chords with disharmonious components remained a constant element even in works with much less radical sound. His best known pieces from this early period are for piano: Synthèses, op. 16 (1914), Formes en l’air (1915), and a series of pieces for children, Rojal’ v detskoy (Piano in the Nursery) (1917).
Lourié’s name appears frequently in the memoirs and diaries of famous St. Petersburg poets, painters, and artists. He was especially attracted to poets, and according to at least one account, he tried his hand at poetry. The poet Anna Akhmatova was his lover. He roamed the streets of St. Petersburg with another Acmeist poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave advice on music to Russia’s most famous Symbolist poet, Aleksandr Blok. A dandy with refined taste, Lourié was painted by well-known Russian artists: Yury Annenkov, Pyotr Miturich, Georgy Yakulov, Lev Bruni, and Savely Sorin. He appears in photographs with important Russian Futurists, painters and poets, his omni-presence earning him the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s ironic quip: “Tis a blockhead who doesn’t know Lourié.” Many concerts that featured his music in pre-Revolutionary Russia took place in the famous cabaret, The Stray Dog. During this time, which came to be called a “Silver Age” in Russia, conceptions of art were expanding—Lourié was ready to apply these new ideas to music.
The Russian Revolution and the onset of civil war put an end to the artistic dreams of the Silver Age. Despite the daily violence, the Revolution initially appeared to be the realization of the Futurists’ program. Like some other radical intellectuals, Lourié welcomed the Revolution and joined the Bolshevik administration as Anatoly Lunacharsky’s chief commissar of music. It was the most exalted position he would ever hold. He paid a high price for it later in emigration, where hard feelings about his commissar past and thinly veiled anti-Semitism kept him apart from the Russian immigrant community. During his brief revolutionary stint, his dandyish, aristocratic habits were reformulated as Bolshevik radicalism and administrative work took the place of artistic projects.
Lourié did not last long in his new position. He defected in 1922, leaving Soviet Russia, ostensibly on an official trip to Berlin, never to return. He joined millions of Russian refugees trying to make a new life in the West. In Paris, where he had lived from 1923 to 1940, revolutionary ideals were replaced with new aesthetics, as Lourié, acting as the close ally of Igor Stravinsky, converted to neoclassicism. Studying Stravinsky’s music and working in close proximity with him affected Lourié’s aesthetics more than his music. He had neither Stravinsky’s meticulousness and precision, nor his rhythmic drive, and thus never became a Stravinsky epigon. As the Russian music critic Boris de Schloezer later wrote, Stravinsky served as the perfect stimulus for Lourié to develop his own unique musical personality. His most known neoclassical works are A Little Chamber Music for string quartet (1923/24), Toccata (1924) and Gigue (1927) for piano.
