I thought you lot might like to read my obituary of Ilya Musin, which
appeared in today's Independent.  A bit long, I'm afraid, but then he
was a very important chap.

   Ilya Musin

   Under more propitious circumstances Ilya Musin might have been
   one of the century's greatest conductors; in the event, he will be
   remembered as the century's greatest teacher of conductors. A list
   of Musin's students at the Leningrad Conservatoire of Music reads
   like a roll-call of some of the most prominent Russian names now
   active on the podium: Rudolf Barshai, Semyon Byshkov, Valeri Gergiev,
   Yakov Kreizberg, Vassily Sinaisky and Yuri Temirkanov; his British
   students included Martyn Brabbins and Sian Edwards.  Musin grew up
   in pre-Soviet Russia and lived to see the Communist regime collapse
   - but just too late to allow him the kind of attention he deserved
   in a world he hadn't been allowed to know.

   As a schoolboy Musin wanted to be an artist:  to begin with, he had
   little interest in the piano lessons his watchmaker father insisted
   he take, although he applied himself to the instrument systematically
   enough to be accepted into the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire in
   Leningrad in 1919 at the age of sixteen, when the round-spectacled
   boy behind him in the admissions queue was the thirteen-year-old
   Dmitry Shostakovich.  There was little professional musical activity
   in Kostroma, the provincial town on the Volga where he grew up, so
   that the first time he heard an orchestra was after he had enrolled
   at the Conservatoire, when a chance overhearing of a rehearsal of
   Dvorak's Ninth Symphony took his breath away.  He began assiduously
   to attend all the concerts he could, watching people like Klemperer
   and Bruno Walter, although when damage sustained to Musin's hands by
   the freezing conditions in revolutionary Leningrad necessitated a
   change, he switched first to classes in theory and composing.

   Chance again intervened:  "It happened that I had to replace a
   colleague of mine who was the director of a small amateur orchestra
   and through this experience I discovered that I could conduct".  And
   that is what he now began to do in earnest, first with an amateur
   group, then, in 1925, entering the conducting class of Nikolai Malko,
   head of the Leningrad Philharmonic and the most important conductor
   in the Soviet Union (which he left two years later).

   It was at Malko's suggestion, in 1929, that Musin, still a student
   himself, began to teach, thus initiating a career that lasted until
   the end of last week.  With his graduation the next year, he took up
   a post at the Conservatoire and stayed there all his life.  His own
   conducting activities were getting off the ground, too, and in 1933,
   along with his former classmate Yevgeny Mravinsky, he was appointed
   assistant to Fritz Stiedry, an Austrian Jew newly fled from Hitler's
   Berlin and nominated principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic.

   In 1937 Musin conducted some thirty concerts of the Leningrad orchestra
   during their summer season in Kislovodsk, and was then offered the
   post of principal conductor in Minsk, the capital of what is now
   Belarus.  With Musin out of the way, Mravinsky, an unabashed member
   of the Communist Party, made his move in Leningrad and seized the
   chief conductorship.  Musin was frozen out, a victim of professional
   jealousy reinforced by the anti-Semitism Mravinsky shared with the
   Soviet system.

   But the advent of war presented Musin with more immediate concerns.
   With the Germans at the gates of Minsk, he, his wife and their
   seven-year-old son got out the only way they could - on foot, working
   their way south-east on an epic, month-long trek that eventually
   covered 500 kilometres, little eased by whatever hospitality they
   could get from the villagers they met on the way.

   When they reached safety, Musin discovered that the Leningrad
   Conservatoire had been evacuated to Tashkent and made his way there.
   (Stalin had passed an edict forbidding Jews from enlisting in the
   Soviet Army, so Musin was in no danger of conscription.) It was here
   that Musin, now head of the Conservatoire, gave the second-ever
   performance of the Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, after its
   premiere in besieged Leningrad.  When Shostakovich and his family
   were evacuated, they took the manuscript of the work, which narrowly
   escaped destruction:  it was separated from Shostakovich on the
   densely packed train and some hours later was rediscovered in the
   toilet, its wrapping soaked in urine.  Luckily the manuscript itself
   was untouched and was passed on to Musin, whose students spent two
   days and nights frantically copying the parts before immediately
   performing it under his baton.

   In 1944 the Conservatoire returned to Leningrad.  With it, of course,
   came Musin, and there he stayed for the rest of his life.  He conducted
   the professional symphony and opera orchestras maintained by the
   Conservatoire; otherwise, until a very late Indian summer, his public
   appearances had come to an end.

   That tardy public flourishing began in 1992, which he gave his first
   master-class abroad, in Helsinki.  He discovered he enjoyed the
   acknowledgement he was now attracting and, frail but enthusiastic,
   and despite diminished eyesight, he began to travel, a luxury denied
   him for the previous three-quarters of a century.  In April 1993 he
   was in London to teach at the Royal Academy of Music, returning for
   each of the next two years, and in February and March 1996, aged 92,
   he had his debut concerts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
   And he was well into his nineties when he visited Tel Aviv and Kyoto,
   to give master-classes and conduct concerts.

   For all that Musin was an institution, he was a genuinely humble
   man, unaffected by his status as the very embodiment of the Russian
   conducting tradition.  He never sought to blame anyone for his lack
   of recognition and he never expressed any bitterness for the want of
   a public career - though if a student was over-excited at the prospect
   of attending a Mravinsky concert, Musin's discomfort revealed that
   he had not entirely forgiven his former rival.

   A low profile meant that Musin was able to avoid the brushes with
   authority that made life so difficult for other musicians, though
   his sympathies emerged when it was safe for them to do so.  When,
   for example, the English conductor Mark Wigglesworth went to consult
   him in 1996 about the Shostakovich symphonies, Musin swiftly produced
   a copy of the Russian typescript of Testimony, Shostakovich's
   controversial anti-Stalinist memoirs, and insisted that everything
   in it was true.

   For over half-a-century Musin followed the same schedule:  he would
   take his conducting classes at 3pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays
   - for four hours without a break, except for a brief pause when he
   walked across the room to the window, to fetch the sliced apple his
   wife had prepared.  His orchestral classes were on Wednesdays and
   Saturdays.  He took his last class on Thursday of last week, before
   under going a hernia operation on the next day; following two heart
   operations over the past year, it seems to have been the last straw.

   After the death of his colleague and friend Nikolai Rabonovich in 1972,
   at which point Musin became the head of the conducting classes, his
   only other friends, he told Norman Lebrecht in 1996, "are my students",
   of whom he admitted a maximum of ten a year, though there were also
   mature musicians who would come back for short periods to refresh their
   technique.  The care he lavished on them extended well beyond their
   official period of tutelage:  he kept a watchful eye even on those
   whose careers were well-established - in 1996, for example, the
   92-year-old Musin was expressing worries that Valery Gergiev, 51
   years his junior, was driving himself too hard.

   As a result his students were devoted to him:  talk to anyone who
   had anything to do with Musin and the word that surfaces before very
   long is "love".

   His students would turn up at his house to accompany him as he walked
   to the Conservatoire, and they would walk him back.  Others would wait
   for him to arrive so as to be able to have a quick word with him.
   And his every birthday was celebrated by inviting his students to his
   undersized Soviet-era flat, where he and his wife would feed them and
   fuss over them.

   Sian Edwards studied with Musin in 1983-85, the first of what eventually
   became a large number of westerners to make the journey east to sit at
   his feet.  She explained what it was that made students so happy to
   work with him:  "You felt when you were with him that he knew exactly
   how you were going to respond, and why he was giving you a certain
   piece of music, and what you were going to do with it, and how he was
   going to develop it; you felt a tremendous sense of security".  Gerry
   Cornelius, another British student, remembers Musin's "analytical eye
   which always saw what the student needed" and his "infinite patience:
   most teachers would not tolerate the crimes we committed in front of
   him".  And his extraordinary sense of perspective would emerge when he
   was correcting some fault, telling the offender not to worry because
   "it will be fine in forty years".

   Edwards remembers him explaining how the right hand gave the pulse of
   the music, while the left, which should be equally fluent, translated
   that into the artistic line (for Musin co-ordination of the two was
   easy, since he was completely ambidextrous and could write his name
   with both hands simultaneously, the left mirroring the right):  "He
   was continually working on how you make contact with the music in a
   physical way and how you then transmit a pulse to a group of musicians
   and then, building on that, how you develop the whole musical and
   artistic framework of a piece." Musin's initial emphasis was on line;
   the subtleties of inflection, particular bow-strokes and the like
   should come later.  He wrote two books on conducting technique and an
   autobiography; all await translation into English.  Yakov Kreizberg,
   chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, studied with
   Musin from the early 1970s and has clear views on what him so
   remarkable:

   He was somebody who could explain to just about anybody in the most
   unmistakable terms what it was exactly that he was trying to teach.
   It reminded me very much of Bernstein:  Lenny was a unique figure in
   that he could explain to an audience who had never been to a concert
   what it is was that made a piece of music great and what it spoke about.
   In that way Musin also had a unique kind of genius.  We used to say
   that he could teach somebody without a shred of talent how to do a
   decent job, so that he could stand in front of an orchestra and the
   orchestra could play with that person.  He could teach about conducting
   in a way that Lenny could teach about music.

   Norman Lebrecht catalogued some of Musin's aphoristic comments during
   his Royal Academy masterclasses:

      Only two motions are possible in conducting, clockwise and
      counter-clockwise.  The first pushes the music away from you.
      The other says, come to me.

      When conducting a melody, the circular motion is meaningful because
      a circle has no ends.  Never accentuate the first beat - the
      conductor has to feel the continuous motion of the music.

      Always start with your arms wide apart - open yourself to the
      musicians and the music.

   When Lebrecht asked how he had obtained such insights, Musin's reply
   was simple:  "For seventy years I have been thinking of nothing else".

   Il'ya Alexandrovich Musin, conductor and teacher; born 6 January 1904
   (Old Style 24 December 1903), Kostroma, Russia; married 1931 Anna
   Aronovna (d.  1992), two sons (one deceased); died St Petersburg,
   6 June 1999.

Martin Anderson
Toccata Press
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