Is It Really Unprecedented? By Thomas Wolf

Today we associate the word “unprecedented” with the COVID-19 crisis. In describing the life and careers of musicians, many sentences begin with the word: “For the first time...” There are no known models for how to move forward, we are told. It is a new world and we should not count on returning to the old one.

But is all this really true?

As I have delved into my family’s history, I am struck by how many parallels there are between our current moment and the period beginning in 1917-1918. A pandemic, the so-called “Spanish flu” (which was neither Spanish nor a flu), followed upon an era of war, political instability, and conflict. The stable old order was torn asunder. Like today, social class, minority status, and wealth was a predictor of how likely one was to avoid death by disease or death by the gun.

For musicians, like members of my family, the situation was especially grim. Historically marginalized both by occupation and religion, they had overcome childhood poverty and hardship and had, for a few years, been living an opulent life in Moscow. My violinist grandmother, Lea Luboshutz, lived with and was supported by a rich lawyer who was also the father of her children. Her cellist sister, Anna, had married a prominent physician. Supplementing their solo careers and in partnership with their younger pianist brother, Pierre, they had been touring throughout Russia as the Luboshutz Trio, one of the most prominent chamber ensembles in the country.

They were so celebrated that the two women had been chosen to perform Tchaikovsky’s A minor Trio at Tolstoy’s memorial event in Moscow. Young Pierre was replaced by the much more famous pianist, Rosa Pasternak, mother of the future Nobel Prize novelist, whose husband had painted Tolstoy’s portrait and was chosen to speak at the ceremony. Occasional Western European tours were also part of the career trajectories of my relatives, though such travel was curtailed during the dangerous years of the First World War, beginning in 1914. Still, Russia provided them with plenty of concerts, ample money, and fame.

The year 1917 was the turning point. Exhausted by the world war that had been economically devastating to the country and costly in human life, Russians turned on the Tsarist government, and after a bitter civil war, replaced it with the Communist Soviet system. On top of this revolution, which is detailed to a greater or lesser degree in every history book of the period, came the “Spanish flu” which, until recently was not covered nearly as comprehensively in historical surveys. Appearing in August of 1918, the disease ravaged the country (along with the rest of the world), killing 3% of the Russian population in just 18 months. Initially, it was Kiev and the Ukraine that bore the brunt of the disease; but in time it made its way to Moscow where my family lived and where many others died by a combination of disease and starvation.

The challenges my family faced were immense. The music business, as they had known it, ceased to exist. My grandmother’s concert itinerary evaporated—concerts were cancelled, major halls were closed. The man she lived with, Onissim Goldovsky, was a member of a despised political party, advocating gradual political change along the western model of a constitutional democracy. The Soviets targeted him as a bourgeois agitator. His legal practice dried up—including his lucrative work representing discredited railroad tycoons (many of whom emigrated or were imprisoned). Worse, it was unclear whether his life was in danger as the results of the civil war made it increasingly clear that the Soviets were ruthless, especially toward prominent and wealthy liberals like Onissim. Anti-Semitism was on the rise again and though my grandfather had converted to Catholicism, he was still regarded as a Jew as he had written extensively about Jewish persecution in Russia.

*My mother, Irene Goldovsky, as a child*

Complicating all these external events was the birth of my mother in 1917. With the coming of the pandemic in 1918 and for some years thereafter, her health would be a constant concern.

Lea and Onissim’s large apartment was confiscated and they were forced to share it with another family, living only in a small portion of it with this new addition to the family and her two older brothers. The service staff of the apartment house departed and the elevator to their fifth floor apartment no longer worked. Heat was irregular as was running water. Most concerning was the food supply. My mother needed milk and my grandmother’s breasts ran dry. The woman who had supplied them with cow’s milk was told that the Luboshutz-Goldovsky family should no longer be regarded as a priority customer. My grandmother bribed her, trading a beautiful fur coat and some jewels for the promise of milk, albeit at inflated prices. Meanwhile, my Great Uncle Pierre who lived in the apartment with the family would go out in the morning searching far and wide for a chicken so my mother could have some protein. Years later, he used to tease my mother that his successful efforts to find chickens were the reason she had grown up healthy enough to become what he called a “baby factory” (my mother bore six healthy children, two of whom became professional musicians). For years, as a child, I was urged to “finish everything on your plate” if I wanted to stay healthy, though if anything, in my suburban American home, I was fed far too much.

Another habit developed in those years that came down to my generation was maintaining good hygiene. No one spoke about the disease that had surrounded the family in Russia during those years (nasty bits of family history were glossed over). But we were made to wash our hands constantly, to take a bath or shower every day, and we were to equate bad hygiene with illness. When one of us had even the mildest symptoms of a sniffle or headache, we were kept home from school, isolated in our rooms, and fed our favorite foods to compensate. I will confess that I faked a few illnesses as it was a pretty lavish lifestyle to be served a lamb chop with mint jelly on a special table that was reserved for sick family members that fit conveniently over the bed. We only left the room for bathroom breaks and hand washing.

But how did musicians in Russia manage to earn a living beginning in 1917? Some failed to do so. But there were ways for those who could adapt—one of the important lessons for today’s musicians. Soviets deemed it important for factory workers to experience “culture” and they allocated food to be “paid” to musicians who played for workers. Lea, and eventually her son, eleven-year-old son Boris Goldovsky, began playing as frequently as possible in these unusual venues where the fee was often a sack of potatoes and some herring. My Aunt Anna, a cellist, recalled an event in which she appeared along with circus performers and dancers. A young person in the front row eating peanuts and spitting out the husks exclaimed loudly, “Look at the babe with the guitar” (her “guitar” being a rare 18th century Giovanni Battista Guadagnini cello). On one occasion, Anna was lowered on a platform into a coal mine where she played for the miners in an eerie and most extraordinary venue with light provided by the miners’ head lamps. She also performed for sailors of the Red Fleet aboard one of its ships and accompanied her husband to the front during the Civil War to perform for soldiers.

My Great Uncle Pierre had perhaps the cushiest job. He got to accompany the American dancer, Isadora Duncan, when she performed in Russia. As Duncan had spoken glowingly of the Soviet system, the government supported her tours and gave her money to set up a school in Moscow. Pierre was hired to become an accompanist at the school and while he may have found the occupation boring, the job paid well and he was able to hire another family member, sister Lea’s oldest son Yuri, to assist him. His nephew brought in more money for the household.

These were hardly the careers that any of my relatives were trained for or had chosen! But for a time they considered themselves lucky. They all stayed healthy during the pandemic, they generally had enough to eat, and they assumed things would return to normal in a short time. In this latter assumption, they were wrong, just as many of today’s musicians may be overly optimistic about a timeline. Instead of getting better, conditions worsened, Onissim’s status with the Soviets deteriorated, and within a few years he died of the strain of his difficult life. Added to the misery, the state threatened to confiscate Lea’s valuable Niccolo Amati violin for fear she would leave the country with it (officials had been prescient—eventually she did).

One thing that is eerily similar to the present era were the opportunities offered by new technologies. My Aunt Anna, who chose to stay in the Soviet Union, embraced radio. She had her own program and was featured on radio every day, becoming famous throughout the country as millions heard her name and her cello. When concert life started up again (and eventually it did), she was well positioned to become a leading soloist. My Uncle Pierre, on the other hand, was fascinated by the new technology of recordings. One can still purchase CD remasters of some of his recordings with the double bass virtuoso, Serge Koussevitzky (made before both emigrated to the US where Koussevitzky would eventually become music director of the Boston Symphony). From time to time I come across mentions of other old recordings of singers and instrumentalists in which Pierre is listed as accompanist. Later, based on his experience with the technology, when Pierre was well established in the US and formed the duo-piano team of Luboshutz & Nemenoff with his wife Genia, the two made numerous recordings which contributed mightily to their fame and income. While recordings no longer are a guarantee of either fame or fortune today, new technologies like virtual performances delivered over the internet offer a possible new frontier that may be an important component of a musician’s career (and possibly income) in the future.

Other musicians—performers and composers—saw great opportunities in still another new technology, cinema. While this was true of some in Lea, Anna, and Pierre’s generation, the opportunities were even more compelling for a younger generation of musicians fleeing Nazi Germany and finding refuge in Hollywood. The commercial opportunities provided generous livelihoods and allowed some superb musicians to make a great deal of money by day and play their beloved classical music avocationally at night.

Once my grandmother and my Uncle Pierre established themselves in the US, a different kind of concert career offered stability and opportunity for classical performers. In some ways, it resembled the old pattern of big city recitals, appearances with orchestras, and tours to the provinces. But their programming had to be adjusted on those tours for audiences that did not have the sophistication and experience of Europeans. The first half of a program might contain the masterworks of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, but the second half was devoted to short pieces, including American folk songs and opera arias arranged for their instruments. There was no room for arrogance or haughtiness in programming—one had to survive. Some of their colleagues and old friends—like the four Russians of the Budapest String Quartet—found career opportunities in chamber music, replicating in a strange way the careers my relatives had had as youngsters in Russia with the Luboshutz Trio. Indeed, the more things changed, in certain respects, the more they appeared to stay the same.

By the time I came along, years of success obscured the long and dark journey that the family had taken. To the extent it was described to us in the younger generation, their travails were recounted as humorous stories with the suffering left out. It was only much later as I began my research about the family that I learned just how treacherous their journey had been.

So what lessons do I take from their story? There is good news and bad news. First the good: there is a future for classical musicians and many aspects of the old career will probably come back in some form or another, though musicians will need to be creative in embracing new opportunities. The bad: it may take much time—possibly years—before that new stability is achieved.

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