Yuly Serhiyovych Meytus

Yuly Serhiyovych Meytus (Yelizavetgrad, 1903 – Kyiv, 1997) was one of the most prolific Ukrainian composers of the twentieth century, with a body of work encompassing orchestral music, song and, above all, opera. His career illustrates how the cultural life of interwar Soviet Ukraine and the aesthetics of socialist realism shaped an entire generation of musicians.

Born in Yelizavetgrad, a city with a very lively cultural life, he received his first lessons from Gustav Neuhaus and then continued with Neuhaus's son, Heinrich. Between 1923 and 1931 he studied composition with S. S. Bogatyryov at the Institute of Music and Theatre in Kharkiv. While still a student, the influential theatre director Les Kurbas commissioned him to write music for his innovative productions of plays by M. Kulish, and Kurbas's Berezil company left a deep impression on him that steered his interest towards dramatic art. In those same years he co-founded, together with V. Kostenko, the Association of Revolutionary Composers of Ukraine, which remained active until its dissolution in 1932.

In the late 1920s he began to harmonise and arrange folk music from Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere, and some of these arrangements were praised by Bartók. His first orchestral suite based on Ukrainian song styles dates from 1927, but it was the second, Na Dniprel'stani (On the Dnieper Dam), of 1929, that brought him international recognition. Its almost minimalist rhythmic ostinatos and a large percussion section turn the work into an almost futurist homage to the power of the machine, reflecting the era's fascination with industry.

Towards the end of the 1930s he turned to opera, which would ultimately become the most important genre in his output. His first two operas were written in collaboration with other composers. During the Second World War, living in Alma-Ata and Ashgabat, he became intensely interested in Turkmen music and worked with Kuliyev on Abadan, the first opera to address the war then under way. After returning to Kyiv in 1944 he wrote Moloda Hvardia (1947), with which he achieved his first operatic success. Between 1951 and 1997 he composed ten more operas, as well as occasional instrumental works and a series of song cycles in which he condensed his operatic sensibility into brief dramatic scenes.

His legacy is viewed unevenly: he began with experimental and eclectic leanings, but his operas are highly conservative in character and have a pronounced national colour. Ukradene shchastia (The Stolen Happiness) remains in the repertoire of post-Soviet Ukraine. He never fully shed the imprint of socialist realism, although in his finest pages he reached passages of elegant beauty and subtle psychological characterisation.