On a drizzly weekday evening in December, I walk past the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory on the Bolshaya ("Great") Nikitskaya Street. No snow has fallen yet this month, giving the low-rise eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses a look of ennui, as though the usually bustling Russian capital has shut down. Even Coffeemania--the pricey coffee bar located in one wing of the conservatory, where the nouveaux riches treat their mistresses to Sachertorte and champagne, and the Bentleys queue up outside--is nearly empty. Then a concert poster in one of the glass cases near the music academy''s entrance catches my eye. That evening there will be a concert commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of the composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-98). I decide to buy a ticket, but at the box office I''m told the concert is sold out. Back outside, an elderly woman in a checked winter coat beckons me. Under the watchful gaze of the bronze statue of Tchaikovsky, she offers me a ticket for the equivalent of less than two euros--true, four times its face value, but still chickenfeed compared to a seat in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

I''m somewhat familiar with Schnittke''s music. It''s exciting, aloof and weird all at once. In 1992 I attended the premiere of his opera Life with an Idiot in the Amsterdam Muziektheater, conducted by his compatriot Mstislav Rostropovich, who for the occasion traded his cello for the baton. The composer was present as well. During the final applause, as Schnittke approached the stage to be embraced by an exuberant Rostropovich, Amsterdam was briefly transformed into Little Moscow, the auditorium roaring with Russian bravos and hoorahs . For Schnittke, it must have felt like a victory over the totalitarian system that had frustrated his life as a musician in his homeland. Authorities in the recently collapsed Soviet Union had denounced his music as "avant-gardist" and banned its performance. So the aggrieved composer, who made his living mainly by writing music for films, had emigrated in 1990 to Germany, the country his Jewish father had left in 1927 for the Soviet Union.

Alfred Schnittke died in Hamburg eight years after his Amsterdam triumph. But in Moscow, on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday, for nearly two hours he is very much alive. On the stage stands a large portrait, draped with flowers. Throughout the con- cert, someone will regularly walk up, their eyes solemnly teary, to place two red or white carnations before the late composer and stand for a moment''s silence. One of the soloists is Natalia Gutman, a world-class musician and a good friend of Schnittke''s. Her playing fills the auditorium with the sombreness of his music. And yet, for her it is also a cele- bration, for her friend has been brought to life, the many listeners honouring him along with her. From my perch up in the gods, I scan the vast, packed audito- rium with its wood panelling and ceilings and its superb acoustics.

I am struck by the faces of the men and women listening intently to the music, as if they don''t want to miss a single note. Many of them aren''t even that old, but they''re wearing those large plastic- rimmed glasses and the drab, ill-fitting suits you could get at the GUM department store on Red Square in the days of the Soviet Union. It makes these folks seem transplanted from another era, one that vanished when the Soviet Union was dissolved at the end of December 1991. They are the quintessence of the old Soviet intelligentsia, the teachers, the professors, the doctors and the physicists who did not benefit from the wild capitalism that spawned the New Russians, with their Coffeemania, their Bentleys and their insatiable hunger for luxury consumer products. It''s as though I''m in some huge Noah''s Ark, together with barely a couple of thousand survivors of a drowned civilization. Next to me, a few earnest-looking conservatory students are feverishly taking notes. When, come intermission, they discover I''m a foreigner and hail from the Netherlands, they crowd around me for a chat. "Ah, Holland, land of tulips, Rembrandt and Diepenbrock," muses one of them, a beautiful, dark-eyed violin student.

"I would so like to go there," she says. "And never leave." Her fellow classmates also talk about emigrating to the West, because in Russia it''s impossible to eke out a living as a composer. I tell them I''m not their man, that I always advise dreamers to stay put in their own country because that''s where they''re needed most--it''s people like them who will help build a modern society. "And where else than in Russia," I add, "can you find such exquisite music and excellent musicians?" After intermission I move up a few rows and find myself next to a father with his three young sons. He teaches organ at the con- servatory; his boys study, respectively, violin, cello and piano. All four are enamoured of Schnittke, they say, just as they are of all great Russian composers. The father confesses to having idolized Schnittke even back in the Soviet days, and never passed up the chance to attend an illicit concert of his music.

I have always been fascinated by the admiration so many Russians harbour for classical music. In the Soviet Union, musicians and composers were revered as gods. They enjoyed a certain degree of immunity because they were unique in their creative urge. And yet, at the same time, dozens of them were persecuted, shipped off to labour camps or executed by the communist regime; their compositions and recordings were destroyed or banned; their per- formances cancelled. Of course, this is nothing compared to the fifteen hundred writers executed under Stalin. But still, I''m intrigued by what was behind their persecution. Was it their music, or something else? There were also composers and performers who acquiesced. And yet they, too, were often punished anyway.

Because what was expected from them besides blind compliance, no one really could say. The one thing they all shared during the first three decades of the Soviet Union was the misfortune that Joseph Stalin was a music-lover. He actively interfered in the nation''s musical life and listened to every new release of a classical recording, noting his verdict on the record sleeve: "good", "average" or "rubbish". This last one could, in the worst-case scenario, earn you a bullet. In 1932 Stalin decided to subject music, like the rest of the arts, to the artistic doctrine of socialist realism. Solace, beauty or amusement no longer mattered: art''s sole purpose was to further the advancement of socialism. The regime''s rationale (although many composers did their best to skirt around this edict) was that the positive energy radiated by this new Soviet music would lead to the betterment of the masses. This book is about composers and musicians trapped in such an ideological system.

What made them choose to make conces- sions--or not--in their work? Why did they risk their lives by being wilful or contrary? Were their actions purely the consequence of their creative urge, or did vanity play a role? And what about Tikhon Khrennikov, the powerful general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, who both aided fellow composers and made their lives miserable? Was he simply more power-hungry than tal- ented, or was there more to it? Could his fickleness be understood only by someone who experienced the convoluted Soviet system at first hand? After all, musical life in the defunct USSR was of an unheard-of calibre: consider composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and performers like Mstislav Rostropovich, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan and Maria Yudina. By the time I got to Moscow, many of these great musicians either were deceased or had emigrated to the West. On occa- sion I heard one of them--for instance, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich--perform there. But for the most part it felt like all that was left were some faded memories of an exceptional bygone era. At times I was lucky enough to be afforded a whiff of that glorious past, like in the small Moscow opera theatre built by the renowned soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Rostropovich''s widow, for her talented pupils. Vishnevskaya would sit enthroned in her own "royal box" and receive cheers from the singers and the audience after each performance out of gratitude for everything she "had done for Russia". Such moments not only validated my love of Russian music, but also further piqued my curiosity. In the end, I decided to delve into a turbulent period in Soviet history, during which, to paraphrase the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, for every even slightly reasonable and not entirely insensitive person, life assumed the form of a daily ordeal.

The fact that in this very coun- try such marvellous music was composed and such outstanding performers graced the stage is nothing short of miraculous.