Alexander Galich
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Alexander Galich (Russian: Алекса́ндр Арка́дьевич Га́лич, born
Alexander Aronovich Ginzburg, October 19, 1918 – December 15,
1977), was a Russian poet, screenwriter, playwright, and
singer-songwriter. Galich is a pen name, a sort of acronym of
his last name, first name, and patronymic: Ginzburg Alexander
Arkadievich. He adopted this name to conceal his Jewish ancestry
in the face of Soviet antisemitism. He also changed his
patronymic from Aronovich to Arkadievich for this reason.
Biography
Alexander Ginzburg was born on October 19, 1918 in Ekaterinoslav
(now Dnipropetrovsk) into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His
father, Aron Samoilovich Ginzburg, was an economist, and his
mother, Fanni Borisovna Eksler, worked in a music conservatory.
For most of his childhood he lived in Sevastopol. Before World
War II, he entered the Gorky Literary Institute, then moved to
Stanislavsky's Operatic-Dramatic Studio, and then to the
Studio-Theatre of A. Arbuzov and V. Pluchek (in 1939).
He wrote plays and screenplays, and in the late 1950s, he
started to write songs and sing them accompanying himself on his
guitar. Influenced by the Russian city romance tradition and the
art of Alexander Vertinsky, Galich developed his own voice
within the genre. He practically single-handedly created the
genre of "bard song". Many of his songs spoke of the Second
World War and the lives of concentration camp inmates --
subjects which Vladimir Vysotsky also began tackling at around
the same time. They became popular with the public and were made
available via magnitizdat.
His first songs, though rather innocent politically,
nevertheless were distinctly out of tune with the official
Soviet aesthetics. They marked a turning point in Galich's
creative life, since before this, he was a quite successful
Soviet man of letters. This turn was also brought about by the
aborted premiere of his play Matrosskaya Tishina written for the
newly opened Sovremennik Theatre. The play, already rehearsed,
was banned by censors, who claimed that the author had a
distorted view of the role of Jews in the Great Patriotic War.
This incident was later described by Galich in the story
Generalnaya Repetitsiya (Dress Rehearsal).
Galich's increasingly sharp criticism of the Soviet regime in
his music caused him many problems. In 1971, he was expelled
from the Soviet Writers' Union, which he had joined in 1955. In
1972, he was expelled from the Union of Cinematographers. That
year he became baptized in the Orthodox Church.
Galich was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1974.
He initially lived in Norway for one year, where he made his
first recordings outside of the USSR. These were broadcasted on
Radio Liberty, a congress-funded radio station outlawed in USSR.
His songs became immensely popular in the underground scene for
being openly critical towards the Soviet government. He later
moved to Munich, where he joined the Russian anti-communist
organization NTS. He finally moved to Paris where, on the
evening of December 15, 1977, he was found dead by his wife,
clutching a Grundig stereo recording antenna plugged into a
power socket. While his death appears to have been an accident,
the consensus opinion was that it was either an assassination or
a suicide. As his wife was absent the whole day, no one
witnessed the exact circumstances of his death. In 1988, he was
posthumously re-instated into the Writers' and Cinematographers'
Unions. In 2003, the first memorial plaque for Galich was put up
on a building in Akademgorodok (Novosibirsk) where he performed
in 1968. That same year, the Alexander Galich Memorial Society
was founded.
Music
Alexander Galich, like most bards, had a fairly minimal musical
background. He played his songs on a seven string Russian
guitar, which was fairly standard at the time. He often wrote in
the key of D minor, relying on very simple chord progressions
and fingerpicking techniques. He had basic piano playing skills
as well.
Galich had a signature cadence that he would usually play at
the conclusion of a song (and sometimes at the beginning). He
would play the D minor chord toward the top of the fretboard
(fret position 0XX0233, thickest to thinnest string, open G
tuning), then slide down the fretboard to a higher voiced D
minor (0 X X 0 10 10 12).
