Anatol Kos-Anatolsky: Composer from Kolomyia, who became the ambassador of Ukrainian jazz in the USSR

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The family of Kosiv

Anatol’s father, Yosyp Kos, is a music-loving doctor with perfect hearing, and his mother, Lidia, is a pianist. They had 5 children. The fate of the youngest daughter Marusa, a member of the Ukrainian student radical movement, was tragic. She died during an assassination attempt on Bronisław Peratski, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland. The eldest son Mykhailo received an engineering education, emigrated to America in 1940, had a number of inventions and patents, in particular, the KOS-MOTOR internal combustion engine.

The Kosiv family.

In the numerous family of Kosivs – doctors, engineers, writers, lawyers, all of them were educated people, knew several languages. Anatol – the middle child of the couple – spoke Polish, English, German, French, Greek, Italian, and Latin. Back in student days, Anatole’s friends joked: “There are many Kosos in the world, but Anatol is only one. Therefore, Kos-Anatolsky!”. That’s how the nickname appeared.

Anatol Kos-Anatolskyi.

Anatoly’s father was friends with Solomiya Krushelnytska. He met her in 1895 while still a student in Vienna, and during the First World War, Krushelnytska was an intermediary in the correspondence between Yosyp – a military doctor in Vienna – and his family in Galicia on the other side of the front. The outstanding Ukrainian singer lived in Italy, which at that time was still a “politically neutral” country, so she had to be an information link for families separated by the war.

Anatoly took vocal lessons from Odarka Bandrivska, Solomiya’s niece, the future founder of the Solomiya Krushelnytska museum in Lviv. Odarka’s husband, pianist and teacher Taras Shukhevich, was a teacher of Kos-Anatolskyi in the piano class, first at the Lysenko Lviv Higher Music Institute, and later at the Karol Szymanovsky Lviv Conservatory. Taras Shukhevich, like Kos-Anatolsky, first received a law degree, and only then a higher musical education.

Later, in Soviet times, Kos-Anatolskyi already begged for Solomiya Krushelnytska, who lived in difficult conditions in Lviv. And later he initiated the assignment of her name to the Lviv Music School at the Conservatory.

He helped another musician from another family of the Krushelnytskys – Maria, an outstanding Ukrainian pianist, who later actively promoted the piano work of Anatoly Kos-Anatolskyi. On the YouTube page of Maria Krushelnytska, you can familiarize yourself with the composer’s piano work and listen to his poetry – yes, he was also a master of words, other composers wrote songs based on his poems!

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Hometown of Kos-Anatolian

The composer was born, but lived for a short time in Kolomyia – a city mentioned by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in his works, where Solomiya Krushelnytska performed, where Ivan Franko was imprisoned. This city boasts thousands of stories. And also a record related to Kos-Anatolian. The festival named after him is the oldest in Ukraine, it has been held annually since 1987, it has not been stopped by either the pandemic or the war.

This year, the final concert of the festival is scheduled for December 2 in the premises of the youngest Philharmonic of Ukraine, opened in May 2022, which is also a kind of record.

During the day – a lawyer, in the evening – a jazz musician

While still studying at the Stanislavsky (Ivano-Frankivsk) gymnasium, Anatol created a choir and began recording songs. In Lviv, he received two educations at once – legal and musical.

Then, in the interwar period of the 20s and 30s, Lviv was simply enveloped in jazz. Dance orchestras (jazz bands) and revelers (male quartets with jazz accompaniment) dominated the concert venues.

In the early 1930s, Kos-Anatolskyi was bored in practice in a law office, received a meager salary, so he did not refuse to earn extra money at parties, playing jazz in the then popular Lviv Yablonskyi chapel (“Yabtsio-jazz”). The music for the ensemble was written by Bohdan Veselovskyi, Yaroslav Barnych, Bohdan Vahnyanin and Anatol Kos himself. These were legendary times with parties and “trends” from Europe.

Jazz band “Yabtso-jazz”. From left to right: Stepan Guminilovich, Anatol Kos, Leonid Yablonskyi, Bohdan Vesolovskyi.

In order to make a decent living, it was necessary to open his own law office, which Kos-Anatolsky failed to organize in Lviv. For some time he worked in his own law office in Zaliztsy, Ternopil Region, but there he lacked a rich cultural life.

With the arrival of the Soviets in 1939, Kos-Anatolskyi returned to Lviv, and it is with this city that his work is connected. His first independent work was the musical arrangement of the puppet show “The Girl and the Squirrel”.

In the future, he wrote a lot for the theater, in his first ballet – “Dovbush’s Handkerchief” – he sang the image of the legendary Ukrainian opryshka. Kos-Anatolsky managed to combine jazz or dance motifs with Hutsul melos (“Carpathian tango”), wrote the first concerto for harp and orchestra in the history of Ukrainian academic music.

Dialogues with Lyudkevich, conflict with Ivasyuk and non-partisanship

The life of Kos-Anatolian during Soviet times could be called relatively cloudless. He was not arrested, his music was not publicly burned in the courtyard of the Lviv Conservatory, he and his wife were not sent to Mordovian camps for 10 years, as happened to another composer Vasyl Barvinsky.

Perhaps it was the legal education that allowed Kos-Anatolsky to avoid repression. However, like everyone in the Soviet Union, he behaved extremely cautiously and discussed important topics with colleagues on the street, outside the home, for fear of eavesdropping.

According to contemporaries, Kos-Anatolskyi was a modest, benevolent person. But he also did not hold back his emotions in some situations. One of them is related to a friend and colleague, Stanislav Ludkevich.

Ukrainian composer and musicologist Stanislav Lyudkevich said to Kos-Anatolsky during his final exams: “Your life should belong to music!”

Lyudkevich, who lived for more than a hundred years, knew how to inspire and accurately capture the essence. In 1939, when the Soviet authorities came to the city, he stated: “We have been liberated and there is no reason for it!”

Among the musical community of Lviv, 1946. Sitting from left to right: O. Lysenko, L. Revutskyi, S. Krushelnytska, F. Kolessa, S. Lyudkevich, V. Barvinskyi; standing: A. Shtogarenko, Yu. Krykh, R. Simovych, Y. Moskvychiv, M. Mykhailov, T. Shukhevich, V. Tipakov, D. Zaleska-Kolessa, M. Kolessa. Photo: from the funds of the Ukrainian Center for Social and Cultural Affairs

Of course, the Soviet authorities did not give the composer his clear pro-Ukrainian position. In 1969, the directorate of the publishing house “Muzychna Ukraina” reported that it could publish a collection of musicological works of Lyudkevich only in abbreviated form, allegedly due to a lack of paper. Enraged Kos-Anatolskyi (at that time already a People’s Artist of Ukraine, a professor at the Lviv Conservatory) wrote a letter to the head of the Union of Composers of Ukraine and the director of the publishing house:

“If the publishing house had paper to publish a collection of musical anecdotes with a circulation of 115,000 and in Russian with a circulation of 100,000, then it is a shame to justify the reduction in the collection of Stanislav Ludkevich with a lack of paper!”

Kos-Anatolskyi and Lyudkevich were connected by something else: they both took care of the restoration of musical heritage and the rehabilitation of the name of Vasyl Barvinskyi, wrote letters to the authorities in his defense.

Like Ludkevich, Kos-Anatolsky also soberly assessed the political situation in the country. Shortly before his death in 1983, he told his wife Nadia Kos: “If we had our own state, we would be different in the world”.

In the early 1970s, a preparatory composition department was opened at the Lviv Conservatory, one of its first students was Volodymyr Ivasiuk. He entered the class at Kos-Anatolskyi. However, in 1974, a conflict arose between the teacher and the student, and Ivasiuk transferred to another teacher. What exactly happened and why the creative paths of two bright personalities diverged is still shrouded in mystery.

But it is even more surprising how Kos-Anatolskyi could receive the highest state awards, be a member of the Verkhovna Rada, write letters to Barvinskyi in the camps, express his indignation to the composers’ union, head the Lviv branch of the Ukrainian composers’ union, boldly write jazz and at the same time be non-partisan?

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Kos Anatolian today

“Life is short, but art is eternal“, Anatolii Kos-Anatolsky liked to say, so he sang his solo “oh you girl” now forever with us, but listen to his other song “Starry Night” – in a modern, playful version.

And get ready for the premiere at the Kyiv Opera: already this December, Kos-Anatolian ballet will be revived in the theater “Soychny wing” based on the novel by Ivan Franko. This work has been waiting for its revival for a long time – since the 1950s, when it was first performed on the stage of the Lviv Opera. Now single tickets for the premiere days can still be found on the theater’s website.

Poster for the performance. Photo: Kyiv Opera

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