Banned for a Century, Recovered by a Choirmaster

Artemy Vedel's life after his most productive years turned into one of the harsher stories in Ukrainian music history. Tsar Paul I abolished the regimental chapel choirs that had employed him in 1797 and prohibited non-liturgical church music outright, ending the patronage that had sustained his composing. Vedel entered the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery as a novice in 1799, and that same year monastery authorities discovered a book containing handwritten insults about the royal family, attributed it to him, and had him declared mentally ill, confining him to an asylum for nearly a decade with no formal arrest or trial ever taking place. He was released in 1808, dying shortly afterward, and even his burial proved difficult to arrange given how the authorities still regarded him.

The suppression outlived him by a century. Performance and publication of his works were banned by two successive tsars, Paul I and then Alexander I, for more than a hundred years after his death, and it was only in the early twentieth century that the choirmaster Oleksandr Koshyts revived his music from surviving autograph manuscripts, bringing concertos like this one back into performance for the first time in generations. Soviet authorities then banned religious music performance again from 1928 until the political thaw of the 1950s, a second suppression layered on top of the first. Vedel is remembered today, alongside Maxim Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky, as one of the Golden Three composers of eighteenth century Ukrainian classical music, a reputation his own century almost entirely failed to let him keep.