.
Rise of The Communist Party
He founded the Red Army during the Revolution of 1917 and won major victories against the anticommunist White armies in the name of the Bolsheviks. Though his tactics were criticized by Stalinists at the time, Trotsky’s stellar military feats earned him the title of War Commissar. He continued to make strides, defeating socialist Aleksander Kerensky at Petrograd and the Battle of Pulkovo. At the end of the Russian Civil War in 1920, the battle for political power began. While Trotsky was an adept military chief, his lack of diplomacy and articulation. He gained the favor of Bolshevik Community Party leader Vladimir Lenin and become one of the original five members of Politburo, the Communist Party legislature. But Lenin and Trotsky, due to their willingness to compromise with the working class, soon found themselves out of step with the fast-paced revolution.
Despite being a formidable leader for the cause of the Soviet Union, he was often subject to the precarious nature of its rule. Trotsky made his fatal error—taking political position against Stalin’s new economic plan—after Lenin died in 1924. His essay “The Lessons of October 1917,” which chronicled the leadership failings of the Revolution of 1917, saw Trotsky removed from his commissariat position, barred from the Communist party, and exiled once again. After being moved from place to place in Europe, he eventually sought asylum in Coyoacán, Mexico. Still, his betrayal of Stalin would not go unrewarded.
Assassination and Death
In May of 1940, 20 gunmen organized by Stalinist Pavel Sudoplatov sent a barrage of bullets flying through Trotsky’s bedroom window, forcing him and his wife to duck under their bed for protection. This unsuccessful attack left him unscathed, but on guard. It soon became clear that a more subtle approach was needed to take Trotsky down.
A man known to Trotsky as Franc Jacson wiggled his way into his affairs by seducing a member of his inner party: one Sylvia Ageloff. Their relationship granted his access to his compound and he soon became a regular visitor as he helped Trotsky with his political writing.
One sunny afternoon not three months after the violent attack, Jacson entered Trotsky’s compound, a raincoat draped over his left arm. Trotsky greeted him and led him to his study. It was there that Jacson took out the ice pick he had been hiding under his coat and smashed it into the back of Trotsky’s head.
The blow did not kill him immediately—he even had enough wherewithal to turn and attack Jacson. His screams alerted his wife and guards, who found him just as Ives depicts him—conscious, but with an ice pick (rather than an axe) smashed into his skull. As the guards attacked Jacson preparing to murder him, Trotsky spoke his last words: “Don’t kill him! He must talk!”
Trotsky slipped into a coma 40 minutes after the fatal blow, though he remained alive for 25 hours and 35 minutes, being pronounced dead at 7:47PM on August 21, 1940 (Ives cleverly includes this detail in his play).
Legacy
After an investigation, it was revealed that Franc Jacson was, in fact, a Spanish Communist named Ramón Mercader with many aliases. His meeting with Sylvia and subsequent move to Mexico was all part of a detailed assassination plot. Even his mother, Eustaquia Caridad, an avid Communist herself, played a part—waiting outside Trotsky’s compound in a getaway car. The assassination landed him in prison for 20 years. Afterwards, he returned to the Soviet Union where he became the new darling of the Party, receiving the Hero of the Soviet Union decoration for his deed.
In 1964, he received a Fulbright Scholarship and continued his musical study in Paris under Nadia Boulanger. Trained at the Paris Conservatory, this famous French composer and teacher had seen many of her pupils rise to stardom; Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Elliott Carter, David Diamond and many other prominent American composers all number among her students. It was this experience that shaped the rest of Glass’s musical career.
Rise to Fame
While in France, he spent much of his time in the experimental theatre and film industry. He met many renowned actors, directors, and artists—some of whom he would compose scores for. His most significant collaboration occurred in 1966 when he worked with Ravi Shankar on a film score. Shankar, who became well known for incorporating traditional Indian music with that of contemporary Western, introduced Glass to the minimalist style that would later become his trademark.
He returned to New York City, where he attended a concert featuring the work of Steven Reich. It was there that he heard Reich’s landmark piece Piano Phase, an experiment in musical phasing that soon became popular. This was the spark Glass needed. In less than 18 months, he composed 9 new works using his newfound minimalist approach, including 1+1, Strung Out, and Music in the Shape of a Square.
He returned to New York City, where he attended a concert featuring the work of Steven Reich. It was there that he heard Reich’s landmark piece Piano Phase, an experiment in musical phasing that soon became popular. This was the spark Glass needed. In less than 18 months, he composed 9 new works using his newfound minimalist approach, including 1+1, Strung Out, and Music in the Shape of a Square.
Style and The Avante Garde
Even in the midst of composing, his love for experimental theatre remained. In 1970, he co-founded Mabou Mines, an avant-garde theatre based in New York City, and married co-founder, JoAnne Akalaitis, a prominent American theatre director.
The year 1971 saw the foundation of the Philip Glass Ensemble, which included keyboardists Michael Reisman and Eleanor Sandresky, audio engineer Dan Dryden, and singer Lisa Beilawa among many other musicians and technicians. Together they composed Music in Twelve Parts, which defined Glass’s musical style for the rest of his career.
His anti-modernist approach to music made him a force to be reckoned with. His musical watermark lies in its minimalism, or, as Glass prefers, music with repetitive structures—a series of musical phrases that are repeated in harmony or pattern. His most famous work, Einstein on the Beach, is a 5-hour opera with additive and subtractive structures, costumes, and lighting that tell the story of Albert Einstein. In total, Glass has written over 25 operas, 12 symphonies, and 3 concertos. The Philip Glass Ensemble is alive and well today. Their next tour performance in Athens will be of Glass’s Music in Eight Parts.
Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread
In Philip Buys a Loaf of Bread, Ives plays with the idea music with repetitive structures, as the characters repeat sounds and phrases again and again. We are pleased that our music director, Dr. Michael Ciavaglia, has composed a score in classic Glass style. It is the perfect blend of performance and concert that Glass would undoubtedly enjoy.
Listen to Philip Glass's musical style in this short video here:
Philip Glass - MUSIC IN EIGHT PARTS - The Philip Glass Ensemble
Early Life and Education
There is no name in nature documentary, broadcasting, or narration more well-known that that of Sir David Frederick Attenborough. Born on May 8, 1926 in London, England, his collection of fossils and bird eggs betrayed his enchantment with nature at a young age. He attended many lectures by the notable Archibald Belaney (also known as Grey Owl), who fascinated him with his theory and practice of conservation—a practice that Attenborough advocates for even now. He was educated at the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys where he won a scholarship that took him to Cambridge, where he studied zoology and geology.
Television and The BBC
While working his job editing children’s science textbooks, he caught the eye of Mary Adam, head of the BBC’s factual broadcasting department and was invited to train there. He was initially discouraged from a career on camera because Adams thought his teeth were too big, so he began his stint at the BBC as the producer of a quiz show called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and then The Pattern of Animals following that. But Attenborough disliked these shows for one key reason: they took animals out of their natural habitat. It was because of this that Attenborough went on to write and produce his own series, Zoo Quest, which filmed animals out in nature at a distance, so they could be studied at their most authentic. This was the show that started his long and illustrious career; it became so wildly popular that the BBC dedicated a second channel, BBC-2, to these explorations.
Nature Documentaries
Once Attenborough became a freelance writer and narrator, his career took off. His most famous The Life series contained programs such as Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), Private Life of Plants (1995), and Life in the Undergrowth (2005) among others His most recent credits include the narration of Blue Planet II (2017)—for which he earned an Emmy—and Our Planet (2019) which debuted on Netflix.
Legacy and Mayflies
In addition to his many honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, Attenborough has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and given the Order of Merit. He is a patron of Population Matters, an organization that studies the impact of human population on nature, and the World Land Trust, an organization that purchases and preserves rainforests around the globe.
Sir David Attenborough had indeed studied mayflies in collaboration with National Geographic biologist and photographer Joe Petersburger. Filmed by the BBC in Hungary, this video shows the two working together on a story for National Geographic. Furthermore, in an episode of Our Planet entitled “Freshwater”, the dancing mayfly spectacle can be seen, with narration by the one and only Attenborough.
Sir David Attenborough with Joe Petersburger and The Mayflies
Sir David Attenborough Breaks Record for Fastest Time to Reach 1 Million Followers on Instagram
