The Moroccan Musical Moment: Evgeny Ivanovich Evetz (1905-1990), His Post-World War II Russian Choir, and Their Legacy in the Orthodox Music World — Nicholas and Michelle Ganson

All of us who sang in the choir in Casablanca received good musical training, learned choral discipline,
and retained our love for the rich repertoire of sacred, classical, and folk music for the rest of our lives.

—Tamara Joukov (a choir director trained under E. I. Evetz)

We should not close our eyes to the fact that our [church music] culture in most countries of the Russian diaspora
is in a state of decline or, at best, is on the eve of decline. One would like to add: catastrophic and irreversible decline…. 
[T]he Russian youth choir in Paris, directed by the wonderful choral pedagogue Evgeny I. Evetz made an especially
strong impression on me because it…is preparing replacements for the generation of ‘fathers’ and ‘grandfathers.’

—Johann Von Gardner, 1969

In the late 1940s, Russian Orthodox refugees who had been displaced by World War II and concomitant political turmoil began to trickle into French Morocco. Many of them settled on the outskirts of Casablanca, in a neighborhood called Bournazel, which became the center of a community under the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russian (ROCOR).[3] Within a few years, these refugees managed to establish a vibrant liturgical and cultural life. The spiritual leader of the community was Fr. Mitrophan Znosko, while his brother-in-law, Evgeny Ivanovich Evetz, was the choral director. Evetz’s choir, made up entirely of Orthodox laypeople, became well-known among the French population of Casablanca. In a span of roughly fourteen years, between 1948 and Evetz’s departure from Casablanca in 1962, the choir—in addition to singing at all the divine services—managed to perform approximately one hundred concerts of sacred, classical, and folk music. With the end of the French protectorate of Morocco in 1956, Russians began to gradually abandon Morocco for western countries, where they often came to be known in émigré circles simply as “the Moroccans” (marokkantsy). This title stayed with the Russian-Moroccan émigrés even outside Morocco because the years spent in Morocco were formative for the singers. Evetz, as their musical leader, instilled a strong culture of singing, which they carried with them to other countries and contexts. Many of them, in turn, sought to transmit the culture of singing they had acquired to a younger generation as they served as church conductors, singers, and mentors in Paris, where the Evetz family ended up, and in a number of parish communities in the United States. In working toward documenting the afterlife of the Moroccan choir, this article fills in a crucial piece of the rich mosaic of Orthodox church singing culture and history in America. The research is based on a variety of primary sources—including published and unpublished memoirs, interviews, photographs, artifacts from private collections and, on occasion, the first-hand knowledge and experiences of the authors—and seeks to bring the story of Evgeny Evetz and his choir out of obscurity and document its substantial impact on the international Orthodox music world. 

The Russian Émigré Context

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in October 1917 and the subsequent establishment of Soviet power spurred the flight of millions of people from the country. Emigration happened in numerous waves: the first major emigration, or the First Wave, happened shortly after the revolution and ensuing Russian Civil War (1917-20); the Second Wave occurred during the chaos of World War II. The new Soviet state sought to eliminate entire social classes, supplanting the old order with a new proletarian society; in the process, it sought to extirpate the culture of old Russia. Bolshevik iconoclasm targeted all elements of the old order. In following a policy of militant atheism, the Soviet state directed its assault most forcefully at the Russian Orthodox Church, the main religious institution in the country, deemed by the communists to be the handmaiden of the Russian imperial state. By the time of World War II, the Church and old culture to which it was tied had been subjected to numerous waves of attacks through the 1920s and 1930s, first under Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin. Those in the emigration who maintained the Orthodox Christian faith through this old culture sought to preserve it in the diaspora, recognizing that the failure to do so could lead to its complete loss. Opposition to the communist experiment in Russia constituted a defining characteristic of what Marc Raeff refers to as “Russia Abroad”; likewise, this characteristic extended to the Russian émigrés in the community in Morocco to which Evetz belonged.