The “Other” Boris Ledkovsky (1894–1975) — Research, Recollections, and Reflections Fifty Years after His Repose — Elizabeth A. Ledkovsky
Boris Mikhailovitch Ledkovsky breathed his last in 1975, on August 6 (July 24, his patron saint’s day, on the Julian calendar). On the Gregorian calendar, August 6 is the Feast of Holy Transfiguration, and the Orthodox Church of America (OCA)’s Saint Vladimir’s Seminary noted the coincidence in an article remembering the professor and conductor who played “a key role in changing the style of singing in North American Orthodox churches.”
I was not at my grandfather’s bedside when he died. I was only seven. Most of my memories of the tall, thin, ebony-haired, bespectacled basso profundo with a glass eye and calm demeanor are from his final year: sitting quietly at his piano on “Russian” Christmas Day, watching grandchildren tear into presents; sleeping on a narrow bed in a darkened room, which we were forbidden from disturbing; laid out in a coffin in the center of the ROCOR Cathedral of our Lady of the Sign, thick-lensed glasses inexplicably on his face. So this paper is not a memoir.
Fifty years after his death and burial, Boris Ledkovsky as an influence on Orthodox liturgical music is anything but dead and buried. His creative output as a composer did not merely survive him: It flourished.
Interestingly, the work for which Ledkovsky is best known—his arrangements of Kievan, Russian “Greek,” and znamenny chant, and an emphasis on austere tserkovnost’ (“churchliness”)—turns out to be only part of the story. Likewise, biographical details curated by an adoring widow and filtered through a grieving heart are only partial histories. This article tells more about a giant of post-revolutionary Russian liturgical music—the other Boris Ledkovsky.
In Part I, through photos, letters, scholarship, and even archives of Nazi records, tragic facts about Boris Ledkovsky’s long, interesting life are revealed. Part II, co-authored by Dr. Katya Ermolaeva, discusses the recent discovery of several unpublished manuscripts, exposing a more layered, more dramatic side of Ledkovsky’s musical creativity. Part III reflects on the Ledkovsky legacy, postulating a shared bequest to scholars and musicians and considering what could be done next to cultivate the fruits of this inheritance.
