The Soviet Faust

A sorrowful moan in the wilderness... sobbing... the wind in a drainpipe... an echo hurled into the sky... the divination of an invisible shaman...

This is what Music of Breath sounds like, a work by composer and renowned theremin player Olesya Rostovskaya. Watching her hands at work as she performs, it is as if she is stitching an airy canvas of glass beads. She’s conducting music of the celestial sphere... officiating at an inscrutable sacred ritual.

During her tours, audience members often ask Rostovskaya how she transforms her voice. They take the timbre of the instrument for some type of cosmic vocalization, something between an angel’s voice and a stringed instrument – now edgy, now perfectly calm. But the theremin, the strange instrument that debuted in Moscow in 1921, has nothing to do with the human voice.

On October 5, 1921, Petersburg inventor Lev Theremin performed a concert of “radio music” at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum before a large audience. Moving his hand in the air in front of a metal screen, he coaxed sounds from this membrane, his movement regulating the pitch of the tones. The audience listened enthralled as he performed a variety of challenging musical compositions. A journalist dubbed the instrument a “thereminvox” (voice of Theremin); it later simply came to be known by the last name of its inventor.

Theremin, [in Russian, his name is written Termen] then a young Petersburg student working under the tutelage of Professor Abram Ioffe in the newly-founded School of Physics and Engineering, never suspected that his musical invention would be so popular in the West or that it would make him rich. Neither did he suspect that the fledgling Soviet government would exploit his invention so skillfully. Newspapers were dotted with headlines: “From Physics to the Grand Opera,” “Lenin’s Guest,” “I Listened in on the Kremlin.” Journalists used the life of the great inventor as fodder for sensational story lines.

I began to study music at 9 and electricity at 7. Even in childhood, when I began to play the cello, I experienced a big disconnect between the music itself and the mechanical means of producing it. I felt that electricity had greater subtlety and I always wanted to somehow bring electricity and music together. At 13, I began to fall in love with high frequencies, and with low-capacity transformers like the Tesla, Ruhmkorff coils, resonant spark phenomenon, and Geissler fluorescence.

When my teacher discovered my interests, he invited me to work in the physics laboratory at the First Grammar School of St. Petersburg. When I entered the 7th grade (1921), the principal of the school suggested that I give a talk with a demonstration of my experiments for students and parents.

About 3 meters above the audience, I hung a few cables, to which I was able to supply a high frequency voltage of 300 kw from a Tesla resonant transformer and electrolytic circuit breaker with a Ruhmkorff coil. As I began to discuss the electric fields, I handed out a few Geissler gas discharge tubes to the audience. When audience members stood up and raised them in the air, the tubes glowed. Then I took a small metal rod and gave it a high-voltage spark. By moving it closer and farther from away [from the cables], I was able to generate sounds of different frequencies, allowing me to produce the melody of the Song of the Volga Boatmen. As a cellist, it seemed to me as if I was playing a sparking string.”

Needless to say, this all made a great impression on the audience. The lecture was reported in the Petersburg press, and his experiment had contained the roots of the invention that would make him famous.

Working with Ioffe, Theremin conducted a series of experiments involving the use of gas-filled lamps as measuring devices. In one of these experiments, he placed gas in the chamber between capacitor sheets. When temperature increased, the gas expanded, changing the capacitance between the plates. Increasing the sensitivity of the instrument with his favorite “cathode relay” (frequency converter), the inventor plugged headphones instead of the usual needle indicator into the output of the instrument. The instrument generated sounds, changing the frequency as the state of the gas changed. Theremin noticed that by putting his hand inside the capacitor circuit, he could change the capacitance level, and thus the frequency of the audio output.

After some practice on the instrument, he played Lament by Jules Massenet and Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns, from his Carnival of the Animals, sliding from note to note as if he were playing a stringed instrument.

Wearing headphones, Theremin reveled in the music summoned from the air. In the school’s smoking room befuddled students gossiped: “Theremin plays Glück on the voltmeter.” In 1921, Theremin registered patent number 780 under the name “Musical instrument with cathode tubes.” It was the first electronic instrument that could be used for concert performances.

Soon thereafter, Theremin brought two versions of his new instrument to the Kremlin: one for creating music, the other to demonstrate an alternate use for the technology: as a touchless alarm system.

There was a grand piano in Lenin’s office. So, after a demonstration of the alarm’s capabilities, Theremin, accompanied by Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, who had once studied at the Conservatory, played Swan by Saint-Saëns. Then, he performed one of Scriabin’s études and Glinka’s Lark. Theremin later recalled his Kremlin meeting with Lenin:

He was short, pudgy, and had red hair. He was shorter than me. I took his hand and helped him begin. He was very musical. He was able to finish “Lark” without my help.

It was decided to install the alarm in the Hermitage Museum’s Scythian Wing, which housed many gold treasures.

The theremin’s sound does not result from contact, but from the movement of the player’s hand in proximity to two antennas – the right one regulates pitch, the left volume. Therefore, to observers, Rostovskaya says, it seems like the sound is coming from nowhere. The eerie tones can sound like a violin or a cello; the timbre of its sound is governed by the instrument’s power supply.

The theremin’s popularity in the West took root in the summer of 1927, at the Gesamtkunstwerk International Expo held in Frankfurt, Germany. The German press raved about Theremin’s concerts. He was applauded in the concert halls of Dresden, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Munich, Leipzig, and at the Berlin Philharmonic. His European concerts were attended by the writers Gerhardt Hauptmann, Bernard Shaw, and the musicians Bruno Walter, Morris Ravel, Ottorinno Respighi and many other celebrities. The physicist Albert Einstein expressed his delight in a phrase that became an adage: “The sound flows freely out of nowhere. This is a completely new thing.” (Einstein several times played duets with Theremin, with Einstein on the violin.)

After Germany, Theremin traveled to the United States on the ocean liner, The Majestic.

Accompanying him on the voyage was the renowned violinist Josef Sigeti, who had met Theremin in Moscow.

Because neither Theremin nor his secretary spoke English, my wife and I had to explain the meaning of this competition between a Mister S. from Chicago, a Mister F. of Detroit, and a Mister W. from Philadelphia.

But all these names and people we mentioned were seemingly of no interest to the young Soviet scholar. We couldn’t help being overwhelmed with excitement – even though it wasn’t any of our business! All these offers seemed unreal to us. However, Theremin, steeped in socialist ideology, coolly and persistently refused them and remained true to his original plan – carry his invention to the end, and only later think about selling. This was all very instructive for me.

The General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA companies started replicating the theremin and released a few thousand units. They asked Theremin to teach a few salespeople about the new product, and many unexpectedly became competitors, migrating from the shop to the stage. In the musician’s union there were soon 700 registered representatives of this new profession: theremin player. The most talented among Theremin’s students were Lucie Rosen and Clara Rockmore.

Theremin settled in New York, where he leased a six-story building for 99 years. There, he was visited by the great Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein and American glitterati such as Ira Gershwin, Jascha Heifetz, and Yehudi Menuhin. After a meeting with the inventor, Charlie Chaplin ordered an original theremin for his films.

Theremin’s alarm systems sold like hotcakes. They were installed in Sing Sing Prison in New York and at Fort Knox. By the mid-30s, Theremin was listed as one of the world’s top 25 celebrities and was a member of the millionaires’ club.

In addition to giving concerts and lessons and overseeing production of theremins, the Soviet scientist moonlighted in industrial and technological espionage. (For the full story of this and subsequent episodes in Theremin’s remarkable life, read Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage see box, page 50.) But his marriage to the beautiful African-American dancer Lavinia Williams brought this hidden profession to a screeching halt. Interracial marriage was not accepted in the America of the 1930s, and he became a social outcast, much to the consternation of the Soviet intelligence service (which a few years earlier had forced him to divorce his first wife, Katya).

In 1938, Theremin suddenly disappeared from New York. His wife Lavinia asserted that he was kidnapped by KGB agents. Others averred that he left because of tax difficulties. Theremin himself later said he was worried about the approaching war, yet Glinsky has convincingly shown that he fled of his own accord, escaping debts he had allowed to pile up for years, eager to return to his homeland as a hero. Smuggled back to Russia aboard the Old Bolshevik, he arrived in Leningrad where Ioffe shunned him. He traveled to Moscow to seek the protection of Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, but within days was arrested and locked up in Butyrka prison, sent to do slave labor in the gold mines of Kolyma.

L.S. Termen, born in 1896, was convicted on August 15, 1939 by the Special Council of the NKVD (secret police) of the USSR according to Art. 58-4 of the criminal code of the Russian Federation and sentenced to eight years of hard labor.

Theremin allegedly confessed to “Planning the assassination of Kirov in a conspiracy with a group of astronomers.” The conspiracy went like this... Sergei Kirov (long dead) was planning to visit the Pulkovo Observatory. The astronomers planted a bomb in Foucault’s Pendulum there. Theremin planned to send radio signals from the U.S. to detonate the bomb just as Kirov approached the Pendulum. Investigators were not disturbed by the fact that said Pendulum was actually located at Kazan Cathedral in downtown Leningrad, rather than at Pulkovo Observatory.

Even at the labor camp in Magadan, Theremin distinguished himself. He invented a sort of wooden monorail for workers’ wheelbarrows, allowing them to go from moving a single heavy wheelbarrow of gravel from the mines per day, to six or seven. Rewarded with extra food rations, the other convicts were grateful.

“Many think that he had a relationship with Soviet intelligence,” notes performer Rostovskaya. “But I don’t think that this is true. Lev Sergeyevich moved in aristocratic circles. He was a member of the club of American millionaires – he had a ton of money. All over the world, owners of banks and jewelry stores bought his alarm system. I’ve read a lot about Theremin. It seems to me that he was a person beyond good and evil... Even in prison, he agreed to work, as long as they equipped him with everything that was necessary to create his latest inventions.”

Theremin spent less than three months in Kolyma. In December 1939, he was transferred to a Moscow sharashka – a scientific research center within the Gulag system, where he worked alongside Andrey Tupolev (father of Soviet aviation) and Sergei Korolev (father of the Soviet space program).* Rather than working on musical instruments, Theremin developed a unique system of remote surveillance. The system he engineered was called Buran (“blizzard”) and was used by Soviet intelligence agents for remote surveillance at the embassies of former allies – French and American. It garnered him the Stalin Prize in 1947, the year of his release from the sharashka. (Little did Stalin suspect that Lavrentiy Beria would later use the device to spy on him.)

Theremin also developed the infamous bugging device that was placed inside a Great Seal of the United States, carved of wood. It hung in the office of the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow for seven years before being discovered.

When Lev Sergeyevich was asked if he was afraid that Buran could be used not just against potential adversaries, but also on his own people, he answered: “Let them answer, those who use my technology! And how can we say that’s criminal? I’m worried about something else entirely – how to remove noise from the amplifier.”

The scientist worked for the KGB until 1966, then taught and worked at the Moscow Conservatory, where he invented other electronic instruments, like the electronic cello and the terpsitone. It was there, in 1967, that he was accidentally discovered by Harold Schonberg, the music critic of the New York Times, who happened to be visiting the Conservatory. It was a revelation. Everyone in the West had thought Theremin was executed soon after his return in 1938, and here he was teaching and inventing at the Conservatory. The resulting publicity (along with an article published under his name) led to Theremin’s dismissal from the Conservatory.

In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Theremin visited the United States once again at age 95. He also joined the Communist Party months before the Soviet Union broke up, saying: “I promised Lenin I would.” He died in 1993, at the age of 97.

People rarely realize how much theremin music they have heard. Hollywood loves the theremin, and continues to use it widely in films, especially those with aliens. The eerie glissando sounds draw the viewer into parallel worlds and into uncharted territory. In the films Mars Attacks and Amphibian Man, the theremin appears in all its magical, mysterious beauty. Likewise, it is a signature sound in The Beach Boys 1966 hit, Good Vibrations and supplied the characteristic buzzing in the popular 1930s radio drama, the Green Hornet.

As a result, today it is easy to buy a theremin. A factory-made instrument costs a couple hundred dollars, thanks to the efforts of Bob Moog, an early devotee of the theremin who went on to invent the synthesizer. However, instruments for professional performers are made by special craftsmen. Rostovskaya’s are handmade by Georgy Pavlov and Andrei Smirnov, directors of the Theremin Center at the Moscow Conservatory.

For the past year, the ballet Rusalochka (The Little Mermaid), being performed at the Stanislavsky Music Theater in Moscow, has featured the high-pitched and lugubrious sounds of the theremin to signify the weeping of the disheveled and desecrated soul of the beautiful Mermaid.

Often, the moment Olesya Rostovskaya begins playing her theremin, there is also sobbing heard from the audience.

In the last decade, there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in the theremin. Inviting a thereminist to entertain at a corporate party is all the rage. But any audience is important to Olesya.

“I’ve played at corporate parties the size of a stadium. All around, people were eating. But this only bugged me for a while. Did anyone stop chewing when they listened to Mozart? I only want to popularize this unique instrument.”

But not every performance is so luxurious.

“Once I performed a solo concert called Playing on the Waves in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk,” Rostovskaya continues. “There was no place to eat breakfast. The grocery store was miles away. The city sprawled over several kilometers. I came across the only shop open 24 hours. It happened to be a pawnshop. None of the snack bars had any coffee, only beer. The heating had been shut off in half the city. In this depressing place, a thought came to me: ‘What can I say to these people with my organ and theremin?’ And suddenly you see kind faces and attentive eyes in the audience. People asked good, thoughtful questions. I was very moved.” RL

* Sharashka (diminutive of sharaga) -– literally “a sinister enterprise based on bluff or deceipt.” These were forced labor scientific enterprises (“Special Design Bureaus”) where the living and working conditions were considerably better than in labor camps, and often better than for many average Soviet citizens. The work being conducted was usually top-top secret. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle.

Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage

Albert Glinsky (University of Illinois Press, $24.95)

This superbly layered and minutely detailed biography of a very complex individual draws on a wide variety of documentary resources and interviews (including with Theremin himself) to present the most complete picture of the inventor’s life (and, indeed, a very thorough picture of the world in which he traveled, worked, spied and invented).

Glinsky is to be commended for mastering not only the intricacies of electronics and synthesizers, but also espionage, international relations, the Gulag, Kremlin politics and Soviet history. On top of that, it is just a very good read.

– Paul E. Richardson