Vasyl Barvinsky is one of the most eminent Western Ukrainian composers — a pianist, teacher, and music leader, for many years director of the Lysenko Higher Music Institute in Lviv. His refined, impressionistically coloured music (piano cycles, the “Ukrainian Suite,” chamber works) stood on a level with the finest European examples.
His fate is one of the most tragic in our culture: in 1948 the Soviet authorities arrested Barvinsky together with his wife, sentenced him to 10 years in the camps of Mordovia, and publicly burned his manuscripts. Returning broken and ill, he tried until his death to reconstruct the destroyed works from memory. Rehabilitated, Barvinsky became a symbol both of a composer of genius and of the martyrdom of Ukrainian culture under totalitarianism.
