Hollywood movie Green Book (2018) gained three Oscars. Russian cinema-goers admired the masterpiece because of its humor, the virtual presence of Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Dr. Shirley’s fight for his right to be what he was: black. But one moment not connected directly with the plot wowed cinema halls visitors in Russia with waves of “my hat!” exclamations.
At this moment, Don Shirley was telling his driver Tony Vallelonga a tale about his childhood. Sitting in the lobby of a hotel, he said that he had been sent to the Leningrad Conservatory of Music to study piano theory there at the age of nine.
The audience was ready to hear anything including the fact that the world-known pianist and composer had fallen from the sky or had been an alien, but not this.
Leningrad is the former name of St. Petersburg in 1924 — 1991 given after Vladimir Lenin, the mastermind of the Russian Revolution 1917 (the Great October Socialist Revolution).
Leningrad? For a nine-year-old boy? In those times? Seriously? It’s just impossible to believe it.
Meanwhile, a few respected websites contain the information on his study here. Though, no details are available: which class or faculty, the names of teachers, the date of arrival, the date of departure… Nothing.
A closer look reveals that the only source of the information on Shirley’s trip is Mr. Vallelonga, who could not deliver any additional data and who was not familiar with Donald Shirley at the time of the musician’s childhood.
Moreover, the family of Shirley repeatedly deny any trips by Shirley to the Soviet Union in those years.
Russian media reacted with investigations into the matter. Indeed, a little black boy studying in the 1930s in Leningrad and subsequently turning into one of the most famous musicians of the world could not go unnoticed! So, how come we know this from a Hollywood movie, not from Soviet papers or history books?
The truth appeared to be simple. Don Shirley never went to Leningrad during his childhood. The Metro newspaper, St. Petersburg edition, contacted the conservatory now called the St. Petersburg Conservatory and talked to its representatives. Its alumni include such big names as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofieff, Valery Gergiev (now general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater, located just opposite the conservatory), and many others, but not Dr. Donald Shirley.
Press secretary of the conservatory Ekaterina Homchuk told Metro that the establishment’s archive contains no information on Shirley. “A nine-year-old boy could hardly study at the highest school. But he might have been sent to the conservatory’s special secondary school.”
Nor did the school’s archive have something on it that doesn’t come as somewhat surprising. Shirley was nine-year-old in 1936 when the school didn’t exist. There was only a conservatory’s special department for kids to educate future musicians.
Metro’s journalists found one Russian composer, Andrei Kurnavin, then 92 (died in 2020), who studied there at that time. He was not able to recollect a black boy. Nor did he remember his teacher relating stories on a pupil from the USA, which would certainly have been a remarkable fact to recollect.
So, after all the facts put together the only conclusion we can come to is that Donald Shirley never studied in Leningrad. What could be a nice fairy tale, worth another movie, at least in Russia, unfortunately, turned out to be a fake which well fitted into the Hollywood story.
Well, is it all that important? We don’t think so. Shirley’s work and inheritance belong to humanity no matter where he was born, raised, educated, and where he performed. In a dramatic scene on the road when he questions his own identity in dialogue with Vallelonga the right answer by Tony could be: “You are just genius, you are out of the time and space. You are in eternity, so it doesn’t matter who you are.”
But that kind of answer didn’t fit Vallelonga’s character.
Perhaps, Rachmaninoff could have answered like that.
Photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org