The first thing anyone learns about Galina Ustvolskaya is that her composition teacher, Dmitri Shostakovich, asked to marry her in the early 1950s. She rejected him, saying once that ‘he killed my best feelings’. He remembered her warmly enough, however, to quote a trio of hers in his fifth string quartet, and again in the late Michaelangelo Suite. That was the closest Galina came to a fame she never sought. She taught music for thirty years at the Leningrad Conservatory, lived alone and let no-one into her apartment. Her works were of a religious character, unacceptable to the Soviet authorities.…
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