Historical prologue for 92nd St Y concert in NYC in Jan 2011

Remarks by Harald Hille (my commentary was ad lib, slides are taken from the PowerPoint presentation)

The Yale Russian Chorus is a curious phenomenon, part singing group, part fraternity, part discussion group, that started in 1953 at Yale at the height of the Cold War, when exhibiting a strong interest in matters Russian and Soviet was rather suspect in some powerful circles in the USA.

Yale in 1953 had a Russian Club, which actively, although in a purely academic context, pursued topics in Russian culture and history and the history and workings of the Soviet Union. Students and faculty had almost no access to direct observation, no opportunity to travel, but they wanted to go beyond the constraints imposed by the Cold War, the Red Scare and the mutual demonization operating in both East and West.

The climate of fear was much exacerbated by military doctrines such as Mutually Assured Destruction. Since much of fear is based on ignorance, we wanted to overcome ignorance.

The President of the Yale Russian Club in 1953 was George Litton, an engineering student of Russian parentage, who invited Denis Mickiewicz to give a talk/demonstration on Russian folk songs. Denis was a piano student at the Yale Music School and was born in Latvia of Russian parents. His family emigrated from from Latvia to Poland during the war and from Salzburg in Austria to the USA after the war. Denis came to the Russian Club armed with some scores, his guitar and some vodka. The result was inevitable: a Russian Chorus was formed.

The Chorus soon had about 12-15 members, mostly students of Russian, and after a few months began singing locally.  Denis's model for a Russian men's chorus was Serge Jaroff's Don Cossack Choir, which he had come to know in Austria. The photos show a YRC performance at the New Haven YMCA in 1955 and a chance meeting with Serge Jaroff in the Balalaika restaurant in NYC. As the repertoire grew, including some religious pieces, and the frequency of performances increased, the Chorus became conscious of its role in preserving a musical tradition that was being suppressed in the Soviet Union and in presenting a human face of Russia to Americans.

In early 1958 the Lacy-Zarubin agreement on cultural exchange between the USSR and  the USA was signed, allowing for visits by groups, scholars and tourists from each country. The Chorus now had an opportunity to see Russia at first hand and become cultural ambassadors without portfolio, presenting a human face of America to Russians.

The Chorus began traveling to the USSR in the summer - 3 trips from 1958 to 1960. Each time, we went as tourists not as a singing group.  We did sing, of course, but informally in parks and squares as we walked around town.  We would open with some American songs, often Negro spirituals, and then switch to Russian songs, which had an enormous impact on the crowds listening to us, who then kept us going in conversations late into the evening.  After the 1960 trip, we realized that some of the people we had been talking to had got into difficulties with the authorities.  Not wishing to harm people by our contacts and believing that genuine cultural exchange required open dialog, we stopped going to the USSR for a while and turned towards formal concert tours in Western Europe.

These photos show crowds on Red Square in 1958 and a letter from Sen. Hubert Humphrey endorsing the YRC in 1960.

The Western European trips involved formally arranged concerts in various countries.  The left-hand photos show a review from San Sebastian in Spain and a poster from Paris.  The right-hand photo captures a very dramatic occasion when the Chorus sang next to the spot of the Berlin Wall where a young East German, Peter Fechter, was shot and killed by East German border guards as he was trying to escape over the Wall.  There were East German border guards in the dark windows with machine guns trained on the YRC as we sang.

In 1968 we met a Georgian chorus in a Budapest cafe and exchanged songs all evening. They taught us our first Georgian songs. Later the Chorus would visit Georgia along with European Russia.  The YRC in the 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s typically had about 25-30 singers, gave 30 or so concerts during the year and tried to tour in Europe or the USSR once every 2-3 years.

In 1968 we also made our first visit to the Balkans and picked up some Balkan songs. That summer many of us also visited the Eastern Orthodox monastery complex on Mt. Athos, a peninsula in Greece in the northern Aegean Sea.

The YRC has made a number of recordings, including this one with Philips in 1963, an opportunity we gained by winning the first prize for men's choruses at the Lille International Choral Festival in 1962.

The 1959 LP was our first recording and the 2010 CD is our latest, recorded at Duke with Denis Mickiewicz in 2009.

There have been a number of singing groups that have spun off the YRC: a women's chorus at Yale, the Yale Slavic Chorus, which sings mostly Balkan music; Slavyanka in San Francisco, a men's Russian chorus started by some YRC alumni in SF; and Iveria and Kartuli, Georgian groups started by YRC alumni in Boston and New York.

There is still a Yale Russian Chorus that sings at Yale.  It is a smaller and less active group and they have broken with the Mickiewicz tradition since 1995.  Since they sing mostly different music and in a different style, we can longer sing in their concerts nor can they sing in our alumni concerts.  That means that since 1995 we no longer get new alumni and the aging of our alumni group becomes unavoidable.

The alumni gather to sing concerts about once a year in various cities and towns where one of us lives. Typically we rehearse for a day and a half, have a banquet and perform the next day. There have also been major reunion concerts at Yale in the past, several of which have produced recordings. The photos show the 25th Anniversary (1978) and 50th Anniversary (2003) concerts in Woolsey Hall at Yale.

The photos show an alumni concert at SUNY Purchase in the late 1990s and another at Duke University (where Denis is now an emeritus professor) in 2005.

In 2007 Catherine Mattingly made a documentary on the YRC, based on archival footage and photographs and her own coverage of the preparations for the 50th Anniversary.