Wladimir Pohl

Born on January 1, 1875 in Paris in a Russian-speaking German family. He studied at the Kiev Conservatory and then in Moscow with S.I. Taneyev as well as with the Russian painter Gue. He studied piano with Vladimir Horowitz, Vladimir Puchalsky, himself a student of Leschetitzky. While still a student, he married for the first time with the pianist M.S. Novitskaya, whom he divorced after the revolution after having had two children with her. His son Oleg, a mathematician and theologian, was a victim of the repression in 1929 in the Caucasus. Tamara Pohl, worked as a music teacher and lived to the age of 94 (she is buried in Moscow). In 1903, Pohl passed the conservatory exam and received the title of "free artist". As a pianist he made concert tours in Kiev, Yalta, Moscow and abroad. Due to a lung disease, he moved to Crimea in 1904 for the duration of his treatment. He taught and directed the Crimean branch of the Russian Musical Society. In Yalta, he met an aspiring chamber singer Anna Mikhailovna Petrunkevich, known by the stage name Yan-Ruban. She would later become his second wife. They first performed in concert programs, where Pohl was an accompanist. Yan-Ruban and Vladimir Pol continued to work together, after moving to Moscow where they settled in a house together. In 1905, Pohl became and remained for five years director of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society. In 1911, he was appointed director of the Empress Maria Music Institute, replacing Sergei Rachmaninoff in this position. Pohl is interested in philosophy and the occult, meets Nikolai Lossky, P. D. Uspensky and G. I. Gurdjieff. This has a serious impact on the rest of his life. Having reached an advanced age, Vladimir Pohl practices yoga, including "Kalokagathia", the ancient art of finding the balance between spirit and flesh for the ascent to eternity. All his life, Pohl observed the strictest hygiene - diet food, abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, etc. He does gymnastics, rubs himself with a brush, takes air baths, walks briskly for hours in any weather. He adopts Hindu and Japanese yoga, which prescribe subordinating the physiology of the body to the immortal spirit. Vladimir Pohl said: "A person must acquire power over the entire metabolism, over every breath of a living cell." He was not yet thirty when the legend of a very experienced "wise man" who had not visited India in vain (where he had never been) began to entwine around him.

In music, Vladimir Pohl was a traditionalist, a follower of the classical school, but at the same time, according to Sergei Makovsky, "he dreamed of putting his mystical ideas into a harmoniously perfect orchestral symphony." In 1914, he wrote a string quintet composed of those Hindu motifs presented to Vladimir Ivanovich Pohl by the truly Hindu philosopher and preacher Inayat Khan, summoned by Alexander Tairov to Moscow, where he opened the "Chamber Theatre" with Kalidasa's drama "Sakuntala." According to Sergei Makovsky, this "music on themes inspired by Inayat Khan was composed by Pohl at the request of Tairov."

In 1917, Pohl and Yan-Ruban left for the Crimea. The musical evenings and concerts of the Pohl couple are exceptionally successful. Yan-Ruban performs songs by Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and compositions by Pohl himself. According to the memoirs of Felix Yusupov, Vladimir Pohl and Yan-Ruban often visited Gaspra in Crimea, even before 1917, in the palace of Countess Panina, who received politicians, artists, writers. He writes: "At her house I met Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov made friends with a charming couple - the singer Yan-Ruban and her husband, composer and artist Pohl. Mrs. Yan-Ruban even gave me singing lessons and came to see us herself. I did not know a singer with better diction. And no one sang Schumann, Schubert and Brahms with such emotion." In Gaspra, Vladimir Pohl met the young Vladimir Nabokov, they became friends. Pohl had a great influence on Nabokov, who dedicated the poem "Ephemera" to him.

In 1922, he emigrated first to Constantinople, to Germany in 1923 and finally to Paris in 1924. V. I. Pohl was one of the founders, with Rachmaninov and Glazunov, of the Russian Conservatory of Paris, of which he was the director from 1931 to 1956 and honorary director until the end of his life. From 1937 to 1962 he was one of the directors of the Beliaev music publishing house in Leipzig and then in Bonn. He wrote music for ballets, symphonies, and piano. He also wrote several works on the history and theory of music. He held the head of his friend Tolstoy while the sculptor Mercourov executed his mask.