Matvei Isaakovich Blanter was a Soviet Jewish composer, and one of the most prominent composers of popular songs and film music in the Soviet Union. Among many other works, he wrote the famous "Katyusha", performed to this day internationally. He was active as a composer until 1975, producing more than two thousand songs.
Blanter's first songs were composed in the 1920s. At the time, he wrote light dance and jazz music, including "John Gray", a foxtrot that became a major hit. In the 1930s, as Soviet culture grew more ideologically strict, Blanter shifted toward writing Soviet propaganda songs. He emerged as one of the creators of the Soviet "mass song". Some of Blanter's 1930s songs were styled after the Red Army songs of the Russian Civil War and mythologized the war's Bolshevik heroes. The most famous among these are "The Song of Shchors", telling the tale of Ukrainian Red Army commander Nikolai Shchors, and "Partisan Zheleznyak", which combines the energetic rhythms of a military marching song with elements of a mournful ballad as it describes Commander Zheleznyak's heroic death in battle. Other notable Blanter songs from that period include "Youth", a cheerful marching song asserting that "right now, everyone is young in our young, beautiful country"; "Stalin Is Our Battle-Glory", a widely performed hymn to Joseph Stalin; and "The Football March", music from which is still performed at the start of every soccer match in Russia. In 1938, Blanter began his long-lasting collaboration with the poet Mikhail Isakovsky. Their first song, undoubtedly the most famous of Blanter's works, was the world-renowned "Katyusha". In it, Blanter combined elements of the heroic, upbeat battle song and of a peasant song representing a woman's lamentation for an absent lover. Standing on a high riverbank, a young woman, Katyusha, sings of her beloved, who is far away serving on the Soviet border. The theme of the song is that the soldier will protect the Motherland and its people while his girl will preserve their love. While the song is joyful and filled with the imagery of a fertile, blooming land, it also conveys the sense that the motherland is under threat. "Katyusha" gained fame during World War II as an inspiration to defend one's land from the enemy. In 1937, Pravda published a request for thousands of Soviet girls to go to work in the far east of the county, to help construct military defences. Blanter was commissioned to write the highly-popular operetta On the Bank of the Amur River to celebrate the initiative: the premiere took place at Moscow Operetta Theatre in 1939, and the work was broadcast by Moscow Radio as well as taken up by operatic companies throughout the country. Blanter accompanied the Red Army to Berlin in early 1945. He was commissioned by Stalin to compose a symphony about the capture of Berlin. Blanter wrote several other highly popular wartime songs. His 1945 song, "The Enemy Burned Down His Home", about a soldier who returns from the front to find his entire family dead, became controversial when the authorities deemed it too pessimistic and banned its performance; it was performed for the first time in 1961. Blanter's postwar songs include "The Migratory Birds Are Flying", a patriotic Soviet song in which the narrator watches migratory birds fly away and asserts that he can think of no better place to be than the Motherland, and "Dark-Eyed Cossack Girl", written especially for the bass-baritoneLeonid Kharitonov. In 1983, Blanter became a member of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, an organization created by the Soviet Union as a tool against the Israeli state's aggression against its Arab neighbours. He died in Moscow in 1990.
