Disappearing Genius

...The pioneering synthesizer manufacturer Robert Moog began his electronic-instrument career by producing in the late 1950s a homemade theremin...

...The cause of his loss was his own choice to return to the Soviet Union after he had lived in the West, but the loss itself is real: Communists ate the lives even of those they didn't kill...

...One antenna, customarily extended vertically, controlled pitch...

...My hunch is that, had Theremin stayed in America, he would have joined his countryman Vladimir Zworykin in developing television or, at least, become an emigre professor at an institute of technology—an acoustic analogue to Harold Edgerton, the M.I.T...

...but, of course, more lives were wasted by communism, not only in the sense of being prematurely ended but in being forcibly assigned to a narrow range of tasks...

...I remember hearing leftist friends speak of Alger Hiss's "wasted life, given what he could have done," implicitly blaming anti-communism...

...His companies were failing badly, his personal debts were mounting, and he simply boarded a Soviet freighter in a New Jersey port and sailed home...

...Few figures of Theremin's Richard Kostelanetz recently completed his second collection of essays on music, More On Innovative Music(ian)s...

...Its inventor, Thaddeus Cahill, later joined his brothers in developing night lights for baseball stadiums...

...What additional inventions could have come from Theremin's mind, had he stayed in New York, are beyond speculation...

...Always planning to return to Russia, he never applied for U.S...

...Petersburg in 1896, he had invented at the end of World War I an early electronic sound instrument, eventually named after himself...

...But a feature-length documentary film produced in 1993 by Steven Martin, Theremin, repeated Lavinia Williams's claim that her husband had been abducted by the KGB...

...the other, customarily horizontal, controlled volume...

...The obstacle that makes both these books special is that first-rank musical technologists are more difficult subjects than composers...

...The instrument memorably accompanies a cello in the Beach Boys' 1966 classic "Good Vibrations...

...stature in any modern art have so completely and inexplicably vanished...

...Such groups as Led Zeppelin, the Pixies, Portishead, and a duo called the Kurstins have similarly used theremins...

...In a mid-1960s rock group called Lo-thar and the Hand People, "Lothar" was not one of the humans but the theremin they featured in their songs...

...Just before his disappearance, Theremin married a young African-American dancer, Lavinia Williams, who spoke several languages including Russian...

...The biography it most resembles in this respect is Reynold Weidenaar's Magic Music from the Telharmonium (1995), which likewise rescues from obscurity the previously under-understood development at the beginning of this century of the first musical synthesizer, serviced by a private cable network...

...Here he designed miniature security machines (which responded, as his musical instrument did, to changes in the air around them) and eavesdropping devices...

...The final scene of the film has them walking arm in arm down 57th Street to the sound of "Good Vibrations...

...After more than a decade of research, Glinsky discovered that Theremin had maintained contact in New York with Soviet agents (to whom he gave technical information...

...Curiously, his instrument survived in America, not only in Clara Rock-more's occasional concerts but in the soundtracks to horror and science-fiction films, where it provided otherworldly sounds with sliding pitches...

...To the surprise of everyone, Leon Theremin reemerged in 1989, now in his nineties, initially to be honored at electronic music festivals...

...Why then did he disappear from New York in 1938...

...No wonder his friends in the West thought him dead (and Shostakovich couldn't say where he was...

...citizenship, even after marrying an American...

...He could escape America as a failed capitalist, but he couldn't escape Stalinism...

...Theremin later invented a rhythm machine and a proto-television...

...I remember asking the great musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky in the late 1980s what happened to Theremin...

...This is not a reinter-pretation of familiar history but the product of original research, including the definitive interview with Theremin, just before his death...

...At a time when prominent European artists and intellectuals were desperately trying to move west, Theremin headed east—eventually, way, way east, for once he returned to Russia he found himself promptly imprisoned and exiled to a Siberian labor camp...

...The theremin differed from previous instruments in that it was not directly touched...

...When Soviet chiefs recognized his genius, he was assigned to a prison complex for technicians...

...Several composers, awed by the new instrument, wrote pieces for it, while young musicians, most prominently Clara Rockmore, performed on it in live concerts...

...Slonimsky suggested that Theremin had two wives and, feeling some heat, returned to his native Russia...

...Born in St...

...He didn't know, though he reported that Dmitri Shostakovich had told him sometime in the 1970s that Theremin was still alive, but Shostakovich could not reveal where...

...Once on his own, Theremin decided to work for another secret Soviet agency known as a "mailbox," because its building had no address and its workers were forbidden contact with outsiders, even their relatives...

...Rather, the performer moved his hands in the air around two thin electrified poles...

...engineer who invented the strobe light...

...BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Even after he disappeared from New York in 1938, Leon Theremin remained one of the legendary figures in modern music...

...Thanks to supportive entrepreneurs, Theremin went west, first to Berlin and then to New York, where he acquired a patron, who rented him a townhouse at 37 W. 54th St., and new business partners, who formed the Teletouch Corporation...

...Albert Glinsky's new biography Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage disputes both these stories...

...One was successfully installed in the American embassy...

...Of course, part of the question is why Theremin was remembered at all...

...The filmmaker Steven Martin brought him to New York for a dazed tour of Times Square and a memorable reunion with Clara Rockmore...

...another, in Stalin's own apartment...

...Apparently, he did good work during the war, for he was released in 1947 and given a "secret" Stalin Prize...

...Typically, the Soviets wanted the last not for consumers but for border security...

...RCA contracted one of Theremin's companies to manufacture it, but the company failed commercially, simply because the theremin was too hard to use...

...What makes Glinsky's Theremin a first-rate biography is his elevating our knowledge of a previously hidden unique figure...

...In the 1984 edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Slonimsky could write only that his sometime friend was "still active in 1977...