To what extent did the Tsarist and Soviet governments control and influence music in the period 1875-1975?

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Name: Max Norman

Candidate Number: 0785

Title: To what extent did Russian governments control and influence music in the period 1875-1975?  In particular, how successful were Soviet governments’ attempts to control and influence Dmitri Shostakovich?

The purpose of this enquiry is to assess the extent to which Russian governments controlled and influenced music in the period 1875-1975.  To do this I have primarily taken three composers, each of whom I feel represents a different aspect of the musical community’s relationship with governments of this period.  However, Dmitri Shostakovich occupies the bulk of discussion.  Much of this section is taken up by an examination of his private political views, which superficially seem only slightly relevant to the question at hand.  This perception would be mistaken: establishing whether the most prominent composer of the period was or was not a “secret dissident” is crucial for determining how successful the régime’s attempts were at controlling music.  The picture presented by biographers such as Ian MacDonald of a musician who incessantly hid coded critiques of the system in his works would, if true, imply that the authorities’ attempts to restrict cultural freedom were a resounding failure, but that they were unable to realise this.  This scenario would have major implications for the question with which this enquiry attempts to deal, which is why much space has been devoted to it.

* * *

The period between Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 and the revolutions of 1917 is often described as the Silver Age in Russian culture.  It was during this period that a new capitalist class sought to emulate the aristocracy and support the arts.  The music of Sergei Rachmaninoff is a remarkable if not innovative representation of late Russian romanticism.  His work, especially the third piano concerto (1909), the second symphony (1908) and the Vsenoshchnoye bdeniye (1915), is renowned for its melody and closely-argued structure.

        In many ways Rachmaninoff was the closest heir of Chaikovsky.  But he was not adopted by the tsarist state as the musical ambassador of Russia, as his predecessor had been.  Much of his music has a strong element of fatalism to it, particularly the Isle of the Dead (1909) and The Bells (1913), signified by the use of the haunting plainchant Dies Irae theme.  The composer wrote no highly-stylised ballets of the sort which would attract government subsidies, and no patriotic orchestral works glorifying the régime.  The state had no particular objection to his music and made no attempts to modify his output, but by denying him support strongly restricted his ability to compose.  Rachmaninoff was forced to remain a pianist and a conductor in order to make a living, and found neither an aristocratic patron willing to support him, nor appreciative audiences.  As a result his compositional output is far smaller than it might otherwise have been.

        When the revolution came in 1917 the Russia Rachmaninoff had known was gone forever – the composer left his homeland and never returned.

* * *

        Igor Stravinsky was a relentless modernist, permanently out of favour both with the imperial and Soviet governments until his highly public reconciliation with the latter in 1962.  The composer has come to be thought one of the foremost innovators in the history of music, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) to the 20th century what Beethoven’s ninth symphony was to the 19th.  This piece, and others from Stravinsky’s output during this period such as Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), combines an ingenious use of octatonacism, chromaticism and polytonality with unique orchestration, creating entirely unprecedented musical idioms.  These works were written for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a group dedicated to overturning all conventions in choreography just as composers such as Stravinsky were doing in music.

        All of this put the composer in direct opposition to the conservatism of the tsarist élite.  At court there was no taste for modernism: the Imperial Ballet performed Chaikovsky and the Imperial Opera performed Glinka – music was traditional and stifled, solely to serve the nobility’s closed-mindedness.  Imagination was anathema.  As such, governmental reaction to innovation was uniform: enforce musical conservatism by ignoring and refusing to support upstarts.  Stravinsky was forced to live out his career in France and the United States.

When the revolution came he vowed never to return to Russia, and for forty-five years kept his word.  During the Stalin years Stravinsky was held by the party establishment as the archetypal example of bourgeois formalism.  During Khrushchev’s thaw however, he was invited to Leningrad to give concerts in 1962, and received a “fawning” reception from the authorities, anxious to claim one of Russia’s most illustrious sons as their own.

        * * *        

                The Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 with a commitment to establishing for the state a dominant role in all aspects of life, which included music and other arts.  In the chaos of revolution and civil war which followed however, top party leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky were far too occupied with these crises to give culture the attention it later received under Stalin.  Consequently, a free rein was given to intellectuals led by Alexander Bogdanov, who aimed to “proletise” culture so as to render it less “bourgeois” and more collectivist/proletarian/modern/accessible-to-the-masses.  Their organisation became known as Proletkult.  In trying to create a culture for workers, no attention was ever paid to the entertainments workers and peasants actually preferred; rather Bogdanov and others were educated individuals from wealthy backgrounds, who wished to tear down traditional art and replace it with their own conception of what “socialist” art should be like.

        In music this led to some curious experiments.  Traditional orchestral instruments such as the bassoon and cello, it was declared for example, lacked relation to workers’ experiences.  So avant-garde pieces were written scored for industrial machinery and other “instruments” to which the proletariat would supposedly be able more easily to relate.  Exactly what the results of all of this were is unknowable, as few if any recordings survive, but more recent performances inspired by Proletkult can perhaps give an impression.  As an example of how this movement influenced mainstream composition, Dmitri Shostakovich’s second symphony includes factory whistles during the climax (perhaps in parody).

        After the end of the civil war Lenin, with conservative bourgeois tastes, decided to close down Proletkult, which in any case was demonstrating dangerous independence from his authority.  His understanding of “proletising” art was to preserve traditional figures such as Chaikovsky, but to educate the masses so that they were no longer the prerogative of an élite.  There were no more attempts after his death to return to the avant-garde, but the idea that culture should be accessible to workers persisted, and impacted substantially upon later Stalinist thinking.

* * *

Dmitri Shostakovich was a Russian composer, whose life displays the history of Soviet censorship in almost a single career.  His uniquely sarcastic style of writing, as well as arguments surrounding his political views and his relationships with Soviet governments, have made him one of music’s most widely-studied figures.  The most famous exposition of the “dissident” view is Solomon Volkov’s discredited forgery Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich.  The literature on this topic is justifiably immense, and for succinctness this enquiry makes use primarily of two biographies: Ian MacDonald’s revisionist work The New Shostakovich and Laurel E. Fay’s anti-revisionist Shostakovich: A Life (though other sources are used).  The breadth of his life and work is far too vast for the scope of this enquiry, but one particular event deserves mention, for it was the official denunciation of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) which displayed, more than ever previously, the régime’s determination to control art in the USSR.

Lady Macbeth was the culmination of over a decade of modernism by a restless composer.  Such a tendency was dangerous however, and two days after Stalin and the Politburo winced and laughed their way through a performance on January 26th 1936, Lady Macbeth was officially denounced in a now-notorious article from party newspaper Pravda, entitled Muddle Instead of Music.  Shostakovich’s life was changed permanently.  The man who in 1935 had been poised to become the most influential composer of the 20th century never wrote another opera, and lived the rest of his life with one eye over his shoulder at the state censor.

There exists some dispute as to what exactly the “message” of Lady Macbeth is, on a moral and political level – and hence as to what precisely the régime’s objections were and why it was censured.  For MacDonald, Katerina, the titular murderess, is a representation of Shostakovich himself and others like him, surrounded by “soul-destroying mediocrities” and betrayed by the world.  But, according to the author, the bureaucracy’s main complaints about the work concerned its bleakness, especially in the final act.  In terms of narrative content and musical idiom, Lady Macbeth stood as the exact opposite of the “song symphonies” lauded by Party officials.  The state wanted its artists to produce only works of “Socialist Realism”: patriotic material intended to galvanise the workforce, and the opera was alien within this stifling context.

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On the last point Fay takes a broadly similar view, emphasising the idiom clearly owing more to contemporary classical developments than to either traditional Russian opera or socialist realism, more to Berg and even American jazz than Rimsky-Korsakov.  There is however an important distinction between the two authors concerning the purpose of the denunciation.  MacDonald views it as a result of state domination of the arts which was thoroughly in place by January 1936, hence his account of “mediocrities” with whom Shostakovich supposedly had to battle to have the opera staged.  Fay argues that, rather, what precisely “socialist realism” meant with respect ...

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