For all the horrors of Stalinism, the October Revolution proved in practice the superiority of a nationalized planned economy. Such is the choice of language used in the rarefied atmosphere of academic debate in the USA: as Marx would have said - every word a urinal, and not an empty one. The second is a traditional German song. Nothing.". But he detested Stalin and the bureaucracy. But there were times when the burden of this lonely struggle proved too great for him, and he was forced to stage a tactical retreat. The Cold War was already well underway and the Soviet authorities were anxious to prove to the world the superiority of the USSR in the field of culture. The first ominous warning was when the Father of the People attended a performance of Lady Macbeth and walked out. Your email address will not be published. This is a difficult work in terms of its musical language. The leading clique therefore took the necessary steps to protect their lives and to eliminate the source of the danger, who was poisoned or otherwise disposed of by his comrades. What happened was viewed with great gravity by everyone. The only statement Volkov attributes to Shostakovich concerning the symphony in his book Testimony is the remark that the work has to do with events repeating themselves in Russian history, and that "it deals with contemporary themes even though it's called 1905.' But it did not end his one-man struggle against the bureaucracy. Britain: Disaster in Hartlepool Starmer out! The Father of the People,as we have seen earlier, was a keen film fan and regularly watched films in his private cinema in the Kremlin. I see myself a boy in Belostok Blood spills, and runs upon the floors, The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half. As a result, many Soviet planes were destroyed on the ground and millions of Red Army soldiers were captured without firing a shot and sent to Nazi death camps from which few emerged alive. This year is the centenary of two great composers. The so-called campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (i.e., Jews) culminated with the notorious Doctors' Plot. When he heard of the attack, Stalin initially refused to believe it and ordered the Red Army not to fight. Unlike Shostakovich, my grandfather had had no qualms about joining the Party. The second movement is subtitled The Ninth of January. The symphony is based on poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of the Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. Shostakovich never uttered these weasel words, which were the invention of some boot-licking Stalinist hack or other. Our destinies are still unknown.". Stravinsky does not have to wait for the fall of Tsarism to Instead of increased equality there was a steady increase in inequality between the bureaucrats and the masses, aggravated by corruption on a huge scale. Boris Pilnyak experimented with new styles in the writing of novels. Here, bad taste is not a personal characteristic but the reflection of social trends, political changes and class and caste interests. It seems likely that this was the case. The Father of the People was now showing all the signs of pathological paranoia. This was the last Shostakovich symphony Mravinsky It seems to me that I am Anna Frank, Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April, And I'm in love, and have no need of phrases, But only that we gaze into each other's eyes. Shostakovich was well aware of the colossal cultural potential of the October Revolution, which he wholeheartedly supported, along with all the best intellectuals of his generation. The other group, made up of diehard Cold Warriors, insist that Shostakovich was really a KGB agent all along. ), which contains the following powerful lines: "Like an act of betrayal, like a tyrant's conscience, the night is black.". The movements of this symphony, like its predecessor, contain a "programme". Its main themes are a mixture of dark tragedy and violent struggles. Surrounded and trapped, I'm persecuted, spat on, slandered, and The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face. The composer's response to his denunciation was the Fifth Symphony, the musical idiom of which was more conservative and less modernist than his earlier works. The Final Movement is subtitled: The Tocsin. The so-called 'triumph' at the end - we understood what he was saying. After the death of Lenin in 1924, the Soviet bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, became increasingly assertive. In my soul there is not one grey hair. The Stalinist political counterrevolution had its psychological roots in a petty-bourgeois reaction against October. O, Russia of my heart, I know that you Are international, by inner nature. The success of the First symphony made its author famous at the early age of 19. The other is from Tristan and Isolde, a story of love that ends in death. All the old humiliating restrictions were removed. But in Shostakovich's opera there is an epilogue in which the bureaucrat says: "This was only a nightmare, but reality is even worse. But for Shostakovich it was much more than this. Certainly the work was a challenge to the authorities, who recognized it as such. He used to carry a small suitcase with him in readiness for the arrest he expected from one hour to the next. The times had already passed when a Soviet artist or composer could use his talent to ridicule the new caste of bureaucratic upstarts with impunity. Stalin had won the inner-Party conflict. There is no doubt that the composer held his nose while making such concessions. The first two songs are by the Spanish poet Lorca, who was murdered by the fascists at the start of the Civil War. Only the last movement gives the impression of a "happy ending" with its onward-moving march theme. As the Red Army gradually pushed the Germans back, reversing the tide and then marching into the heart of Europe, there was a general mood of optimism that things would get better after the War. The 1920s in the Soviet Union were an exciting time. 112, subtitled The Year of 1917, in 1961, dedicating it to the memory of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, as he did his Symphony No. These falsifiers of history conveniently "forget" one small detail: that, in order to consolidate his bureaucratic regime, Stalin had to destroy Lenin's party and exterminate almost all of its leaders. Behind the exterior appearance of a timid and retiring person blinking through his spectacles, this was a very courageous and resilient personality - a man determined to make his voice heard at all costs and who took enormous risks to do so. We return once more to the sinister themes of the First Movement. The only place where one can hear this kind of music today is in the cinema, where it provides a splendid background accompaniment to horror movies. But at this stage Stalin was still cautiously feeling his way. This is particularly the case with his last three symphonies, written at the end of his life, when Shostakovich was embittered and increasingly obsessed with the idea of death. His last word, in the Fifteenth Symphony, is one of bitter sarcasm. However, beneath the surface, there is a seething discontent. The Thirteenth Symphony does not only deal with anti-Semitism, it is a devastating criticism of the bureaucratic system in general. "My understanding of Lady Macbeth is that the crimes of Katerina Izmailova are a protest against the atmosphere in which she lives: against the dismal, stifling atmosphere of the merchant milieu of the last century." And it was not the 'triumph' of the mighty, those in power.". The problem with both these positions is that they assume that it was only possible to oppose the Stalinist regime from a capitalist standpoint. But is there even the slightest evidence that he was in favour of capitalism or sympathetic to the West? All Rights Reserved. And it is the sacred right of any young writer or composer to write badly sometimes. The dark night is the long night of arbitrary and despotic rule. The central character, Katerina Izmailova, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to a merchant and murders him, is shown in a sympathetic light, as a victim of circumstances. What they cannot explain is how a nation that in 1917 was more backward than Pakistan today managed to transform itself very quickly into the second most powerful nation on earth, how the USSR succeeded almost single-handedly in defeating Hitler's Germany with all the resources of Europe behind it, and how after the War it succeeded, without the benefit of Marshall Aid, in rebuilding a country that had lost 27 million people - more than all the other countries put together. He had already started work on his Fourth Symphony, with its dark and ominous tones. While still working on his second symphony, Shostakovich struck out in a new direction: opera. He composed the piece in the wake of the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Litvinov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was Jewish and identified with the policy of rapprochement with Britain and France against Nazi Germany, was replaced by the Russian Molotov. Introduction to Trotsky's writings on Art and Culture, Beethoven: man, composer and revolutionary, Snowpiercer: Class struggle and revolutionon a train, Hieronymus Bosch and the art of the death agony of feudalism. But under Stalin Russian chauvinism began to re-emerge, and with it all the old filth of anti-Semitism. It was neither socialist nor realist, but rather a kind of dreary conformism and conservatism that presented Stalin and the bureaucracy with the kind of undemanding and superficial "art" that their limited understanding and narrow outlook could cope with, while at the same time it painted Soviet life in rose-tinted colours. For in all honesty, nobody nowadays listens to the so-called avant-garde music of composers like Schoenberg, Webern and Pierre Boulez, which has turned out to be a blind alley. And what have these admirers of capitalism got to say about Russia today? Shostakovich on the cover of TIME magazine. In the second place, Shostakovich is known internationally first and foremost as a symphonist. They looked hard to find some traces of Lenin in it, but there are none. At this time there could be no question of the Party or the state ordering writers or composers what they could or could not write. As in every other sphere, the victory of the bureaucratic counterrevolution meant the liquidation of the political conquests of October. There is not the slightest evidence to support this view. All but the last movement was written inside the besieged city and is a moving expression of the sufferings and heroism of the people of Leningrad and of the whole Soviet Union. ", In a debate on the opera, Shostakovich was asked whether he was worried it would be understood. The verses read as follows: No monument stands over Babi Yar. Both camps in this controversy have a reactionary anti-Soviet and pro-bourgeois position. In The New York Times (9th March 2000), the opera critic Bernard Holland accused the composer of cowardice, calling him "a mediocre human being" who "toadied and cringed before his Soviet bosses". But by the end of the 1920s, the whole political and cultural climate in the USSR was changing. Jews, on their way out of the city of Kiev to the Babi Yar ravine, pass corpses lying on the street. Shostakovich was pleased with the premiere, writing: My Ninth Symphony is very difficult to perform. The reason why Shostakovich never wrote his "Lenin Symphony" was that the contrast between the ideas of Lenin and the October Revolution and the ugly reality of Stalinism was too great, the images of the anti-Bolshevik Purges too recent and too painful, to allow him to do this. It did not receive its first performance until 1961, although a piano reduction was published in 1946. Those reactionary anti-Communists who blame him for this are unjustified and ill-intentioned. Under Stalin all that changed. Beginning with the 20th congress of the CPSU in 1956, Nikita Khrushchov attempted to find a way out of the blind alley caused by the bureaucratic control and administration of the nationalized planned economy in the USSR by reform from the top. He turned a Gogol short story into an opera. Shostakovich's first major musical achievement was the First Symphony, premiered in 1926, written as his graduation piece. But events were to force him to abandon the project, and the symphony was consigned to a drawer, and received its first performance three decades later. Legend has it that at the first performance of Shostakovichs Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. Another great Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev, also went abroad. Most of Shostakovichs works were banned, he was forced to publicly repent, and his family had privileges withdrawn. The remarkable Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), personal target of Joseph Stalin and Party censors, managed to survive all these periods while maintaining his artistic integrity. Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. This is entirely false. Today the smug, comfortable images of contented workers and smiling collective farmers surrounded by a sea of waving cornfields arouse no interest other than curiosity or dismissive laughter. Krzysztof Meyer comes far closer to the truth when he writes (DSCH Journal 12 January 2000): "[Shostakovich] was never like the Communists. But Shostakovich's new symphony (the Eighth) was completely unlike the Seventh, which depicts a heroic (and ultimately victorious) struggle against adversity. The tentative "thaw" under Khrushchov came to an abrupt halt in 1964 when he was overthrown by Brezhnev. He wrote: "People who thought themselves my friends wanted the ending to provide some consolation, that is to say, that death is only a beginning. Cannot you see that life has become unbearable for us because of the Tsar's servants?". In 1929, Shostakovich's opera was criticised as "formalist" by this Stalinist musicians' organisation, and was subjected to hostile reviews. The democratic and socialist ideals of October did not only attract the exploited and oppressed masses. The scene of the massacre must be one of the most violent episodes in all of music. Although it was part of Hitler's policy of systematic extermination of Jews in the occupied territories, there is no doubt that some Ukrainians (a minority) collaborated with the Nazis and shared their anti-Semitic views. Under Mravinsky, the Leningrad Philharmonic gained a legendary reputation, particularly in Russian music such as Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. It is very likely that the author of this article was Stalin. Shostakovich wrote it in 1957, a few months after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Shostakovich attempted to defend himself and his opera. Moreover, in a totalitarian regime, where political debate and criticism is silenced and opposition is persecuted with the heavy hand of the state, art, literature and music can play the role of an underground opposition in which criticism of the bureaucracy is conveyed in a cryptic language that people accustomed to reading between the lines can understand. Shostakovich was a child of the Revolution and would never have achieved what he did without it. It is no accident that it was at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. But this was a friendly and constructive dialogue, and not a bureaucratic monologue in which an all-powerful State, with the Father of the People at its head could dictate not only how men and women should act, but also how they should think and feel. The vicissitudes of his tragic life closely followed those of the October Revolution. Moreover, however difficult his situation may have been in the years of triumphant reaction after 1815, Beethoven never had to contend with the horrific conditions of a monstrous totalitarian state that consigned its opponents to the Gulag or the mental hospital. I am a Soviet composer, and I see our epoch as something heroic. I consider that any artist who isolates himself from the world is doomed.. The problem of Shostakovich's music was not that it failed to express the real feelings of the Soviet people, but that it expressed them only too well. That is the central meaning of this outstanding symphony. But throughout his life Shostakovich showed absolutely no interest in emigrating, nor did he express any particular admiration for the capitalist way of life. The first movement of the Symphony includes a celebrated passage in which a march-like theme is constantly repeated, getting ever louder, somewhat in the manner of Ravel's Bolero. The Party hacks in the Composers' Union began to denounce not only Lady Macbeth but other works by Shostakovich such as The Nose and The Limpid Stream. None, I suppose. Eisenstein did not believe it. The realization that all the promises of a return to Lenin and socialist democracy were just lies made his end all the more bitter. The stormy and savage second movement is said to be a musical portrait of Stalin himself. His audience never asked. He began piano lessons at the age of nine. Very few of them had a political ideology or a firm grasp of Marxism, but they instinctively gravitated towards the October Revolution and Bolshevism, which in some way corresponded to their own rebellious spirit, the emphatic rejection of the old and a striving after new forms of artistic expression. Despite all the attempts to belittle this great composer, and to distort his real ideas and purposes for different reasons, history will establish his reputation as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - composers of the 20th century, as a heroic and tragic figure who provided posterity with a most moving, and true, record of the history of the times in which he lived, created and fought. This would reopen []. One quote from Wagner is from Siegfried's Funeral March from the Twilight of the Gods (Goetterdaemmerung), which ends in the death of a hero and the fiery ending of Walhalla, the home of the Gods. The last three symphonies are clearly an expression of personal anguish. LISTEN to the EcoJustice Radio discussion with the lead architectural designer for the firm Biotonomy using a holistic and Nature-based approach for buildings and cities to address the climate and biodiversity emergency. It really is the end. ", The Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin wrote in the Gramophone magazine "You in the West sometimes have a very naive view. In his moving last poem, written shortly before he took his own life, Mayakovsky wrote: "I feel myself slowly growing grey." Later, the theme of Rage, tyrants! As a matter of fact, despite its apparently triumphant ending, it has a profoundly tragic character. Shostakovitch, MacDonald contends, is a yurodivy, a Russian "holy fool," much like a court jester, who acts in a seemingly innocent way while concealing a greater, darker truth. It was an immediate success, and remains one of his most popular works. It is not entirely convincing. I cannot take part in this production because I am Jewish". In 1948 Shostakovich, along with many other composers, was denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. The latter replied: "Don't you understand what this means? The years of revolution and civil war were years of hunger and terrible material hardship and suffering. But there was far worse than this. Was Shostakovich such a fool that he did not realise that this was dangerous ground to tread on? One of the most horrifying and at the same time inspiring episodes in the War was the siege of Leningrad. It was at this time that Shostakovich wrote his masterly and moving song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. A performance was cancelled "because the soloist was ill". In the field of the arts, he used the services of the notorious Zhdanov, who launched a savage attack on artists, writers and composers who were not complete lackeys of the regime. It begins with a lengthy and tragic first movement, in which the composer peers into the abyss and stares at hell itself. The magazine Kultura I Zhizn' asserted that Shostakovich was "unable to reflect the spirit of the Soviet people." The powerful final movement is dominated by a sense of struggle against superhuman odds, in which the human spirit finally triumphs against tyranny and barbarism. His suicide was an act of protest. And the whole purpose of that, in turn, is to persuade the future generations, both in Russia and the West, that it is far better to stick to capitalism. Another supposedly "respectable" scholar, Richard Taruskin, has incredibly described Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to be an apologia for Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine! His family was politically liberal, and it is known that some of them participated in the underground movement against tsarism in the early years of the 20th century. Yes, Shostakovich was indeed a communist. The Twelfth Symphony, written in 1959-61, and subtitled October, is intended as a continuation of the Eleventh. Here we re-tell the creation myth of Ch'ujtiat from the Ch'ol People. The authorities did not object to contradictions in music (after all, the Father of the People had stated - in flat contradiction to Marx and Lenin - that the class struggle would intensify as communism grew nearer). He lived 52 years in Tangier, Morocco, and wrote evocatively of the place and its peoples. There was no question at that time of condemning a young composer for writing "difficult" music, for experimenting or for using foreign models. Shostakovichs music and biography are profoundly affected by Soviet cultural politics. No great artist ever became great by reading cook-books on how to write or compose. In the memoirs of Shostakovich written by Solomon Volkov, it is pointed out that in this period the works of Wagner were first performed in the Bolshoi, commencing with Die Walkure. Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian Sabby Sagall describes the wave of creativity unleashed by the Russian Revolution, altering the course of twentieth century classical music. One of the movements describes a queue of Soviet women waiting for scarce consumer goods. We have entered into the fateful battle with our enemies. Dmitri Shostakovich in 1950. The poet affirms that this makes him ashamed to be Russian. The very idea that Shostakovich could have welcomed the victory of Hitler is a scandalous libel on a man who all his life defended progressive ideals and was a convinced Soviet patriot, despite his hatred of Stalin and the bureaucracy. These confessions were used to implicate other people in the "plot" and so forth. As part of this policy, prominent Jews were removed from public office. It is a complete scandal to equate either communism or socialism with the bureaucratic and totalitarian regime of Stalinism. Shostakovich was a man of principle, and hypocrisy was entirely foreign to him. Prokofiev's wife was sent to prison after her husband was denounced by Zhdanov. Alarmed by what his father had done, he whispered in his ear: "papa, what if they hang you for this?" The origin of the present article was some notes I wrote a few years ago to explain in general outline the meaning of Shostakovich's symphonies, as I see it, to my dear friend Miguel Fernandez, a veteran of the Spanish workers' movement in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship, as well as a talented poet and lover of classical music. Within months of Khrushchov's secret speech at the 20th congress denouncing Stalin's crimes, the Hungarian workers rose up, arms in hand, against Soviet and Stalinist domination. What is the reason for such a quantity of poisonous bile, spite and sheer hatred? The music is Throughout the history of class society, the enslavement of women to men has provided a firm basis for the family, and the family has provided a firm basis for the state, that is, for the organised oppression of one class (or caste) by another. They even issued an order to the concentration camps, instructing the guards not to use the word fascist as an insult against the prisoners. The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky promoted artistic freedom. Berliner Philharmoniker / Recorded at the Berlin Philharmonie, 13 September 2009. The celebrated Soviet theatre director Vsevolod Meyerholt, with whom Shostakovich had collaborated, was sent to a concentration camp, where he was murdered in 1940. The Fifth Symphony is not a celebration of the "happy life". It is very much the symphony of a young man who has just embarked on an exciting journey, full of self-confidence and adventure. From Wikipedia. The acmeist poets Osip Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova and the symbolist Alexander Blok all participated in the debates on art and literature, together with Bogdanov and the other representatives of Proletkult. And who can deny that the symphonies of Shostakovich, taking their starting point from Mahler, developed into an entirely different musical idiom that is unmistakably Shostakovich and nobody else but Shostakovich? The restrictions on Shostakovich's music and living arrangements were partially relaxed in 1949, in order to secure his participation in a Soviet delegation to the U.S.A. The result was predicable. This does not mean that he wrote nothing else. Stalin and the bureaucracy were expecting triumphal music - a "hymn of victory. The remainder are by Apollinaire and Russian poets. That is incorrect. When asked what they meant he would shrug his shoulders and say, in so many words: "You guess.". Growing up, Shostakovich and his family welcomed the Russian revolution, and were radicals, but were very scared of Lenin and his power. Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988)debuted as conductor in 1931,who in 1938 took up the post that he was to hold until 1988: principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. The atmosphere of menace is increased by repeated drum-rolls and trumpet calls that recall the symphonies of Mahler. With all of this in mind, lets listen to three pieces Shostakovich wrote to commemorate anniversaries of the October Revolution- the October 25, 1917 seizure of state power through insurrection that led to the Russian Revolution. Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand, I feel my hair changing shade to gray. In my veins there does not flow a single drop of Jewish blood, but in the face of all this, I am a Jew". (Besnuytes, Tyrany!) Stalin handed over German antifascist refugees in Russia to the tender mercies of Hitler. Although it contains much valuable information, Volkov's book commits the gross mistake of attributing to Shostakovich (at least implicitly) an anti-Soviet and anti-Communist outlook. Stalin's spiteful nature - which Lenin commented on in his Suppressed Testament - was shown by his treatment of the families of those he saw as enemies. Despite being a shy and retiring man, he showed enormous personal courage and great integrity in fighting the Stalinist regime, while simultaneously producing works that represents the very summit of musical creation of the 20th century, not just in the USSR but in the world. This got the young composer into his first spot of trouble with the Soviet authorities. But in the first place, we must not forget that Beethoven also passed through long periods of depression when he wrote very little. In 1960 he joined the Communist Party, interpreted variously as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure, and as his free decision. At no time and in no place have I seen people, not listening to, but devouring music with such trembling eagerness, such feeling as in Russia during those years." Stalin systematically trampled on every principle of Leninism and Soviet democracy. However, the Warshavianka had been taken up by the Russian workers as one of their own revolutionary songs, and in 1905 was as popular as the Workers' Marseilles. William Tell was the well-known fighter for Swiss freedom from Austrian oppression. I was once present at a concert in London's South Bank Centre when the work was performed. This is a vision of the masses "storming heaven," to use Marx's description of the Paris Commune. The composer even enlisted in the fire brigade. Shostakovich's music will live for as long as men and women love music, because, like his idol Beethoven, he was a man with something important to say. Only through trial and error does youth learn the way to live life, let alone to write works of music and literature. There is no Jewish blood that's blood of mine, But, hated with a passion that's corrosive Am I by antisemites like a Jew. Anti-Semitism featured prominently at every stage of the Stalinist political counterrevolution. But the slow movement is full of anxiety, while the other movements are sinister, menacing, even diabolical. Later, his betrayal of the Spanish Revolution removed the last obstacle to a new war in Europe.
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