“Muddle Instead of Music” On the Concert Program
“We are good revolutionaries, but somehow we feel obliged to prove that we are on par with ‘contemporary culture.’ But I have the courage to declare myself a ‘barbarian.’ I am unable to count the works of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and similar ‘isms’ among the high manifestations of creative genius. I do not understand them. I do not derive any pleasure from them… We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it as a starting point, even if it is ‘old.’ Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is new?”1 These words, uttered by Vladimir Lenin and recounted by Clara Zetkin in her Reminiscences, are a distillation of what became Socialist Realism, the idealized artistic style which eschewed modernist abstraction for the “realistic”—that is “realistic” as sanctioned by the Soviet State. Lenin’s words wrap traditionalism in the guise of revolution, and it is the enforcement of this aesthetic philosophy, administered through an apparatus of totalitarian surveillance and propaganda, that formed and informs the biography of the Soviet Union’s most performed composer, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. The only composer in the Soviet Union who achieved a position of unquestioned international preeminence in his lifetime,2 Shostakovich’s troubles with Soviet authority began after Joseph Stalin and his retinue saw a performance of the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at a 1936 festival of Soviet music in Moscow. Based on a 19th-century novella by Nikolai Leskov, the opera recasts the story’s protagonist as an emancipated heroine of Soviet society. Stalin didn’t see it that way. Maybe he was scandalized by some of the opera’s sexual material or begrudged Shostakovich his international success, but the opera was promptly denounced with an article entitled “Muddle Instead of Music” in Pravda, the Communist Party’s official newspaper: “The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent love scenes as naturally as
Thursday September 30
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