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Essay: “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
possible, and ‘love,’ in its most vulgar form is smeared all over the opera… Left deviationism in opera grows out of the same source as left deviationism in painting, in poetry, in pedagogy, in science…”3
The phrase “left deviationism” is especially chilling. Stalin was beginning to perpetrate his Great Purge in 1936—which resulted in the execution of possibly 1.2 million victims—and “left deviationism” is the exact term that was used to doom those perceived to be political adversaries. Shostakovich, expecting to be arrested and imprisoned, packed a suitcase preparing for the worst.4 Through twists of fate he was never arrested, but the composer lived the majority of his life stigmatized by the threat of “left deviationism.”
Seven years after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich was pressured into joining the Communist Party. The composer had gone to Dresden, working with Leo Arnshtam on a film entitled Five Days, Five Nights about the British and American bombings in World War II that flattened the city. While there, Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 8 Op. 110 in a three-day creative fit, furnishing the piece with the dedication: “In Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War.”
On the surface of things, this dedication could be read as a commemoration to the city in which it was composed. However, with Shostakovich composing into the quartet the notational cryptogram of his name, DSCH (D, E flat, C, B natural),5 the composition is placed squarely in the realm of subjective psychology. With DSCH appearing all over the piece and self-quotations from previous compositions including the Tenth Symphony, the First Symphony, the Piano Trio No. 2, the Cello Concerto No. 1, and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, it is no wonder that the quartet is described by Alex Ross as “one of the most extraordinary autobiographical pieces in musical history.”6 Shostakovich’s self-quotations are set alongside further quotations in the quartet: snippets of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” Siegfried’s funeral procession from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, and the 19th-century revolutionary song Zamuchen tyazholoy nevolyey (“Exhausted by Grievous Bondage”). Shostakovich placed himself within a musico-political canon, a self-memorialization in the brooding and gloomy notes of the Eighth Quartet. The composer described his reasoning for the quartet in a letter to Isaak Glikman, “I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself. The title page should carry the dedication: ‘To the memory of the composer of this quartet.’”7
Sofia Gubaidulina met Shostakovich a year before he wrote his String Quartet No. 8 and received early encouragement from him, the older composer instructing her to continue on her “own incorrect path.”8 These words are a reference to the Zhdanovshchina, the cultural policy formulated by Andrei Zhdanov, the most powerful politician in the Soviet realm after Stalin. Under Zhdanovshchina, the Soviet Union re-imposed strict state censorship in the arts, which had relaxed during World War II; “incorrect art” is art deemed as counter-revolutionary, art that is not serving the purposes of the people, art that is charged as “formalist”—code for the elite modernism strictly forbidden under Zhdanov’s doctrine.
Gubaidulina took Shostakovich’s advice to heart, saying later: “I am grateful the whole of my life for those wonderful words. They fortified me and were exactly what a young composer needed to hear from an older one. It gave me the courage to follow my own path.”9
And follow her own path she did, steeling herself in the face of forceful state deterrence. In 1973, Gubaidulina was attacked by a man, suspected to be a KGB agent, who attempted to strangle her in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow. In 1979, she and six other composers10 were denounced by Tikhon Khrennikov, leader of the Union of Soviet Composers, at the Sixth Congress of the Composers’ Union for participation in music festivals outside of the Soviet Union. He called the composers’ music “pointlessness… noisy mud instead of real musical innovation.”
Gubaidulina’s sense of innovation is on full display with her pioneering work Vivente – non vivente (“Living – Not Living”) created at the Moscow Experimental Studio of Electronic Music. Vivente – non vivente is composed for ANS Synthesizer, a photo-electronic instrument invented by Evgeny Murzin. Since there is only one ANS Synthesizer left in the world (at the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow), modern performances of the piece have been few and far between (this is the Berlin premiere) and rely on recreating the instrument through digital patches. Although composed in 1970, Vivente – non vivente is, effectively, rendered obsolete, an artifact that can only be realized through a type of historically informed electronic music performance practice.
There is one striking biographical distinction between the two Hungarian composers György Kurtág and György Ligeti: Ligeti left Hungry permanently after the Soviet’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, first moving to Vienna and then settling in Cologne; Kurtág studied in Paris after the Uprising but settled back in Budapest in 1958. Like Sofia Gubaidulina, who stayed in the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, Kurtág would live and work in Hungary until the 90s, holding a professorship at the Franz Liszt Academy until 1993.
While Ligeti enjoyed widespread acclaim in the West after his emigration, Kurtág had his first international opportunity in Darmstadt in 1968 with a performance of The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza. Praise for his music came slowly, first with approval following the 1981 premiere in Paris of Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber ensemble and then breaking through with his seminal work for orchestra, Stele, composed while at residency with the Berliner Philharmoniker and premiered in 1994.
One can almost detect this biographical distinction in their respective music; Ligeti, a brilliant master of individualism, innovation, and reinvention, sonically sums up the 20th century through his ability to synthesize and recreate the styles around him. He is worldly, a beneficiary of the West’s system of cultural patronage set up to draw ideological boundaries during the Cold War and steeped in the Bartókian tradition of transcription, interpolation, and sublimation of folk song into his own musical idiom. Kurtág, on the other hand, crafts his scores with remarkable efficiency, almost as if musical notation is a precious resource which cannot be wasted. There seems to be a singular musical project that occupies his entire compositional output: how to say as much as possible using as little as possible.
It should not come as a surprise that two of Kurtág’s artistic icons, Samuel Beckett and Johann Sebastian Bach, are both authorities in the parsimony of artistic material. While the former obsession has yielded Kurtág his first opera, Fin de partie (premiered at La Scala in 2018), the latter has produced sets of Bach transcriptions for four-hand piano and two pianos, some of which were lovingly rendered in a 1997 ECM recording of Kurtág and his wife Márta. The transcriptions prove to be very private affairs, but, in some way, make Bach’s work all the more consumable. By choosing to transcribe Bach’s cantata chorales and arias, his organ works, and further pieces that demand specialist instruments or performance practice insight, Kurtág success-
fully makes that which is sublime accessible. They can be performed with striking panache but are likely more suited to be played on an upright piano at home—as in György and Márta Kurtag’s YouTube videos—reveling in normcore musical intimacy.11
Accessibility aside, Kurtág is his stringent, uncompromising self with his String Quartet Op. 1. Composed while he was in his early 30s, the piece marks a stylistic consistency that Kurtág would maintain throughout his career. In six movements comprising about 14 minutes, Kurtág matches Webern in his ability to distill traditional compositional form into its lyrical essence. Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello, another piece written when the composer was in his early 30s, strikes a markedly different tone, permeated with influences of Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók. When Ligeti submitted the piece for review to the Communist Party–controlled Composers’ Union, the piece was decried as too “modern,” a remarkable conclusion. The composition is written with an accessible idiom reminiscent of Ligeti’s Hungarian predecessors, with its lyrical first movement and frenetically paced, but still quite tonal, second movement—the piece does end with a G-major triad. The Composer Union’s decree doomed the piece for 26 years; the Sonata for Solo Cello received its first public performance in 1979.
When Kurtág received the Ordre pour le mérite in 2007, he used the occasion to remember his friend, Ligeti, who had passed away a year earlier, saying: “I’d like to tell him what I’ve finally discovered in his works after decades. Perhaps there are correlations that only I’ve discovered. So many things I’d like to ask. Sometimes his later works give answers, but other times it seems hopeless, because he’s not here to explain them.”12
Prof. Dr. Mena Mark Hanna
1 Zetkin, Clara: Reminiscences of Lenin, Chatto and Windus, London 1929, p. 14. 2 Taruskin, Richard: The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 4: Music in the Early
Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, p. 780. 3 “Sumbur vmesto muzïki” (“Muddle Instead of Music”), in Pravda, January 28, 1936. 4 The Great Purge claimed many close to the composer, including his political patron, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (shot in 1937); his brother-in-law, the physicist
Vsevolod Frederiks (imprisoned, died on his way home in 1937); his mother-inlaw, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar (imprisoned in Karaganda); his friend, the poet Boris Kornilov (shot in 1938); his friend and collaborator, dramaturg Adrian Piotrovsky (shot in 1937), and his friend, writer Galina
Serebryakova (survived imprisonment in Gulag, released in 1955). 5 German nomenclature uses the letter H for B natural and Es for E flat, following a tradition of cryptographically “spelling” names through notation that likely started with Bach, who spelled his name notationally as B flat, A, C, B natural, i.e. in
German nomenclature BACH. 6 Ross, Alex: The Rest is Noise. Listening to the Twentieth Century, Picador, New York 2007, p. 475. 7 Shostakovich, Dmitri and Isaak Glikman: Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry
Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman 1941–1975. With a Commentary by Isaak Glikman, translated by Anthony Phillips, Cornell University Press, Ithaka 2001, p. 90–91. 8 Jeffries, Stuart: “Sofia Gubaidulina. Unchained Melodies,” in The Guardian,
October 31, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/31/sofiagubaidulina-unchained-melodies (last retrieved September 16, 2021). 9 Ibid. 10 The six other composers denounced at the Sixth Congress of the Composers’
Union by its leader Tikhon Khrennikov were Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov,
Alexander Knaifel, Viktor Suslin, Vyacheslav Artyomov, and Edison Denisov. 11 Video recordings of György and Márta Kurtág’s performances of the Bach transcriptions have become something of an unexpected YouTube sensation.
Most of the videos of the two of them playing were uploaded a few years before
Márta passed away in 2019 and show the two huddled together over an upright piano. One video has registered nearly 280,000 views—unheard-of numbers for new classical music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8lTh58jhA8 12 Kurtág, György: “Kylwyria – KálváriaAppendix,” published in NZZ, August 4, 2007, https://www.nzz.ch/kylwyria__kalvariaappendix-1.536303 (last retrieved
September 16, 2021).
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