This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode The Art of Fear: The music of oppression and war.
Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Listen to This.
THE ART OF FEAR
Music in Stalin’s Russia
From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Contents
Suggested Listening and Reading
About the Publisher
Music in Stalin’s Russia
On January 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), went to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow for a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The Soviet dictator often attended opera and ballet at the Bolshoi, where he made a show of being inconspicuous; he preferred to take a seat in the back row of Box A, just before the curtain rose, and positioned himself behind a small curtain, which concealed him from the audience without obstructing his view of the stage. Phalanxes of security and a general heightening of tension would signal to experienced observers that Stalin was in the hall. On this night, Shostakovich, the twenty-nine-year-old star of Soviet composition, had been officially instructed to attend. He sat facing Box A. Visible in front were Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Andrei Zhdanov, all of them members or candidate members of the Politburo. According to one account, they were laughing, talking among themselves, and otherwise enjoying their proximity to the man behind the curtain.
Stalin had lately taken an interest in Soviet opera. On January 17 he had seen Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s The Quiet Don, and liked it enough to summon the composer to his box for an interview, commenting that Soviet opera should “make use of all the latest devices of musical techniques, but its idiom should be close to the masses, clear and accessible.” Lady Macbeth, the tale of a vaguely Lulu-like Russian house-wife who leaves a string of bodies in her wake, did not meet these somewhat ambiguous specifications. Stalin left the hall either before or during the final act, taking with him Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan, and Zhdanov. Shostakovich confided to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky that he, too, had been hoping to receive an invitation to Box A. Despite vigorous applause from the audience, the composer left feeling “sick at heart,” and he remained so as he boarded a train for the northern city of Arkhangel’sk, where he was scheduled to perform.
Two days later, one of the great nightmares of twentieth-century cultural history began riding down on the nervous young composer. Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, printed an editorial with the headline “Muddle Instead of Music,” in which Lady Macbeth was condemned as an artistically obscure and morally obscene work. “From the first moment of the opera,” the anonymous author wrote, “the listener is flabbergasted by the deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds.” Shostakovich was said to be playing a game that “may end very badly.” The last phrase was chilling. Stalin’s Terror was imminent, and Soviet citizens were about to discover, if they did not know already, what a bad end might mean. Some would be pilloried and executed as enemies of the people, some would be arrested and killed in secret, some would be sent to the gulags, some would simply disappear. Shostakovich never shook off the pall of fear that those six hundred words in Pravda cast on him.
A few weeks before “Muddle Instead of Music” was published, a familiar face appeared again in Moscow. Sergei Prokofiev, who had been living outside Russia since 1918, arrived with his wife, Lina, to celebrate New Year’s Eve. According to Harlow Robinson’s biography, Prokofiev attended a party at the Moscow Art Theatre and remained there until five in the morning. Since 1927, the former enfant terrible of Russian music had returned many times to his native land; now he decided to live in Moscow full-time. He was well aware that Soviet artists were subject to censorship, but he chose to think that such restrictions would not apply to him. He was, at this time, forty-four years old, at the height of his powers and in good health. He, too, would endure a long string of humiliations, and was not granted the satisfaction of outliving Stalin. In a twist that would seem too heavy-handed in a novel, Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, about fifty minutes before Stalin breathed his last.
The period from the mid-thirties onward marked the onset of the most warped and tragic phase in twentieth-century music: the total politicizing of the art by totalitarian means. On the eve of the Second World War, dictators had manipulated popular resentment and media spectacle to take control of half of Europe. Hitler in Germany and Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary, and Franco in Spain. In the Soviet Union, Stalin refined Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship into an omnipotent machine, relying on a cult of personality, rigid control of the media, and an army of secret police. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt was granted extraordinary executive powers to counter the ravages of the Depression, leading conservatives to fear an erosion of constitutional process, particularly when federal arts programs were harnessed to political purposes. In Germany, Hitler forged the most unholy alliance of art and politics that the world had ever seen.
For anyone who cherishes the notion that there is some inherent spiritual goodness in artists of great talent, the era of Stalin and Hitler is disillusioning. Not only did composers fail to rise up en masse against totalitarianism, but many actively welcomed it. In the capitalist free-for-all of the twenties, they had contended with technologically enhanced mass culture, which introduced a new aristocracy of movie stars, pop musicians, and celebrities without portfolio. Having long depended on the largesse of the Church, the upper classes, and the high bourgeoisie, composers suddenly found themselves, in the Jazz Age, without obvious means of support. Some fell to dreaming of a political knight in shining armor who would come to their aid.
The dictators played that role to perfection. Stalin and Hitler aped the art-loving monarchs of yore, pledging the patronage of the centralized state. But these men were a different species. Coming from the social margins, they believed themselves to be perfect embodiments of popular will and popular taste. At the same time, they saw themselves as artist-intellectuals, members of history’s vanguard. Adept at playing on the weaknesses of the creative mind, they offered the seduction of power with one hand and the fear of destruction with the other. One by one, artists fell in line.
Untangling composers’ relationships with totalitarianism is a tricky exercise. For a long time discussion of Shostakovich revolved around the issue of whether he was an “official” composer who produced propaganda on command or a secret dissident
