A worker’s visit to the Symphony Hall, Birmingham, to hear Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony
On Saturday 16 March I saw a performance by the city of Birmingham symphony
orchestra (CBSO) of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5. The symphony took up the
second half of the performance, with the period before the interval
dedicated to a mixed bag from Shostakovich’s ‘the Limpid Stream’ and his
Piano Concerto No 1.
Workers are entitled to ask – why should I care? Whilst classical music in
Britain enjoys broad popularity, it is by no means accessible to the vast
majority of workers and has a decidedly unfashionable image amongst large
swathes of the population. A typical assumption would be that price
excludes large numbers of workers, though hundreds of thousands of British
workers are quite prepared to pay far in excess of the price for a
mid-range ticket in a symphony hall (£35) to see some dreadful performance
at the O2 or watch South Americans kick a ball about for Manchester City.
Classical music, so long dominated by the intelligentsia and the ruling
class, appears to millions of workers as aloof, long-winded, high-brow and
political, and who could blame them? For those not accustomed to its
special laws, to the etiquette of clapping in the right places and holding
in every cough until an interval, the entire proceedings can be as
incomprehensible as a first trip to that other bizarre spectacle and
stomping ground for the middle classes and former colonial peoples, Test
cricket.
Marx on music
Workers are exposed to all sorts of musical influences, and many workers
are exposed to classical music without even realising it, even if it is
just Zadok the Priest prior to a Champions League football match. This
music has mass appeal, but it is not the music that is always the easiest
to comprehend. Depth and content are too readily discarded in modern
society in favour of shallow meaningless forgettable music.
Marx, writing in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) had this to
say when discussing music and beauty,
“…only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most
beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear… the meaning of an
object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has only a meaning for a
sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the senses of the
social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the
objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of
subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in
short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves
as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For
not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the
practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human
nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of
humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire
history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude
practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not
the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as
food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be
impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of
animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the
finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not
the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no
mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both
in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense
human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire
wealth of human and natural substance.”
It is from such a position that communist workers should learn to enjoy
classical music.
As Party life teaches, our enjoyment (more often than not) can also serve
the class struggle, and it is also on this front that we take an interest
in classical music, and the musical heritage of the Soviet Union in
particular.
Mirga conducts Shostakovich
The outstanding feature of the pre-concert atmosphere was the naked and
extreme hostility to the USSR. The advertisement and programme was
explicitly political, as is often the case with Shostakovich. The
bourgeoisie, who dominate classical music (as with all the arts, even those
which appear to be dominated by us) never ceases to draw political,
cultural and historical allegory from music old and new. Art for them has
to serve their class interests, and the music at times is little more than
an avenue by which to foist upon the audience their interpretation of
historical events and political prejudice.
The CBSO performance was conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla. Mirga is the
CBSO Music Director. She is a Lithuanian, a rising star in the world of
classical music, though she cannot play any instrument to the level of a
virtuoso. This writer could find no display of blatant anti-Sovietism in
her interviews, although every journalist who interviews her is sure to
note that she is Lithuanian, a witness to the Soviet ‘occupation’ etc. In
fact in every interview you can be sure that some remarks, in addition to
the comments that she is a woman sticking it out in a man’s world, will be
made along the lines of these in the Financial Times:
“She lived through the collapse of the Soviet regime in her country and
experienced at first hand the ‘positive, unifying force’ of the mass
singing that played such an important role during the Baltic republics’
liberation” (Hannah Nepil. ‘Conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla — a combination
of flamboyance and steely poise’, 28 July 2017).
Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich is of importance and interest to advanced workers for
three reasons. Firstly he is universally recognised as a great composer of
music; secondly, he was a Soviet artist with enduring worldwide fame; and
thirdly, he represented a revisionist tendency in Soviet music, being a
recognised leader of the formalist tendency. With regard to his position as
a formalist, Shostakovich has been very useful to anti-Soviet
musicologists, sociologists and historians, and this must contribute
towards his ongoing popularity in the West.
Everyone connected with classical music likes to quote from the words of
Shostakovich, usually words (published at second hand) uttered at the end
of his life, the period of his decline, in the 20 years he lived with the
political ‘freedoms’ Khruschevite revisionism won for the remnants of the
vanquished exploiting classes and, in particular, for the sections of
Soviet society which clung onto the habits and ways of thinking associated
with the epoch of exploitation. Shostakovich was one of these men. A
formalist in the twenties he was part of the ‘avant garde’.
Historians and fans tend to dismiss all Shostakovich’s earlier words, his
articles in Pravda (of praise for the Soviet system) by saying that these
were forced words, that he was often ‘contradictory’; and they even go so
far as to say he was an outright liar when they find something reflecting
too positively upon Soviet life.
Politics and the CBSO
The programme notes for the CBSO evening entertainment are there to tell
the audience exactly what to think, exactly how to interpret the music they
are about to hear. Gerard McBurney gave the pre-concert talk for members
and supporters of the CBSO, and he was responsible for a large part of the
printed programme, giving his ludicrous and anti-communist reflections on
all manner of aspects of the music. McBurney is viciously anti-Soviet and
anti-Stalin. He is the son of an American archaeologist who ended up
teaching at Cambridge. His grandparents on his mother’s side were British
army officers, as were his great-grandparents on that side. The
archaeologist father took an interest in the USSR and produced a book
entitled Early man in the Soviet Union. His position at Cambridge
University may have helped to get his children in, and, after early
schooling at Winchester College, Gerard McBurney, our British composer and
critic, entered Corpus Christi, Cambridge, along with his brother the actor
Simon McBurney OBE (whom you may have seen in Harry Potter or the Vicar of
Dibley and all manner of other silly things).
Gerard McBurney’s ludicrous concert notes leave the audience in no doubt
whatsoever that Shostakovich was a persecuted artist, like all good Soviet
artists (the rest being mere tools of Stalinist tyranny), that he was in
fear for his life, and that he mixed with writers and artists who for no
good reason whatsoever were executed by a tyrannical regime in the Kremlin.
“The extent of violent repression in the USSR in the 1930s was, by any
standards, shocking. This was the period of Stalin’s most ruthless
consolidation of absolute power [no less!], beginning in 1928 with the
Five-Year Plans [those awful things] and the monstrous project of the
Collectivisation of agriculture…
“It’s an oft-told story – one of the nightmares of the 20th century history
– and certainly one factor in why Shostakovich’s music sounds the way it
does.
“At the very start of this period, Shostakovich’s supreme compositional
achievement was undoubtedly his opera ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District’…
The composer began it in the autumn of 1930, at the age of only 24, and
finished it two years later…
“A year or so later, around the time of the first performance of his opera,
he completed his ballet ‘The Limpid Stream’. To begin with, this piece,
like the opera, was successful; its first staging in Leningrad in the
spring of 1935 was followed by a second one in Moscow in the autumn.”
“From then on, it was not only Shostakovich’s career that was threatened,
but – as we know from memoirs of his friends and family – his personal
safety.”
Shostakovich’s ‘Limpid Stream’ (meaning Bright Stream) is set on a
collective farm. The concert notes think Shostakovich was poking fun at the
name of the workers’ holiday villages which the Soviet Union had set up.
Only an entitled middle class snob could imagine such a pun. Our own
country, with its Sandy Bays and Sunny Heights, its Naples of the North
(Morecombe) and English Riviera (Devon) are decidedly untrendy holiday
resorts for mobile middle class aesthetes like McBurney. He can only
imagine that Shostakovich, like himself, would have scoffed at those Soviet
workers forced to take holidays in such wretched places. Indeed they may
well have scoffed (though to their credit they didn’t) at the proletariat
in the capitalist world who, far from being able to take free holidays in
resorts like the Bright Stream, were permanently on holiday from the world
of work and suffering the acute crisis of capitalism which destroyed
millions of workers at this time (20% unemployment in Britain and 25% in
the USA).
Shostakovich wrote the music for the ballet but not the entire story, and
it is foremost the story which is criticised by Pravda in an article
entitled ‘Ballet Falsity’. The Limpid Stream follows a troupe of musicians
and dancers sent to perform for agricultural workers in the provinces. The
scriptwriter, Adrian Piotrovsky, who in 1937 was shot for espionage (58-6
of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR), tells the story of the antics of the
troupe, who essentially frolic, wife swop (unknowingly) and make games down
on the farm. Shostakovich’s music accompanies these antics, especially the
frolicking; it even led the New York Sun to label the music pornophony,
which is a far harsher criticism of the music than Shostakovich received
from the Soviets! Indeed, a recurring theme in Pravda’s criticism is that
Soviet art criticism is decidedly lacking in criticism and most often takes
on the role of lavishing praise on favourite artists.
Pravda’s criticism in 1936 of the ‘Limpid Stream’ was essentially directed
at the fact that the ballet had not bothered to investigate in any way the
life and problems of a real collective farm, nor had it made even the
slightest effort to depict the costumes, folk dance and traditions of the
people it was purporting to represent (from the Kuban). In our modern,
touchy idPol dominated times it would be most distressing to see such
brazen ignorance of the cultural traditions and values of ethnic
minorities, and it is surprising that McBurney is so insensitive to this.
When it came to the musical score of Shostakovich, Pravda said:
“From the libretto, we learn that it has been partially transferred to the
collective farm ballet ‘Bolt’ which failed [a previous work by
Shostakovich, he essentially reused his old tunes]. It is clear what
happens when the same music should express different phenomena. In fact, it
expresses only the composer’s indifferent attitude to the topic.
“The authors of the ballet — both the directors and the composer — seem to
expect that our public is undemanding, that she will accept everything,
that she is crammed together by nimble and unceremonious people.
“In reality, only our musical and art criticism is undemanding. She often
commends works that do not deserve it.”
In our book such criticism hardly amounts to a death threat.
Muddle Instead of Music
The Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk is perhaps the most infamous of all
Shostakovich’s works, and is undergoing a revival in the West where it is
used repeatedly to push the lie that Stalin personally launched an attack
on Shostakovich, the great innovator, and had this masterpiece censored. In
Birmingham in March, the celebrated Birmingham Opera Company performed this
very piece, just another example of their innovative (i.e., very dull,
predictable, liberal and PC) trajectory.
The story of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk originated with Nikolay Leskov. Leskov
wrote a sordid tale in which Katerina Ismailova, the wife of a provincial
merchant, has an affair with a clerk in her husband’s office. She poisons
her father-in-law who is unsurprisingly unimpressed, then joins her lover
in strangling her husband and finally murders her little nephew. Leskov
wrote Katerina as a depraved criminal, but Shostakovich attempted to
present her as a tribute to women’s liberation. So effective was
Shostakovich, that the Guardian (remarking upon a recent performance of the
opera in London) said, “we get to marvel at the way in which in this opera
Shostakovich so brazenly and lovingly hands the moral high ground to a
murderer, and keeps you rooting for her until the very last note.”
Shostakovich’s Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, received the praise of many a
Soviet ‘critic’ at the time of the first performance in Leningrad.
Particular fawning praise came from Ivan Sollertinsky who was a professor
at the Leningrad conservatoire as well as the artistic director of the
Leningrad Philharmonic, an impartial ear if ever there was one. It can be
of no surprise that when Shostakovich’s Lady MacBeth debuted in Leningrad
it was well received by such good friendly critics and that it was not
until it had had a thorough inspection in Moscow that any independent
criticism was given. It is unsurprising that the artistic director of the
philharmonic would praise his own work, but it is a surprise that an
artistic director could be considered a suitable critic for his own chosen
performances! And Soviet publications, including Pravda don’t fail to
capture the sense that nepotism and the old boys club operated just as well
in certain circles of Soviet artistic production as they had done under
capitalism. McBurney sees it somewhat differently of course. In his notes
he says,
“…in January 1936, the composer’s life was turned inside out by a
devastating public attack on his Lady Macbeth, a now notorious article
entitled ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, published prominently in ‘Pravda’ [on
page 3], the official newspaper of the Communist Party.”
McBurney, like Sollertinsky thinks Shostakovich should be above criticism,
not criticism in general but most certainly Soviet criticism. Soviet
criticism has as its aim the ‘extermination of the artist’, his
‘incarceration and physical annihilation’ etc., etc. For McBurney,
Shostakovich was certainly above criticism from the workers and their
Communist Party, from those foul people who holiday in Sunny Heights and
Fawlty Towers. McBurney fails to mention that Shostakovich, to his credit,
had, like many Soviet artists, a completely different attitude to criticism
and self-criticism, even if it left a bitter taste years after the
experience. In those times of open class struggle, many artists were as
happy writing criticism of their contemporaries as they were composing new
works, and only weeks before his rebuke Shostakovich had been published in
Pravda describing as “weak” his contemporary Ivan Dzerzinsky’s ballet ‘The
Quiet Don’ based on the world famous Sholokov story!
Stalin goes to the opera
It is said that Stalin, Zhdanov and a handful of Politburo members went to
the Moscow showing of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk and were decidedly
unimpressed. Their opinions were shared by others such as Kerzhentsev, the
Chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs. ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ was
their response, and it was published by Pravda without an author being
named:
“With the general cultural development of our country there grew also the
necessity for good music. At no time and in no other place has the composer
had a more appreciative audience. The people expect good songs, but also
good instrumental works, and good operas.
“Certain theatres are presenting to the new culturally mature Soviet public
Shostakovich’s opera ‘Lady Macbeth’ as an innovation and achievement.
Musical criticism, always ready to serve, has praised the opera to the
skies, and given it resounding glory. The young composer, instead of
hearing serious criticism, which could have helped him in his future work,
hears only enthusiastic compliments.
“From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance,
by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a
musical phrase, are drowned, emerge again, and disappear in a grinding and
squealing roar. To follow this ‘music’ is most difficult; to remember it,
impossible.
“Thus it goes, practically throughout the entire opera. The singing on the
stage is replaced by shrieks. If the composer chances to come upon the path
of a clear and simple melody, he throws himself back into a wilderness of
musical chaos – in places becoming cacophony. The expression which the
listener expects is supplanted by wild rhythm. Passion is here supposed to
be expressed by noise. All this is not due to lack of talent, or lack of
ability to depict strong and simple emotions in music. Here is music turned
deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of
classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with
simple and popular musical language accessible to all. This music is built
on the basis of rejecting opera – the same basis on which ‘Leftist’ Art
rejects in the theatre simplicity, realism, clarity of image, and the
unaffected spoken word – which carries into the theatre and into music the
most negative features of ‘Meyerholdism’ infinitely multiplied. Here we
have ‘leftist’ confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good
music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois,
‘formalist’ attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a
game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.
“The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in
opera stems from the same source as Leftist distortion in painting, poetry,
teaching, and science. Petty-bourgeois ‘innovations’ lead to a break with
real art, real science and real literature.
“The composer of ‘Lady Macbeth’ was forced to borrow from jazz its nervous,
convulsive, and spasmodic music in order to lend ‘passion’ to his
characters. While our critics, including music critics, swear by the name
of socialist realism, the stage serves us, in Shostakovich’s creation, the
coarsest kind of naturalism. He reveals the merchants and the people
monotonously and bestially. The predatory merchant woman who scrambles into
the possession of wealth through murder is pictured as some kind of
‘victim’ of bourgeois society. Leskov’s story has been given a significance
which it does not possess.
“And all this is coarse, primitive and vulgar. The music quacks, grunts,
and growls, and suffocates itself in order to express the love scenes as
naturalistically as possible. And ‘love’ is smeared all over the opera in
the most vulgar manner. The merchant’s double bed occupies the central
position on the stage. On this bed all ‘problems’ are solved. In the same
coarse, naturalistic style is shown the death from poisoning and the
flogging – both practically on stage.
“The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet
audience looks for and expects in music. As though deliberately, he
scribbles down his music, confusing all the sounds in such a way that his
music would reach only the effete ‘formalists’ who had lost all their
wholesome taste. He ignored the demand of Soviet culture that all
coarseness and savagery be abolished from every corner of Soviet life. Some
critics call the glorification of the merchants’ lust a satire. But there
is no question of satire here. The composer has tried, with all the musical
and dramatic means at his command, to arouse the sympathy of the spectators
for the coarse and vulgar inclinations and behaviour of the merchant woman
Katerina Izmailova.
“’Lady Macbeth’ is having great success with bourgeois audiences abroad. Is
it not because the opera is non-political and confusing that they praise
it? Is it not explained by the fact that it tickles the perverted taste of
the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music?
“Our theatres have expended a great deal of energy on giving Shostakovich’s
opera a thorough presentation. The actors have shown exceptional talent in
dominating the noise, the screaming, and the roar of the orchestra. With
their dramatic action, they have tried to reinforce the weakness of the
melodic content. Unfortunately, this has served only to bring out the
opera’s vulgar features more vividly. The talented acting deserves
gratitude, the wasted efforts – regret.”
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony
Following the Pravda article Shostakovich met with Kerzhentsev, the
Chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs, and carried on his work, having
expressed his willingness to comprehend the criticism and to alter his
work. In his meeting with Kerzhentsev he was reportedly told that he should
reject his formalist errors, work to attain in his art something that could
be comprehended by the masses and that the authorities did not want a
‘public declaration’ that was insincere or formulaic. It was suggested to
him that he should tour the USSR and listen and record the folk songs and
music of its peoples, acquaint himself with the best 100 and synthesise his
experience. Such an approach was in the best traditions of the greatest of
Russian artists, not least the poet Pushkin who had set out on a similar
journey a century before writing his best works.
Far from destruction, out of ‘Muddle instead of music’ arose Shostakovich’s
greatest triumph, his Fifth Symphony, nearly universally recognised as his
best. It was often referred to as “the practical creative answer of a
Soviet artist to just criticism”. Made up of four parts (movements),
Moderato (moderate pace), Allegretto (brisk), Largo (slow and dignified)
and Allegro non troppo (meaning fast, but not too much!), his work is
comprehensible to the ear, has an easy to follow melody for the most part,
and an incredibly distinctive and memorable finale which feels as though it
will bring the roof in. The Birmingham CBSO, ending on this monumental
piece, were clearly having a lot more fun than they had had played the
jarring and ugly parts of the first half of the evening’s concert; and it
was the only piece to bring truly rapturous applause from the Birmingham
audience. It was the finale of the Fifth which caused such a sensation at
the time as well and is the source of controversy today. Bourgeois critics
cannot possibly ignore the greatness of the piece, and so have to find a
way to explain its existence, especially as the composer was, according to
them, at risk of losing his life, was reviled by the people and harassed at
every turn. They turn to the old tune that, yes, it is a work of genius,
with special hidden meaning only discernible to them. They are aided in
this by Shostakovich’s ‘smuggled memoirs’ in which he says “I think it is
clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth… it’s as if someone were
beating you with a stick and saying ‘Your business is rejoicing, your
business is rejoicing’, and you rise, shakily, and go off muttering ‘Our
business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” At the time, in his
published writings Shostakovich said
“The idea behind my symphony is the making of a man. I saw him, with all
his experience, at the centre of the work, which is lyrical from beginning
to end…”
Writer Alexei Tolstoy witnessed that “the audience understood
Shostakovich’s unshakable optimism… We were faced with the realistic, great
art of our epoch…” The four movements of the symphony were likened to the
psychological stages in the formation of a personality, in which ‘the
Finale brings an optimistic solution to the tragic parts of the first
movement’…”
Formalism in music
Pravda’s criticism became known as criticism of the formalist trend in
music. Formalism, as in the arts and literature, attempted to foist on
Soviet society art which could only be appreciated by ‘the chosen few’,
those enrolled into its secret meanings, a small self-appreciation circle.
These days we are so used to this ludicrous attitude to art and social life
that we think nothing of it. Incomprehensible garbled words spat out so
fast or sung so annoyingly slowly they cannot be understood by most people,
animal faeces on canvas and in sculpture which is open to ‘interpretation’,
and a world of idPol acronyms and politically correct alphabetti spaghetti
to describe sexuality and race, with its stranglehold of political
correctness enforced by imperialist-funded thought police in the
universities and galleries – a world under the pernicious influence of
toothless vegetarians in the arts, literature and philosophy.
In the post war period, the CPSU(b) led a campaign against this trend. In
its struggle to overcome the formalists in music it was necessary to
overcome Dmitri Shostakovich, amongst others. Speaking to a Conference of
Soviet Music Workers in 1948, the great Marxist-Leninist Andrei Zhdanov
said,
“There is in fact, then, a sharp though hidden struggle between two trends
taking place in Soviet music. One trend represents the healthy, progressive
principles in Soviet music, based on the acceptance of the immense role to
be played by the classical heritage, and in particular by the Russian
school, in the creation of a music which is realist and of truthful content
and is closely and organically linked with the people and their folk music
and folk song — all this combined with a high degree of professional
mastery. The other trend represents a formalism alien to Soviet art, a
rejection of the classical heritage under the banner of innovation, a
rejection of the idea of the popular origin of music, and of service to the
people, in order to gratify the individualistic emotions of a small group
of select aesthetes.
“The formalist trend brings about the substitution of a music which is
false, vulgar and often purely pathological, for natural, beautiful, human
music. Furthermore, it is characteristic of this trend to avoid a frontal
attack and to screen its revisionist activities by formally agreeing with
the basic principles of socialist realism. This sort of underhand method
is, of course, nothing new. History can show many instances of revisionism
behind the label of sham agreement with a given teaching. This makes it all
the more necessary to reveal the real essence of the formalist trend and
the damage it has done to the development of Soviet music.
“As an example, there is the attitude towards the classical heritage. There
is no indication whatever that the supporters of the formalist school are
carrying on and developing the traditions of classical music, however much
they may protest to the contrary. Any listener will tell you that the works
of Soviet composers of the formalist type differ fundamentally from
classical music. Classical music is marked by its truthfulness and realism,
its ability to blend brilliant artistic form with profound content, and to
combine the highest technical achievement with simplicity and
intelligibility. Formalism and crude naturalism are alien to classical
music in general and to Russian classical music in particular. The high
level of the idea content in classical music springs from the recognition
of the fact that classical music has its sources in the musical creative
powers of the people, in a deep respect and love for the people, their
music and song…
“Let us recall how Serov [Alexander Serov 1820-1871 – Ed.] described his
attitude to folk music. I have in mind his article ‘The Music of South
Russian Song’ in which he says:
“’Folk songs are musical organisms which are in no way the work of
individual creative talent but compositions of the whole people, and by all
their attributes far removed from artificial music. These flowers break
through the soil into the light quite of their own, as it were, and grow to
full resplendence without the slightest thought about authorship and
composers’ rights and therefore little resemble the hothouse products of
the learned composers’ activity. So it is that, above all, in folk song we
find unaffected creative genius and the wisdom of simplicity, as Gogol puts
it so aptly in ‘Dead Souls’, which is the supreme charm and secret of any
work of art.
“’As a lily in its magnificent raiment of purity puts to shame the glitter
of brocade and precious stones, so is folk music, in its childlike
simplicity, a thousand times richer and stronger than all the complexities
of scholastic invention taught by pedants in conservatoires and music
academies’.
“How well and forcefully this is said! How true the formulation of the main
issue: that the development of music must proceed on a foundation of
interplay, that is by enriching ‘academic’ music from folk music. This
theme has practically disappeared from our theoretical and critical
articles today.”
Whatever Shostakovich’s merits and frailties as a man, his political
weaknesses as an artist are discernible. Though he was a man lucky enough
to have been born to witness the ascendency of the Russian proletariat and
to record in music what he saw, he could never shake off the elitism of his
education and position. Toadying and nepotism are hangovers from capitalism
and exploitative society that socialism must overcome. As Zhdanov remarked
“the crux of the matter is that the regime of the formalist sect in the
musical organisations has not been entirely unpleasant, to put it mildly,
for the leading group of our composers.” Shostakovich’s greatest musical
work is a product of the most fantastic, and incredible era yet witnessed
in the development of human culture, the period of socialist construction,
and as such it should be of interest to all advanced workers, even if not
always to their taste. His output is inextricably tied to the momentous
achievements of the USSR, achievements never surpassed by any other
socialist state in terms of the development of all round culture and the
moulding of a new man. We must remember that the class struggle is fought
across many battlefields, music being one very important front. Our job, as
thinking workers and proletarian revolutionaries is to know our Soviet
history so as to build the new world.