That's enough Stalin (Ed.)

It is time to recall a couple of other people who died on this day, in one case sixty years ago. Both of them were great artists and both suffered under the Soviet system though neither was actually arrested.

Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev, one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, died on March 5, 1953 and his death was overshadowed by that of the great tyrant. His last years were overshadowed by persecution and the arrest of his wife. Even in death he found difficulties.

He had lived near Red Square, and for three days the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to carry Prokofiev's body out for the funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composer's Union.

I think, people might like to listen to the Radio 3 programme on Prokofiev and here is Valery Gergiyev conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Dance of the Knights, one of my personal favourites. I shall be happy to put up any other piece that readers prefer.

 

How can one forget the other great artist, in this case a great poet, who died on March 5 though she managed to outlive the old tyrant by 13 years? Anna Akhmatova, one of the greatest of the twentieth century poets and one of those who created a wondrous memorial to the victims in her cycle Requiem, died in 1966, having witnessed the cultural thaw but also its ending. Sadly but predictably Requiem, Poem without a Hero and her essays on Pushkin remained available only in the West till many years after her death, when they were finally published in the Soviet Union. For some people March 5 is Anna Akhmatova Day.

Oh, and incidentally, I have written about her before: here, here and here.

Censoring symbols will not change history either

One of the great advantages of having a blog is that one can take one's fierce arguments on other forums and turn them into a posting. Naturally, one's opponents can respond though in this case, I suspect, they or, rather, she will not. But if she does, she will be welcome.

Readers of this blog know well how I feel about the inequality between the opprobrium that is expressed by all sorts of people about the Nazi regime and about the Communist regimes (as there were several and some are still in place). I have written about it, have spoken about it and never fail to sneer at the morons who wear t-shirts with Che Guevara the mass murderer, the hammer and sickle, symbol of mass murder or Lenin the founder of that mass murder. But, the other side of that is the need to mention Communism when it is relevant to some event or activity or artistic performance in the way Nazism is always mentioned.

Not so long ago I wrote about in connection with plays about Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler. In the posting I postulated that one day the comments made about Strauss would be made about Shostakovich

There is, yet another way of testing our attitudes. Suppose the discussion quoted at the beginning had not been about Richard Strauss but about Dmitry Shostakovich. “He wrote glorious music but what a f***ing Stalinist.” How does that sound? Yet, it was true. Shostakovich wrote music to order, agreed to censorship, watched silently as his colleagues were persecuted and arrested without, to my knowledge, saving anybody. Perhaps he could not. It is not, precisely, for me to judge. But it is something to remember.

The debate on the subject was also about Shostakovich but took rather a curious turn.

The discussion started with Dan Mitchell, a man whose economic acumen and pronouncements I have quoted on this blog repeatedly, posting on his blog that he was slightly surprised to find that the hammer and sickle, a symbol of a regime, as he rightly said, which had murdered "nearly 62 million people between 1917 and 1987" in advertising a performance of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.

Is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra really oblivious to the monstrous nature of Soviet Communism? Would they feature a swastika in an ad for concert featuring the music of a German composer who produced works in 1938? I hope not, just like I can’t imagine an architecture exhibit on the work of Albert Speer featuring a swastika (other than in a way designed to connote evil). Nothing positive should be associated with horrid regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

As a matter of fact it would be impossible to have an architecture exhibit of the work of Albert Speer without featuring a swastika in a purely factual rather than emotional manner. And yes, almost all German musicians who stayed in the country have the word Nazism mentioned somewhere during a concert of their music or any programme about them. That is, precisely, what I object to. Why should we not be told the truth about Shostakovich?

I replied to the blog and then re-posted the reply on another forum:

This could be justified by saying that Shostakovich wrote under a Soviet regime and was, largely, a loyal Soviet artist (well, he had to be – that is not a criticism). Cutting out the hammer and sickle would be like purging Tom Sawyer of the “n” word. You cannot change history by changing words you don’t like. And yes, I think a programme about Albert Speer will have to feature the swastika. Richard Strauss is a bit trickier.

On the other forum (which is private so I cannot link to it) I was attacked for mixing art and politics to which I replied by saying that in the Soviet Union the two were mixed. In fact, this particular symphony is particularly political.

In 1936, as the Great Purge was taking off, Shostakovich had fallen from favour and had been severely criticized for two of his works, particularly the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He was under pressure to produce simpler music that could be called Soviet and patriotic. His immediate patron in the party hierarchy, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was arrested (and hideously tortured in prison though that was not known at the time) and shot with numerous other officers of the Red Army in 1937. Shostakovich's friends and colleagues were under threat or were being arrested. He, understandably, gave in to the pressure with alacrity. The Fifth Symphony was performed in the summer of 1937 at the height of the Great Purge, was a huge success and ensured Shostakovich's place in the Soviet arts hierarchy. The idea that there is no politics attached to that piece of music is balderdash.

When I presented some of this facts, I was asked by the lady mentioned above whether I had ever lived behind the iron curtain, a stupid question in my opinion. Nevertheless, I could reply in all honesty that I had been born and brought up there. I did not add that my father is still known, many years after his death, as one of the leading experts on the Soviet Union and that I have written on the subject myself. She seemed a little taken aback by the fact that she was not the only one who had lived behind the iron curtain and by my insistence that neither her nor my biography is of any significance in this case. It's Shostakovich's biography that matters, the facts of the arts in the Soviet Union and the peculiar situation there in the mid-thirties. Just as you cannot erase the nastiness of slavery by deciding that you are too sensitive ever to read nasty words, so you cannot change the facts that the Soviet system was appallingly nasty and interfered heavily in the arts by censoring its symbol and producing it only as an emotional hate picture. The facts matter. In fact, as Stalin used to say, "facts are stubborn things". (He did, honestly.)

ADDENDUM: Some time ago I wrote about the uselessness and, indeed, harmfulness of arguments on the basis of "I was there". Here it is.

Show time

They don't come much better than this. Glenn Miller's orchestra playing Chattanooga-Choo-Choo, Dorothy Dandridge singing and the Nicholas Brothers dancing. Fred Astaire thought the Nicholas Brothers were among the best and their dance in Stormy Weather (to be posted another time) was the greatest dance sequence in film. Who am I to argue?

Let's imagine

The June issue of Standpoint, an excellent magazine, always full of good reading material, has a theatre review not by the usual critic, Minette Marrin, but by Mark Ronan, who also blogs on the arts. (Actually, he is quite a guy, a professor of mathematics who has also acted and danced as well as written about both the arts and mathematics. In fact, I am beginning to think that he is a figment of somebody’s imagination.)

The review in question is of two plays by Ronald Harwood at the Duchess Theatre in London, both about German musicians who remained in the country under the Nazis and went on working, indeed flourished but had to face up to the consequences in 1945. Appropriately enough, it is called “Facing the Music”.

(Here is another review of the plays in the Economist.)

The two musicians are Richard Strauss, long “known” by all bien pensants for being a Nazi (Ken Russell has much to answer for) and the sublime conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Respectively, the plays are entitled “Collaboration” and “Taking Sides”.

Mr Ronan’s first paragraph sums up the problem about judging people on the basis of hearsay:

When I once performed an acting role in Richard Strauss's Salome, in Chicago, one of the singers said to me, "He wrote glorious music, but what a f***ing Nazi!" I was astonished. This was not the Richard Strauss I knew about, so I rang a lady friend in England, who said, "And did this man know that Strauss had a Jewish daughter-in-law, of whom he was extremely fond? And that he protected her and his Jewish grandchildren throughout the war?"

There is also the fact that Richard Strauss insisted on keeping the name of Stefan Zweig, the Jewish writer and librettist of Die Schweigsame Frau, on the playbill.

But, undoubtedly, Strauss collaborated to some extent with the regime, as did Furtwängler, though he was not a member of the party, however hard the American interrogator tried to prove that and he did help Jewish musicians in escaping. The accusation that by helping them he knew what was going on and was, therefore, guilty, apparently levelled at the conductor in 1945 could have come only from people who understood nothing about the realities of totalitarianism.

It seems, however, that certain record shops have decided that they know everything:

[W]hen Harwood was preparing the play he asked his daughter in New York to go to Tower Records and get him all the Furtwängler recordings she could. She called back half an hour later to say, "Dad, I've had a terrible time, I went in and the man said, ‘We don't keep Nazi recordings in this shop'."

At the end or his article Mr Ronan says:

We are left with questions. How would we have acted in the circumstances of the time? Some people seem certain of their own righteousness and condemn the musicians, yet self-righteousness and condemnation are something of which the Nazis were guilty. A contemporary theatre critic in a major newspaper wrote that Strauss was a Quisling. Does he not understand the meaning of the word? Strauss was German, so was Furtwängler. Their country, ruled by a government they disliked and officials who disgusted them, can be easily condemned, but condemning those who lived there as things went from bad to worse is another matter entirely. Was Strauss a "f***ing Nazi"? Was Furtwängler? These plays should inspire us to examine ourselves and our world.

The last reference is to the repeated attempts to boycott Israeli academics and artists simply because they are Israeli (oh what the heck, because they are Jewish). Often these calls are voiced by the same people who spit at the name of Strauss or Furtwängler, assuming they have heard of the latter.

As for how would any of us behave in those circumstances, we do not know if we have not been through it. The most surprising people behave heroically; it is the theme of many stories, such as Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif”. Come to think of it, is that not what the story of Mary Magdalen about?

There is, yet another way of testing our attitudes. Suppose the discussion quoted at the beginning had not been about Richard Strauss but about Dmitry Shostakovich. “He wrote glorious music but what a f***ing Stalinist.” How does that sound? Yet, it was true. Shostakovich wrote music to order, agreed to censorship, watched silently as his colleagues were persecuted and arrested without, to my knowledge, saving anybody. Perhaps he could not. It is not, precisely, for me to judge. But it is something to remember.