CHAPTER 5
ON 31 DECEMBER 1900, the last day of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky’s surviving kuchkist confrère and musical executor, universally recognized and hailed as the greatest living Russian composer, received a visit from his faithful Boswell, a banker named Vasiliy Vasilievich Yastrebtsev. Yastrebtsev asked for a fitting memento of the day, whereupon Rimsky-Korsakov wrote out the accompaniment to a passage from Spring’s recitative in the prologue to his opera The Snow Maiden (example 5.1).
“Figure out the riddle, kind sir,” he wrote as inscription, alluding to the missing words: “And it’s all just light and cold brilliance, and there’s no warmth.”1 It was an apt if ruefully overstated comment on what had happened over the preceding quarter-century to his music, and to Russian music as a whole, as a result of professionalization, institutionalization, self-censorship, and what might be called the perils of safe harbor.
EXAMPLE 5.1. Rimsky-Korsakov’s end-of-century inscription in Yastrebtsev’s album, with voice part (from The Snow Maiden) restored
Rimsky-Korsakov is still identified in every history book as a member of the “Mighty Five,” as they are often called in English, the maverick group of self-trained musicians who fought the good nationalist fight against German hegemony, against academic routine, and against philistine conservatism. By 1900 that group was only a memory. Its two most characteristic members, Musorgsky and Borodin, were long dead, and Rimsky-Korsakov was at the head of another school of composers altogether, one that is never mentioned in Western history texts since it does not conform to the stereotypical behavior the West expects from Russian composers.
The school Rimsky-Korsakov now headed was known as the Belyayev school, because it owed its existence to the activities and largesse of a timber merchant named Mitrofan Petrovich Belyayev, who, beginning in 1882, the year after Musorgsky’s death, had endowed a magnificent publishing enterprise, two concert series, and several annual prizes for the purpose of supporting Russian art music. The patron’s will made provision for the continuation of these undertakings in perpetuity: the concert series and the awards lasted until the revolution, and the publishing house, now located in Frankfurt, Germany, has lasted to this day. For composers willing and able to meet Belyayev’s standards, his company offered cradle-to-grave career insurance. Anyone able to make the grade was also willing.
For all his commitment to the cause of indigenous musical culture, Belyayev’s idea of musical culture was wholly formed on the Germanic academic model. An amateur violinist and violist, he was a great enthusiast of chamber music, with “absolute” symphonic works next in line, program music and concertos after that, and all vocal genres at the very bottom.2 His notion of standards was founded on a notion of technical quality that was founded in turn on the three Rs of the musical academy—harmony, counterpoint, form. He enforced these standards through an executive committee consisting of three conservatory professors, with Rimsky-Korsakov at its head.
Rimsky-Korsakov had already been a conservatory professor for over a decade when Belyayev began his patronage activity, and by the turn of the century he was as pedantic a stickler for the academic niceties as any conservatory professor anywhere. The St. Petersburg Conservatory, which now bears Rimsky-Korsakov’s name, had been founded in 1862 by Anton Rubinstein over the vociferous objections of the nationalist faction. Rimsky-Korsakov had been unexpectedly named to its faculty in 1871, although, as a member in good standing of the Mighty Five, he was himself innocent of academic training. He therefore embarked on a heroic program of belated self-education that estranged him from his former circle and left him in command of a superlative academic technique he spent the rest of his life imparting to others, beginning with Alexander Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov and ending with Igor Stravinsky. His early star pupils, Glazunov and Lyadov, both fellow professors by century’s end, joined him on the Belyayev executive committee.
Thus these three composers, as pedagogues and as channelers of a fantastic Maecenas’s largesse, became the all-powerful leaders of a guild, or, to use a contemporary Russian term, an artel, a crafts collective.3 They brought up their pupils to exhibit their academic credentials to the point of virtuosity, and rewarded them with a place at the Belyayev feeding trough. It was as easy to deride the artel from without as it was difficult to rebel from within. Debate around it, moreover, took exactly the form debate would take about its virtual successor, the Union of Soviet Composers, with proponents emphasizing material benefits and detractors emphasizing creative freedom. Yet so powerful were the blandishments it could offer, even without any raw state power to back them up, that the Conservatory/Belyayev nexus made for an absolutely invincible establishment. The result, with the single equivocal exception of Scriabin, was the near-total absence of a Russian musical avant-garde all through the period of literary and painterly experimentation now known as the Silver Age.
There was, however, a modest sort of approved musical modernism within the establishment. Rimsky-Korsakov, who reviled Debussy and Richard Strauss, and who never tired of exhorting his pupils to avoid the sort of anarchic decadence those names represented, never gave up his sense of himself as a “progressive” musician.4 He enjoyed experimenting with unusual harmonies—and the word “experimenting” is especially well chosen in his case, since his attitude toward musical innovation (“progress”) was naively scientific in the sense that it was obsessively rigorous and fatally systematic. In the excerpt from The Snow Maiden given in this chapter as example 5.1, the unusual chords—not that unusual, really, just augmented triads—were deployed in a regular chromatic ascent that mirrored an equally systematic and rhythmically sequential chromatic descent in the bass, the whole accomplishing nothing but a motion from one voicing of the A-major triad to another. The progression is thus what theorists would call a “coloristic” (or “prolongational”) rather than a “functional” one.
The main harmonic innovation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s later years—one that he passed on directly to his pupils—was the cautious and methodical mining of the coloristic possibilities inherent in a scale of regularly alternating whole steps and half steps. In his day it was known as the “tone-semitone scale” (gamma ton-poluton), or “Rimsky-Korsakov scale” (korsakovskaya gamma); today’s music theorists call it the octatonic scale because it contains eight tones to the octave.5 It defines Russia musically at the turn of the century just as surely as “modal” folk song harmonizations had done forty years earlier.
The main reason for this preoccupation of Rimsky’s was his heavy investment in fantastic and fairy-tale subject matter, for which a vocabulary of recherché yet easily apprehended harmonies and harmonic sequences was desirable (along with the sort of recondite orchestral timbres he could summon up better than any contemporary) to contrast with the diatonic and folkish idiom of the older Russian “nationalism,” as a musical metaphor for the confrontation between human characters and supernatural ones, both benign and sinister. It was a tradition that went back to Glinka, but it received its strongest emphasis in Russian music during Rimsky-Korsakov’s late years in reaction to conditions of Russian literary and theatrical censorship.
The composers of the Mighty Five, working at a particularly “civic” moment in Russian intellectual history that had been made possible by a relaxation of censorship under the Emancipator-Tsar Alexander II, had been drawn to themes of serious historiographical import: alongside Musorgsky’s famous historical operas one could place Rimsky-Korsakov’s first dramatic effort, The Maid of Pskov (1872), in which Ivan the Terrible not only appears and sings but is explicitly judged.6 By contrast, in the stringent conditions that followed the liberal Tsar’s assassination and that obtained throughout the reigns of Alexander III and Nikolai II, the safest course was a retreat into fantasy.7
Rimsky-Korsakov had made his retreat in 1900 with The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and followed up with Kashchey the Deathless (1902), The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (1904), and The Golden Cockerel (1907), highly colored fairy tales all. There was also a new tendency to borrow aspects of the style and form of his work, not just its subject matter, from folk models, which put Rimsky-Korsakov in touch with the movement in Russian painting today’s art historians call neonationalism. To this very limited extent, then, the late Rimsky-Korsakov, and his pupils, responded to the Russian Silver Age.
To the extent that any musicians went farther in these directions during the decade that followed Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908, it was simply a matter of what is best called maximalism—intensifying the means employed toward accepted ends. The Firebird, the ballet through which Stravinsky made his early reputation, was an exact analogue to his teacher’s fantastic operas, replete with a folkloric diatonic idiom representing the human characters and a coloristic chromatic one representing the supernatural. The repertory of timbres and special instrumental effects was expanded, and the arsenal of exotic harmonic Kunststücke grew, as the result of both a normal emulatory impulse and the special needs of Sergey Diaghilev’s “export campaign,” by which the Russian school had to become more demonstratively Russian than ever to satisfy the expectations of a Parisian audience, even as advanced musicians at home were waving the banner of “denationalization” as an earnest of artistic maturity.8
Petrushka, Stravinsky’s second ballet, brought foreign-export neonationalism to its peak and made its composer’s name an emblem of (Parisian) modernism. Yet even its most seemingly radical devices, like its eponymous “bitonal” chord, were direct applications of established St. Petersburg habits. (The “Petrushka chord” was a venerable guild secret that had been explicitly handed down from Rimsky-Korsakov to his pupils; Stravinsky was by no means the only one to use it).9 The Rite of Spring, conspicuously more radical than its predecessors, was no less than they a maximalization of an existing practice to which it remained loyal—or rather, a synthesis of several practices: the rationalized harmonic techniques inherited from Rimsky-Korsakov, an archaistic or neoprimitivist tendency that in its maximalistic phase went by the name of Scythianism (but which is by now easy to accept as an extension of the older, tamer neonationalism), and of course the generalized Silver Age rhetoric of apocalypse, of which the greatest musical exponent—and by common contemporary consent, simply the greatest exponent—was Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.
But even though Scriabin was a genuine theurgist, a self-appointed mediator in his art between the human and the divine, and even though, as chapter 12 will detail, he took inspiration directly from Vyacheslav Ivanov and other religious and metaphysical poets of his age, he was anything but a reckless or disheveled avant-gardist. He was the proud recipient of an elite conservatory education, spent his early years in the Belyayev incubator, and retained to the end of his career a fastidious, not to say pedantic concern for polish and finish that earned him Rimsky-Korsakov’s eternal if somewhat grudging respect.10 Not even the gawky, gangling young Prokofiev—whose early works horrified the squeamish Scriabin, and who attempted a rather callow emulation or maximalization of The Rite of Spring in his Scythian Suite, with its naively liter-alistic title—not even he could be called an avant-gardist. His loyalty, like Stravinsky’s and like Scriabin’s, was to the established elite culture. While he liked playing the role of an enfant terrible, he made sure that an academician could always detect his underlying allegiance to the traditional values and skills on which grades were based. This remained true throughout his life; it is utterly characteristic of Prokofiev that beneath the clangorous surface there always lay a simple harmonic design and a stereotyped formal pattern straight out of the textbook.
Thus there simply was no avant-garde in Russian music on the eve of the revolution. The most poignant example of its lack is suitably negative. When Kazimir Malevich and Alexey Kruchonïkh needed a score for their “cubo-futurist” opera, Victory over the Sun (1913), they commissioned it from Mikhail Matyushin, a name that will not be found in any music dictionary. Why? Because Matyushin was a painter, who happened to have studied the violin at the Moscow Conservatory and played professionally for a while, and who therefore could read and write musical notation.11 There was no professional composer in Russia who would subscribe to anything like the futurist manifesto called “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” who would consider writing the musical equivalent of zaúmnïy yazïk, the “transrational language” of futurist poetry, or who would even attempt a creative career outside the established institutions of the day, unless they were new institutions that promised, like Diaghilev’s Paris enterprise, to outstrip the establishment in material extravagance and social prestige.
IT WAS the Bolshevik coup that gave rise to the only musical avant-garde Russia has known in the twentieth century. To understand this fact, however, one must know what an avant-garde really is. The term does not properly signify the mere possession or use of an “advanced” technique. That could be called elite modernism or modernist professionalism if a term is needed, and that term would serve to cover all the maximalistic tendencies we have been surveying. Maximalism, as we have seen, implies the extension of a tradition, which in turn implies loyalty to the tradition one is extending, even if one is extending it to the point of so-called decadence.
An avant-garde is something else. The term is military, and it implies belligerence: countercultural hostility, antagonism to existing institutions and traditions. Avant-gardes always put traditionalists on the defensive, even maximalizing or decadent traditionalists, and turn them reactionary. Compare the rhetoric deployed by our own tenured modernists (who still like to call themselves the “academic avant-garde”) against the so-called Minimalists, nonaffiliated composers who represent (or who represented until their commercial co-option) a true avant-garde position in recent concert music.
To return to revolutionary Russia, it seemed at first inevitable that a workers’ and peasants’ government would be hostile to the art institutions of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, which had harbored the art of what Lenin called the “bored upper ten thousand.”12 Yet as long as an elite art was supported by its consumers, only its value was open to question, not its authenticity. Once the many are asked to support the art of the few, questions of authenticity are inevitable, along with questions of social function and social responsibility . If these questions can become so exacerbated even in relatively placid liberal democracies like ours, how much more, then, in a revolutionary socialist state? Nationalizing the theaters, the concert halls, and the conservatories was in fact one of the earliest acts of the new regime. To many elite establishmentarians, emphatically including the modernists among them, this was handwriting on the wall, and they left—the Rachmaninoffs and the Pro-kofievs alike.
The famous exchange between the emigrating Prokofiev and Anatoly Luna-charsky, the head of the so-called NARKOMPROS (the “People’s commissariat for enlightenment”), as recorded in Prokofiev’s Soviet-period memoirs, illustrates a familiar confusion. “You are revolutionaries in art,” Lunacharsky is supposed to have said, “we are revolutionaries in life; we ought to work together.” But Prokofiev was no revolutionary in art. Like Rachmaninoff (and like Stravinsky, who had been a voluntary expatriate since 1910), he was a traditional maximalist who saw the revolution in “life” as a threat. It was only when he became convinced that the arts policies of the Soviet state no longer posed any threat to traditional art that he decided to return.
But if Prokofiev was no revolutionary in art, neither was Lunacharsky, and neither was Lenin. They, too, were committed traditionalists in art, faithful to the petty-bourgeois tastes of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, the social class from which they had emerged. In an oft-quoted conversation with the German Communist Klara Zetkin, Lenin had no hesitation in proclaiming himself a philistine with respect to modern art movements, and even derided the sentiment Lunacharsky is supposed to have expressed to Prokofiev. “We are good revolutionaries,” he said, “but somehow we feel obliged to prove that we are on a 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 highest manifestations of creative genius. I do not understand them. I do not derive any pleasure from them.”
If Lenin had gone on to say that therefore the art of the traditional high culture was corrupt and had to be replaced with a proletarian culture, he would have qualified as an avant-gardist. But he said nothing of the kind. In fact, he said, “We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it as starting point, even if it is ‘old.’ Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is ‘old’? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is ‘new’?”13
So notions of beauty did not have to change with notions of social justice. What had inspired Tsar and courtier could continue to inspirit the Soviet state. Trotsky went so far in his loyalty to Victorian aesthetics as explicitly to assert that culture was above classes—and he did so in express opposition to the notion of a specifically proletarian art.14 The Bolsheviks were quite right to distrust modernism, of course, because modernism is often motivated by the wish to preserve exclusivity. But the premodern, the conventionally beautiful, would be retained out of affection and habit—and above all, out of national pride, which vouchsafed the especially improbable survival of the Russian classical ballet into the Soviet period: for all that it symbolized the autocracy, it was after all the world’s finest.
So the Bolshevik takeover did not endanger the arts institutions of Tsarist Russia. Works overtly glorifying the Romanov dynasty, like Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, were of course removed from the repertory—until their librettos could be refurbished, anyway—and others were sanitized. (The peasant scene, for example, was dropped from Chaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, though it, too, came back under Stalin.) The difference was that the institutions of the “landlord culture” would be placed at the service of the working class.
The task was undertaken in a spirit of the frankest paternalism. The masses were to be raised to the level of the unquestioned elite culture. They were to be educated in the old bourgeois ways, right down to elementary behavior— don’t talk, don’t smoke, don’t crack nuts, wear a tie “so as to fit more into the atmosphere of beauty.”15 Some remarks by Lunacharsky before a performance of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila capture the flavor: “To you, workers, will be shown one of the greatest creations, one of the most cherished diamonds in the wondrous crown of Russian art. On a valuable tray you are presented with a goblet of beautiful sparkling wine—drink and enjoy it.”16 Even chamber music, the most aristocratic music of all, was lovingly preserved and presented to the masses. New quartets sprang up, including the Lunacharsky Quartet and the Lenin Quartet. Their performing style was “externalized,” as the saying then went—overdramatized, overly demonstrative, ingenuously explicit, didactic. It is the style of playing still recognizable, alas, as “Soviet.”
And this raises the chief difficulty with the notion of hybridizing an avant-garde social ideology with traditional art institutions: all it produces is debased institutions. More authentic, perhaps, within the early Soviet context was another educational endeavor instigated by Lunacharsky: the so-called Proletkult, in which the emphasis was placed on direct musical participation —samodeyatel’ nosf, to use the Soviet term. This type of organized local instruction had its roots in nineteenth-century “populism,” the idealistic khozhdeniye v narod, the “going to the people” through which the educated could serve them and prepare them for responsible self-government. The many folk schools and choruses organized by the Proletkult were modeled on the famous St. Petersburg ‘Free Music School’ founded by Lomakin and Balakirev in the early 1860s. Lenin, with his suspicion of independent activity and his visceral commitment to traditional high culture, thought the movement obscurantist and threw the decisive weight of his prestige against it. It lasted only until 1923.
It was during the so-called NEP years that the genuine Soviet avant-garde emerged. During this period of economic recovery, the Party and the government declared a laissez-faire policy with respect to the arts while devoting their attention to more pressing matters of survival. A hundred flowers bloomed. As usual, one particular Venus flytrap eventually managed to gobble up the other flowers, but for a time many schools of thought did contend. In 1923 two major professional associations of musicians were organized. One, the Association of Contemporary Music (called the “ASM” after its Russian initials) comprised the traditional establishment, including the traditional maximalists. It was affiliated with the International Society of Contemporary Music and participated in the prestigious ISCM festivals. At its own concerts the ASM featured guests like Milhaud, Hindemith, Franz Schreker, Alfredo Casella—and Henry Cowell, who published his most maximalistic piece of piano music, The Tiger, while touring the USSR (figure 5.1). The ASM propagandized on behalf of such major modernist events as the Leningrad production of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1927, with the composer in attendance. (It was because he remembered this triumph of Berg’s that Berg’s teacher, Schoenberg, briefly considered taking refuge in the Soviet Union in the period of his persecution by the Nazis.)
FIGURE 5.1. Henry Cowell, Tiger (1928), published in 1930 by the USSR State Music Publishing House (Muzgiz) as the second of Dve p‘yesï (Two Pieces)
The ASM’s most prominent composer member was Nikolai Myaskovsky; its other main organizers were scholars and critics, including Pavel Lamm, Boris Asafyev, Victor Belyayev (unrelated to the old Maecenas), and Leonid Sabaneyev (who would soon emigrate). Its most radical representatives included Alexander Mosolov (1900-1973), who gained a brief world notoriety for his futuristic symphonic suite Stal’ (Steel), which included the famously cacophonous Zavod, known in English as “The Iron Foundry,” and Georgiy Mikhailovich Rimsky-Korsakov (1901-65), the grandson of the great composer, who was an early experimenter with microtonal music. The ASM sponsored several journals and a publishing house called the Tritone, which issued Asafyev’s famous futurist critique of Stravinsky.17 The ASM was not exclusively a modernist organization, however; it represented all established traditions, not just the tradition of the new. Its membership included the latter-day “Belyayevtsï” and most conservatory professors, like Maximilian Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov’s very conservative son-in-law, who qualified on both counts.
Now because music history in the West has traditionally been written from an elite modernist perspective, with stylistic complexity and technical innovation valued as the chief earnests of cultural authenticity, the ASM has been greatly glorified as the one bright spot in the otherwise deplorable history of Soviet music. There have been some enthusiastic Western technical studies of “Asmovsky” music, including a pioneering general survey by the German scholar Detlef Gojowy and more recent ones by Peter D. Roberts (on the piano repertoire) and Larry Sitsky.18
Most of the music, to judge by these surveys, is uninteresting, dividing into a sub-Scriabin wing, in which the old rhetoric of apocalypse was all too easily assimilated to a rhetoric of revolution, and a superficially antithetical futurist wing in which sub-Stravinskian, even sub-Prokoflevian neoprimitivism was assimilated just as predictably to evocations of industrial or urban reality. All this music can be traced back through its models to the old Belyayev school.
There is no need for a revisionist vendetta against the ASM; despite the best efforts of its rediscoverers it is finished, forgotten and unrevivable, and many of its members suffered cruelly under Stalin.19 But there is a need to challenge its status in conventional historiography as the site of a golden age or an authentic avant-garde. It was merely the phase of Soviet music that most closely conformed to the Western European modernist model, and hence most amenable to exploration and evaluation on the accepted terms of Western musicology. The ASM was not the Soviet avant-garde.
That distinction must be reserved for its great adversary, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (called the RAPM, after its Russian initials), by now the most universally reviled faction in the history of Soviet music. Militantly countercultural, hopelessly doctrinaire, intolerant, self-righteous, the radical proletarians were the ones who wanted to throw out all sophisticated traditions and build the new Soviet music on the rubble. RAPM frightened elite modernists by portending what Maximilian Steinberg called “the annihilation of professional art and the reduction of everything to complete dilettantism.”20
RAPM defined itself chiefly by what it opposed: it was antimodern, anti-Western, antijazz—but also antifolklore, antinationalist. The “RAPMisti” also opposed whatever was politically incorrect beyond redemption in the classical repertory both European (Wagner!) and Russian (Chaikovsky!). They stigmatized the music produced and patronized by the ASM as that of the decadent bourgeoisie, denouncing it under four general rubrics: 1) the cultivation of sensual and pathologically erotic moods; 2) mysticism (these two corresponding to what I have called the “sub-Scriabin” mode); 3) naturalistic reproduction of the movement of the contemporary capitalist city (what is usually called futurism); and 4) cultivation of primitive, coarse subjects (these corresponding to the “sub-Stravinsky” or “sub-Prokofiev” modes).21
In place of all this the RAPMisfi proffered revolutionary gebrauchsmusik, marchlike massoviye pesni (“mass songs” for group singing) set to agitational propaganda (agitprop) lyrics, and “operas” or “oratorios” fashioned out of medleys of such songs, often the product of collective authorship. Their names—Alexander Davidenko, Boris Shekhter, Victor Belïy—are mostly forgotten now, except when exhumed for ritual execration, but they also include Dmitriy Kabalevsky and Marian Koval, two of the great villains of Soviet music under Stalin.
Not a stellar roster, not much of a musical yield, and from 1929, when they achieved administrative power, a terrible brake on Soviet musical life. But the RAPM was nevertheless significant as the one really new tendency the Soviet state brought forth in musical art. As the Asmovsky stalwart Leonid Sabaneyev put it, however sarcastically, shortly after emigrating, “If Communist Russia has created anything original, it is the advance in the democratic direction, the appeal for ‘music for all.’“22 The avant-garde character of this seemingly reactionary appeal is important to note, because otherwise one can understand neither the style nor the sentiment that informs the music of Shostakovich, the tragic genius of Soviet music.
Shostakovich, although passively a member of the local Leningrad chapter of ASM,23 was typical of neither organization. His music was too Asmovsky for RAPM and too Rapmovsky for ASM. On the Asmovsky side, he had an elite conservatory education and was interested in all the modernist trends of the twenties, of which many—but especially Wozzeck and the Zeitoper (“now” opera) of Kfenek and Hindemith—found echo in his work. He could be a maximalist’s maximalist, as in the thirteen-voice dissonant fugato from his Second Symphony. There is also a striking futurist streak in his music of the period: not just the famous factory whistle in the same symphony but also its characteristic “cinematic” montage technique, juxtaposing quickly changing “frames” in place of the linear developmental techniques one learned in school. (Not by accident, and he was not the only one, Shostakovich’s first paying job as a musician was as a piano player in a silent movie theater.)
The choral finales of the Second (“October”) and Third (“May Day”) Symphonies (1927, 1929) followed a RAPM stereotype, replaying the closing gestures of Beethoven’s Ninth as street harangue, accompanied by a rhythm-band orchestra. At the end of the Second, the chorus begins shouting instead of singing; the passage sits ambiguously between ASM, in its maximalism, and RAPM, in its revolutionary skepticism of the symphonic tradition. The same skepticism—critiquing and undermining established genres from within—informs Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, after Gogol (1928), where in place of a cavatina for the hero, Kovalyov, we hear him gargling at his sink, and where the first symphonic interlude is given over to the un-pitched percussion. One has the impression of traditions being mocked and smashed, not extended. ASM seems to have understood; Shostakovich was boycotted by its selection committee when it came to sending Soviet works abroad to ISCM festivals. (He did not need them: Bruno Walter played the First Symphony in Berlin on his own initiative, followed by Stokowski in Philadelphia; by 1928, when he was twenty-two, Shostakovich’s lifelong international fame had been established.)
And yet RAPM suspected him, too, agitating against The Nose until its run was curtailed under their pressure in 1930. Shostakovich’s genuine “proletkult” sympathies are evident in his loyalty all through the period of RAPM’s ascendancy to the so-called TRaM theater (Theater of Working-class Youth), for which he composed a wealth of incidental music; and also in his professed hostility toward commercial “light music” (lyogkiy zhanr) and other opiates of the masses. Yet “lower” genres nevertheless infect a great deal of his early music, especially the First Symphony with its piano-dominated circus-galop of a scherzo. It was with Shostakovich no matter of raising the lower genre to the level of the higher. From the conservatory or Asmovsky perspective his music threatened debasement.
So it is fruitless to try to pigeonhole Shostakovich within the ready-made categories of ASM and RAPM; he was bigger than both of them. As the one major and enduring Soviet composer of the period with genuine avant-garde, not merely elite-modernist, leanings, he was unique. His is the only Soviet music of the period that seems to have a future.
And yet, as the last chapter of this book will relate in grievous detail, that future was cut short. The next phase of Soviet music, the grim one, was inaugurated by an event many unsuspecting musicians hailed with relief: the “historic April resolution” of 1932, as Shostakovich himself called it,24 through which the Communist Party dissolved all the independent arts organizations, replacing them with the “unions” of art workers that lasted to the end of the Soviet period. Prokofiev responded to this move by accepting Soviet citizenship at last; not only for him but for every Soviet composer the unions seemed to offer protection and a guaranteed material security—shades of Mitrofan Belyayev! But what was at first thought to be a deliverance from the dictatorship of the meddlesome proletarianists in fact removed the last remaining obstacles to the naked exercise of totalitarian power over the arts. They were now directly subject to arbitrary Stalinist control.
Like all times of radical (in this case directed) change, this was a time of (in this case cynical) theorizing on a grand scale. The concept of socialist realism was invented (by Andrey Zhdanov) and christened (by Gorky, like Prokofiev a newly returned émigré) in connection with the implementation of the April resolution. The charter of the Union of Soviet Composers defined it as support of “the victorious progressive principles of reality, toward all things heroic, bright, and beautiful,” and as struggle against “folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art.”25 Thus affirmation became an enforceable requirement, along with antimodernism and—for the first time—nationalism, a bourgeois mystificatory concept toward which Marxian “scientific socialism,” with its theory of class struggle, was hostile by virtual definition. Yet there it was, resurrected from the dustbin of history.
But then, for all its novel bureaucratic vocabulary, socialist realism really meant the institutionalization of petit-bourgeois taste at its most philistine (what Vera Dunham, in her fundamental study of Stalinist literature, identified as meshchanstvo, middle-class values),26 as well as the revival of Tsarist notions of art and education in service not to class interests but to those of the state. The holy trinity of socialist-realist norms—partiynosf (serving the ends of the Party), ideynosf (high propaganda content), and narodnosf (nationalism)—shared the final term with the three weird sisters that a century earlier had defined the dynastic ideology of Tsarism, as formulated under Nikolai I, the most Stalinesque of all the Tsars. Partiynosf stood in for sam-oderzhaviye (autocracy) and ideynosf for pravoslaviye (orthodoxy). There was even a direct hint of Christian ethics à la Tolstoy in the new insistence upon universal accessibility as an earnest of authenticity.27
What this final requirement boiled down to in practice, however, was nothing more than the elevation of russkaya klassika, the standard Russian repertory of the nineteenth century—created for an imperial stage and reflecting its values, now a focus of newly reemphasized national pride, and of course greatly popular with audiences—to the status of an aesthetic and stylistic norm to which Soviet composers were expected to adhere. Chaikovsky’s centenary in 1940 was a watershed. Alexander III’s court musician was officially designated the greatest Russian composer. His work—and even his person, which took some doing—became sacrosanct. His operas were restored to their authentic form in performance, which meant ridding the Soviet stage of all manner of saving adaptations, including the famous Meyerhold “re-Pushkinization” of The Queen of Spades, and reinstating the servile peasant scene in Yevgeniy Onegin that had so offended proletarian taste.
So those who have looked (and continue to look) upon the arts policies of high Stalinism as a resurgence of RAPMism could not be more mistaken. RAPM was antimodern, all right, but it was also anticlassical. The mistake, as always, is the confusion of categories, with modernism equated with avant-garde and conservatism with reaction. Where RAPM (like Western “neo-classicism” at the opposite end of the political spectrum) was a reactionary avant-garde, the aesthetics of Stalinism exhibited the predictable conservatism of entrenched power.
One could indeed argue, against the conventional view that the abstractness of (instrumental) music exempted it from direct ideological control, that the new official philistinism affected music most directly, precisely because the paraphrasable or extractable “content” of music is usually so much less explicit than its style. Thus over the next two decades Soviet composers were subjected to an increasingly inflexible stylistic censorship, their dissonance treatment, for example, or their observance of formal conventions, being themselves regarded as potential indicators of political orthodoxy. This was truly formalism stood on its head. (What is incredible to musicians is that nonmusicians so often look upon it as benign; more than once I have been brought up short by educated people in the West, even professional intellectuals or scholars, who seem to think that censorship, anathema in other fields—theirs, for instance—is, for music, right.)
By the time of the infamous musical show-trials convened by Zhdanov in 1948, Soviet composers were exhorted simply to copy the music of Chaikovsky and the Mighty Five—which, of course, is exactly what the less imaginative members of the Belyayev school had been doing half a century before (figures 5.2a and b). We are back to our starting point, but with a difference: now it was murderous state power, not just the pecuniary blandishments of a millionaire patron, that enforced stylistic conformity. The late-Stalinist imitation of the nineteenth-century classics was skillful, literal, and unbelievable. Between 1948 and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, the style of most Soviet music became virtually indistinguishable from that of the turn-of-the-century Belyayev school, itself a sodality of epigones.
The most exemplary cases, and the most hyperbolically acclaimed, were the abject exculpatory efforts of the hobbled, terrified geriatric generation: Myaskovsky’s last symphony, the Twenty-Seventh in C major, Op. 85 (1949), the recipient of a posthumous Stalin prize and for years afterward the officially canonized model of “‘correct’ Soviet symphonism”;28 Prokofiev’s last symphony, the Seventh in C# minor, Op. 131 (1952), which also post-humously earned what by then had been renamed the Lenin Prize, but only after a substitute “optimistic” ending had been demanded and supplied; perhaps most paradigmatically, the Concerto for French Horn and Orchestra in BK Op. 91 (1950), by Reinhold Glierè (1875-1956), a composer old enough to have been an actual Belyayevets fellow traveler half a century earlier, who had hardly modified his style since then, but who nevertheless felt the need to make a propitiatory offering. About the Horn Concerto a contemporary critic wrote—approvingly, it should be reemphasized—that, unlike the composer’s Cello Concerto (completed in 1946, shortly before the crackdown), “it contains practically no psychological or emotional contrasts; even, placid, and of a cheerful character, its predominantly major tonalities, diatonic harmonies, and bright instrumental timbres are maintained over the course of its three movements.”29
FIGURE 5.2A. “At the musical Hippodrome,” a cartoon from Sovetskaya muzïka, issue of January 1948 (actually published in February), in which the Zhdanov-convened “Conference of Soviet Musicians at the Headquarters of the Central Committee” was reported and the notorious Party Resolution on Music promulgated. In the chariot (1. to r.) are Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, and Chaikovsky, saying, “You threatened to surpass us, but just you try to catch up!” (Grozili vï nas peregnat’, I No vot, poprobuyte . . . dognat!). Trailing them on nags and hobbyhorses are (l. to r.) Marian Koval’, the editor of the journal, Ivan Dzerzhinsky (composer of the hitherto highly approved “song opera” Quiet Flows the Don), Sergey Prokofiev, and Gavriyil Popov, a recent Stalin-Prize winner whose career was effectively smashed by the Resolution.
FIGURE 5.2B. Cartoon from the March issue, in which Glinka, holding the January issue behind his back, congratulates Boris Asafyev (the celebrated Soviet musicologist and member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who wrote criticism under the pen name Igor Glebov, and who was given credit for the wording of the Resolution on Music) ostensibly for his recent (1947) Glinka biography. The caption rhyme: “An enigmatic picture, a momentous view: Glinka Glebov or Glebov Glinka, who here’s thanking who?” The last line—”Kto zhe kogo zdes’ blagodarit?”—plays chillingly on the proverbial rule of Cossack frontier justice (popularized by Lenin), “kto kogo”—literally, “one [does it to, gets the best of] the other,” so by extension, “somebody’s got to be the winner (and somebody’s got to be dead).”
The work of gifted and extremely well trained composers, the music of the post-Zhdanovite half-decade is highly palatable stuff—unless you know its date. When you do know it, and when you know the fear and trembling that stood behind the folksy anodynes and the smooth or stirring platitudes, it is the most indigestible music in the world. “What were all the exulting, cheery, dashing songs of those years all about?” wrote Daniyil Zhitomirsky, a revered figure in Soviet musicology and a disciple of Zhilyayev, about the mass songs of the thirties, when thousands, including his master, had perished; and, in bitter parody of the old doctrinaire language, he asked, “What was their social function?”30 From the perspective of the glasnosf years, when Zhitomirsky posed it, the question had an answer too obvious to bother stating. “Life is getting better, life is getting gayer” (zhizn stanovitsya luchshe, veseleye), went the Stalinist mantra all through the years of terror. Music, too, could lie. And if mass songs could lie in the thirties, symphonies and concertos could lie even more impressively in the forties and fifties.
And yet they did not lie; they spoke the icy truth. In its hothouse isolation, its servile affirmation, its cultural stagnation, and its intellectual limitation this music faithfully mirrored the attributes of the society from which it had been wrested. In a terrible way it, too, defined Russia.
1 V. V. Yastrebtsev, Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, ed. and trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 275-76.
2 Reinhold Glière, “Vstrechi s belyayevskim kruzhkom,” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 8 (1949): 66: for more on the Belyayev school and the “Belyayevets” mentality, see R. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), chapter 1.
3 “Silèn” [Alfred Nurok], “Muzïkal’nïy artel’,” Mir iskusstva, nos. 21-22 (1898): 79.
4 For Rimsky-Korsakov on Debussy, see his diary for 1907, printed in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1960), p. 16; on Strauss, see the anonymous obituary memoir by a former pupil in Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta 15, nos. 32-33 (10-17 August 1908), col. 661; and on his definition of progressive (as opposed to “revolutionary”), see Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (London: Eulenburg Books, 1974), pp. 285-86.
5 It was christened by Arthur Berger in a seminal article, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky” (1963), in Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone, ed., Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 123-55. On its use among the Belyayevtsï see R. Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s ‘Angle,’“ Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 72-142.
6 See R. Taruskin, “ ‘The Present in the Past’: Russian Opera and Russian Historiography, ca. 1870,” in Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz, ed. Malcolm H. Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), pp. 77-146, esp. pp. 90-124.
7 On the “retreat into fantasy” see Boris Tyuneyev, “O Cherepnine (dialog),” Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta 22, no. 15 (12 April 1915), cols. 275-76.
8 The term “denationalization” was made explicit in the year of The Firebird’s première by the critic Vyacheslav Karatïgin in (of all places) an obituary for Miliy Balakirev, the original leader of the Mighty Five, who had long outlived his relevance to the Russian musical scene. See V. Karatïgin, “Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev 1837-1910,” Apollon, no. 10 (September 1910): 54.
9 See R. Taruskin, “Chez Petrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky,” 19th-century Music 10 (1986-87): 265-86, where the chord is sighted in and cited from the work of Maximilian Steinberg, who had adopted it from a late unpublished sketch by Rimsky-Korsakov himself.
10 See, for instance, Yastrebtsev, Moi vospominaniya o N. A. Rimskom-Korsakove, vol. 2 (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1960), p. 365.
11 See The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980), pp. 208-9.
12 “Party Organization and Party Literature,” in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 151.
13 Klara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), p. 14.
14 See Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1924), p. 14.
15 Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, trans. J. J. Robbins (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 554.
16 Istoriya muzïki narodov SSSR, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1966), p. 51; quoted in Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: Enlarged Edition, 1917-1981 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 15.
17 Kniga o Stravinskom (Leningrad: Triton, 1929; 2d ed., Leningrad: Muzïka, 1977), trans. Richard F. French as A Book about Stravinsky (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982).
18 Detlef Gojowy, Neue sowjetische Musik der 20er Jahre (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1980); Peter Deane Roberts, Modernism in Russian Piano Music, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Larry Sitsky, Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900-1929 (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994).
19 The paradigmatic case was that of Mosolov. There had always been conspicuous and disconcerting gaps in the accounts of this quintessential twenties futurist in standard reference works. The article on him in the New Grove, for example, by the Soviet musicologist Inna Barsova, contained two statements, as follows: “Mosolov lived in Moscow until 1937,” and “from 1939 to his death he lived in Moscow’’ (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie [London: Macmillan, 1980], vol. 12, p. 612). A 1989 article in Sovetskaya muzïka, also by Barsova, innocently titled “From the unpublished archive of A. V. Mosolov,” heartbreakingly rilled the gap with documents and photographs, including one of Mosolov’s Gulag registration card, dated 25 August 1938, and the text of a frantic letter addressed by his former teachers, Myaskovsky and Gliere, to Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet figurehead president, in an effort—a successful effort, amazing to relate—to secure his release. (I. A. Barsova, “Iz neopublikovannogo arkhiva A. V. Mosolova,” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 7 [1989]: 80-92, and no. 8 [1989]: 69-75.) The unusual success of the intervention was due to the fact that Mosolov had been incarcerated not on a political charge but on a trumped-up charge of “hooliganism,” brought by his enemies within the Composers’ Union. Before his arrest he had, in the wake of the formal denunciation of Shostakovich, been expelled from the union (4 February 1936), an extreme measure that effectively deprived him of his livelihood, and that merited a report in the union organ. The gleefully sarcastic report is signed by the wife of Tikhon Khren-nikov: Kl[ara Arnoldovna] Vaks, “Kompozitor Mosolov isklyuchen iz SSK,” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 3 (1936): 104. (The one prominent Soviet musician to have been “illegally repressed,” as his entry in the standard Soviet music encyclopedia now reads, was the composer and theorist Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev (1891-1938), pupil of Taneyev and Ippolitov-Ivanov, close friend of Scriabin, and teacher of Khachaturyan, among many other Soviet composers. He was, unluckily, also close to Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and his downfall came in the wake of Tukhachevsky’s arrest in 1937.)
20 Quoted in Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, p. 102.
21 “Platform of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians” (1929), in Nicolas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pp. 1353-57.
22 Leonid Sabaneyeff, Modern Russian Composers, trans. Judah A. Joffe (New York: International Publishers, 1927; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), p. 240.
23 Laurel Fay, “Shostakovich, LASM and Asafiev,” a paper read at the University of Michigan conference “Shostakovich: The Man and His Age,” 29 January 1994.
24 S. Shostakovich, “Moyo ponimaniye ‘Ledi Makbet,’” in “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda” opera D. D. Shostakovicha (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennïy Akademicheskiy Malïy Operniy Teatr, 1934), p. 9.
25 Quoted in B. S. Shteynpress and I. M. Yampolsky, Entsiklopedicheskiy muzïkal’nïy slovar , 2d ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1966), p. 486.
26 Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
27 For a consideration of the Tolstoyan roots of Soviet arts policy, see R. Taruskin, “Current Chronicle: Molchanov’s The Dawns Are Quiet Here” Musical Quarterly 62 (1976): 105-15.
28 Stanley Dale Krebs, Soviet Composers and the Development of Soviet Music (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 117.
29 Marina Leonova, “Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo Gliera,” in Reyngol’d Moritsevich Glier: Stafi, vospominaniya, materialï ed. V. M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1967), vol. 2, p. 63.
30 Daniyil Zhitomirsky, “O proshlom bez prikras” (On the Past, Unvarnished), Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 2 (1988): 103. This article was the very first response in the Soviet musical press to Mikhail Gorbachev’s fateful call for “glasnost’.”