Listening to Russian Music in Putin’s Shadow

On the morning of August 21, 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square, in Prague, finishing an right away Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Alexander Dubček, the liberal-minded chief of the Czech government, was detained and flown to Moscow. That night, in London, the U.S.S.R. Condition Symphony, under the course of Yevgeny Svetlanov, gave a concert at Royal Albert Corridor, as portion of the BBC Proms. Shouts of protest ended up heard at the outset of each and every operate on the plan. Mstislav Rostropovich, who was to depart the Soviet Union 6 a long time afterwards, broke into tears as he performed Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, a landmark of Czech audio. The next half of the concert was provided over to Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, a monumental oration by the residing titan of Soviet composers. Sounds from the audience carried in excess of into the 1st bars of the work then silence fell. Fifty minutes later on, a roar of applause followed the frenzied closing bars of the symphony.

This sort of scenes were being pretty plan in classical audio by most of the twentieth century, as one particular nation or a further took its convert in the function of arch-villain on the international stage. Right now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has established a cultural stress of a sort that has not been found in generations. Many performers with powerful ties to Vladimir Putin—Valery Gergiev, Anna Netrebko, Denis Matsuev—have seen their careers in Europe and America evaporate. In a few isolated circumstances, classic Russian will work have been pulled from plans. At the commencing of March, the Polish Countrywide Opera identified as off a staging of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” that had been scheduled for the spring. A couple of days later, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and his Next Symphony had been dropped from a concert by the Cardiff Philharmonic—a determination that elicited worldwide mockery on social media.

No protests materialized the other night time when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, beneath the course of Ludovic Morlot, presented a largely Russian software at Disney Corridor: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos,” Prokofiev’s Initially Piano Concerto, and the Shostakovich Tenth. Nor did the orchestra take the move of introducing the live performance with a rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem, as lots of other ensembles have currently performed. Issuing no apologies or explanations, the orchestra trustworthy its viewers to grapple with two composers whose lives in Stalinist Russia ended up immensely fraught and whose partnership with no matter what is intended by Russianness was advanced. This appeared the suitable tactic.

A number of commentators have tried using to solid the boycotting of Russian composers and musicians as so-known as cancel tradition run amok. The argument demonstrates farcical ignorance of more than a century of cultural heritage. During the To start with Entire world War, when anti-German paranoia swept throughout The us, the Fulfilled stopped presenting not only the obvious Wagner but also Mozart, who experienced been a topic of the Holy Roman Empire. When the following war arrived, corporations took a various tack, appropriating German repertory for the war effort: Beethoven’s Fifth became a V-for-victory symbol “The Ride of the Valkyries” was connected to Allied bombing raids. Neither tactic did the new music justice, but the next is the just one really worth emulating: by reversing the jargon of Nazi propaganda, it restored the maddening ambiguity that is music’s natural habitat.

“How Russian is it?” is a concern that could be asked of both significant is effective on the L.A. Phil’s current software. Prokofiev was, in fact, Ukrainian, nevertheless in an anachronistic feeling. He was born in 1891, in the village of Sontsovka, presently acknowledged as Sontsivka, in eastern Ukraine. 30 miles to the east is Donetsk, which has turn out to be the money of the People’s Republic of Donetsk, a Russian-backed separatist entity. The nearby airport bears the title Donetsk Sergei Prokofiev Intercontinental Airport in 2014, it became a battlefield involving Ukrainian and separatist forces, and was destroyed in the system. Although Ukrainian troopers ended up sooner or later compelled to withdraw, their furious resistance acquired legendary position, and was commemorated in the 2017 movie “Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die.” Despite Russian improvements in the earlier thirty day period, Sontsivka appears to remain in Ukrainian hands.

Nonetheless Prokofiev lacked nearby roots: his father, an estate supervisor, came from Moscow. Cosmopolitan in his outlook, the composer used time in The united states and France following the Bolshevik Revolution. His choice to settle in Stalinist Russia, in the thirties, was based mostly on a miscalculation that his fame would safeguard him from ideological pressures. As a substitute, he satisfied with repeated humiliations. A case in position is the lousy reception accorded to his 1940 opera, “Semyon Kotko,” which was established in Ukraine through the chaotic civil war that adopted the revolutions of 1917. The ostensible agenda was to embrace Ukrainian heritage although buttressing the greater Bolshevik induce. The villains of the piece are German occupiers and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators. But, as the musicologist Nathan Seinen observes, Prokofiev failed to produce a ringing endorsement of that socialist-realist program his location of Taras Shevchenko’s 1845 poem “Zapovit” (“Testament”), a classic of Ukrainian literature, carried a whiff of nationalist feeling. Seinen writes, “There was a probability for a subtext to be read through here of the oppression of Ukraine by a up to date Russia alternatively than by a Western enemy.”

Recently, I have gone back to the recording of “Semyon Kotko” that Gergiev built with the Mariinsky Theatre ensemble in 1999—part of an invaluable series of Russian-opera recordings that appeared on the now defunct Philips label. In individual, I’ve been listening to the finale of Act III, which depicts the burning of a Ukrainian village. More than a relentless ostinato, a women’s refrain sings, “They plunder and melt away us, / they plunder and burn off. / Our Ukraine is dropped, / all is lost! Oh, make a stand! Make a stand!” Needless to say, these traces believe a unique solid in light of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Gergiev would definitely be consternated by that interpretation. Perhaps Prokofiev would have been, far too. But there is no managing the resonances that will work receive as they go forward in time.

No political thoughts go to the 1st Piano Concerto—the insolently excellent function of a 20-a person-calendar year-outdated composer who was defining himself inside of and against Russian traditions. Inspired in element by Richard Strauss’s youthful anti-concerto “Burleske,” Prokofiev has fun at the expenditure of the grand Romantic fashion, even as he deploys its gadgets to empower the soloist (himself, at the première, in 1912). At the conclude, the pianist flings down D-flat-main chords in all registers, in blatant reference to Tchaikovsky’s Initially Piano Concerto. A critic of the period accused Prokofiev of embodying the “modern ‘football’ technology . . . stupid, inane, and blockheaded.” Sergio Tiempo, the soloist at the L.A. Phil, confirmed ample flattening energy to justify the athletic metaphors, although his intelligently playful type was anything but inane. What the piece eventually has to do with Russia—Tsarist, Stalinist, Putinist—is anyone’s guess.

Prokofiev’s performs normally dance a small outside of time. With Shostakovich’s, we can rarely neglect the conditions underneath which they gestated. The Tenth Symphony was done in the slide of 1953, 7 months right after Stalin’s death. (In the most hefty-handed irony in musical background, Prokofiev died on the very same working day as the gentleman who tormented him.) Shostakovich experienced been residing beneath a pall of worry since 1936, when Pravda revealed a denunciation of his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” In the symphony, he makes obsessive use of a notational cipher based mostly on his personal name—D, E-flat, C, B-all-natural, or D, S, C, H, in German notation—almost forcing the listener to assume about his destiny. Yet, as with practically every little thing Shostakovich wrote, the rating defeats a univocal interpretation, its classical 4-movement composition interlaced with political, personalized, and purely musical messages.

The tone of the Tenth Symphony is established in a big, meandering opening movement, which acquires at moments a hurtling headlong electricity. Shostakovich was adept at this sort of mutating construction, which had been pioneered by his gifted, erratic colleague Gavriil Popov. There follows a curt, violent Scherzo—an apotheosis of unthinking force. The orchestration mimics the movement of a mob: woodwinds racing through their upper registers in tight-ranked cadres, brass crunching forward in metal columns. I as soon as listened to this motion when walking by way of a rush-hour crowd in Instances Square, and felt an uncanny likeness concerning the feeling of the music and the sensation of the crowd—the animal power that arrives from riding with the move, the animal panic that comes from resisting it. Fittingly, nevertheless surreally, an arrangement of the Scherzo has turn into a showpiece for American superior-school and faculty marching bands.

In a regular symphonic narrative, a Scherzo would be paired with a soulful or tragic sluggish motion, this kind of as Shostakovich equipped with his enormously well known Fifth Symphony. The third motion of the Tenth, marked Allegretto, wanders in a different way. About a moment in, more than a lurching three-quarter dance rhythm, piccolos and oboe pipe out the D-S-C-H motto. This is ultimately joined by a solitary horn call: E-A-E-D-A. The musicologist Nelly Kravetz identified that this second musical cipher alludes to the pianist Elmira Nazirova, with whom Shostakovich was besotted at the time. The motif also resembles the opening horn theme of “Das Lied von der Erde,” as Shostakovich pointed out in a letter to Nazirova. Just just after, the brooding songs of the 1st motion returns. Afterwards, both equally motifs audio from a pileup of dissonant chords, which is like a wall via which neither can move. The enigmatic environment of this motion, with its gestures towards Austro-German custom, undermines any endeavor to body the operate as a heroic Soviet narrative.

Soviet symphonists were expected to conclude their is effective in lifetime-affirming vogue. From his Fifth Symphony onward, Shostakovich practiced an artwork of equivocal triumph, and the finale of the Tenth may possibly be his deftest feat in this line. The work appears to be to be scampering towards a cartoonishly festive finish when D-S-C-H is blasted out triple forte by the whole orchestra, at which place all the things crashes to a halt. Soon plenty of, the carnival mood resumes, with D-S-C-H woven into the fabric. By the closing pages, the repetition of the motif has all the subtlety of a blinking neon signal. Swirling up-and-down flourishes in the winds and strings echo the march movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique”—itself a model of unstable exultation. For both Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky turns into an component in an intricate musical collage.

The Soviet-period musicologist Marina Sabinina after linked the coda of the Tenth to a single of the darkest times of Shostakovich’s vocation: his speech at a 1948 Soviet composers’ convention, at which he was obliged to confess that he had “deviated in the direction of formalism” and had started to “speak a language incomprehensible to the people today.” In accordance to Sabinina, Shostakovich privately as opposed himself to a “cut-out paper doll on a string.” She relates that image to a ugly anecdote about Gogol staring at himself in the mirror: “Completely self-absorbed, he would consistently phone out his own title with a sense of alienation and revulsion.” In contrast to numerous stories explained to about Shostakovich, this one particular has an genuine ring. At the same time, it doesn’t do justice to the manic exuberance of the new music. At the Proms in 1968, the viewers responded with visceral glee. So as well did the one particular at Disney Corridor, in the wake of a performance that, regardless of staying a bit much too straitlaced in tempo, experienced an obliterating effect. This is serious pleasure, having said that traumatized: the pleasure of survival.

Dividing the repertory into countrywide teams is practical for musicians, scholars, and the common public alike. This way of thinking yields systems with titles like “From the Russian Steppes” and “French Impressions.” Nonetheless the perpetuation of hoary national clichés obscures the complexity of every single composer’s relations with domestic and international influences. Shostakovich had far more in prevalent with his English counterpart Benjamin Britten than with any of his Russian contemporaries. Prokofiev was closer to Ravel or Poulenc than to Shostakovich. The émigré Stravinsky grew to become, in the stop, a nation unto himself. Reliance on national types is all the far more questionable at a time when Putin, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and Éric Zemmour—to name a couple practicing and would-be autocrats—are reviving exceptionalist rhetoric.

Acknowledging the polyglot entanglements of the musical canon can, in fact, provide as a check on the oppressive attract of nationalist mythologies. The late Benedict Anderson, in his outstanding book “Imagined Communities,” showed how these kinds of narratives count on the creation of ancient origins that feed the political requires of the existing. Evicting Russian composers from the repertory would perversely conclude up reinforcing Putin’s exploitation of an more mature Russian tradition in the title of chauvinistic conceptions of a Russky Mir (a “Russian World”). The ban on Wagner performances in Israel is likewise counterproductive: it upholds Hitler’s assert on a composer whose ideological convictions were being considerably far too puzzled to match any acknowledged political truth.

Proust wrote, “Every artist appears to be the citizen of an mysterious homeland, one particular that he himself has neglected.” Shostakovich carries that feeling of a shed homeland via his function, its contours getting noticeable in just a couple bars of audio. It may perhaps overlap with the Russia of his delivery, but it also borders on the tunes of other lands and on the inner landscape of his creativity. As time passes, the artist’s non-public world merges with the worlds of its listeners. It no for a longer period belongs to a person land or one time. Which is why films of superior-faculty bands actively playing the Tenth at halftime give a giddy sort of delight: they mean that Shostakovich has escaped the nightmare of history.