Songs My Mother Taught Me Crossover and Double Recycling in Soviet and Post-Soviet Music Who’s afraid of Socialist Realism?

2011

1 See, for example:

Peter Schmelz, ‘Alfred Schnittke’s Nagasaki: Soviet Nuclear Culture, Radio Moscow, and the Global Cold War,’ Journal of American Musicological Society, 3 (2009): 463.

2 Simon Morrison, People’s Artist (New York, 2009), 331.

3 Various authors (Vysshaia Partiinaia Shkola pri TsK KPSS), Marksistsko-Leninskaia Filosofia, Istorichesky Materializm. Sixth, revised edition (Moscow, 1977), 249.

4 Soveshchanie deiatelei sovetskoi muzyki v TsK VKP9b, minutes [Meeting of Soviet Musicians at the Central Committee of All-Russian Communist Party (of Bol'sheviks')]. (Moscow, 1948).

5 A.A. Danilov, L.G. Kosulina and M.Iu. Brandt. Istoriia Rossii XX - nachala XXI veka [History of Russia in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries] (Moscow, 2009), 190.

6 Andrei Siniavsky. Chto takoe sotsialistichesky realism [What Socialist Realism is about], 1957: http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/synyavsky/1059651903.html

Accessed 26.04.10.

7 G. Khazagerov. Politicheskaia Ritorika. Part 2, Chapter 1.4, ‘Sistema Ubezhdaiushchikh Rechei v Leninskuiu I Stalinskuiu Epokhu.’ Online edition, Moscow State University, 2006, http://genhis.philol.msu.ru/article_116.shtml

Accessed 24.01.11.

8 Immanuel Kant’s Collected Works edition (in six volumes) was published in the USSR in 1963–1966, with a print run of 22,000.

9 Private conversation with the author in his St Petersburg home on 17 February 2007.

10 Lenin notoriously called some of them (Hegel, for instance) ‘idealisticheskaia svoloch’ [a bastard-idealist]. Soviet students were very much amused by reading such rude comments.

11 Philosophical Notebooks, in English translation, can be found on:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/ess-religion/se01.htm . Accessed 26.01.11.

12 Similar systems do not exist in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada. There, music performance and composition are taught at the universities. Well-established performance groups are often formed by semi-amateurs who were never systematically trained in performance (such as the many various ‘consorts’, ‘singers’, ‘academies’ and chamber orchestras). They nevertheless achieve extremely well, since the members of the groups are usually highly intelligent and well-rounded educated people, graduates from Cambridge or Oxford. Here is an example of how intelligence can prevail over systematic practical training. However, this can only be related to young students on an elite level, while the Soviet system worked practically for everyone.

13 There are 5,234 primary music schools and 231 music colleges in Russia at present, according to 2008 statistics. These schools, still generously funded by the state, offer tuition on two instruments (secondary piano is compulsory), ear training, music history and orchestra classes for any reasonably gifted pupil, for seven consecutive years. After these seven years pupils decide whether it makes sense for them to go on with music. If so, they continue at college level or at specialised music schools and, four years later, enter a conservatoire. In most cases, the pupils decide not to proceed, but at least they have studied at a fully professional level for seven years. They form a major part of the well-educated audiences in the concert halls.

14 Sarah Wilson, ‘The Soviet Pavillion in Paris’, in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-Party State, ed. Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester, 1993), 112. See also: Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (London, 1989).

15 A movement (often called a Counterplan) among workers and peasants to increase production work led by and named after a miner, Aleksei Stakhanov (1906–1977).

16 We are familiar with Russian prodigies, happy to sacrifice almost anything for the sake of ‘perfection’. As children they become so focused on performance that they have no hobbies, no time for sport and no leisure activities. A very early start on a repertoire far beyond children’s understanding often results in technical brilliance but lack of a substance and variety. The traditional ‘Romantic’ approach to nearly all musical styles typical for Russian school reflects the almost religious idea of sacrificing your life in favour of success as a performer.

17 American pianist Van Cliburn, the winner of the First Tchaikovsky piano competition in 1958, still has this superstar status in Russia. In 2009 he was appointed president of the much corrupted and devalued Tchaikovsky competition.

18 Today Russian specialist music education is by no means an ideal system. It goes rather deeper than wider, which does not always match the needs of contemporary professional life. Often students leave Moscow Conservatoire after two initial years of studies. They normally go to Europe or to the US, where they can learn music in a wider context, and get closer to the jobs market.

19 See: Wolfgang Holz, ‘Allegory and Iconography in Socialist Realism Painting’, in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-Party State, ed. Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester, 1993), 33–50.

20 See: Svetlana Boym. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 105.

21 The Soviet system of musical education has recently been developed successfully in China and Venezuela, with its pioneering El Sistema (in fact based on old Soviet ideas).

22 A.M. Prokhorov, ed., Sovetsky Entsiklopedichesky Slovar’. Fourth edition (Moscow, 1988), 1251.

23 Iu. [Iury] V. [Vsevolodovich] Keldysh (Ed.) Muzykal’naia Entsiklopedia, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1978), 567.

24 See footnote 7. Shostakovich later used the same means in his Antiformalist Rayok, mocking Stalin’s accent there, as well as Zhdanov’s illiteracy in the wrong stressing of the name Rimsky-Kor-SA-kov.

25 Richard Taruskin. On Russian Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009), 279.

On New Year’s Eve 1937, at the peak of Stalin’s terror, Prokofiev published an article in Pravda. He wrote, ‘The search for a musical language matching the ideals of the socialist epoch is not an easy task. But it is a very interesting task.’ At the end of his article Prokofiev hailed a new symphony by Tikhon Khrennikov (1913–2007). He could not foresee that ten years later Khrennikov would accuse him of formalism and lacking any gift for melody. Prokofiev also wrote a letter to the Central Committee’s cultural chief, comrade Platon Kerzhentsev, asking for permission to go on tour in America and Europe. He wrote:

I understand the significance of all the historic events in the Soviet Union… Recently I wrote a large suite for choir and orchestra, Songs of our days, on contemporary Soviet texts published in Pravda… I hope my tour will be of benefit to the Soviet Union as I will speak openly about the new achievements in our culture in my numerous talks and interviews while in the West.

Varunts, Viktor, ed., Prokofiev o Prokofieve [Prokofiev on Prokofiev] (Moscow, 1991), 157–158.

Permission was granted. While in America in 1938 he was offered the then astronomical fee of $2,500 per week if he were to stay in Hollywood. He refused. It was his final trip abroad.

26 See, for example, Taneev’s recommendations based on his ‘graphic’ analysis of the key changes in J.S. Bach’s fugues: ‘Tezisy o Dvoinoi Fuge’ [Thesis on Double Fugue], in Sergei Taneev, Iz Nauchno-pedagogicheskogo Naslediia [Research and Teaching Papers], ed. Fedor Arzamanov and Liudmila Korabel’nikova (Moscow, 1967).

27 Particularly witty is a baritone song about a ‘bear who was sleeping in Siberia for ages, but soon will be woken up by Soviet young workers, they will wake him up with an… axe!’ The music is incredibly sweet and ‘sleepy’, very similar to the Prince’s phrase in Love for Three Oranges, where he wants to be brought back to his heated bed.

28 ‘Simple’ was never ‘primitive’ for him. Openly and boldly criticising Ivan Dzerzhinsky and the other mediocre Soviet composers in 1937 (the year Songs of our days was written), he said: ‘why should we eat yesterday’s bread and a tainted meat?’ Quoted in Viktor Varunts. Prokofiev o Prokofieve [Prokofiev on Prokofiev] (Moscow, 1991), 155.

29 For Songs of our days, the composer used texts of various kinds. Some of them, such as the poems of Samuil Marshak, are extremely good, while others are of rather dubious quality—for instance, those by the official poet, Vasily Lebedev-Kumach. Some were taken from the Communist newspaper Pravda as examples of Ukrainian and Belorussian folklore, although these texts were most probably written by a ‘specialist’ called Alexander Mashistov. He was famous for his ‘translations’ of the texts in Bach’s Cantatas in which all religious names were skilfully transformed into birds, flowers, animals and so on. The following ‘translation’ from a folk text (the ninth movement of the Songs) exemplifies his style:

There is a man behind the Kremlin walls

And the entire land knows and loves him.

Your joy and happiness comes from him

Stalin! That is his great name!

30 See: Marina Frolova-Walker, ‘Stalin and the Art of Boredom, ’ Twentieth-Century Music, 1/1 (2004): 114.

Vladimir Orlov sees here some similarities to Negro spirituals (see V. Orlov, ‘Soviet Cantatas and Oratorios by Sergei Prokofiev’ (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2010), 242.

31 See Manashir Iakubov. ‘Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Assessment by the Composer and His Critics’. Novoe Sobranie Sochinenii [New Collected Works Edition], vol. 20 (Moscow, 2003), 124–130. This text is based on a book: Aleksandr Benditsky. O Piatoi Simfonii D. Shostakovicha [On the Fifth Symphony of D. Shostakovich] (Nizhny Novgorod, 2000).

For Bach’s allusions see: Boris Gasparov. Five Operas and a Symphony (New Haven and London, 2005), 180–182.

32 David Fanning. The Breath of the Symphonist (London, 1989), 79–80.

33 Alexander Ivashkin, ‘Shostakovich, Old Believers and New Minimalists’ (paper presented at the Shostakovich-100 International Symposium, London, September 26, 2006).

34 Often ‘by the addition of two smaller notes resulting in the rhythmic value of the larger note…’ See: Leo Mazel, ‘Zametki o Myzykal’nom Stile Shostakovicha’ [Notes on Shostakovich’s Musical Style], in Dmitry Shostakovich, ed. L.[ev] Danilevich (Moscow, 1967), 336–337.

35 Alexander Ivashkin, ‘Symbols, Metaphors and Irrationalities in Twentieth-Century Music’, in Mimesi, Verità e Fiction, ed. Rafael Jiménez Cataño and Ignacio Yarza (Roma, 2009), 79–82.

36 Rick Wakeman, ‘My Music’, Gramophone, 5 (2010): 146.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 As Mstislav Rostropovich observed, ‘unlike Shostakovich, Prokofiev cannot sustain long development.’ (Conversation with the author at a masterclass in Florence, 6 October 2006.) See also Alexander Ivashkin, ‘Cooling the Volcano: Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto Op. 58 and Symphony-Concerto Op. 125.’ Three Oranges, Journal of the Serge Prokofiev Foundation, 18 (2009): 10.

40 See: Iu. [Iury] M. [Mikhailovich] Lotman. ‘O dvukh modeliakh kommunikatsii v sisteme kul’tury’ [On two models of communication within the system of culture], in Trudy po Znakovym Sistemam [Works on Semiotics], VI , ed. Iu. [Iury] Lotman (Tartu, 1973), 232. Lotman’s ideas are based on the theory of ‘fascination’ developed by Iury Knorozov (1922–1999), who played a major role in the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

41 The Soviet mass song normally has three verses (‘couplets’)—a familiar ritual device of the ‘number three’; see Alexander Ivashkin, ‘Symbols, Metaphors and Irrationalities in Twentieth-Century Music’, in Mimesi, Verità e Fiction, ed Rafael Jiménez Cataño and Ignacio Yarza (Roma, 2009), 81–82.

42 Gerard McBurney, ‘Whose Shostakovich?’, A Shostakovich Casebook, ed. Malcolm Brown (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004), 296–297.

43 See: Alexander Ivashkin, ‘Shostakovich and Schnittke: The erosion of symphonic syntax’, in D. Fanning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies (Cambridge, 1995), 259–260.

44The fight between the official rejection of ‘modernism’ and unofficial strong interest in it in the Soviet period comes to its opposite in the post-Soviet period: a fight between the now officially allowed modernism and its rejection in the works and ideas of Vladimir Martynov, Valentin Silvestrov, Sergei Zagny, Leonid Desiatnikov, Pavel Karmanov and others.

45 Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Sobranie Sochinenii v 16 tomakh [Collected Works in Sixteen Volumes], vol. 14. http://petrograd.biz/stalin/14-27.php. Accessed 22.03.10.

46 Stalin started as a poet; he published seven of his early poems in the Iveria literary magazine in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in 1895–1896. He studied at the Tiflis seminary and heard many operas by Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini and Verdi at the local opera theatre. His musical taste was largely determined by this extensive knowledge of Italian operatic repertoire of the nineteenth century, and later by Puccini’s operas. See: ‘Gruzinsky Teatr Opery i Baleta’ [Georgian Opera and Ballet Theater], in Muzykal’naia Entsiklopediia [Musical Encyclopedia], ed. Iu.[ry] Keldysh, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1974), 88. On Stalin’s early years see: Edward Radzinsky, Stalin, http://lib.ru/PXESY/RADZINSKIJ/stalin.txt. Accessed 26.01.11.

47 Dunaevsky, who is still little known outside Russia, was an extremely gifted composer, not merely in popular or film music but also in more serious genres.

48 See: I.[saak] O.[sipovich] Dunaevsky. Sobranie Sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1965), 14–15.

A film clip of ‘Aniuta’s Song’ can be seen online : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLtn51q2xiI

49Accessed 08.05.10

^ See: I.[saak] O.[sipovich] Dunaevsky. Sobranie Sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 7 (Moscow, 1966), 137–173.

A film clip with the complete overture can be seen online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flFD6BMS6MY&feature=related

50Accessed 08.05.10

^ A film clip of ‘Paganel’s Song’ can be seen online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pur84y33nkk

51Accessed 08.05.10

^ As recalled and related to me in 1973 by the composer’s niece, singer Natasha Pashinskaia (née Dunaevsky).

52 I am grateful to the Mexican musicologist and violinist Dr Emilia Ismael, for providing me with this information. La Adelita can be heard online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEm1al3gJrM

Accessed 08.05.10

Compare with Dunaevsky’s tune:

http://video.mail.ru/mail/grishina.v/847/526.html?liked=1

53Accessed 08.05.10

^ Jay Leyda. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, 1983), 124.

In the late 1940s, Stalin started to built Moscow skyscrapers, replicas of New York’s Empire State Building (1934).

54 This song can be heard online: http://www.sovmusic.ru/download.php?fname=commbrig

55Accessed 08.05.10

^ A film clip from Svad’ba s Pridanym [The Wedding with the Dowry], 1953, with the song can be seen online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efrGNgolZ04

56Accessed 08.02.11

^ A film clip with the song can be seen online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f67vXMHE-yo

57Accessed 08.05.10

^ Boris Gasparov. Five Operas and a Symphony (New Haven and London, 2005), 180–182; 215–217.

58 See Karol Berger. A Theory of Art (Oxford and New York, 2000), 150.

59 A.[ram] Khachaturian, ‘The Sun shines on the Motherland’, Sovietskaia Muzyka, 1953/1: 10.

60 Rodina slyshit was written in 1950, for soprano and chorus, for the play Mir [A Peace] by Evgeny Dolmatovsky, and published in the collection of Dolmatovsky’s texts: Evgeny Dolmatovsky. Pesni [Songs] (Moscow, 1951), 42–47. The play was never staged; the song was included in Shostakovich’s song cycle Four Songs on Texts of Dolmatovsky, op. 86.

The song can be heard online, performed by the legendary Soviet boy soprano Zhenia Talanov, who supposedly sang this song to Iuri Gagarin before his first ever flight into space: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXEypZJU4ZQ

61Accessed 08.05.10

^ Leo Mazel. Etiudy o Shostakoviche [Études on Shostakovich] (Moscow: 1986), 160–170. This song can be heard online:

http://www.sovmusic.ru/download.php?fname=vstrechn

62Accessed 08.05.10

^ The text was written by a poet, Mark Lisiansky, during a short stop in Moscow on his trip from Iaroslavl’ to the front line in autumn 1941, when Moscow was practically besieged by the German army. Dunaevsky had read the poem (published in the literary monthly Novy Mir in December 1941) on a train in Russia’s Far East. He made his first sketch of the song in the train compartment, on the margins of Novy Mir pages. Soon the song was premiered in Ulan-Ude, next to the Mongolian and Manchurian border, where Soviet soldiers were fighting Japanese troops. This was an unusual premiere: the soldiers demanded that the song be repeated five times in a row. Soon it was recorded (with a correction in the text: ‘a girlfriend who lives in Moscow’ was replaced by ‘beloved Stalin who lives in Moscow’). Two lines from the refrain have been engraved on the monument to Moscow Defence in 1941–1942 on Leningradskoie chaussee where German troops were stopped on 4 December 1941 (now a part of greater Moscow, close to the International Sheremet’evo Airport):

And the enemy will never succeed

In bringing Moscow to its knees.

The music and the text of this war song can be seen online:

http://www.a-pesni.golosa.info/ww2/oficial/mojamoskva.htm

Accessed 08.05.10

The historic 1943 recording can be heard online:

http://sovmusic.ru/download.php?fname=dormsk

Accessed 08.05.10

63 See a fragment from the film with Pugacheva’s performance online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvgCUZOXY-A&feature=related

The bittersweet quality of Soviet life was surely one of the reasons for Soviet poetry’s extraordinary popularity from the 1960s to the 1980s. Public readings in the1960s (by Evgeny Evtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky and others) took place not only in large concert halls, but also in outdoor squares and stadiums; many poems appeared in samizdat publications. The names of these poets and their fellow composers of the 1960s sound like a poem:

Evteshenko–Voznesensky–Akhmadulina;

Denisov–Schnittke–Gubaidulina.

64 Here is the fragment from Semnadtsat’ Mgnovenii Vesny: Stirlitz secretly and silently sees his wife in a German café, unable to talk with her:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coyoO2A1Kkc&feature=related

65 I remember his singing Lensky in Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Opera in 1972 when he was 70; his voice was still very special and charismatic.

66Again everything has died down till dawn,

The door doesn‘t squeak, the fire doesn’t flare.

All that‘s heard, somewhere out on the street,

Are the meanderings of a lonely accordion.

First in the fields, then beyond the gates,

Then it returns this way again—

As if in search of someone there,

But unable to search them out.

A chill blows in from the fields,

The apple tree blooms thick with blossoms…

Speak out—for whom are you searching?

For whom, young accordionist?

Maybe your happiness is not far off,

It’s just she doesn’t know it’s for her that you’re waiting…

That you walk alone the whole night through,

That you keep all the girls from sleeping?

Lemeshev’s historic recording can be heard online:

http://www.playcast.ru/view/1028937/bbc90e4b189822d91d4c12170e7fe8435ed925c6pl

67Accessed 08.05.10

^ Tat’iana Cherednichenko shows that any dance in any era has been erotic by nature, imitating the sexual act, and even more transparently so in Soviet times. See: Tat’iana Cherednichenko. Muzykal’ny zapas (Moscow, 2002), 513.

68 To have sex, young people had to use public doorways and vestibules, or, if they had money, book a sleeper train ticket with an expensive two-bed compartment. Reserving a hotel room without a stamp in the passport was impossible, and a concierge (usually a lady with the look of a tractor driver) was always on guard on every floor of the hotel. Sexual education was practically nonexistent.

69 This was quite a smart move on the part of Kinoprokat—the organisation leasing foreign movies for show in the USSR. A spectacular Argentinian film, like many Indian movies (such as The Tramp, 1951, starring Raj Kapoor and Nargis) it helped at the time to keep Russian people happy and quiet. In the post–World War II years, a similarly tranquillising effect in the Soviet Union was produced by the British fantasy film The Thief of Baghdad, 1940. Interestingly, this movie (by Alexander Korda, with Miklosz Rosza’s music) was sent to the USSR as a present by the film director as a token of appreciation of the Soviets’ fight against fascism.