MOSCOW - It's a pity Vladimir Lenin was
tone-deaf, and dismissed music (along with chess)
as an entertainment for the ruling class. Had he
an ear and taste for classical music (like Karl
Marx, who was keen on Ludwig van Beethoven, and
Leon Trotsky, who loved Giuseppe Verdi), he might
have devised a revolutionary doctrine for the
performing arts.
This could have protected
Russia from the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich the
cellist, Nikita Mikhalkov the filmmaker, Valery
Gergiev the conductor, and X
the theater director.
I regret I am
obliged to avoid using X's or his Moscow theater's
real names, because he and his colleagues are so
thin-skinned, so despotic and so vengeful that
they brook no criticism, and would react by
attacking the livelihood of a member of my family.
And this is the point: the erstwhile
freedom that the presidency of Boris Yeltsin
introduced, after toppling Mikhail Gorbachev in
1990, was not a freedom for artistic expression in
Russia at all. It was the start of a new
dictatorship, much worse for Russian culture, its
producers and consumers than anything that had
gone before.
The eulogies over the death
of Rostropovich - which followed Yeltsin's in
Moscow by five days in April - miss the point of
the human rights that Rostropovich made a
reputation pursuing, aggressively, during the
Yeltsin period - Rostropovich's interest was
limited to advancing his own right to make as much
money out of Russia as possible.
Even an
oligarch as wealthy as Oleg Deripaska, owner of
Russian Aluminium, expressed his shock at the size
of the performance fee Rostropovich once demanded
for a charity concert in the Samara region,
sponsored by Deripaska's company.
Just as
Yeltsin privatized Russia's natural resources for
the benefit of a handful of his supporters, who
banked the cash value abroad, so his privatization
of Russia's cultural resources made a handful of
performing artists very rich.
The cultural
privatization also started a reign of new terror,
in which this handful of men took control of the
performing arts in Moscow - the concert halls,
theater stages, film studios, airwaves - and
systematically destroyed all rivals for a
dwindling state culture budget, corruptly
garnering the public resources that had supported
Soviet arts education, copyrights and
broadcasting, for their private gain. Unreformed,
they still rule today. The destruction they
wreaked was far greater, countrywide, and
longer-lasting than the policies of the cultural
commissars of Josef Stalin's time.
The new
men are not new oligarchs of art, because they
aren't a new phenomenon. Most of them had highly
successful and publicly celebrated careers in the
Soviet period. They are the Stalins of sound,
because they used Yeltsin, and then President
Vladimir Putin, to grant them a monopoly of money
and power in their corners of the performing
world.
All Russian musicians remember the
story of January 26, 1936, when Stalin walked out
of a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, disparaging it in
terms more pungent than Pravda the next day, which
editorialized that Shostakovich had created chaos
instead of music.
Stalin's reaction has
been pilloried by Shostakovich's supporters ever
since. The fact that Stalin's ear was not attuned
to the atonality of 20th-century classical
composition puts him squarely among the majority
of the classical-music audience the world over. In
a thousand years of European cultural history, he
was not the first sovereign to stop up his ears at
the audible dissonance, and to reject the new
sounds his musicians were making.
But step
back to Lenin's doctrine of performance, which he
never got around to writing. That starts with the
history of the evolution of classical music from
the two most powerful institutions of the day, the
Church and the throne, and from the ear of
listeners attuned only to music they could sing or
dance to.
Driving this evolution was the
technology of sound-making - the invention of
standard notation, the revision of well-tempered
harmony, the construction of strings, piano
actions and instruments of louder and louder
tones, audible in larger and larger rooms, as well
as printing presses to churn out thousands of
copies of sheet music. And supporting all this
invention was the profit motive, which emancipated
performers, then composers, from the limited
prospects allowed by their patrons - bishops,
kings, noblemen.
The final evolution of
the concert hall in the 19th century, along with
the steel-stringed cello and the pianoforte action
to fill the hall with sound, were the triumph of
bourgeois capitalism. Liberated, at last, was
music from religious limitations on melody and
harmony, delivered to a new breed of impresario,
manipulated by a new type of star performer, and
amplified by the new technology of sound, so that
the largest possible number of paying ears could
be accommodated in a single space.
And the
bigger the bang in the concert hall, the higher
the sales went of sheet music for home
entertainment. Along the way, the performing arts
naturally backed the rise of the bourgeois
nationalisms. These found their champions in
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's conflict with Antonio
Salieri over opera in German versus Italian, and
the deployment of canons in Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky's pseudo-national anthem, the "1812
Overture". At least Tchaikovsky admitted himself
that that one was hack work: "very loud and noisy,
but I've written it without affection and
enthusiasm, and therefore there will probably be
no artistic merit in it" (1880).
Trotsky
also remembered the melodious nationalism of
Italian opera in Odessa, when he was at high
school, not least of all, he
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