later admitted
in his autobiography, because he had a crush on
one of the sopranos.
This music to thump
by reached its epitome in Richard Wagner's musical
dramatizations for the kaiser's, then Hitler's,
killing-machines; and John Philip Sousa's tunes to
accompany the beach landings of the US marines,
taking US imperialism to Cuba, the Philippines and
elsewhere. If Shostakovich had been
engaged to write music for
Sousa's clientele, the outcome would have been
more draconian than his clash with Stalin.
It is of passing interest to note that it
was a big-band thumper like Sousa who felt
threatened by the invention of sound recording.
"These talking machines are going to ruin the
artistic development of music in this country," he
warned.
"When I was a boy ... in front of
every house in the summer evenings, you would find
young people together singing the songs of the day
or old songs. Today you hear these infernal
machines going night and day. We will not have a
vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated
by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man
when he came from the ape." Sousa underestimated
the capitalism of music, by a long shot.
The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was the
first modern performer of international status to
repudiate the concert hall, and to recognize - for
purely musical reasons - that the technology of
recording sound could be superior esthetically to
the live performance. He also proved that the
performing artist could survive the switchover
economically, though, of course, the concert
impresario and the sheet-music publisher have not
done as well.
Gould saw the potential for
a revolution in music-making and understanding in
the Soviet Union; that's why he chose to visit in
1957 - over the objections of officials in Ottawa
and Washington, who believed at the time that he
was aiding and abetting the enemy. Subsequently,
in a 1962 broadcast on Canadian government
television, Gould defended the quality of Sergei
Prokofiev and Shostakovich, clashing head-on with
the Soviet cultural authorities over what Gould
called "the idiotic repressions of Soviet musical
life".
But Gould also saw beyond his own
revolution in sound production to the revival of
the individual listener, the small room, and the
chamber sound with which music had flourished five
centuries earlier. Gould's revolution was the
antithesis of music to thump by. Had the
democratic ideologies of the Russian reformers of
1991 been genuine ones, the outcome today for
Russia's performing arts might have been equally
liberating.
What happened instead to the
performing arts in Moscow was that the richest,
most powerful state budget for the performing
artist in the world was suddenly cut off. In a
relatively short time, this led to the loss of the
state copyrights on recorded music; the pirating
of performance rights; the wholesale destruction
of the place Russian filmmaking had in the cinemas
and on television, and its replacement with trash
imported primarily from the US.
Although
some classical-music recording labels tried to
keep orchestras alive with recording contracts,
those who lacked the patronage of despotic
conductor impresarios, such as Gergiev, could not
survive. He and Rostropovich positioned themselves
as intermediaries and conduits for Western culture
cash. It was paid out, and they took it, for the
same political and ideological reasons that had
sustained the Congress for Cultural Freedom and
other Cold War-fighting fronts. [1]
As the
older generation of performers dwindled, there was
no longer a state-supported system to replace them
with the young, or to employ the old to cultivate
the talent of the young.
The state-funded
system for the education and training of
performing artists in music, theater and film was
crippled. Admission to the drama schools was
accomplished through bribery. Radio Orfei, the
state-funded classical-music broadcaster, with a
daily audience of 9 million, was choked for lack
of funds, and left the air, its frequency taken
over by a church broadcaster. When that radio fell
silent, the revolution of the intimate audience
that Gould had hoped might be self-sustaining
failed.
While the casting couch was not
unheard of in Soviet film studios and live
theaters, the directors who flourished in the
Yeltsin period did so as pimps. A boom in Russian
filmmaking developed - for pornography and
sadistic violence. Talented actresses became a
Russian export for the first time in history - as
sex slaves. Film directors from Hollywood and
Bollywood created networks of agents in Moscow,
and Russia's leading regional centers, to audition
boys and girls for sex shows sold on the Internet.
To revisit Pravda's notice on
Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth", Russian music had
become chaos - while a tiny elite accumulated all
the benefits. They arranged through a compliant
Kremlin to award themselves state-signed telegrams
of congratulation on their jubilees and state
awards. And abroad, posturing as the new artistic
leaders of democratic Russia, Rostropovich,
Mikhalkov, Gergiev and X were showered with
Western honors. What exactly had they, have they,
done for Russian culture?
They have
encouraged foreign entertainment combines to swamp
radio, television and the sound-recording
industry. They have withheld training from a
generation of talent. They have established a more
ruthless artistic oligopoly than Stalin was able
to enforce and pauperized the generation that
follows them. Their tyrannizing extends to the
most intimate of details. It is reported of
Gergiev that he will not allow his orchestra
players and singers a decent interval to relieve
themselves.
Under a baton like that,
Russian culture has reverted to what it was in
1839, when the French nobleman Astolphe de Custine
wrote his Letters from Russia. Banned by
the Russian censor until 1996, de Custine wrote:
"Civilization, which elsewhere elevates the mind,
here perverts it. It had been better for the
Russians had they remained savages: to polish
slaves is to betray society. It is needful that a
man possess a basis of virtue to enable him to
bear culture."
The Stalins of sound claim
virtue, but they are savage destroyers.
Note 1. Mstislav
Rostropovich plays a walk-on, footnote role in the
Central Intelligence Agency's first cultural war
against the Soviet Union, when in 1964 he paid a
call on the Berlin house of Nikolai Nabokov, then
front-man for the CIA. At the time, Rostropovich
was with the Soviet ambassador to East Berlin,
Pyotr Abrassimov. Fully committed on the US side,
and taking money, was Igor Stravinsky. He and
other composers on the same payroll were funded to
encourage 12-tone and other avant-garde musical
compositions, premiered by touring US orchestras
also subsidized from the same source. Arturo
Toscanini, then conductor of the NBC Sympthony
Orchestra, refused to be recruited, because he
hated the music. For the tale of the cultural cold
war between 1950 to 1970, see Frances Stonor
Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the
Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books,
1999). The story after 1970, in which Rostropovich
played a much bigger role, and of the new cultural
cold war, which began with Boris Yeltsin, hasn't
been told yet.
John Helmer is
the longest-serving foreign correspondent in
Russia.
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