Patrick Bade
Stalin’s Composers

Patrick Bade | Stalin’s Composers | 07.17.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Good afternoon to everybody from a very hot London. Now, as we all know, Stalin’s regime in Soviet Union was one of the most brutally repressive regimes of the 20th century. You could argue which was worse really, Stalin or Hitler. I think I would go for Hitler, for obvious reasons. The worst phases of cultural repression were 1936 to 1941, and then right at the end of Stalin’s life, 1949 to ‘53. Of course he died in '53. I think it was big collective sigh of relief. But Soviet Russia was never as culturally barren as Nazi Germany. 'Cause Nazi Germany, you still had the great Richard Strauss and he was still writing great music. But as far as the Nazis were concerned, he had gone absent without leave. He never, apart from the one episode where he wrote a hymn for the 1936 Olympics under duress, he never put his genius at the surface of the Nazi regime. Now, Stalin had two of the greatest composers of the 20th century at his beck and call, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, you see either side of Stalin here. And they really, they were forced to engage politically with the regime, and I shall get to them eventually.

This is of course a piece of completely fake propaganda. Stalin wanted it to look like Lenin had chosen him as his successor, which was not the case at all. Now, in the earliest phase of the Russian Revolution, there was, I think, a real sense of joyous liberation, and that found itself in wonderful cutting edge, daring experimentalism in all the arts, of the pioneering of abstraction with Malevich on the left-hand side, his Suprematist Movement, and the constructivist movement of Tatlin, you see one of his most famous works on the right-hand side. So it was a real sense that everything was possible and there was a sense that there was a new beginning and exciting things were happening. This was also very much in the performing the arts. This is a theatre piece directed by Meyerhold. So the, quite soon though, there were big ideological battles around culture and particularly around music.

And there were two rival factions within the revolution. Two musical organisations, there was the ASM, that’s the Association of Contemporary Music, and their ideals were modernist and internationalists They wanted to make contact with avant garde composers in other countries. And they were opposed by the RAPM, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. And they wanted what the Germans would later call This is that music should be, it shouldn’t be an end in itself. They we’re against any form of art for art’s sake, that the music had to serve a purpose and it had to serve a social purpose and a political purpose. It had to serve the regime, and it had to be simple, the favourite folk influences. It had to be able to speak to the masses. And of course, in the end, by the end of the 1920s, it was the RAPM who had triumphed and dominated Russian music thereafter. First piece I’m going to play you, very exciting piece written in 1926 when I suppose already for some artists, the writing was on the wall. It’s '27, '28 that Stalin really consolidates his power in Russia. And the, a more repressive spirit comes into play.

But the piece I’m going to play, it’s by a composer called Alexander Mosolov, and the title is Iron Foundry, and it was the first movement for a ballet entitled Steel. So it was a ballet on the theme of workers and factories. So very much sort of thing that the regime favoured. What we have on the right hand side is actually not an image of that particular ballet. It’s a ballet called , the Step of Steel that was actually staged by Diaghilev and it had music by Prokofiev. Diaghilev was willing to experiment with anything new. Of course, he was very much against the ideals of the revolution and it’s rather odd that he agreed to stage that particular ballet. But… It seems to have stuck. So here is this very exciting piece that uses dissonance and mitotic rhythms to evoke the atmosphere of a factory. And it was a piece that had an immediate success around the world. It was performed at proms, it was performed in America, and it’s the one piece by Mosolov that continues to be performed from time to time.

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So until the late twenties, the Soviet Union was still very open to foreign avant garde composers. And here are five composers who visited the Soviets, visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s: Arthur Honegger, top left, Darius Milhaud, top middle, Alban Berg, his opera, Wozzeck, was actually performed in Russia long, long before it was performed in Britain or America. And then bottom left is Shaker, and bottom right is Ernst Krenek. So they, until the end of the twenties, such composers received a warm welcome in Russia. But by 1930s, there’s a big change of mood, not just in music, of course, in the visual arts as well. Artists like Malevich were forced to recant and move back to a very conservative pictorial style. And we have the so-called Soviet realism. This is an example of it with cheerful paintings of, of happy peasants. And so this, Mosolov falls in line. He stopped writing dissonant pieces like the one we just heard, and he, instead, he kowtows to the regime and he writes songs for, again, for happy workers. This one is entitled Threshing.

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Nikolai Roslavets is an example of a career whose composer was blighted by this cultural change of direction about 1930. He could have become one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century. He devised a system that was very similar to the 12-turn system of Schonberg. And he wrote extremely dissonant and challenging music in the 1920s. But 1930, from 1930 onwards, his music was a completely banned, public performance of his music was banned. He was expelled from all musical organisations. He didn’t die, he wasn’t murdered like some other cultural figures, but he had to completely disappear. And when he finally did dive natural causes in 1944, his flat was ransacked and manuscripts of his work were taken away and destroyed. Luckily, his wife had, was able to hide and preserve some of them. And in the 1960s, there was a revival of interesting in his work. Here is an example of his avant garde start of the 1920s. This is, as you’ll hear, (indistinct).

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This is Nikolai Miaskowski, whose style was much more conservative. He was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov. He’s a very prolific composer, wrote 27 symphonies. And he certainly wasn’t going to get into trouble with the Soviet regime for being elitist or too avant garde. He’s a fine composer and he was a man who, he was a kind of father figure to younger Soviet composers and a man greatly respected for his integrity and his courage where he did everything he could to defend younger composers like Shostakovich, who got into the firing line of the regime. But despite all of this, he himself was branded a formalist in 1949, was a second phase of repression. Formalism was a dreadful accusation of the Soviet regime. It it meant that the composer was not doing his duty towards the state, not supporting the regime through his music. So at the end of his life was very much clouded this by this and he was in considerable danger. But here is a a sample of one of his 27 symphonies. This is a movement from his Symphony No. 5.

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Very lovely, but essentially late romantic, could easily have been written in the 1880s rather than between the wars. And he was the teacher of the two Soviet composers who are best known apart from Shostakovich and Prokofiev, they are Aram Khachaturian and Kabalevsky. Khachaturian, as you may guess from his name was of Armenian background. He actually came very humble peasant background and his music had a lot of Armenian folk glory elements in it. So you would think that he would please the regime, and he did for much of his career. And he had his first great international success during the Second World War when, as we shall hear in my next lecture, the rest of the world was very open to new Russian music during the war for obvious political reasons, propaganda reasons. And so this is the sabre dance from his ballet, Gayane, from 1942, which became a huge international hit.

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Like Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Miaskowski, he was declared a formalist in 1949, and he actually was, he was forced to publicly recant. This is a very typical feature of course of the Soviet regime that writers, intellectuals and composers made these rather painful public recantations. And he said, “Lately I estranged myself increasingly "from my Armenian origins. "I wanted to become international, "which of course was a terrible sin. But he survived and he had another great international hit with his score for the ballet, Spartacus, which is about a revolt of the, Spartacus was the leader of a slaves revolt under the Roman Empire, so obviously a hero to the Soviets. They saw him as a kind of prototype for Lenin and Stalin. And I’m going to play you one moment in this ballet, which certainly, well any British witness will be very familiar with this 'cause it was used to introduce the popular series on the television. But it’s a heart-stopping moment, you have a buildup to a climax and then a crashing of cymbals and a change of key as you launch into this absolutely gorgeous tune, which is worthy of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.

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I can spend most of the rest of my talk concentrating on the two major figures of the Prokofiev and Shostakovitch. Now, Prokofiev is a bit of an exception. He was formed of, as a composer, before the Revolution. He was a brilliant star, but kind of at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Like Rachmaninoff, he was a very brilliant pianist and seemed destined for a career as a virtuoso pianist. But in the competition at the Conservatoire to play a piano concerto, he had the incredible chutzpah as someone who’s still a student, not to play as all the other contestants did, but to play his own very brilliant first concerto. So he was somebody who’s clearly destined for super stardom right from the start, and I think he was very aware of that. And like so many others, after the revolution, he decided to leave Russia. And so he arrived in New York in 1919, and for the next 18 years, he was rather like Rachmaninoff, he was a peripatetic composer, he was giving concerts with a mixed degree of success. He had some great successes. His opera, The Love of Three Oranges, was staged in Chicago. He had a number of very successful premieres in Paris as well. But strangely, as I will tell you in a minute, decided to go back to Russia just as in a way the curtain was coming down and the regime was becoming extremely repressive.

But I I thought you’d enjoy hearing very first piece that he wrote after leaving Russia and after arriving in New York. And he describes how this piece came about. It’s called, it’s the Overture on Hebrew Themes. He says, in the fall of 1919, former friends of mine from the St. Petersburg Conservatory came to America. They created the Jewish ensemble, Zimro. They told me about concerts they had organised to collect money for a music conservatory in Jerusalem. In reality, they had barely enough money for everyday life. They wanted me to write a sextet so we could all do do it together, and they handed me a notebook of Jewish folk themes. I tried to excuse myself or explain that I only composed with my own musical material. Nevertheless, I kept the notebook. One evening while thrumming through it, I selected several nice themes and started to improvise at the piano. I noticed that suddenly the whole, the whole fragments came together and developed. The next day, I worked until the evening and through the night writing down the entire overture. So this, I think you can sense in this piece, it’s such a lively and inventive piece, that sort of white heat of inspiration of a piece of music that was written in less than 48 hours.

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He returned briefly to Russia in 1929 and then once again, and settled permanently in 1936. And you think, my god, what disastrous timing. Well, if ever there was a composer whose life and career was characterised by bad timing, it’s certainly Prokofiev. So 1936 was when the great purge was beginning, and the regime was becoming extremely culturally regressive. Anyway, he was obviously very keen to curry favour with the regime when he returned, and his first big work was a cantata entitled, October, Celebrating the October Revolution. And it’s a work on an absolutely megalomaniac scale. It’s for two mixed choruses, four orchestras, and another orchestra of Russian concertinas. And it uses text by Marx, Engles, Lenin and Stalin. Here is a sample of this work.

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It was criticised by the regime as not being heroic enough. You think, oh my God, what did they expect? How much more heroic can you get than that? Certainly, in terms of his creativity, the move back to Russia was not as disastrous as you might have expected. Of course, he couldn’t really experiment with cutting edge themes as he had while he was in the West, like the fiery angel or with very avant garde musical language. He was forced into a more conservative musical language. But as that didn’t seem to dampen his inspiration, he wrote some of his best and most loved works after returning to Russia in 1936, including the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, of course, and the opera, War and Peace. But as I said, his timing, he was just so unlucky with his timing. He had had great inspiration of working with one of the world’s, one of the 20th century’s greatest film directors, Serge Eisenstein, and they, he wrote the score for the movie, Alexander Nevsky, and then he later wrote the scores for the Ivan the Terrible series, a bit of which I played you earlier.

But Alexander Nevsky is generally regarded as one of the most amazing films of the 20th century, both visually and certainly it’s, this is, if you had to choose one single film score from the whole of the 20th century, it might be this one. It’s a fantastic score and it can stand up on its own in the concert hall. It doesn’t actually need the film to go with it. But as I said, his timing was disastrous. This came out in 1938 when Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were facing up against one another in bitter hostility to one another. And the film, it was about an invasion of Russia by the Teutonic Knights. So it’s a film which has a very clear political message. It’s anti-German, it’s anti-Nazi, but no sooner had it come out and been well received, and then there was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. And of course the film was then an embarrassment and it was withdrawn.

But here is a sample, one of the most famous scenes, which is the battle on the ice, where we have the invasion of these terrifyingly dehumanised Teutonic soldiers, which is a really remarkable anticipation really, of the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 famously characterised also by Shostakovich in his seventh symphony.

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Prokofiev’s greatest success with currying favour with the regime came in in 1939 when he wrote a piece called , The Salute, and it’s basically a homage to Stalin, another very bombastic piece. And it was actually broadcast through loud speakers all over Moscow.

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So his, just as he wrote that, of course, the great purges and the persecutions of the late thirties were reaching their climax, and two former friends and colleagues, Milhaud, who you see, got left, and poet, Osip Mandelstam were arrested and imprisoned and eventually executed. Milhaud’s wife was murdered on the orders of Stalin. So Prokofiev’s life was strangely entwined with that of Stalin and by a very extraordinary coincidence, of course, at the end of his life, he was under a shadow of official disapproval. But he died on the very same day in 1953 that Stalin died. So he, unfortunately, he didn’t live to see himself rehabilitated. Now the other major composer, of course, is Dmitri Shostakovich, again, an extremely precocious talent. And he had already established international reputation as a very young man in his early twenties, in the 1920s, his first symphony, and it’s an incredible achievement in 1926, was immediately taken up around the world, and only seven years later after it was premiered, it received a complete commercial recording in America, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. And here is an excerpt from that recording.

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His next symphony, No. 2, is subtitled, October. Again, it’s a celebration of the October Revolution. It’s a very bombastic work. Again, clearly he was out to curry favour with Stalin with this piece.

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A crunch came in 1934. Shostakovich wrote an opera called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that was initially a huge popular success. It received countless performances all over Russia until one fateful day Stalin decided to attend a performance. Now it’s curious, the fact that both Stalin and Hitler were oddly puritanical in matters of sex. Hitler was outraged when he went to a performance of an opera called of Hindemith, which had a nude scene for the soprano. Hitler never forgave Hindemith for that, although he was not Jewish, he was actually driven, eventually driven out of Germany because of that. And Stalin was offended by, probably, I suppose, one of the most graphic musical depictions of sex in the history of opera. Very brutal sex. It’s almost a rape actually when the married heroin, she’s married to a man she doesn’t love, and this rather hunky young guy who makes the moves on her, and she puts up a very brief resistance and then gives into him. And he’s a real sort of wham-bam, thank you, ma'am sex, as I said, you can really hear graphically in the orchestra what’s going on. And at the end when he’s had his way with her, the trombones, I can, well, I can only describe them as the noises they make as detumescent, as his physical excitement subsides after the sex. Here it is.

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Now, just as the official newspapers were denouncing the opera and it was repressed, Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony was in rehearsal and it became evident during the rehearsals that it was just not going to be accepted by the regime. It was far too harsh in its musical language. And Shostakovich withdrew the score, in fact, it never, it didn’t receive its premiere until 1961, well after Stalin’s death, and he knew he was in real danger. So his next symphony, the 5th Symphony, which has turned out to be his most popular, was again, I think very much an attempt to mend bridges with the regime. And he gave an interview in which he said that the work was a Soviet composer’s response to justified criticism. It was, it worked, it was, although it was, it was touch and go because the premier was such a huge success and the audience was absolutely delirious with enthusiasm, but that in itself, of course, was dangerous for Shostakovich 'cause the applause of the audience could have been seen as a criticism of the regime. But, so here is an excerpt from that well known, very beautiful Symphony No. 5.

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Now I’m going to finish this talk talking about a concert, a very memorable concert that was given in Moscow on the 14th of June, 1949 by the Great American bass, Paul Robeson. Now, in my opinion, he’s one of the heroes of the 20th century. He’s somebody who should have statues raised to him. Maybe when they pulled down some of those statues that we don’t want, we could put up some to him. Very, very brave man, incredibly talented. He was a great athlete. That’s how he got his education in America, as an athlete. He was a very fine actor, an extremely intelligent man. And of course, one of the most beautiful voices of the 20th century. Now, he was somebody who’d gotten to, remember, this is 1949. America is gripped with anti-communist hysteria, and you’ve got the McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities. And there is a repression in America that’s an equivalent of the repressiveness in the USSR. At the same time, people weren’t actually murdered, but lives were destroyed. Robeson’s career was destroyed. He was, he had, he was forbidden to appear in public. Eventually his parcel was taken away from him. But he was not as naive as some people think. He was not, I mean, of course there were American liberals, very left liberals who idolised Stalin and didn’t recognise the evils of the regime. That’s not the case actually, with Robeson, Robeson had formed a friendship with two Russian Jews who had been in New York during Second World War building up links between Russia and the US in their common cause against the Nazis. And there was an actor, very well known actor called Solomon Nichols, and a poet called Itzik Feffer. And Robeson knew that they were, that they were in trouble. And he arrived in Moscow and the first thing he said was that he wanted to see them, and he was shocked to discover, he was told that Nichols had died of a heart attack, but he soon discovered that in fact, he’d been murdered. And Itzik Feffer was in prison. And Robeson demanded, he insisted on seeing him, and Feffer was bought from prison to Robeson’s Hotel. He indicated to Robeson that the room was bugged, so they had a double conversation. They had a conversation in words about everyday banal things, and they conversed about what was really happening with sign language and little scribbled notes. So this was the period, 1949, where Stalin suddenly became very paranoid about Jews. It’s the period of the doctor’s plot and so on, so-called doctor’s plot. And so Jews were being persecuted in Russia and Robeson wanted to do everything he could to fight against this. So in his concert, he made a speech in which he gave a warm tribute to Solomon Nichols and to Itzik Feffer that the audience was absolutely aghast with horror, they couldn’t believe he was doing this. And he went on to say how important links were between the Jewish communities in Russia and America. Now, the whole concert was recorded and published by the Soviets but obviously that section of Robeson’s speech was cut out of the published recording. But I’m going to play you, first of all, a little bit of him talking in Russian. He obviously spoke quite good Russian, sounds convincing to me. First of all this is him, actually, , this is him singing, of course, his signature tune, Old Man River, which I dunno if you know the original words, that has really, I think unacceptably racist words at the end of this song. And he sings it in English, but you’ll see he changes the original words of the song to a very defiant message at the end.

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♪ There’s an old man called the Mississippi ♪ ♪ That’s the old man I don’t like to be ♪ ♪ What does he care if the world’s got troubles ♪ ♪ What does he care if the land is free ♪ ♪ Old man river ♪ ♪ That old man river ♪ ♪ He must know something ♪ ♪ But don’t say nothing ♪ ♪ He just keeps rolling ♪ ♪ He keeps on rolling along ♪ ♪ He don’t plant taters ♪ ♪ He don’t plant cotton ♪ ♪ And them that plants them is soon forgotten ♪ ♪ But old man river ♪ ♪ He just keep rolling along ♪ ♪ You and me’ ♪ ♪ We sweat and strain. ♪ ♪ Body all achin’ and racked with pain ♪ ♪ Tote that barge, and lift that bale ♪ ♪ You show a little grit ♪ ♪ And you’ll land in jail ♪ ♪ But I keeps laughing ♪ ♪ Instead of crying ♪ ♪ I must keep fighting ♪ ♪ Until I’m dying ♪ ♪ And old man river ♪ ♪ He’ll just keeps rolling along ♪

And as a final encore, he made another gesture of sympathy and solidarity with the Jewish community by singing a song in Yiddish, the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto, which is again, a song of defiance.

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Well, I think I better finish now. I’ve run out of time. So let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments

The choice of a ballet about Steel was a not so subtle piece of flattery to Stalin, of course, yes, absolutely. Yes, Roslavets a very interesting composer who deserves to be better known. It’s on, Herbert, the list of all, as usual, gives you all the details of the recording, and it was actually conducted by, Ooh, I haven’t written it on my list, so I can’t actually tell you. It’s not, I dunno, I’d have to go look it up. Lots of blitz in the sound. I don’t know. I think it must be your end. I don’t know if other people had them or not. First composer I talked about was, no, that would’ve been, it wasn’t the first composer. The composer who died in 1944 was Roslavets. Piece of Prokofiev on Jewish musical themes.

Thank you, liked that very much, Karen. Thank you. Judy, yes, he did. The piano part was written, he did participate in performances, he played the piano. I have heard that Prokofiev cantata played at the festival. I mean, it must be 25 years ago. And I remember that actually there was a member of the audience who was American, who got up at the end and protested against its performance and the texts. This is Ann, who’s just returned from a museum in Haifa, which has seven wonderful paintings by Soutine. Lucky them. I would, Ann, my email is P-J-S-B-A-D-E@aol.com. But you could always get to me through Karen or Judy.

Q: What motivated Prokofiev to return to Russia? A: I think it must just have been nostalgia and longing. I can’t think what else. What a moment to return. It’s such a, it’s a mystery. But I think, you know, cause Rachmaninoff also felt, I think he would’ve returned if he could, you know, these were artists who had very, very deep roots in the Russian soil. No, it certainly wasn’t just to work with Eisenstein. I think it was, you know, that he, he felt the need to go back.

Yes, but Monty, I agree with you that about that. But it is, but think about the history of art. Think about all the great art. I mean, think about the Renaissance popes. They weren’t saints and some of the greatest art ever made has been work, you know, Michelangelo and Raphael, they were working for Julius II, who was definitely a monster. Testimony, I have read Testimony and I know I’m going to talk about it next time. I’m not really in a position to say whether I think it’s all genuine or not. The controversy is that words were put into his mouth and that he didn’t actually write all of it. According to Prokofiev some time ago, his Polish born wife was imprisoned. Yes, that’s true. Was she Polish? I thought she was Italian. And she, that’s right, she was sent to Siberia. I’m not sure. I don’t think it was just that he, I don’t think he married the second time, just for political reasons. A very dear friend, family, Bruno Reichen, a refugee from Lithuanian won a piano scholarship to Leipzig Academy of Music and left only in the thirties for London. is what the German said about the English. He accompanied Paul Robeson on his tours. But on a planned trip to Russia, he was banned from entering Russia as he was Jewish. I’m sure Robeson would’ve been very angry about that.

You’re talking Tea for Two. Of course, yes, there is a very funny setting of Tea for Two by Shostakovich. I agree, Robeson’s voice is so special. It actually always brings tears to my eyes. I find him a very moving singer. This is David Freud, Throughout my life, growing up in South Africa, after apartheid, we played records of Paul Robeson, and he was a hero. And yes, to me, he’s a great hero. ‘Cause when he was banned, they took his passport away. And when he was banned from, from leaving the country, he was supposed to sing in England, I think it was in a prom. And there were 8,000 people in the Albert Hall who listened to him singing over a telephone line from America. This is Judy saying, you’re treated to a full Israel philharmonic concert with Vasily Petrenko conducted Leningrad by Shostakovich and Fourth Symphony. Very, yeah, I think Leningrad Symphony, well, I’ll talk a bit about it next time. I know, of course, Dennis has talked about it in more detail. I think it’s one of those work. you probably have to hear live. You need the physical impact of it.

I’m going to talk about that, Herbert, in the next lecture, all the controversy around the American Premier or the Leningrad under Toscanini. Thank you everybody. Yes. Ron, that’s right. Old Man River, Jerome, Oscar Hammerstein, both of whom came from Jewish backgrounds. Yeah, thank you, Sheila. Said, ready three programme, Paul Robeson, which use those things. Thank you. How reliable is it, Martin? I don’t have sufficient knowledge to tell you really. As I said, it’s been very, the testimony is extremely controversial. Erica in Greece. I wonder if you’re my only follower in Greece and it’s nice to hear from you, Erica. Other people saying they had time glitches in the music. There’s nothing I can do about that. Sorry. Thank you. The piece with two orchestras was actually four orchestras by Prokofiev from two choirs.

Q: Who paid? A: Well, I suppose it was the state. I mean, you didn’t have to worry about. That was one thing, composers didn’t have to worry about it.

And I, Susan, I so agree with you, Robeson, a hero and a giant.

Thank you all very, very much. And I will continue with some of the same themes, particularly of course the Leningrad Symphony in my talk on Wednesday. Thank you, bye-bye.