Post
by John F » Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:58 am
No question but that the only cult of personality allowed in Stalin's Soviet Union was of Stalin himself, and the inclusion of Prokofiev in the Zhdanov anti-formulist denunciation of 1948 can only be interpreted as showing him his place. After all, he had only recently received official approval of his 5th Symphony and Stalin Prizes for the 7th and 8th sonatas, and the 9th sonata and 6th symphony were little different, though perhaps not the heroic celebrations that were looked for after the victory in World War II. Putting Shostakovich in his place was doubtless one of the reasons why he was condemned, twice, by Stalin and his minions.
But the Shostakovich case is more complicated. Stalin's musical taste, though genuine (like Hitler, he cared much more about classical music than his underlings), was conventional and indeed conservative, and so was his sense of sexual morality. Both were offended by "Lady Macbeth of Mzensk," which he attended but left before the end - I'd guess soon after the scene in Act 3 that lampoons the police. "Muddle Instead of Music" followed almost immediately, and it's not about killing Shostakovich's popularity, or not only about that, but a direct response to what is actually there in the libretto and the music - if you omit Act 4, as Stalin did that night.
The Communist regime, like the Nazi regime, had a strong and narrow concept of the esthetics of art and the role of artists in society. Shostakovich repeatedly failed to conform, notably in the 9th Symphony of 1945 whose cheeky, nose-thumbing first movement was taken as his public response to the war just won, and found unacceptable as such. Whether Shostakovich intended, by this failure to meet expectations and requirements, to show dissent from the Soviet way, consciously or otherwise, is beside the point - it could be and evidently was taken as a form of dissent, and Shostakovich paid the price.
John Francis
