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Let them listen to classical music


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By Lev Navrozov
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

Monday, November 27, 2006

After the establishment of the dictatorship in Russia in November 1917, it seemed for a while that the heritage of classical culture would be discarded either as bourgeois or as aristocratic and replaced by a new culture, not dissimilar to the "new culture" in the West, such as pop music or "atonal music," for this culture could well be accepted as "revolutionary," "proletarian," "popular," and what have you.

However, owing to communists like Bukharin, a connoisseur of Western and Russian culture, another theory quickly took over.

In both bourgeois and aristocratic societies, few people are interested in classical music because most of the population is poor and hence deprived of the relevant cultivation. Small wonder that the poet Boris Pasternak was a lover of classical music. His mother was a pianist, and for a while he wanted to be a composer. But what about those who have never heard classical music? Not surprisingly, in the West pop music is now ousting classical music.

There was one radio station for the whole of Soviet Russia (Comintern [Communist International] Radio) to be listened to on radio sets or by plugging a loudspeaker into a socket similar to an electric socket. Bukharin was shot in 1938. But in the earlier epoch, Comintern Radio broadcasted and transmitted classical music only.

Let the entire population be as musically sophisticated as the rich or aristocracy once were. As for the "new culture" in the West, the bourgeois world was dying, and its "new culture" was a sign of decadence, decay, and death, while the new, vigorous, creative communism would replace it, as capitalism once replaced feudalism.

It is owing to this twist of ideology that classical music, so very bourgeois or aristocratic, flourished under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Moscow, its center was the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. It was a kind of social club where the celebrities of culture congregated to listen to outstanding performers and exchange the news or art.

The portraits of great composers adorned the walls all round the Hall above the audience — the great composers of the bourgeois and aristocratic past.

Curiously, Rachmaninov was performed often — though he had emigrated (a grievous crime!), while Shostakovich was hardly ever performed in the Moscow Conservatory, though his devotion to the powers that be was so great that he joined the Communist Party — in 1960! On the contrary, this is why some habituιs of the Hall despised him.

Shostakovich was born in 1906, and he was the only composer, inherited by the Soviet dictatorship from old Russia, who showed a promise of becoming a composer of genius on a par with composers of genius of the 17th to the 19th century. But the society into which he entered at the age of 11 reduced him to clinical paranoia.

I knew a family who were his friends and the paterfamilias, a music critic, gave a secret interview to a Western correspondent to explain that all the pro-Soviet displays of Shostakovich were provoked by his paranoiac fear of the omnipotent dictatorship. But the name of the music critic was discovered by the Soviet secret police, and he was shot, which by no means helped Shostakovich to cope with his paranoia, so interfused with real life.

It was said by Soviet propaganda that in his Ninth Symphony Beethoven prophesied "our Soviet society." The Soviet legislators of culture wanted Shostakovich to be a second Beethoven, our live Beethoven, the Beethoven of today living in the society that the first Beethoven had prophesied. But "Eroica," the name of Ludwig van Beethoven's Third Symphony, was not just a name. He was a hero: When France was at war with the German principalities in which he lived, he used in his music French revolutionary marches!

While Ludwig van Beethoven was a hero (and the German-Austrian authorities tolerated him as a hero), Shostakovich was a clinical paranoiac. Hence his Fourth Symphony, written in 1936, was "gloomy and introspective." But Pravda had detected that deviation from Beethoven's heroics. In a panic, Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony, already in rehearsal, and wrote his Fifth Symphony, with this inscription on the score: "Creative reply of a Soviet artist to just criticism." The symphony delighted Pravda.

Please recall that Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, whom he initially regarded as the great personification of world freedom. But when Beethoven learned that Napoleon had taken the title of emperor, he removed the dedication because Napoleon had "proved to be as insignificant as anyone else."

Beethoven's new dedication was "To the memory of a great man." That is, Napoleon was a great man when he had personified world freedom. But that great man died when he took the title of emperor, and it is to his memory that Beethoven dedicated his symphony.

The Soviet emperors killed or at least maimed the genius of the only composer who might have been in post-1917 Russia — no, not a clinical paranoiac playing at Beethoven out of fear, but equal to Beethoven in greatness.

However, these intrigues at the highest level of musical composition did not affect the performance of classical music going back to the 1920s.

It is not accidental that performers of classical music from Soviet Russia impressed the West as well. Svyatoslav Richter is a good example. His name has become known to every Western lover of classical music. His concerts were gala occasions in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire well back in the 1950s when outside the Conservatoire, Stalin's dictatorship was approaching one of its most sinister phases.

The pilgrimage of Russian performers to the West continues today, nine years after Richter died. Recently, I heard Rachmaninov performed by the young Russian pianist Olga Domnina. The subtlety of her intuition stunned me. As for her personality in general, I recalled her namesake from Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin." Pushkin, who wrote the "novel in verse," on which the opera is based, thus described Olga:

She is always lovely, and always a darling, She is like morning when spring is near, She is as open-hearted as the life of a poet, As a kiss of love she is always sweet.

Miss Domina describes to her mother in Moscow any man she has met in Europe. "Is he rich?" her mother inquires. "No," Olga says. "He is poor."

"Thank God!" her mother sighs in relief. "Money is the root of all evil. Only poverty promises tranquility and happiness."

Why, then, has Olga come to the West? To a Russian, those who have not been to Europe are lifelong losers. Europe is a spiritual treasure-house in the Russian mind. In Chekhov's "Three Sisters," one of the sisters says in despair that she has become so rustic in their Russian country life that she does not remember the Italian for "ceiling."

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.

Monday, November 27, 2006

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