Two years after the recording of ‘Strange Fruit’, Meeropol was summoned to appear before New York State’s Rapp-Coudert committee investigating alleged Communist infiltration of the state’s high schools. He was accused of having been commissioned by the Communist Party to write the song. That it became well known against such odds is testament both to its simple power and to the fact that it was still extremely difficult in 1939 to challenge publicly the inequality of the race divide in America.
Holiday’s performance and the disturbing images of the poetic text mark the moment in the development of popular song when it could no longer be dismissed as mere frivolity. In the troubled 1930s, escapism and harmless entertainment were the principal domain of popular music, but – as Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator showed – being commercially successful was no longer synonymous with a lack of serious purpose. That the Nazis should have felt threatened enough by American jazz and swing to ban it in the Third Reich, despite or perhaps because of its popularity among the German population, is a telltale indication of its potential to unlock the dangerously unpredictable emotions of whole populations. To the Nazis, American jazz was racially inappropriate (i.e. African) and decadent, though hypocritically they continued to encourage German recording artists to cover favourite swing numbers for the enjoyment of their master race citizens.
Escapist fun was not, by and large, a route chosen by classical composers in the twentieth century. The final gasp of classical music’s contribution to uncomplicated fun was probably Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which opened in Vienna in December 1905, and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s comic romp I Quatro rusteghi (The School for Fathers), which opened in Munich in March 1906, though Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (opened January 1911) might just squeeze into the category. After that, seriousness, confrontation and challenge were classical music’s guiding stars. Indeed, when Shostakovich wanted to mock German culture in his seventh symphony, to evoke the Nazi invasion of the USSR (which well come to shortly), his parody-march was based on a tune from Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Even today there is no greater venom among hardcore classical music champions than that reserved for so-called ‘crossover’ artists who dare to pollute the pure waters of the classical repertoire by appealing to the masses. For Lehár and Wolf-Ferrari in the early twentieth century, read Il Divo and Andre Rieu in the twenty-first.
As European nation-states descended into industrial-scale barbarism in the second half of the 1930s, musicians in these countries were placed in a difficult position. Jewish artists and intellectuals of all kinds fled Nazism, and music by Jews, Communists and Blacks was banned in the Third Reich and its occupied territories. A touring exhibition called Entartete Musik (degenerate music) opened in 1938, ridiculing these minority composers, as well as non-Jewish French composers Ravel, Satie and Saint-Saëns, who were deemed for the purposes of the exhibition to be Jewish. What, though, were the non-Jewish composers left behind expected to do? Collaborate or resist?
Composers who remained in Germany and wanted to have their music performed had no option but to stay on the right side of the regime. Orchestras and opera houses thrived under the Nazis, supported by generous state funding. Musicians and singers were granted privileges and perks denied the rest of the population in wartime. Indeed, the only adult males in the whole of Berlin’s population exempt from defensive duties during its apocalyptic fall to the Red Army in April-May 1945 were the members of the Berlin Philharmonic. In the first hours after the guns fell silent in the ruined city, one of the most horrifying sights reported by civilians and Russian soldiers emerging from the rubble were the corpses of young boys hanging from lamp-posts in the city centre with signs round their necks reading ‘coward’ or ‘would not fight for his Fatherland’. Yet, as reported in Misha Aster’s eye-opening The Reich’s Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933–1945, within days of the city’s surrender the players of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra were congratulating themselves on being able to convene a rehearsal in a makeshift hall and to keep the flame of their reputation alive in spite of the devastation all around them.
The Nazis accorded music considerable esteem, hoping to shape the course of musical history by manipulative policies affecting the production and reception of music across the vast territories they eventually controlled. Attempting to eradicate Jewish composers and musicians under their jurisdiction was one way of stifling a particularly vigorous community of practitioners in the field, filling the inevitable gaps in Germany’s numerous pre-1933 musical institutions with Aryans whose abilities were less important than their racial background. It can only be guessed what future musical riches may have been forfeited from the loss of talent to the Third Reich’s programme of extermination. Despite wrapping up their objections to aspects of musical modernism in pseudo-scientific claptrap about ‘degeneracy’, the Nazi leaders’ distrust of certain forms of music was nothing more than crude, beer-cellar racism. Thus, ‘atonal’ (twelve-tone, or serialist) music was condemned when it was by Schoenberg, its Jewish inventor, but condoned when it was by the Aryan Paul von Klenau.
The most famous living composer in Europe, the now elderly Richard Strauss, had a relationship with the Nazi government that oscillated between polite acquiescence and obstinate stand-offishness, despite its PR-conscious enthusiasm to keep such a high-profile cultural figure happy. He did not openly take the regime to task for its abhorrent racial policies and was involved in a number of prestigious propagandist events – he composed a hymn for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and conducted his ‘Festive Prelude’ at the 1938 Reich Music Festival, convened by Joseph Goebbels, at which the grotesque Entartete Musik exhibition was launched – but mostly Strauss withdrew from public life. Strauss scholars disagree on whether his withdrawal was a rejection of his previous accommodation with the regime, a suspicion that it might not last, or simply an old man choosing retirement.
One composer who had no qualms about cooperating with the Nazi regime was Carl Orff, whose Carmina Burana had its tumultuously successful première in Frankfurt in June 1937. Its sequel, Catulli Carmina, the second part of a trilogy, was presented at the Leipzig Municipal Theatre in November 1943. (It is surely the only work in the choral repertoire with a repeated chorus of ‘Mentula, mentula, mentula, mentula!’ – penis, penis, penis, penis!) Orff had his tetchy criticisms of the regime – not directed at its deranged policies, mind, but because it wouldn’t roll out his children’s music programme Schulwerk into all state schools in the Reich. He did, however, accept the Nazi government’s commission to replace the Jewish Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and felt unable to intervene on behalf of a close friend, Kurt Huber, founder of the White Rose resistance group, who was tortured and executed by the regime. After the war Orff claimed falsely at his de-Nazification tribunal that he had himself been involved in the founding of the White Rose movement. All in all, and certainly from a musical point of view, Orff’s acquiescence with the Third Reich drove him into a cul-de-sac from which he never really recovered – which is unfortunate if only because Carmina Burana was one of the handful of new classical works written between 1930 and 1960 that found genuine popularity with the general public without seeking to be deliberately old-fashioned. (Ottorino Respighi’s patriotic paeans to Roman power in Fascist Italy, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals of 1924 and 1928, were also newly written and popular then as now, but they sit squarely amid his reliquary of plundered, re-orchestrated musical trinketry of Italy’s distant past.)
The nearest thing classical music had to a genuine political dissident in the 1930s was the Hungarian modernist Béla Bartók. By the 1930s, Bartók was eminent as a cutting-edge modernist composer in the Stravinsky mould: his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste (1936) and Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion (1937) had already established his reputation throughout Europe and are still regularly performed today. He was also a tireless collector and annotator of East European folk song, an
d is in fact one of the chief architects of a whole branch of music study known as ethnomusicology. Bartók had serious misgivings about Hungary’s slide towards Fascism, concurrent with developments in Germany and Italy, and after the Nazis seized power in Germany he forbade all performances or broadcasts of his music in the Third Reich and Fascist Italy, a gesture that impoverished him, since his publishers and the lion’s share of his royalties came from Germany. When, in 1938, Goebbels mounted his Entartete Musik exhibition, Bartók asked for his name to be added to the list voluntarily so disgusted was he with the hate campaign waged against selected modernist music, jazz and anything composed or performed by Jews, Slavs, Romani people or anyone of African origin.
Like most high-profile classical composers, though, Bartók was able to leave Axis-controlled Europe safely. He resettled in the United States in 1940, thereby avoiding any more serious consequences of challenging the totalitarian line.
However difficult the situation in Hungary, however, it was a tea party compared to the nightmare that unfolded in Russia in the 1930s. From 1934 onwards, Stalin rigorously suppressed any sign of ‘decadence’ (code word for avant-garde) from composers, in line with his general cultural clampdown, a significant U-turn on the previous Soviet policy of encouraging experimentation in the arts. This hardening of official attitudes made life increasingly difficult for Russia’s leading composers, Prokofiev and Shostakovich (Stravinsky having emigrated, only to return for one emotional visit in 1962, aged eighty). At times they were in favour and received privileges ordinary Russians would have marvelled at; at others their continued survival as professional composers hung by a thread. Shostakovich, for example, was officially denounced in 1936 and again in 1948, but was also a multiple recipient of State Stalin Prizes for the Arts, a People’s Artist of the USSR and holder of the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution and Hero of Socialist Labour. He and Prokofiev were both mercifully spared the treatment accorded writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose criticisms of Soviet authority in his books and public statements landed him in a Siberian prison camp.
Analysts since their time have discussed at length whether Shostakovich’s and Prokofiev’s music somehow ‘defied’ Stalinism in some surreptitious, ironical or coded manner, even when it was ostensibly toeing the Party line, which variously entailed being optimistic and relevant to the ordinary people (abiding by ‘Socialist Realist’ principles, in Soviet jargon), not being too Western-sounding (‘reactionary’), and not being too modernist (‘formalist’). Strangely, it was one of Shostakovich’s most instantly admired larger-scale works, and one which was set in the Bad Old Days of Tsarist Russia, that started his problems with the Soviet regime: his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which opened at the Maly Theatre in what was then Leningrad in January 1934.
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District isn’t exactly HMS Pinafore. It’s a hard-hitting, sometimes grotesque, often violent and erotic spectacular. It’s exciting and powerful, but you couldn’t call it tuneful, or a laugh a minute. Although the story, which concerns a faithless wife who murders her husband, ends up in a Siberian labour camp with her lover, then kills herself, was set in the days of the hated former regime, it must have been crystal clear to its audiences that not much had changed. Indeed, when Stalin, Molotov and a coven of other Party leaders went to the Bolshoi Theatre to see it in December 1935, the same thought occurred to them. They walked out in disgust.
A few days later, the official newspaper of the Party, Pravda, published a stinging attack – thought at the time to have been written by Stalin himself – on Lady Macbeth and its composer, headlined ‘Chaos instead of music’. It described the music as ‘fidgety, screaming and neurotic’, and as a ‘confused stream of sound’. The story was caricatured as ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’. Another venomous article appeared the following week. Shostakovich was denounced by the Soviet Composers’ Union, and then came a deluge of public criticism – even from former friends and colleagues. A few months later he was summoned to the ‘Big House’, the headquarters of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. Many walked through its doors over the course of the 1930s; not many walked out again. (To put this terror in context, between January 1935 and June 1941 official figures claim arrests by the NKVD of just under twenty million people, of which an estimated seven million were executed.) The secret police wanted Shostakovich to answer questions about his friendship with Marshal Tukhachevsky, formerly head of the Red Army, who was being set up for a show trial. He was interrogated on a Friday and told to return on the Monday. In anticipation of his own arrest and almost certain death in the gulag, Shostakovich packed his bags, but in a bizarre twist that was strangely typical of Stalin’s looking-glass world, he was saved by the fact that the NKVD official himself had been ‘purged’ over the weekend.
Clearly, whatever Shostakovich did next was going to seal his fate one way or another. He shelved his newly completed fourth symphony, sensing that its dark modernity might make matters worse, and for a while retreated to the relative safety of film scoring. The work that eventually emerged from all this anguish, his fifth symphony, premièred in November 1937, is now recognised as one of the classical masterpieces of the twentieth century. Shostakovich edged back from his previous gloom and dissonance, composing a more ‘traditional’-style symphony of four contrasting movements, progressing in them from grim, layered anxiety in the first to a triumphant conclusion in the fourth. The symphony’s first audiences were unanimous in their loud approval of it, with extraordinarily emotional scenes at each performance. To the concert-going public, hanging on desperately to some kind of sanity in the midst of Stalin’s murderous, arbitrary repression, the symphony offered a glimmer of hope and, interpreting the music’s journey from struggle to resolution, some kind of defiance. Written in the teeth of the terror, it is an astounding testament of its time. It also, miraculously and without doubt, saved his life. The Party endorsed it.
It is easy, from the comfort and distance of our own time, to judge high-profile Soviet-era composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev for not being more outspoken against Stalin, but they knew well enough what resistance meant in a time of purges. Leaving the USSR between 1936 and the end of the Second World War, in the way Bartók was able to leave Hungary, or film-music pioneers Erich Korngold and Franz Waxman were able to escape the Third Reich, was all but impossible. Whether it is indeed possible to detect a challenge to authority in any abstract piece of music without being given prior non-musical information is debatable, and both Party officials and early audiences of the fifth symphony would have been well aware of Shostakovich’s own public description of his forthcoming work as ‘a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism’. Of course, this did not stop contemporary commentators – nor modern ones – from imputing quasi-narratives to Shostakovich’s fifth, as had been the case with Beethoven’s Eroica and Mahler’s fifth (a clear model for Shostakovich’s fifth), and hundreds of other pieces whose only descriptive clues lie in their directed performance speeds. Thus one contemporary composer and critic, Boris Asafiev, claimed: ‘This unsettled, sensitive, evocative music which inspires such gigantic conflict comes across as a true account of the problems facing modern man – not one individual or several, but mankind.’
Shostakovich himself fuelled speculation as to the ‘meaning’ of his fifth symphony by saying, cryptically, in later, safer years: ‘I’ll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.’ That a debate still continues, seventy-five years later, as to whether the ‘triumph’ at the end of the final movement is a genuine triumph or a parody of triumph reveals how tricky analysing abstract music and making assumptions about it can be.
Whatever agonies Shostakovich and Prokofiev may have endured during the Stalinist terror, and however these agonies may have played themselves out in their music, what ca
nnot be denied is the two composers’ solidarity for and love of Russia and its people, whoever was in charge. So when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the agendas of Stalin and his composers were abruptly realigned. Composers’ purpose, and cause, became patriotism.
Perhaps the most extreme example of a large-scale work of patriotic purpose was Shostakovich’s seventh symphony, Leningrad, premièred in March 1942 and dedicated to the people of his home city, who were at that time enduring an apocalyptic siege by the German Army Group North and their Finnish allies. Shostakovich had composed some of the symphony in Leningrad itself – modern-day St Petersburg – before his evacuation on official orders. It began life as a single, long, exhaustingly forceful movement, but Shostakovich, in a white heat of besieged inspiration, fleshed it out to a further three movements. Although the threat of official denouncement and censure was safely in the past – or so Shostakovich innocently thought – Leningrad nevertheless took the accessible, martial masculinity of the final movement of his fifth symphony as its stylistic starting point. Again, Mahler is all-present in the first and subsequent movements, but this time there is no doubt whatever as to the sincerity of the triumph with which the finale concludes.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 31