The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  On March 16, 1949, Shostakovich answered the telephone and was told that Stalin was coming on the line. “Thank you, everything is fine,” Shostakovich was heard to say. This was in answer to a series of questions about his health. The topic changed to America. Shostakovich had reluctantly agreed to travel to the United States the following month as part of a Soviet cultural and scientific delegation, but he had trouble understanding how he could represent Soviet culture abroad when so many of his compositions were forbidden at home. Boldly, he put the issue to Stalin. “How do you mean forbidden?” Stalin asked in turn. “Forbidden by whom?” Shostakovich named the responsible authority—Glavrepertkom. Stalin told him there must have been a mistake and that nothing prevented performances of his music.

  Later that day, the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. not only rescinded the ban on “formalist” works but reprimanded Glavrepertkom for its mistake. The document was signed by Stalin himself. Shostakovich wrote another letter of thanks, saying, “You supported me very much.” He could breathe again, he told one of his students.

  Yet Shostakovich achieved this sense of security only by splitting his creative persona down the middle. In his propaganda works, he assumed an optimistic mask, though the smile was halfhearted. Already in 1948, Khrennikov was sufficiently impressed by Shostakovich’s film score for The Young Guard that in a year-end review of the activities of the accused formalists he placed Shostakovich in the “most successful” category. (Prokofiev, on the other hand, was condemmed for his latest, last, and worst opera, Story of a Real Man.) Even more humiliatingly effective was the music for The Fall of Berlin, which one film scholar has called the “ultimate Stalinist film.” One can only guess what passed through the composer’s head when he sat down to score a scene of Stalin cultivating trees in his garden—an image that was possibly intended to recall God walking in Eden.

  In a slew of patriotic cantatas and mass songs, Shostakovich kept recycling gestures from the Fifth Symphony’s finale. The ending of Song of the Forests (1949) catalogs the glories of the motherland, Stalin chief among them: at the words “Glory to the wise Stalin” the timpani begin pounding in fourths while the brass play a stepwise rising fanfare. In The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland (1952), the timpani fourths are cued to the word “Communisti.” Shostakovich almost certainly felt shame at having to parody himself in this fashion. According to his pupil Galina Ustvolskaya, after the premiere of Song of the Forests he collapsed on a bed and burst into tears.

  The “other Shostakovich” was a gnomic, cryptic, secretly impassioned figure who spoke through chamber music (twelve string quartets from 1948 on), piano music (the epic cycle of Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues), and songs. The string quartet became his favorite medium: it gave him the freedom to write labyrinthine narratives full of blankly winding fugues, near-motionless funeral marches, wry displays of folkish jollity, off-kilter genre exercises, and stretches of deliberate blandness. One of the composer’s favorite modes might be called “dance on the gallows”—a galumphing, almost polka-like number that suggests a solitary figure facing death with inexplicable glee. Just such an image appears in Robert Burns’s poem “McPherson’s Farewell,” which Shostakovich set to music in the 1942 cycle Six Romances on Texts of W. Raleigh, R. Burns, and W. Shakespeare. The setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 comes close to delivering a direct commentary on the situation of art under Stalin:

  And art made tongue-tied by authority,

  And folly doctor-like controlling skill,

  And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,

  And captive good attending captain ill…

  Interestingly, four years before the Nazi invasion, the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger visited the Soviet Union and produced a tract titled Moscow 1937. It contained an apologia for the purge trials, and Stalin had it reprinted in mass quantities. In one section, though, Feuchtwanger ventured mild criticism of Soviet censorship of the arts. Among other things, he wrote, “an extraordinarily good opera was banned.” Set off in the margins were the words “And art made tongue-tied by authority.”

  Only after Stalin was gone did Shostakovich try to reunite his divided selves. The Tenth Symphony, written in the summer and fall of 1953, in the months following Stalin’s death, might communicate, like the Fifth, all that the composer had “thought and felt” in recent years. In the last movement, Shostakovich seems to be trying to talk himself into writing a positive, life-goes-on conclusion, but the celebration becomes hysterical and overwrought. The self-referential D S C H theme sounds so often that it becomes a cliché, an obnoxious jingle. Rapid up-and-down flourishes in the winds and strings echo the march movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, another somber-minded composer’s attempt at joy. Underneath, the timpani punch out D S C H one last time, the tones dissolving in a blur.

  The musicologist Marina Sabinina linked this ending to Shostakovich’s account of his speech at the 1948 conference, in which he compared himself to a “cut-out paper doll on a string.” She writes, “This motif sounds strange and mechanical, lifeless but persistent, just as if the composer had, with terror and revulsion, seen himself as a puppet.” She connected that scene to an anecdote about Gogol—the author’s “habit of long and continuous self-contemplation in front of a mirror, when, completely self-absorbed, he would repeatedly call out his own name with a sense of alienation and revulsion.” Still, the puppet survives, even enjoys a kind of victory. Perhaps this is how Shostakovich felt when the news of Stalin’s death reached him.

  The long-awaited announcement was made on the morning of March 6, 1953. Moscow promptly dissolved into chaos: thousands of people swarmed around the Hall of Columns, where Stalin’s corpse was on view, and several hundred were trampled to death. So momentous was the news that Pravda did not bother to report for another five days the fact that Sergei Prokofiev had also passed away. Sviatoslav Richter heard the news of Prokofiev’s death while flying back to Moscow to perform at Stalin’s funeral; he was the only passenger on a plane filled with wreaths.

  About thirty people showed up to bid Prokofiev farewell. The Beethoven Quartet was instructed to play Tchaikovsky, although Prokofiev never liked Tchaikovsky; the quartet then disappeared into the mob to play the same music for Stalin. The hearse was not allowed near Prokofiev’s house, so the coffin had to be moved by hand, through and around streets that were blocked by crowds and tanks. As the masses moved toward the Hall of Columns along one avenue, Prokofiev’s body was carried in the opposite direction down an empty street.

  Shostakovich was among the mourners. He and Prokofiev had grown closer in the preceding years, especially since 1948. Prokofiev’s final scores, more tentative in construction but still pulsing with lyric power, fascinated Shostakovich as he set about finding new paths for his own music. In October 1952, after the premiere of Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, a gentle, wistful withdrawal from the world, Shostakovich sent along a touching and unusually direct letter of congratulation: “I wish you at least another hundred years to live and create. Listening to such works as your Seventh Symphony makes it much easier and more joyful to live.” Five months later, he was photographed standing over Prokofiev’s body, his face inscrutable and blank.

  8

  MUSIC FOR ALL

  Music in FDR’s America

  In 1934, Arnold Schoenberg moved to California, bought a Ford sedan, and declared, “I was driven into Paradise.” By the beginning of the forties, when the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and their respective satellites controlled Europe from Madrid to Warsaw, crowds of cultural luminaries sought refuge in the United States, and they were greeted by a significant irony. Europeans had long depicted America as a wilderness of vulgarity; the cult of the dollar had driven Gustav Mahler to an early grave, or so his widow claimed. Now, with Europe in the grip of totalitarianism, America had unexpectedly become the last hope of civilization. The impresario and Zionist activist Meyer Weisgal, in a telegram to the Austrian director Max Reinhardt, put it this way: “IF
HITLER DOESN’T WANT YOU I’LL TAKE YOU.” Many leading composers of the early twentieth century—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, and Eisler, among others—settled in the United States. Entire artistic communities of Paris, Berlin, and the former St. Petersburg reconstituted themselves in neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles. Alma Mahler was herself among the refugees; she escaped the German invasion of France by hiking across the Pyrenees with her latest husband, Franz Werfel, and by the end of 1940 she was living on Los Tilos Road in the Hollywood Hills.

  That such disparate personalities as the White Russian Stravinsky and the hard-core Communist Eisler could feel temporarily at home in America was a tribute to the inclusive spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as president from 1933 until his death in 1945. A patrician with a populist flair, Roosevelt embodied what came to be known as the “middlebrow” vision of American culture—the idea that democratic capitalism operating at full tilt could still accommodate high culture of the European variety.

  Back in 1915, the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” between “academic pedantry and pavement slang.” He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power. In the thirties, the middlebrow became something like a national pastime: symphonic music was broadcast on the radio, literary properties furnished plots for Hollywood A pictures, novels by Thomas Mann and other émigrés were disseminated through the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  The influx of European genius coincided with an upsurge of native composition. Pay no heed to the muses of Europe, Ralph Waldo Emerson had told American artists and intellectuals in 1837; by the 1940s the muses were studying for U.S. citizenship exams, and young American composers had found their voice. Aaron Copland wrote music in praise of the Wild West, Abraham Lincoln, rodeos, and Mexican saloons. Alongside Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, Marc Blitzstein, and other more or less like-minded colleagues, Copland reached out to a new mass public with the aid of radio, recording, and film, and, surprisingly, the U.S. government itself. The Works Progress Administration, inaugurated in 1935, launched an ambitious scheme of federal arts projects, and some ninety-five million people were said to have attended presentations by the Federal Music Project over a two-and-a-half-year period. The democratic masses were evidently taking hold of an art that had long been the property of the elite.

  Hence the exhilaration that Blitzstein felt in 1936, when he wrote an article titled “Coming—the Mass Audience!” for the magazine Modern Music: “The great mass of people enter at last the field of serious music. Radio is responsible, the talkies, the summer concerts, a growing appetite, a hundred things; really the fact of an art and a world in progress. You can no more stop it than you can stop an avalanche.”

  The mass audience came, but it did not remain. No sooner had classical music entered the mainstream arena than it began to face insurmountable obstacles. One problem was political. Populists of Blitzstein’s type subscribed not just to the vaguely social-democratic rhetoric of Roosevelt’s New Deal but also to the semi-Communistic doctrines of the Popular Front. When the New Deal came under political attack in 1938, Roosevelt promptly retreated, letting the federal arts projects collapse, and suddenly the picture was a lot less pretty.

  There was the deeper problem of classical music’s true place in American culture. At some level Americans did not seem to believe that a Europe-based art form could speak for their condition; to most, Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman was a more convincing musical answer to Emerson’s demand for an American Scholar. Yet Copland and others of his generation succeeded in forging sounds so charged with patriotic feeling that they endure in movies and the media today. During the Depression and the Second World War, classical music, whether in the form of Beethoven symphonies or Copland ballets, encapsulated America’s we’re all-in-this-together spirit; it showed how individual efforts could be pooled together in a “common discipline,” as Roosevelt said in his inaugural speech of 1933. That music has not lost its binding power. Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio for Strings plays on the radio.

  Radio Music

  Three major technological advances altered the musical landscape from the twenties onward. First, electrical recording allowed for sound quality of unprecedented richness and dynamic range. Second, radio transmission allowed for the live broadcast of music coast to coast. Third, sound was added to motion pictures. Common to all these breakthroughs was the innovation of the microphone, which had the effect of freeing classical music from the elite concert halls in which it had long been confined, and, consequently, from the domain of city dwellers and the wealthy. The millions whom Beethoven longed to embrace in his “Ode to Joy” showed up in the Hooper ratings—up to ten million for Arturo Toscanini’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony, and millions more for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

  Electrical recording set off a rush to rerecord the classics of the orchestral repertory. Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra led the way with a disc of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre in July 1925. Toscanini was not far behind, and with the publicity machine of the radio-recording conglomerate of NBC and RCA behind him he would go on to sell some twenty million records. NBC’s first nationwide radio broadcast took place in November 1926; it carried a concert by the New York Symphony under the direction of Walter Damrosch, a genial conductor and lecturer who was to become a radio star in his own right. A rival network, CBS, inaugurated its existence in 1927 with Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchman. Sound film created new careers for a host of composers, who fleshed out on-screen action with orchestral brouhaha. Contrary to legend, Al Jolson’s cry of “Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” was not America’s first experience of the power of sound film; in 1926, Warner Brothers created a nationwide sensation by releasing a film of Don Juan with rousing synchronized accompaniment by the New York Philharmonic.

  To some extent, the radio vogue for classical music was imposed on the American public from above. One reason for the trend was utilitarian: the networks feared a government takeover of the radio industry, and by broadcasting classical music they could make a gesture toward “public service” and thus stave off the threat. Another reason was cultural: radio and record-company executives were naturally inclined to support classical programming, whether or not audience surveys demanded it. Many were émigrés or the first-generation offspring of immigrant families, and they considered Beethoven and Tchaikovsky a birthright. The radio pioneer David Sarnoff, who grew up in the same New York Russian-Jewish communities that produced George Gershwin, had declared back in 1915 that one of the advantages of the “radio music box” was that rural listeners would be able to enjoy symphonies by the fireplace. By 1921 Sarnoff had become general manager of the Radio Corporation of America, and five years later he created NBC. All along, he insisted that radio should aspire to class and culture. “I regard radio as a sort of cleansing instrument for the mind,” he once said, “just as the bathtub is for the body.”

  Yet, even without the prompting of the radio executives, Americans of the period avidly sought the cultural improvement that classical music was presumed to provide. The middlebrow ideal was to be sophisticated without being pretentious, worldly but not effete, and classical music with an American accent fit the bill. NBC’s “Blue” network might carry Ohio State versus Indiana one afternoon and a Lotte Lehmann recital the next. Benny Goodman recorded both Mozart and swing. The classically trained composer Morton Gould appeared on radio as the star of the Cresta Blanca Carnival, and Harold Shapero switched between swing arrangements and neoclassical composition. Alan Shulman, a cellist in the NBC Symphony, composed “serious” works, joined an NBC jazz ensemble called New Friends of Rhythm (“Toscanini’s Hep Cats,” they were called), and mentored the master pop arranger Nelson Riddle.

  There was no bigger
star of radio than Toscanini himself, whom Sarnoff introduced to the national NBC audience on Christmas Day 1937. At the close of the first season, the New York Times editorialized ponderously that “Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Sibelius, Brahms are made manifest in many a remote farmhouse and in many a plain home.” Sarnoff’s radio idyll was complete.

  The trouble was that Toscanini could not make classical music American. As the Times’s list of names suggested, the Maestro’s canon was focused on European composers and stopped short of the present, Sibelius having fallen silent. During his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, from 1926 to 1936, Toscanini had ignored American music week after week, conducting only six native works in ten years. He evinced little interest in living composers of any nationality, apart from a few Italians whom he knew personally. At NBC, his taste broadened slightly, and a smattering of American pieces—Roy Harris’s Third Symphony, Copland’s El Salón México, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Gershwin’s An American in Paris, among others—appeared on his programs. On a typical night, though, Beethoven and Brahms prevailed.

  Two other celebrity conductors—Leopold Stokowski, who served briefly as co-conductor of the NBC Symphony, and Serge Koussevitzky, who led the Boston Symphony—treated new and American works far more respectfully. “Dee next Beethoven vill from Colorado come,” Koussevitzky declared. By the end of his twenty-five-year reign in Boston, the Russian émigré had hosted an astounding 85 premieres of American scores and 195 American works altogether. He also commissioned such international masterpieces as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. Stokowski, who had promoted Edgard Varèse and other ultra-moderns back in the twenties, introduced two big new Schoenberg works, the Violin Concerto and the Piano Concerto. Between them, Stokowski and Koussevitzky created much of the core repertory of the mid-twentieth century. Yet they failed to stimulate the radio executives and the corporate heads who bought advertising. Stokowski’s advocacy of new music reportedly alarmed the higher-ups at General Motors, which had begun sponsoring the NBC Symphony. A few months after the premiere of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, it was announced that Stokowski’s contract would not be renewed, and composers lost their most forceful advocate.