Summary

Summary

The present book is the first attempt to reconstruct the reception of classical musical heritage in the Soviet era.

The process of creating new and overthrowing old meanings of classical music showed a powerful potential for ‘myth-building’: its aim was to form a new image of the old art and, in the final account, to develop a futurological project of new art. This new art and, more importantly, the society that had to be represented by it, could be legitimized only if the ‘myth-building’ model had its roots in the great tradition. Hence, the musical mythology of the Soviet era was centred on the question of classics taken in two different, though interconnected senses: the classical musical art of the past had to be ideologically reconsidered in order to become a foundation for the classical music of the future.

The present study’s subject matter is just the specific situation of classical music in the Soviet culture, namely the peculiar mythology of music, which interpreted in new ways the place and the mission of classical music, as well as the music’s inherent meanings. This new ‘mythology of music’, like the previous, Romantic one, found its most complete expression first of all in verbal form.

Through verbal commentaries on music the Soviet ideology ‘appropriated’ the classical musical heritage. The new political doctrine was gradually building its cultural genealogy, captiously picking out the names of great artists of the past, deemed appropriate for such an ideological task, and imposing on their work the artistic and ideological concepts that corresponded to the requirements of a given political moment. The new image of classics was based on a simplified and popularized notion of it; and it was just this new image that served as the foundation of the Soviet musical culture.

The ‘word on music’, however, can be expressed in non-verbal forms as well. Metaphorically speaking, the ‘word’ or the utterance on music (or else its semantic interpretation) can be represented also by a visual image. Theatre and cinema can do it in various ways, supporting the visual aspect with verbal texts. The visual aspect, just as the verbal one, reflects the already existing structure of mythological notions and at the same time continues moulding it. New musical works, too, can function as commentaries on their predecessors. That is why the materials used for this study include a large array of texts – musical-critical and musicological essays, political documents, musical and literary works, movies, sources in the history of Soviet theatre – each type of text interpreting the meanings of classical music in its own manner. This reflects the principle of Soviet cultural policy, according to which music, just as any other art, had to enter the mass market, to cease being esoteric or ‘closed’, to expose its meanings so that they could be verbalized and, hence, interpreted with the use of various artistic means. Thus, the pressure of legitimized semantic interpretations of the classical heritage on the audience’s (as well as on professional musicians’) perception was all-embracing.

The present study deals with the ‘Soviet destinies’ of those classical composers whose music was allowed by the regime’s ideological services to play part in the genealogy of Soviet culture. The book’s Introduction (‘Social Darwinism in Soviet Musicology’) explores the ideological and aesthetical foundations of the reduction of classical heritage in the Soviet musicology according to the principle of ‘natural selection’. Chapter 1 (‘A Difficult Choice of Precursors’) surveys the most important personalities included into the ‘classical music’ canon during the early Soviet period and the era of mature Stalinism; the evolution from the ‘reduction of the list of names’ to the ‘reduction of the meanings of classical works’ is analyzed. The next chapters are devoted to separate figures advanced to the forefront of the Soviet ‘work on classics’: Beethoven (Chapter 2, ‘Proletarians of All Countries, Embrace!’), Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov (Chapter 3, ‘Sinking of the Holy Grail’), Glinka (Chapter 4, ‘Tale of Susanin the Hero and Glinka the Decembrist’), Tchaikovsky (Chapter 5, ‘Tchaikovsky Reforged’). The order of the chapters is partly conditioned by chronology. Thus, the history of the Soviet adaptation of Beethoven’s and Wagner’s oeuvre started as early as the first years after the Revolution; in the early 1930s, however, any excessive concentration on German matters became problematic. The key year for the final solution of ‘the Beethoven problem’ (after which the latter became less critical and even almost non-topical) was 1936 – the year of ‘Stalin’s Constitution’, when the process of ‘working on Beethoven’ virtually came to an end. The ‘Wagner problem’ was resolved in a different – definitely negative – way with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War: Wagner’s heritage was expunged from the official culture and, as a result, driven into the ‘spiritual underground’. On the contrary, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, being among the first classics whose work was ‘reduced’ after the Revolution as useless for the cause of proletariat, were ‘rehabilitated’ by the late 1930s and early 1940s, gaining a foothold in the Soviet culture as the ‘lawgivers’ of Soviet classical music.

Thus, the present study explores the principles and mechanisms of the ‘reduction’ of classical heritage that took place during the Soviet era, surveys the results of its influence on the perception of music by mass audiences and on the development of Soviet art in general, reveals its role in the formation of the concept of ‘Soviet culture’. The historical context of the popularization of classical music in the Soviet culture is analyzed in detail, as is the formation of the image of classical music that still affects not only the mass consciousness, but also the musical education.

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