Shostakovich’s ‘Lenin Project’: The ‘Pre-Twelfth’ Symphony

Although Dmitri Shostakovich repeatedly spoke at various points during his life of writing a musical work on the life and legacy of Lenin, it never materialised—leading some commentators to suggest that this was merely a ruse adopted by the composer to placate the authorities. The present chapter draws on the author’s extensive archives researches in the Shostakovich Archive to demonstrate that the contrary appears to be the case—and that Shostakovich appears to have made several serious attempts to realise this project, including an abandoned version of the Twelfth Symphony. She also examines the veracity of the colourful memoirs by the Soviet composer Lev Lebedinsky, who claimed that Shostakovich had intended to write a satirical work about the Bolshevik leader.

From Enlightened to Sublime: Musical Life under Stalin, 1930–1948

The years 1937–53 are generally thought of as stagnant ones for Soviet concert repertoire. This view, however, is predicated on a number of assumptions: first, that the drop in Western modernism in the schedules and its replacement by Soviet works had a stultifying effect on concert life; second, that the era of Socialist Realism was damagingly insular; and third, that cultural exchange ceased and Soviet composers lost touch with what was being composed in the West. This chapter challenges all those assumptions by analysing concert schedules of this period, presenting evidence of semi-formal/informal cultural exchange and considering the notion that Socialist Realism was not an isolated trend but part of a large-scale shift in European and American art whose importance has been side-lined in a still dominant cultural narrative of technical progress and complexity.

The Phenomenon of ‘Translation’ in Russian Musical Culture of the 1920s and Early 1930s: The Quest for a Soviet Musical Identity

This chapter examines the problematic attempts to evolve a new Soviet musical culture on the basis of extant musical traditions, and the debates concerning how musical material of earlier periods could be transformed in a way that would render it suitable for use by Soviet composers. Musical ‘speech’ was regarded as an analogue of verbal communication and subjected to philological ‘decoding’ in quest for a new kind of musical rhetoric. The chapter concludes by examining Soviet debates about the possibility of ‘translating’ between musical words into words, and what this reveals about the constructs of Soviet identity that were in the process of formation at the period.

The Adventures of Soviet Music in the West: Historical Highlights

This chapter deals with the history of Soviet music’s relations with the outside world from the mid-1920s until the end of the millennium. During all these decades the Soviet musical production of any coloration was perceived by the free Western world as something largely strange or alien, often exotic, almost ‘barbarian’. The inevitable spiritual distance between the Soviet world and the ‘non-Soviet’ one resulted in some significant misunderstandings. Though some important recent publications by Western musicologists display a well qualified view on the music and musical life in the Soviet Union, the traces of past naiveties and/or prejudices are still felt quite often even in the writings of major specialists.

Russian Musicological Scholarship of the Last Two Decades: Achievements and Lacunae

In the last two decades, the discipline of Russian music studies in Russia has undergone a profound transformation. The lifting of restrictions on access to hitherto inaccessible archival materials has made a wealth of new information available, and, in conjunction with the accompanying relaxation of censorship and increased contact with the West, has had far-reaching implications for scholarship. Open discussion of many aspects of the country’s musical past which were hitherto erased from standard Soviet accounts became possible, enabling the distortions and mendacities of Soviet scholarship to be corrected. The present chapter details some of the most significant achievements of Russian musicology in recent years, as well as the problems created by the challenging material conditions in which research on Russian music has to take place.

Glinka in Soviet and Post-Soviet Historiography: Myths, Realities and Ideologies

The advent of glasnost’ prompted a reassessment of many aspects of Russia’s musical past, especially in regard of key figures such as the composer Mikhail Glinka. The revisionism that swept Glinka scholarship in Russia itself thereafter promised much: new and better understanding of Glinka and his music, investigation of previously forbidden topics and reassessment of the sources. Although recent Russian studies have sought to re-contextualise and to reappraise the composer’s life and works in relation to the Western European musical tradition, problematically, this revisionist scholarship tends to fall victim to the clichés that it would seek to avoid: Glinka’s divergence from selected models is generally attributed not to his personal style, but to his Russianness, forcing us to perpetuate the myth of Glinka’s musical uniqueness vis-à-vis his nationality.

The Idea of the 1920s in Russian Music Today

This chapter examines evocations of the early Soviet avant-garde in new compositions of the post-Soviet period, investigating how contemporary Russian composers imagine the modernist culture of the pre-Stalinist past and its significance. It is based upon interviews conducted by the author with contemporary Russian composers and analyses of recent musical works. As we will see, composers relate to the early Soviet avant-garde in a variety of ways. Importantly, attitudes to the 1920s are not merely celebratory: even some of the individuals today most interested in the early Soviet avant-garde see a dark side to its legacy, finding within modernist art of the Soviet 1920s disturbing messages about Russia’s fate or the course of the twentieth century, or even more sinister prophecies of larger tragedies to come.

Defining Diaspora through Culture: Russian Émigré Composers in a Globalising World

This article explores how the Russian émigré composers, no longer required to nurture the nation-constituting loyalties, forge, negotiate and sustain multi-stranded individual relationships both with the transnational powers and with their native country, reclaiming cultural rather than territorial attachments which grow from psychological constructs rather than social conditions. It is revealing to observe that most of them continue to remain culturally tied to their country of origin and to long for its aesthetic values, while at the same time building civic attachments and hybrid identities in the globalised world. Based on empirical studies, this chapter considers how the reflections of post-Soviet identity shape these composers’ creative output and how the composers form relationships with their old and new neighbours.

Is there a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?

Departing from an article by Arthur Lourié published in 1931 which posits a fundamental split between the music produced by Russian composers in the Soviet Union and that produced by Russian composers living abroad as émigrés—and asserts that the latter, not the former, are the ones producing the true Russian music of the day—this paper considers (in the light of Marc Raeff’s Russia Abroad and its treatment of émigré culture) what it takes to maintain a cultural community in diaspora, and whether expatriated Russian musicians have ever constituted such a community.

The Stalinist Opera Project

This chapter focuses on the concerted attempts made during the Stalinist era to create a repertory of new Soviet operas on Socialist Realist lines—a project in which the dictator is known to have attached great importance. In spite of the resources lavished on the Bolshoi Theatre to help it realise this aim, the project proved an abysmal failure: scarcely any of the works commissioned made it onto the stage, either because of their artistic mediocrity or because they fell foul of the censor. This episode is a dramatic illustration of the counterproductive effects of state interference in artistic life.