HEALTHY PESSIMISM 0428
Thanks to a decree from the Central Committee of
the Communist Party, Soviet music took some hardknocks in 1948. Four major
composers were accused of writing “formalistic” music that didn’t serve the
needs of the people, the result being that their music was blacklisted from
performance.
The four were Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei
Prokofiev, Aram Kachaturian and Nikolai Miaskovsky.
The accusations were so serious that after
conducting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony
for what he presumed would be the last time, Evgeny Mravinsky kissed the score
and held it high above his head.
The faultfinding trickled down into every aspect of
music.
At the same time, pianist Dmitry Paperno was a
student at Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory. At first, he and his
classmates found it entertaining to see professors accusing each other of
kowtowing to the West, but after a while it became apparent that awful things
were going on before their eyes. Often as not, the charges came from people
who knew nothing about music. Often the accusers had something to gain from
bringing down the accused.
Paperno particularly admired Miaskovsky, a greatly
respected composer and teacher accused of writing music imbued with a “pessimism
void of ideas”. He grew angry as he heard the charges repeated by accusers who
obviously had been rehearsed.
The dreary litany came with only one moment of
comic relief, when a fellow musician, slightly tipsy, made his way onstage, stamped
his foot and said to the audience, “You see, comrades, his isn’t the kind of
pessimism to condemn – it’s our healthy Soviet pessimism”.
Dmitry Paperno tells the story in his Notes of a
Moscow Pianist.
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