Another excellent article by Ian Pace, in London Review of Books, 10 March 2022:
Why cancel Tchaikovsky?
The
conductor Valery Gergiev, a known ally of Vladimir Putin who appeared in one of
his election campaign videos, has had concerts and contracts cancelled with the
Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Vienna and Munich Philharmonic Orchestras,
La Scala Opera House in Milan, the Edinburgh Festival, the Verbier Festival and
more. The soprano Anna Netrebko, facing the prospect of similar prohibitions,
has cancelled all performances until further notice. She has spoken admiringly
of Putin and posed with the flag of pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists.
The Royal
Opera House and the Met have cancelled appearances from the Bolshoi and
Mariinsky Ballets. Piano competitions in Dublin and Calgary have refused to
accept Russian competitors. The amateur Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has
withdrawn a Tchaikovsky concert including the 1812 Overture. The
Swiss Théâtre Orchestre of Bienne Soleure has cancelled its remaining
performances of Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa.
Some Russian
musicians, including the pianists Evgeny Kissin and Alexander Melnikov, the
conductors Vasily Petrenko and Semyon Bychkov, and the soprano Natalia
Pschenitschnikova, have spoken out against the war. They do not face
cancellations. At the same time there have been efforts to lionise music and
musicians who can be categorised as Ukrainian rather than Russian, difficult
though it may be in some cases to make a clear distinction.
There’s
nothing new about the enlisting of music and musicians to political causes.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, the centenary of Beethoven’s birth, his music was presented in Germany as
embodying purity, health, strength and moral soundness, in contrast with the
alleged moral decline, debilitated health and decadence of French culture.
From the
other side, following the outbreak of the First World War, Debussy wrote to a pupil that ‘we are going to pay
dearly for the right to dislike the music of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg’
and ‘French art needs to take revenge quite as seriously as the French army
does!’ He began to call himself musicien français and
developed a new musical idiom rooted in ideals of antiquity and classicism,
further away from Germanic music (especially that of Wagner) than previously.
During the
Second World War, by contrast, the British pianist Myra Hess gave regular
concerts at the National Gallery in London, even at the height of the Blitz,
often playing Austro-German music, including Beethoven.
At the end
of the war, however, the situation became more complicated again. German
composers, conductors and performers including Richard Strauss, Hans
Pfitzner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugene Jochum, Walter Gieseking and
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf found themselves under intense suspicion and their
ability to perform limited. Denazification was applied inconsistently:
Gieseking for a while could perform in the French Zone but not the British or
American ones; Carl Orff found himself unable to work in Munich, but permitted
in Stuttgart, where one of the local theatre and music officers was one of his
former students – both cities were under US administration.
Less
suspicion fell on compromised citizens of other nations, such as the Romanian
conductor George Georgescu or pianist Dinu Lipatti, who had undertaken concert
tours of areas occupied by Nazi Germany, or the Japanese conductor Hidemaro
Konoye, who regularly conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and even recorded
the Horst-Wessel-Lied with them. Many key figures
involved in the development of new music in Germany after 1945 were also
presumed to belong to a realm apart from Nazism, such as Werner Meyer-Eppler,
the phoneticist, physicist, proponent of electronic music and teacher of Stockhausen. But Meyer-Eppler had been a prominent figure
in the Nationalsozialistische Fliegerkorps, and one of a group of elite
scientists working on major military programmes during the last year of the
war. The British occupiers forbade him from working at his university in Bonn.
Only by reinventing himself as a different type of scholar, looking at
phonetics and speech synthesis (without which the history of elektronische Musik might have been very
different), could Meyer-Eppler return to a full university position.
Most of
these musicians had been involved in activities that in some sense glorified or
propagandised for a genocidal regime. Yet concerns quickly receded,
denazification was relaxed, and German conducting in particular was dominated
for decades after the war by men with tainted personal and political histories.
The Cold War quickly became a much more charged arena. The propaganda value of
music competitions had been apparent to the Central Committee of the Communist
Party since Lev Oborin’s victory at the first International Frederyk Chopin Piano
Competition in Warsaw in 1927. There was a shock when the first International
Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was won by the Texan pianist Van
Cliburn, who had studied with the Russian exile pianist Rosina Lhévinne at the
Juilliard School in New York. Cliburn became a US national hero,
receiving a ticker-tape parade for his triumphant return home. The Soviets paid
increased attention to their strategy for selecting competitors. The
competitions had become not only about the finest performers, but which
political system was better for nurturing talent.
Soviet
musicians’ international travel was carefully limited. Sviatoslav Richter, born
in Ukraine, was not allowed to visit the West until 1960, at the age of 45,
because his father, of German origin, had been arrested as a suspected spy in
Odesa in 1941 and executed. Other pianists such as Maria Yudina, Vladimir
Sofronitsky or Samuil Feinberg were rarely if ever allowed to travel, and
became known to a few Westerners only through hard-to-obtain recordings made in
the Soviet Union. Those who defected, including the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy
and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, received intense attention as propaganda for
the greater artistic freedom claimed by the West. When Soviet musicians did manage
to travel, their concerts were often embroiled with politics. After the
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 there were demonstrations outside a
performance by the State Orchestra of the USSR at the Proms
in London. A planned British tour by the violinist David Oistrakh in 1971 was
cancelled following tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, journalists and
academics by the UK and the Soviet Union. In the
late 1980s, musical and ballet events by Soviet artists in San Francisco were
met with protests as part of a campaign against the USSR’s policies preventing Jewish emigration to Israel.
The state
control of music-making in Putin’s Russia is not on a level with Nazi Germany
or the Soviet Union. A musician does not automatically ‘represent’ the country
or the regime, though the opportunities for those still in Russia to speak out
against the government are already limited and likely to become more so.
Putin’s nationalism differs in some respects from that of the 19th-century, when ‘Westernisers’ and ‘Slavophiles’ argued
about the country’s musical future as well as its interactions with the West.
But it cannot be wholly separated from those roots, which informed the musical
language of Musorgsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and to an extent Tchaikovsky,
some aspects of which were perceived as specifically ‘Russian’, opposed in
particular to what were thought to be Germanic norms.
During a
time of war, it is inevitable and not necessarily inappropriate to limit some
cultural interactions with an enemy nation, not least as part of a strategy of
isolating an aggressor. If Russians cannot compete in international sporting
events, should musical competitions be different? Is it any more unreasonable
to want to postpone a performance of the bombastic and militaristic 1812 Overture than it was for the British
conductor Mark Elder to express doubts about conducting the Last Night of the
Proms following the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War? (Elder was promptly
replaced.)
Moral and
aesthetic considerations cannot be assumed to mirror one another. Too little
has been said about the roots of Geräusch-Musik (noise
music) in the militaristic and misogynistic worldview of Fascist-aligned
Italian futurists, in particular Luigi Russolo; this is a vital consideration,
but I would not wish the whole genre to be dismissed as a result. Conversely,
there is no reason to expect ‘good’ people to produce important art, or that
works which explicitly align themselves to a worthy cause – as with countless
9/11 memorial pieces; no doubt more than one lachrymose ‘Lament for Ukraine’
for string orchestra is currently being composed – should automatically be
thought to have any wider value.
In the
hoped-for event of an ultimate ceasefire and Russian withdrawal, what happens
to Russian music and musicians then? To ‘cancel’ them in the long term would be
futile and culturally impoverishing; I hope that there will still be further
chances to hear performances by Gergiev of music by Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev and others outside Russia. But we should not harbour
the delusion that such music stands above politics in some transcendent realm.
With thanks to my
doctoral student Sarah Innes for information relating to Soviet artists
visiting the UK.