MUSIC
though it would be later, and he would die, with much of his music banned, on the same day as Stalin in 1953. For one of the greatest melodists of the 20th century, this was a tragic irony. Writing his Piano Sonata in wartime, Prokofiev surely bore in mind that the greatest pieces in the piano repertoire were the sonatas of Beethoven. But in savagely invading the Soviet Union, the Germans had forfeited the right to represent ‘culture’, and in the piano sonata he is, I think, throwing Soviet culture back at them: the Soviet Union, with its heroic war effort mobilising every fibre of an entire society, now represents civilization. The music is violent, passionate and outraged. Yet there are ambiguities: Prokoviev had discovered Christian Science in the United States in the 1920s, and there is also a detachment in this music, as if evil is something abstract which can be conquered by force of mind. Shostakovich dedicated his Chamber Symphony to the victims of fascism and war. He abhorred man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, and felt it a civic duty as a composer to express it in music. The second movement vividly brings to mind some of the ghastly images of innocent victims being hunted to death before and during the Second World War. However, the work is also, even primarily, a personal requiem for himself. Whilst it was acceptable to commemorate those who had died for the Socialist Motherland, to dwell on death was to subvert one of the central tenets of Socialist Realism: that life is beautiful. When the music of the Soviet era is performed, there is a tendency to look for hidden meanings beneath the notes. One must be cautious about this, because Shostakovich and Prokofiev were, above all, highly disciplined composers who sought to write effective music. However, in many of their greatest works, both grappled with the brutal reality around them: the Stalinist state, which had arrested or murdered their colleagues, friends and families, and the Nazi invasion, which sought to destroy the Soviet state and enslave the Russian people. Those who held power in the Soviet Union saw music as a political instrument of the state. And yet there were two aspects the politicians couldn’t control: in a closed society, it remained a universal language, and it was the one form where, at the hands of a great composer such as Shostakovich or Prokofiev, it could operate on different levels, offering some ambiguity and therefore some truth. Life isn’t always beautiful, even in a Socialist paradise!
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