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NOTE Totalitarianism and the Arts in the 20th Century (video)

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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Let's get started. This morning, we're going to talk about the power of terrorism in the

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arts. This afternoon, we'll turn to the motion picture. Tonight, remember, we've got the pizza

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party at 5.30 here. Eat your hearts out. Those of you watching are the computer experts. But

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Well, you're invited if you did it, and then tonight seven will show the culmination of our evening, an episode of The Simpsons and an episode of The Exile.

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Let me review a few things before we turn to the subject for today.

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I'm very happy to see that I'm provoking resistance in you, and I'm trying to be provocative, and I think it is interesting to see

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What I suspect is that although we may be Austrian in economics, many of us are still Marxists in culture.

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That is, it's very hard not to imbibe some of the master cultural widths of our day.

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And so we've all somehow been brought up hearing that the commercializing of art must be bad.

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And we have these expressions like going to Hollywood or selling out.

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and I confess most of my life I've been prey to these as well.

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And it really does take some rethinking to understand that commerce

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and culture can go together.

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The example I used yesterday morning, the theory of the days of the novels,

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is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about.

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If you look at how novels were published in the 19th century,

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Just from a distance, it looks crazy, and indeed the British novel public industry in the 19th century is as commercial an example of culture as you could find, and it just seems a completely jerry-built system.

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of Money.

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No one planned it out.

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We had theorized a novel, they kind of stumbled upon it, the success of pickled papers, got

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it rolling.

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It looked so bad from an aesthetic point of view, we see the novelists having to scramble

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to meet deadlines, sometimes loading pages, even as they were being carried off to the

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printer.

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They're forced to make the novels longer than they wanted or shorter than they wanted because

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as well as television programs today.

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And in fact, yeah, the majority of maybe these 40,000 novels

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that were produced were terrible, but the peak were extraordinary,

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including the novels of the greatest novelist, Dickens.

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Moreover, if you look at it from a Marxist perspective, you would say,

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look at this exploitation.

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The belaborers are the novelists.

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They're creating all the value there, and yet they're not getting all the money.

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The publishers are getting money, publishers maybe can get money for still working at a printing press,

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but booksellers are making money off this, book distributors,

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Marxists would say, and many have said in print, that the Victorian public industry exploded these novelists,

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and moreover say the public is being exploited because these novels weren't any good, they were just marketed well

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and you had all these gimmicks like high in action figures and the bargain on, you know, the free binder you got if you bought off one of the installments you bought

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but so far as you apply all the economics to this to say these were just open market transactions, open economic exchanges

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No one could put a gun to a novelist and say, write. Only government can do that to artists.

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Only the Soviet Union could put a gun to just the gold in effect and say, write the music for the Stalin biography film.

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And so we would say, if all this was being done voluntarily, everyone was benefiting from the transaction.

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No one was simply profiting the expense of others. So in fact, yeah, these novelists had to work hard and do up to some extent what their publishers told them, but that at least gave them the chance of being successful and making a lot of money and people voluntarily subjected themselves to this supposedly awful regime.

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Many of them eventually complained about it, but still, none of these people could have

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succeeded as novelists without this huge infrastructure that the publishing industry

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supplied. It's not easy to print up your own book. It's not easy to distribute it and

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market them. We have proof of that, but William Blake did that. He did publish his own work.

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He printed that for himself. He hand-colored them with the help of his wife. He actually advertised himself, put up posters, tried to arrange a sale.

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The result was Blake's biggest seller was Clubby Six Copies, who had been fallen to innocence and experience.

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Many of his books only survived in one or two copies, if that's all there was to know of.

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And so, Blake is sort of our counter example. He put himself in the system. He hated publishers, and so he decided to buck the system. And his work, in some ways, may be better as a result. But he barely survived, both economically and in terms of his work surviving. Kind of lucky that the works weren't long.

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So, in fact, this evil, exploitative publishing industry was helping the writers, giving them an opportunity to spread their work, and some couldn't make a living at it, some made decent livings at it, some became extremely wealthy, as Dickens did, and the public got what it wanted, as shown by the fact that they bought these books

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and you can see many of them they didn't buy, how well marketed, you can't force people

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to read something that's terrible, again, no guns were involved, and so we as Austiners look

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at this and say, yeah, let's pay out at that, the whole system isn't planned,

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it's not centrally regulated, the actual books themselves are not produced by careful planning,

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is something about, so what's really striking about the system, as I was trying to explain yesterday, is the continuous revision, the trial and error, the feedback, but that's how we, that's how markets work, that's what we learn from Austrian economics, so a Marxist looking at the system would see it as crazy, but we're looking at it from an Austrian perspective, see how it works, and it's actually an example of spontaneous order, as we understand.

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So, the virtues of applying Austrian economics into the culture.

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Now, today, I want to turn to an interesting subject, the whole connection of totalitarianism

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and the art of the 20th century, and I particularly want to talk about the interaction between

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totalitarianism and modernism. It's an odd subject. It's something that people basically

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The last thing anyone wants to say, people, we want that to be anything good about totalitarianism,

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not from Germany or the Soviet Union, which is what our council friends are on.

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And we would like to be able to say that there's some kind of infinite connection between freedom and artistic production,

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that there's some kind of infinite connection between freedom and artistic production so that we really, really could say there was no possibility of art in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but that's simple and true and one thing, one reason I've included this, this unit is to suggest that there is no fixed connection between an economic system and cultural achievement

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I keep stressing, it may look as if I'm making some kind of argument that only the commercial system can produce great art.

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No, all I'm trying to suggest is that the commercial system can sometimes produce great art.

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This is the patronage system, and as I'm actually going to say today, this is the totalitarian system, Dan.

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The human spirit is incredibly resilient. The creative spirit cannot be suppressed by anything, not by the palatary dictators, not by the evil market system, not by nasty renaissance tyrannical patrons.

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Somehow art confers under any condition. Again, that's why I keep saying the great mistake of many critics is to look for the sufficient conditions of cultural production, and there are not.

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There are no conditions you can lay out and say, you have this in place, move your great

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art. All you can say is that art has certain necessary conditions, certain level of economic

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development and so on, and then it's fancy as to what will happen. And I find it incredible

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how art was able to flourish in some cases, even under people of horrible consumerist

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and that's why I have the clean system, make sure I'm not trying to make an argument that's only

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under commercial systems in our floor.

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I'm countering the view that is rather prevalent that under commercial conditions,

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no red line is possible.

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We've always seen the fakes here and Dickens grew out of commercial conditions,

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so that's a sufficient reputation.

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But, so let's hear how this is really difficult in some ways to answer the question of totalitarianism

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and the art of totalitarianism in modernity.

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And let me begin with a provocative quotation from a musicologist, a Russian musicist,

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a man named Richard Cheruskin.

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This is in his skeptical case book, which I've added here, Bibliography.

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and he's talking about the fact that there's a graduate student who says

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that he spent his academic year in 1971-72 as a famous student at the Moscow Conservatory

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with certain anticipation on writing opera in the 1860s and so he built a lot of musical performances

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and one of them is a skeptical which is Seventh Symphony, the famous Leningrad Symphony.

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One concert I heard the Seventh Symphony performed on the Kiro Congression in the Concertatory Stable Great Hall.

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I knew the work not only was the butt of Bartok's sarcasm, I love him for his, Ed Paul's ears,

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I stress the quote, his Seventh Symphony became world famous, this was treated as this great protest against the German invasion of Russia and the siege of Leningrad.

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Many modernist composers were disgusted by the praise lavished on their sympathies, sympathies with Beethoven as a piece of glass, and in particular, Data Bartok, you know, many would regard him, along with Kavinsky and Thunberg, as three great modernist composers, Data Bartok was for the self-inflicted, Hitler was living in poverty in the United States at the time, and forcibly, to the Israel broadcast,

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In Bartok's last piece, he's a terrible author who incorporates a passage from Joseph Olsen's

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Seventh Symphony, and he doesn't realize it. It's very clear he's tragically it. So that's

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why Boehm is talking about a legal work, not only in the butt of Bartok's sarcasm, but

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also as the subject of one of Virgil Thompson's earliest reviews. Now Virgil Thompson, at

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At that time, it's possible it was the most famous American contolger of all time, and a famous music critic.

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As far as the musical effect of Ludwig Hansen's text almost by heart, it opens with the remark that, quote,

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Whether one is able to listen without knowing laundry to the seventh symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich

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probably depends on a repeatedly un-musical perception.

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It seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not-very-musical, and the distracted, end quote,

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and then first is no doubt, and it ended with an immortal insult, quote,

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that he is so deliberately diluted as matter, adopted in, by both excessive sophistication

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and it presses repetition to the comprehension of a child of faith in the place that he is willing to write down to a real or fictitious psychology of mass consumption in a way that may abandon his qualifiers for consideration as a serious composer.

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I want to say that Chuck DeCove, Chuck DeCove, who was born as a modern composer and was

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celebrated with us, by the time of the 7th Symphony, he and Virgil Thompson say that he

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is running from mass consumption. So Chuck DeCove had sold out and it was a case of, this

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symphony is popular, it's played everywhere, it must be bad for a modern life market.

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Now, Ludwig goes on with his own experience.

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His variety of experience was a badge of musical sophistication where I came from.

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I've watched at appropriate moments as my soldiers campaigned, hoping to escape the

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lead.

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But no, my friends who were at least as learned and intelligent as I, and who were

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normally just as irreverent about everything things were supposed to be irreverent about,

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were maverized.

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These were not eight-year-olds.

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There was nothing wrong with their musical perceptions

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for their quick-witted musicality, I can certainly tell.

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We also thought, trust me, that they valued this music,

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which I have been forced to despise.

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More highly than I valued any music,

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and that such composers meant more to his and their society

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than only composers meant to mine.

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For the first time, their authenticity

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and Art Form, the unbearable suspicion that the ways of listening to and thinking about music

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that had been instilled in me and all my peers at home were in progress.

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So there is the passage that really suggests here to fill it out that the person began to worry

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that the music he had been taught in grad school, and this will be modernist music,

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about the whole relation of totalitarianism to the art, and specifically to modernism.

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Let me skip it out very quickly and then develop into details into a way to separate our conflicts.

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I always fail to understand it myself.

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That is, I'm so hesitant to say anything good about totalitarianism, but on the one hand,

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And then the totalitarian regime, again I'm talking deeply about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were patrons of the arts on levels that were really quite remarkable and ending up, they in many respects, and I'll give some examples in a minute, provided a lot of money for cultural development.

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If one reason, many artists were attracted to these regimes, and even modern artists were attracted to these regimes, and modernist artists, and indeed it is very strange that in some respects modernism flourished, especially in the Soviet Union, at least in the 1920s and early 30s, but even in certain respects, as I'll try to spell out, in Nazi Germany, it's as strange as that sounds, so it seems so odd in that respect,

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How Many Modernist Artists Were Attracted to Factism?

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Well, Orford was the most extreme and the most famous example than we ever found yesterday.

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But there seems to be something in factism for artists and even for modernist artists.

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And yet, this was the fastest bargain if there ever were one.

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The very few artists live to simply profit from their associations with totalitarianism and it's either price, everyone pays, or service with control, and it is, you know, he pays the price and calls him to, as to the way the lessons are being taught here, given all this time, that if people don't like working for the market, the alternatives really aren't worth it.

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You know, if you say, okay, I don't want to be dependent on the commercial market,

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let the state support me in my artistic endeavors.

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You're going to pay a different kind of price for that.

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You'll be subject to a different kind of control.

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And both the authority and the Soviet Union really do exert tremendous control over the arts.

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And they're the ones who put guns to people's heads.

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and often closed business and again no market has ever done that to anybody and in particular the great irony of the modernist support for factism is both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned out to be anti-modernist in their own aesthetic ideologies and I want to go into that in some detail but also to eventually show the ultimate irony of all this

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is that Hitler and Stalin skewed the victory of the modern aesthetic into the 20th century.

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By attacking it, they legitimated it in ways I now come to conclusion it never would have otherwise been

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legitimated. That may be my most confident defense. Okay, let's decide to review this now in detail.

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On the first point, the totalitarian regimes and cases in New York, it actually follows

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from there being totalitarian regimes.

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That's the point, totalitarianism, the totalitarian society now comes under the purview of the regime,

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under a true laissez-faire society that the government wouldn't be involved in at all.

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That would be one of the many private activities that should be left to people on their own.

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But totalitarian regimes want to regulate everything.

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They want to have a hand in everything, and so one of the things they want to do is support the arts.

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Now, I think we've seen one passage from the book, Art of Civil Rights, by Peter Adams.

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He says, Kirzner was always presented as a great paper of the arts.

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He was seen over the exhibitions, purchasing pictures for party buildings. He became the best

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kind of the great German art exhibition, spending large sums of money at ease. From the second

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exhibition in 1938, he bought no less than 202 works, over half a million marks worth.

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The number of works bought by the theater was astounding. In 1941, he bought nearly 1,000

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will be distributed throughout ministries and public buildings

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will be labeled purported by the fear of risk-highly-guise.

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And now we quote Hitler,

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New age can claim to free itself from the duty to fall for art, Hitler said.

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Continuing the quote,

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We would lose if we did so not only the capacity for our sense of creation,

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but also the capacity to understand it, to experience art.

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So we would work to create a balance of education and nobles

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that increase capacity for appreciation.

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The great cultural achievements of humanity were at all times the highest achievements of the life of the community.

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Well, you take that out of the context that it looks like the popular return for the National Endowment for the Arts, for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Now, this is a, this is a lousy form of argument, reducting alive Hitler.

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I mean, it's really unfair, but you can do this in amazing ways.

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Take quotes from Salerno or Hitler and say, who said this?

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And who was all about to be the head of the NBA said this, and that's unfair, but it is important to see that Hitler had a national policy for the arts, Salerno had a national policy for the arts,

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And when people cry out for a national policy out for this country or a new culture in this country, they ought to think twice about it and realize who the real preference is offered.

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Now, as you probably know, Hitler was a painter, a fairly competent one, I've seen some of his paintings, he wanted to become a painter, he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and in the worst of distance decisions ever made by any committee he was turned down.

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He did admit to that academy that he saved millions of lives, but unfortunately, he was not.

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But one of the reasons he was so interested in the arts is he thought of himself as an artist.

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And as Adam goes on to write, there were, after all, his fellow artists.

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And remembering his hardships as an artist, he said, my artists shall live like princes, seriously.

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and the leading artist for the Reich did precisely that. The artists were very much Hitler. The painters that worked received a personal gift of 100,000 Reichmarks from Hitler to build himself a studio.

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Gerdi Fuss, the ruler of Hitler's favorite architect, received large sums annually for the decoration of her husband's buildings and which he was in charge.

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in which he was in charge, Arno Bocca, one of the most famous sculptor in after Germany,

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played only a focus on his passion.

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Didn't it impact him?

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Oh, that's a real test.

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And in 1942, the large house was a part of a sizable studio

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as the personal gift from the Fuhrer.

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So, you know, this is what Pound wanted.

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He wanted a modern patron of the arts,

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get back to the conditions of the Renaissance, and it's been noted that it required Renaissance

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tyrants and it required modern tyrants to recapture that kind of large-scale hatred from people

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like Hitler and Stalin. You see it in the Soviet Union as well. It is hard for us to

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accept, but the richness of the cultural life in the Soviet Union is extraordinary, especially

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in areas like ballet, opera, metaphors of classical music, I mean, this goes back to Zara's structure, it's not as if the Soviet Union created this, all these musical traditions can be traced back to Zara's structure.

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There's another form of diamond here, but we have all, in classical music, the vast majority of great artists in this century, in the past century and civil century, are Russian.

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Almost all the great violinists are Russian, and the vast majority of the great pianists are Russian.

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and they were the product of essentially the system created by the czars and continued under the Soviet Union, all the ways to optimize and you actually talk to some of these czars now, most of whom are left-writers and they do speak to some of the left, you know, heavily left-writers because there's not, there's not state support for the art, the label was on the copy of it and I'm not saying to find copy of this in here but it is counter-intuitive to us

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You know, any time you hear recordings of Janisov Richter or Anil Gilels or David Oiskrak or all these great Russian artists, they were products of this system.

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They all suffered from it in their own ways, but the degree of patience behind the Bolshoi Ballet, the Pier of Armstrong,

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the fear of regime that really put money into the arts.

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and a particular irony of it is that, and although I can lighten what I was saying a little bit about the anti-modernism regime, is how much they specifically supported the rise of modernism in ways that really seemed weird to us, but, you know, we think of modernism as modernism as obscenity and confidence rise on this totalitarian regime, yet, totalitarian regimes

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had one point of engagement with modernism in that they all desperately wanted to be modern

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and presented themselves as modernizing forces.

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Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union embraced industrialism

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and presented themselves as great industrial powers who were modernizing their countries,

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who had to be at the forefront of technology.

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and so the modernist level fare of technology leads up with the totalitarian level fare of technology.

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As you see this best in Italy with a school of paintings called the Italian Futurists who start flourishing in the teens.

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Many of them became fascists and supported mutual aid.

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If you go to the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, you can see the actual continuity between the futuist paintings of the teens

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and the, and the era of mutual media art was even on display in Rome, mostly Huccarard displayed in Germany, but in England they're so much more open to that aspect of their past.

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So, a lot of famous modernists flourished at least initially with Polynesians and even on the state of Massachusetts.

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The most important figures in modern physics, one of the great developers of abstract art and the whole school is one of Russian constructivism, he starts in late, sorry, Russia, but he really starts in the 20s and 30s, he's one of the things that the Soviet Union offered itself as, as bringing a new humanity into the world.

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and so forth of economic problems and it wasn't in position yet to code ECR but there's a tremendous

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cultural explosion in the Soviet Union in the 20s, spearheaded by painting and people

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like Malavis but also amazing developments in the theater, you know the development of

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the Stanislavski method and all things that are so important to history in the 20th century

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because much of the most avant-garde developments in the theater in the 20th century come out

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of Russia in the 20th century.

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and I can, that's based on developments that started in the art culture, that's what this theory is too.

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And then the fascinating developments in literature, because Moldova, for example, interesting drama developed.

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And then film, we'll be talking about it this afternoon, but I mean, film is the greatest of the modernist arts,

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and one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century is Isaac Stein and he worked in the Soviet Union and Stalin had a great interest in the film industry and Isaac Stein worked very well for the support of Stalin and therefore under the watch of Isaac Stalin and Isaac Stein is easily one of the ten most important filmmakers of the 20th century.

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and Man of the Dove in 12, we just take a class, learn how to use the camera in ways that no one ever had before, the great master of one college, one of the close-ups, and, you know, obviously a great filmmaker, yet look at his films, they are, in some ways, steep Soviet propaganda, Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, you know, the horde of German media,

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The Invading German Barbarians That Must Be Smashed. Now, it's a great film, but if you want to talk about its content, it's totally a propaganda. It's just what Stalin ordered.

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We'll use the scores by Sergei Prokofiev and one of the great musical scores of the 20th century, the Alexander Detsky music.

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and together it's a kind of Wagnerian-Gesamtkund, you know, to feel that there may be no greater meshing of musical score and film than the work that the couple up in Eisenstein did on Alexander Nestor.

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And then Eisenstein went on to do probably the greatest film cinematically, Ivan the Terrible, and then Salerno got a little nervous.

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A portrait of an insane, tyrannical scoundrel, affecting the Western people.

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Stalin got the message, and that was it for Eisen, the terrible, and that's where we'll get it.

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So, again, you pay the price for Stalin's support, but I do, you know, it is extraordinary how much

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Eisenstein was able to accomplish within his framework. You know, some of the great science

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of Modern Cinema, emerged from Salerno's Soviet Union, and who would have thunk it?

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But, you know, it just can't be denied.

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I mean, it tells both sides of the story.

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You know, before he starts getting all weak about Salerno's competitive work, you know,

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he destroyed Eisenstein.

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He destroyed whatever he created.

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Well, this actually, and the story in Nazi Germany is much more truncated

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with the Nazi rule, it's only about 12 years, the corresponding period of modern experimentation

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in Germany occurred in the Weimar Republic, I mean, there's for a point of what I'm saying,

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there have been fewer regimes weaker politically than the Weimar Republic and fewer regimes

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stronger than the special economy of Soviet Union and that essentially both underwent a

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and the period of great artistic flowering and experimentation in the 20s and 20s.

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You can't make a connection really between the regime and the art.

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But still, what is surprising is when you look at the not too years in Germany,

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the degree of importance of the art was explored.

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Now, Germany has always had and continues to have the most classical music life in the world.

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and the number of classical concerts and operas in Germany during the Nazi period, the price for the recordings to buy for many of them, and we can tell the level of these is extremely high, and we've just seen the Nazi sponsors, all sorts of things in competition, all sorts of things that are happening in Germany, and we've just seen all sorts of things that are happening in Germany, and we've just seen all sorts of things that are happening in Germany,

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In the cinema, again, you have the oddity of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century,

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You have the oddity of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, Marie Riefenstahl, emerging during this period.

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In this case, one of the most active supporters of Hitler, Riefenstahl, an incredibly beautiful woman and an actress.

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She was Hitler's favorite actress. She appeared in the German ski epics, the German equivalent of Westerns.

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He was actually going, and Hitler had a crush on her, and basically turned over the German film industry to her, and she made these two remarkable films,

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and the film Triumph of the Will, the film of the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and Olympia,

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the film of the 1936 Hitler Olympics. These films are appalling ideologically. I mean,

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they are Nazi films in the deepest sense of the term. They celebrate Nazism, they celebrate

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and Nazi Ideology. They have all of the Nazi races in them, the Celebration of the Alley Ring.

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I cannot say a nice word about that without prefacing it. I say that. But visually, they are absolutely extraordinary.

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I think everyone says visually. They are the most beautiful documentaries, most magical documentaries ever done.

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They have been endlessly copied, the most famous example is that the last scene

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of the first Fowler's movie is copied, Dr. Fowler's one of the great scenes,

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it's fine for the will, I mean, it's just, filmmakers have absorbed the vocabulary

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of those films in their blood, and, you know, like Eisenstein,

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in the Ludwig style was serving the propaganda of a totalitarian regime, but with great political brilliance.

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And so, again, although, as I've told and admitted, Nazi Germany, like I've told you, actually anti-modernist,

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they actually contribute to the development of modernism.

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and Modernism, I mean, if they produce and support nothing other than Eisenstein and Mises

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style, we will have to say that totalitarianism made a contribution to the development of modernism

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in the cinema. But it actually goes beyond that. If you read some of these books, I put

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on a new list like Adam's Arbitrary Life. In rather odd ways, Nazi Germany contributed

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Modernism, the autobahns, the famous superhighways that Hitler built. They've been copied all

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over the world. Hitler built the first superhighways, and they are a critical example of modernist

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architecture. Even though we tend to think of Hitler's architecture as unclassical

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and anti-modernist, in some ways, and Adam's documents say, the way bridges were built

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for the autobonds, the way the autobonds themselves were built,

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they're almost the ulcers of 20th century modernism.

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And the whole ideology model, they were built to produce money.

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Now, what Hitler had in mind was the speed of moving the garbage.

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But if you just look at the autobonds, and you recognize them,

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because they look like they're interstates, look like models on them,

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well, the road beds were built more properly, lasted better.

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but they are an extraordinary expression of the modernist spirit.

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And for that matter, the Nazi rallies, if you look at the way they're portrayed in science and law and reason,

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they were remarkable examples of 20th century modernist art.

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And the way the Nazis learned to exploit the media, they were really the first politicians

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who learned to fully exploit the 20th century mid-media and especially the radio.

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I mean, most people say that Hitler was not as impossible without the radio,

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and his ability to communicate by radio.

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As an unanswered question about the 20th century, if radio had not been a new medium,

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and Socialism.

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We're totalitarianism, specifically the Nazis have been able to find that it was the nudists

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in the medium that made people trust it.

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They've not yet learned to understand it or be critical about it.

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And it's just unbelievable when you hear a Hitler speech now to think that anyone took

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this seriously.

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It's so melodramatic.

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It's so well-done.

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And yet it's partly the nudists of the medium that allowed them to get along with it.

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Well, I'm going to add a little point.

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and so that the Nazis were anti-modernist, but in its first sense, they were profoundly modernist.

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They had to be. They had to embrace the 20th century on its new technology with the basis of their power.

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And the belief between these totalitarian regimes and modernism is power.

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I hate to say it, but the art of trade power.

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It's easy to have modernism be talented. He's not the only one.

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And in some ways, they were strapped between regimes of power.

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Modernism in the arts was a vision of power, the new power of technology.

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The modernists wanted to remake the world.

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The great slogan of British modernism of the towns and in the moods was make it new.

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It was also the slogan of Nazi Germany and also the slogan of the idiom.

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All this stuff about the new man, the slogan of idiom, and the new woman.

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That was an intersection point between modernism and totalitarianism. Modernists had visions of how they could remake the world into something utopian, and so did Hitler and Stalin.

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So, again, there was a kind of strange alliance between modern art and the totalitarian regime.

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I mean, otherwise, it's inexorable the number of artists who gravitated either towards the Soviet Union or towards Nazi Germany.

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Poets, composers, painters, sculptors, architects.

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To think of what a marvelous opportunity totalitarianism seems to architects, it's part of the Stalin vision, the Hitler vision, to tear down the old corrupt world of bourgeois Europe and rebuild it from the ground up, and that literally became possible under both Hitler and Stalin was very big on urban renewal.

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and so on.

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I think what I was fancying is that we make all of Berlin and when you look at the staging

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of the Nazi rally, the great Nuremberg rally, the Nazis used every new technology, the airplane

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search lights that Albert Speer used to create these procedures of light.

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What a central image of modernism that is, if you didn't know who did it, you know, you

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and I think, oh, a great personal inspiration here, this symphony of life that Albert Speer has created to celebrate in Hitler.

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So, again, it's very creepy almost to understand this, but there are more links between totalitarianism and modernism.

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Having said that, this is all today going to be, on the one hand, on the other hand,

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Modernism ultimately did not flip it under either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, because the great aim of Nazi and Soviet support of art was control, and the degree of bureaucracy for the arts that the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany created is rivaled only by the Americans.

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for the University of the Arts.

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Now, actually, they, they surpassed us in that regard.

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You had all these levels and levels of departments and bureaus.

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Again, on paper, it would be somebody's dream.

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They really care about the artist.

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Look, they've got a secretary of the artist and an undersecretary of the artist,

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and under, undersecretary of the artist.

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One of the essays would be a, a, a fuller and, and real book.

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and how to think of art as a wonderful bureaucratic thought of the organization of the art administration in Nazi Germany.

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And so things were carefully supervised and carefully scrutinized and ultimately behind everything was a gun.

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And together Hitler and Stalin murdered more artists than anybody.

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and history, the record of drilling, Jewish artists, in particular in Germany were sent to concentration camps and many of them killed a whole generation of composers, basically wiped out people that have been too often, bit defined, and their music is only now being revived and made available, thank goodness, but same thing in the Soviet Union, just the COVID managed to survive,

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by the by an accident at one point, he was arrested, was instead arrested before he could get access to COVID, but when Soviet artists were sent to the gulag, so we must never forget that this was the most marvelous painting of the art of the Soviet Union and not just the art of the Soviet Union but the art of the art of the Soviet Union and not just the art of the Soviet Union and not just the art

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So that ultimately, whatever forces it helps, it cycles and Ludwig gets destroyed and stamped out.

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So particularly as the regime consolidated and strengthened and was able to maintain its control over the arts, the arts flourished less and less.

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Again, it's only in the twenties of the former regime, when the regime is bearing in place and it struggles with rights, that the art has came to prove new and historic.

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The Nazis gained power faster and went control faster, but most of the specific art things hurt, particularly painting and sculpture.

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and when you look at it today, it's very difficult to appreciate it.

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And specifically, and this is the other point that for all the links between totalitarianism and modernism,

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in fact, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were specifically and explicitly anti-modernists.

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They were always attacking modern science, and often displaced the very antithesis, so that, for example, to look at the situation in Western Germany, Hitler explicitly attacked abstract art, dada, cubism,

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Think about all of the famous modernist developments of the first 25 years he was sentenced. Hitler exclusively attacked. Hitler liked realistic art. His own art was realistic and he painted little landscapes and little cityscapes and portraits. Hitler's art looked very book-like to us.

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His favorite painters from the 19th century were German realist painters like Anselm Vorbach and Hans Mockbarth and he hated what he and his cohort came to call degenerate art and art d'écoute and that was his famous exhibition in 1936 of so-called degenerate art.

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which was largely modernist art and they put it on display to humiliate it.

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Now it's interesting that Hitler associated modernist art with commercial art

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and specifically with Jewish archaeologists.

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The great animist of his attacks on modernist art was that he saw it as a conspiracy

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of international Jewish art dealers to force this horrible art on the German people.

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And his speech after speech talked about this, and he would, what the Nazis did in the 30s,

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they started to clone German museums of Jewish art, and Hitler would give him speeches,

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Look how much of your tax money went to pay for this work by a Jewish artist, sold by a Jewish archaeologist.

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This modernist project.

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And, again, people point to the irony, which is that there's a wonderful catalogue,

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the exhibit we created in Washington, D.C. about ten years ago.

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The Nazis used sawdust techniques to destroy the Jewish art to make fun of it. And it's really weird when you look at photos of the wall document exhibitions and they would have pictures on the wall and skew some of them and write graffiti under the argument, this is Jewish art.

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in the Arts. You know, if it's graffiti art, I mean, kind of, really, sort of, a hostile attack on the way that the baba is would attack traditional art, the Nazis used it to attack modern art. So, the posters for the exhibit are very modern in their form. It's all very rudely, to put an example, kind of, within the section I'm trying to show here. So, when you look at people's arguments, they're exclusively

368
00:51:25.200 --> 00:51:44.200
and Humanism, the way it's lost hope, with the German people, the Russian people, the Soviet Union has put the form, the attack on Pseudo-Covid, the 1936 one is awful, maybe the death of the pence,

369
00:51:44.200 --> 00:51:54.200
and the next day, SABDA had an editorial called Muddell Instead of Music saying that

370
00:51:54.200 --> 00:52:04.200
the stuff that's going to be used is formula. That was the negative word in Soviet criticism

371
00:52:04.200 --> 00:52:13.200
that formists meant that it placed fewer artistic motives over the expression of the students

372
00:52:13.200 --> 00:52:23.200
to the Western People, and the answer was Soviet rule in them, and again, for all the

373
00:52:23.200 --> 00:52:29.200
antitheses between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, their artistic policies were very

374
00:52:29.200 --> 00:52:39.200
similar, and again, they were both socialist reviews. Nazism is national socialism, and

375
00:52:39.200 --> 00:52:47.200
and in both cases we have national policy to the arts and it's almost like the stolen realism

376
00:52:47.200 --> 00:52:52.200
looks very much like the kind of painting that Hitler liked.

377
00:52:52.200 --> 00:53:01.200
That is, the typical art that Stalin Hitler wanted was a good looking, young, bedded wooden,

378
00:53:01.200 --> 00:53:29.200
in a good physical state, preferably practical waste in both cases, working in the field, working in a factory, everything was all about young, vibrant bodies devoting themselves to the state, and the students of sports in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the celebrators, calisthenics and that sort of thing, but an incredible continuity will be in the art.

379
00:53:29.200 --> 00:53:37.200
Again, realist and always upbeat, pointed away to the future.

380
00:53:37.200 --> 00:53:45.200
Now, I will parapheretically say this is also identical with American art in the 1930s,

381
00:53:45.200 --> 00:53:53.200
the so-called WPA art, the art produced by the American government policy in the arts.

382
00:53:53.200 --> 00:54:05.640
and I, it's very uncanny, but you can see it particularly in rural, in post office this day throughout the United States

383
00:54:05.640 --> 00:54:17.280
that they haven't been falling down, I mean, there's an almost worldwide style of factored star in the 1930s,

384
00:54:17.280 --> 00:54:27.280
You pointed to literally in Hitler's Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, in Roosevelt's United States, and Hitler as well.

385
00:54:27.280 --> 00:54:35.280
Some ways it's a reaction to the depression and the sense the world's falling apart and we've got to rebuild it, but the, you know,

386
00:54:35.280 --> 00:54:45.280
you can see it in Rockefeller Center even, the kind of monumental sculpture there, which in many ways is indistinguishable from the kind of monumental sculpture

387
00:54:45.280 --> 00:55:15.280
in Germany at that time, but stylistically there's a great continuity there, and it is because everybody was turning to the state in the 1930s, and saying the state was the answer to the problem, and they wanted art to reflect that, and artists were being listed into the service of the state, whether with a gun to their head, they'd be bribed with government

388
00:55:15.280 --> 00:55:25.260
of Patroning, so the, all around the world that we see a kind of reaction to modernism.

389
00:55:25.520 --> 00:55:30.600
The United States as well as the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.

390
00:55:30.800 --> 00:55:36.160
And so, I mean, these are wrong picks, that the modernists bought into these regimes.

391
00:55:36.620 --> 00:55:39.860
They thought these regimes were going to elevate them.

392
00:55:39.860 --> 00:55:43.580
And I mean, now you can see in towns, while you got an example yesterday,

393
00:55:43.580 --> 00:56:12.020
that we can see across the board that modernists felt in totalitarian states or just in the state in general, in the new powerful national states of the 20th century, these war-oriented states with their industrial power linked up with their military power, that this was like a return to the renaissance of the era of Stiglitz-Milmöld, Malatesta, and the state would give them the requisition that the market never did.

394
00:56:12.020 --> 00:56:28.020
These frustrated artists, frustrated with having to kow-tow to a public, to a commercial public, to write or pay to others with a commercial public mind, decided, oh, what we need is fake papers.

395
00:56:28.020 --> 00:56:36.020
And these various dictators were brilliant in exploiting these artists.

396
00:56:36.020 --> 00:57:06.020
You know, the way Castro to this day, Latin American writers and other artists call after Castro and present him as this great man, and so many of the famous Latin American authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marca, you know, have been supporters of Castro and pals with him, only Mario Farcoso, although it took him a while to sort through Castro and attach him, but there's no, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Castro,

397
00:57:06.020 --> 00:57:15.020
I mean, Castro supported many fine writers, including Alejo Carpenter, who made it into his cultural ambassador to France and so on.

398
00:57:15.020 --> 00:57:21.020
I mean, he came into this very candy in this way of knowing how to exploit the battery of artists.

399
00:57:21.020 --> 00:57:27.020
You can't net a lot of artists at a public ceremony, and he'll write anything you want about it.

400
00:57:27.020 --> 00:57:31.020
And it's a very sad fact, but I'm assuming it's true.

401
00:57:31.020 --> 00:57:46.020
So, in fact, once people like Hitler and Stalin were fully empowered, they did everything they could to stamp out modernism, particularly in the visual arts, but in music as well.

402
00:57:46.020 --> 00:57:57.020
And again, Hitler had this specific animus, but so many of the modern artists had been Jewish that it all blended together as anti-Semitism and as anti-modernism.

403
00:57:57.020 --> 00:58:25.020
Now, I'm going to talk about flexibility in detail in a minute, but this is my last twist on the story I'm telling, is ironically, this totalitarian attack on modernism made modernism into the ideocracy of 20th century culture, because if Hitler and Stalin hated it, it must be in fact good.

404
00:58:25.020 --> 00:58:32.020
and the worldwide triumph of what's called the international style and art after World War II

405
00:58:32.020 --> 00:58:38.020
would really give you faith to a reaction to Nazism and Soviet communism.

406
00:58:38.020 --> 00:58:48.020
That is, Hitler and Stalin together killed the cause of realist representation in the arts

407
00:58:48.020 --> 00:58:53.020
and for that had a real classical forms and architecture.

408
00:58:53.020 --> 00:58:58.020
It's, by the way, taken a decade to recover from the negative effects.

409
00:58:58.020 --> 00:59:07.020
And I do want to say, just before Hitler and Stalin did write a form of art, doesn't mean it's cool.

410
00:59:07.020 --> 00:59:14.020
I mean, in a weird way, we've ended up embracing modernism, even Hitler and Stalin rejected it.

411
00:59:14.020 --> 00:59:22.020
And I used to just sense this, and the more I studied it, the more I became convinced

412
00:59:22.020 --> 00:59:34.100
of this incredible irony of the development and center culture that modernism triumphed completely

413
00:59:34.100 --> 00:59:40.340
over traditional art and especially representational art because they were able to scar those

414
00:59:40.680 --> 00:59:45.060
with the labels of Soviet legalism and Nazi kids.

415
00:59:45.060 --> 00:59:51.060
Uh, let me give a specific example of it, which I just came across.

416
00:59:51.060 --> 00:59:57.060
I wrote an article about Grant Wood's American Gothic, which celebrated his 50th.

417
00:59:57.060 --> 01:00:02.060
You all know that painting, the man and the woman with the pitchfork in the Iowa field.

418
01:00:02.060 --> 01:00:08.060
Uh, and, uh, a number of books came out on it. I wrote an essay on it.

419
01:00:08.060 --> 01:00:12.060
And I was really shocked in studying the history of it.

420
01:00:12.060 --> 01:00:21.060
This is Hayek, who was initially quite famous, not in the middle of the 30s, but he became very famous in the 40s and the 30s.

421
01:00:21.060 --> 01:00:27.060
He was literally attacked for being fascist in the 40s.

422
01:00:27.060 --> 01:00:37.060
And specifically, H.W. Janssen, the famous H.W. Janssen colloquial de-archets at the ancient old colleges.

423
01:00:37.060 --> 01:00:58.060
He was a bourbon refugee, and in 1943, he wrote an article talking American Gothic, which in some ways is, well, it's an American I found out, you could put it on the dollar bill instead of Washington, I mean, that's become our symbol for the American spirit.

424
01:00:58.060 --> 01:01:09.060
And Jansen said that Grant Wood was stuck to Americanism, that is nationalism, for a set of baddies of any kind.

425
01:01:09.060 --> 01:01:18.060
And he went on after surveying some of Wood's writings and got himself a set of Midwestern pages, Jansen wrote,

426
01:01:18.060 --> 01:01:25.060
In fact, almost every one of the ideas constituting the regional credo could be matched more verbatim

427
01:01:25.060 --> 01:01:27.560
from the Writings of Nazi Experts on Art.

428
01:01:28.120 --> 01:01:30.420
When I first read that, I found it was outrageous.

429
01:01:30.760 --> 01:01:34.060
I've been in preparation for this seminar.

430
01:01:34.060 --> 01:01:36.720
I've read a number of books on Nazi art.

431
01:01:36.720 --> 01:01:39.600
There's four things in Peter Adam's book, it's so valuable,

432
01:01:39.600 --> 01:01:42.620
is it reproduces art from the Nazi period

433
01:01:42.620 --> 01:01:44.900
you will never, ever see anywhere.

434
01:01:44.900 --> 01:01:48.100
I mean, it's just extraordinary, the number of pages,

435
01:01:48.360 --> 01:01:50.020
some of them in full-challenged reproductions.

436
01:01:50.020 --> 01:01:53.560
And I started looking at them, and I said, my God,

437
01:01:53.560 --> 01:02:07.560
and some of these different kind of woodpainters, they're paintings of the fields in the German hit-or-on and some of the settlements out there.

438
01:02:07.560 --> 01:02:17.560
Hord Bansden, he's pretty similar, comes over to the United States and he's being celebrated, same kind of artist, he's from Germany.

439
01:02:17.560 --> 01:02:23.800
and you know there are paintings in here of, you know, Salerno's German farming families,

440
01:02:23.800 --> 01:02:28.760
you know, who live in the land and like, how do they look like that?

441
01:02:28.760 --> 01:02:32.680
I just think Frank Wood is a very good painter, not a great painter,

442
01:02:32.680 --> 01:02:39.400
and I don't think he's a Nazi, a little fascist, but here's what happens,

443
01:02:39.400 --> 01:02:46.760
well, American legalist paintings will be as toxic, especially because so many

444
01:02:46.760 --> 01:02:53.760
of the leading art critics starting in the 40s were emigrants, often Jewish emigrants

445
01:02:53.760 --> 01:03:02.760
from the food and art community. And so these paintings, I mean, I think Thomas Hart said

446
01:03:02.760 --> 01:03:13.760
Benton and Grant Wood are very fine painters, Benton even better than Wood, I think, and

447
01:03:43.760 --> 01:03:50.860
and American Regionalist Representational Painting, and police companies bought into it.

448
01:03:50.860 --> 01:04:00.860
Time magazine, Life magazine promoted abstract expressionism because it wasn't Nazi art and it wasn't Soviet art.

449
01:04:00.860 --> 01:04:12.860
I mean, it was a post-World War II reaction against Nazi art, and then culture depicted by the sense that now the Soviet Union is the enemy.

450
01:04:12.860 --> 01:04:15.420
Therefore, socialist realism is the enemy in art.

451
01:04:15.420 --> 01:04:17.760
Therefore, realism is the enemy in art.

452
01:04:17.760 --> 01:04:26.740
And you get this, this mnemonic moment when life energy puts Jackson Pollock on the cover saying,

453
01:04:26.740 --> 01:04:30.340
Greatest artist alive.

454
01:04:31.220 --> 01:04:36.060
That's almost as if from Wittgenstein's case is that from Wittgenstein, many, many times.

455
01:04:36.060 --> 01:04:38.780
But he wasn't the greatest artist alive at the time.

456
01:04:38.780 --> 01:04:46.580
But, but, look at the twisted logic of this, that America had to embrace abstract expressionism

457
01:04:46.580 --> 01:04:51.040
because they wanted to get away from realism and art, because realism was feared,

458
01:04:51.320 --> 01:04:56.380
would not be associated with, and was solely exposed to real association.

459
01:04:56.380 --> 01:05:01.140
And abstract expressionism was promoted as the international style,

460
01:05:01.900 --> 01:05:06.940
that's actually what it's called, the international style, and the notion was,

461
01:05:06.940 --> 01:05:13.940
And you couldn't call it Americanism, because you couldn't call it, it wasn't representing anything.

462
01:05:13.940 --> 01:05:19.940
You know, you look at Grant Wood Pemping, there's an Iowa cornfield, and that's American.

463
01:05:19.940 --> 01:05:24.940
You can look at a Zakoonian painting or a Jackson Pollock painting, I mean, there's nothing there.

464
01:05:24.940 --> 01:05:32.940
So, and you know, this was part of the, you know, getting away from nationalism,

465
01:05:32.940 --> 01:05:41.940
and Nationalism, and we were getting away from fascism, but we were getting away from Soviet communism by promoting this international modernism that had no roots in anything Frank-like.

466
01:05:41.940 --> 01:05:53.940
Now, it's a very weird story, but again, I'm not making this up, and there have been whole books written on it, and it's fascinating to go back to the 50s and look at things like time magazine and life magazine,

467
01:05:53.940 --> 01:06:20.940
The Luce Empire really bought into this and promoted abstract expressions as the school of American art form because it wasn't national, it's a really rooted America, but above all, this was the area where America claimed its preeminence and started promoting American art by color, and Europe embraced it and certainly Germany embraced it because they wanted nothing to do with traditional art anymore.

468
01:06:20.940 --> 01:06:43.940
I was very struck when I was in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago and looking at the architecture there, which is largely American, I would say that Germany had a very conflictive relationship to its own cultural history after the Nazi period, and I can see why after the war, Germany embraced modernism with a vengeance in the arts.

469
01:06:43.940 --> 01:07:12.940
and I can see how realist art has terrible associations in Germany after the war and really a lot of the impetus behind modernism in the world in general comes out of German art, particularly painting and sculpture.

470
01:07:12.940 --> 01:07:16.740
It's a very special story and, in a way, a very ironic one.

471
01:07:16.740 --> 01:07:30.140
I won't say I think that the efforts by Sittler and Spallon to set about modernism actually gave it a kind of cachet and dominance it never had before, and I don't think it would have had otherwise.

472
01:07:30.140 --> 01:07:41.540
Again, you can see it in architecture, you know what Spallon's architecture looks like, those, you know, the Moscow University building,

473
01:07:41.540 --> 01:07:50.540
and, you know, the monumental and decorative, and, of course, lots of real statuaries associated with it.

474
01:07:50.540 --> 01:07:57.540
Same in Germany. Much of the German architecture never got built, but books like the Adam's book are good,

475
01:07:57.540 --> 01:08:05.540
so Hitler's plan for rebuilding Berlin after the war is new, if you would have wanted that,

476
01:08:05.540 --> 01:08:12.540
as the building which is going to build this giant neoclassical dome that would have warped

477
01:08:12.540 --> 01:08:19.540
either St. Peter's or the U.S. Capitol. And you can look at some of the buildings that were built like the House of Art in Munich,

478
01:08:19.540 --> 01:08:27.540
which was built for this and also the Kunst exhibition. It's still there. It's now the Museum of Modern Art.

479
01:08:27.540 --> 01:08:34.540
Museum of Modern Art is going to build an altruistic building in Munich. There's some altruistic architectures in Munich.

480
01:08:34.540 --> 01:08:42.540
from a lot of the alfalfa architects in Italy, and it was already neoclassical, you know,

481
01:08:42.540 --> 01:08:48.540
glute columns, pedidins, real sculptures associated with them.

482
01:08:48.540 --> 01:08:55.540
Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini managed to give traditional architecture a bad name,

483
01:08:55.540 --> 01:09:03.540
and the triumph of Walter Gropius, Dietz Ben-Gurow, all these refugees from European factories

484
01:09:03.540 --> 01:09:10.540
after the war has a certain ideological basis and a simple international style in architecture.

485
01:09:10.540 --> 01:09:20.540
This renounces ordinance, which renounces recognizable fractalary, which renounces any of the new fractal canon.

486
01:09:20.540 --> 01:09:27.540
You know, basically, the glass tower that we stand on will popularize.

487
01:09:27.540 --> 01:09:31.540
That's, I mean there are many artistic reasons behind that.

488
01:10:01.540 --> 01:10:10.620
by Taylor and Will has a fascinating link between not the architecture and postmodern architecture.

489
01:10:10.620 --> 01:10:17.420
And when we think about the embrace, the embrace of classical elements and historical elements

490
01:10:17.420 --> 01:10:22.300
in general, it does provide a connection now, only just to give you a hint about it.

491
01:10:22.300 --> 01:10:24.740
I never even thought of that before that.

492
01:10:24.980 --> 01:10:30.740
But anyway, you see then what a complex story this is of an interaction between the

493
01:10:30.740 --> 01:10:36.740
and Art in Modernism in particular, and at the time there were names I'd like to talk

494
01:10:36.740 --> 01:10:43.740
a little more specifically about, Stoichka Sobolec, who seems to me emblematic of so many

495
01:10:43.740 --> 01:10:51.740
of the Eastern, Eastern century art that we've been talking about. He's in my opinion the

496
01:10:51.740 --> 01:10:56.740
greatest composer of the 20th century. I do like Schoenberg, I do like Bartholomew,

497
01:10:56.740 --> 01:10:58.740
and Stravinsky and some others.

498
01:10:58.740 --> 01:11:02.740
I've stayed with our child, he's the greatest composer of the 20th century,

499
01:11:02.740 --> 01:11:05.740
but really he's the greatest composer of the 19th century.

500
01:11:05.740 --> 01:11:08.740
I mean, he's kind of a 19th century composer for long.

501
01:11:08.740 --> 01:11:11.740
But, but, you know, if I really have to name one person,

502
01:11:11.740 --> 01:11:13.740
it will be Justin Fowlidge.

503
01:11:13.740 --> 01:11:17.740
And I'm born out by the market.

504
01:11:17.740 --> 01:11:22.740
We finally have time to take out things in 20th century art,

505
01:12:22.740 --> 01:12:30.740
magazine, the first magazine, June 2006, every year they'll have a poll, they ask their leaders

506
01:12:30.740 --> 01:12:39.140
what are their favorite pieces of music and they assemble a top 300 list and then from this list

507
01:12:39.140 --> 01:12:46.500
they look at which composers got how many pieces on the list and that's the cover page, the top one

508
01:12:46.500 --> 01:12:53.500
and Proud for None, the Bureau of Treasure Handles. Here's a list of the top composers

509
01:12:56.100 --> 01:13:03.100
in order, in sending orders. Mozart was number one, then Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms,

510
01:13:03.780 --> 01:13:10.780
Edward Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Ray Vaughan Williams, Handles and Sustacone. His fives were Handles

511
01:13:40.780 --> 01:14:00.780
are the most modern of those composers. Again, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Elva, Rachmaninoff, von Ludwig von Mises, and Tchaikovsky is the one who died the latest of all that, and the only one who could rule in any sense. Elgar and von Ludwig were 20th century composers, but they're not modernists.

512
01:14:00.780 --> 01:14:07.420
and so on. So that's, I mean, whole indications, scientific proof, I need to say how long, but

513
01:14:07.420 --> 01:14:11.820
let's say now, if you looked at other things, like the skepticals, it always comes out well

514
01:14:11.820 --> 01:14:17.500
in the polling, and I would say deservedly so, but I do want to point out that as Correction

515
01:14:17.500 --> 01:14:25.740
said, you cannot believe how trash skepticals is in the musicological literature. I mean,

516
01:14:25.740 --> 01:14:55.740
I was growing up in the fifties and I first started listening to classical music in the fifties and some of my early self pieces were duly recorded, rusted LPs, another of the second Piano Concerto was one of the first LPs I bought, if you know what an LPs is, and I was actually tricked into buying it because it said, Piano for Richter, Second Piano Concerto No. 2, and then Piano Concerto No. 2. I didn't realize that Richter was only playing the Piano Concerto

517
01:14:55.740 --> 01:15:07.740
and food is some second-rate Russian piano since he was a piano concerto, but I got hooked into it by the evil market and the result was I recognized a fabulous piece of music that I subsequently bought,

518
01:15:07.740 --> 01:15:11.020
and the world recordings of it, including Phyllis Pestachowicz himself,

519
01:15:11.020 --> 01:15:14.380
James Ciceno, he was a, he was a world-class pianist.

520
01:15:14.380 --> 01:15:19.580
He tied with Bartok at a, at the Piano Compos in the 40s.

521
01:15:19.580 --> 01:15:24.060
That may have something to do with the, with the side co-painters in the 7th Symphony

522
01:15:24.060 --> 01:15:25.580
in the Concert Op. Orchestra.

523
01:15:25.580 --> 01:15:31.820
But anyway, uh, uh, Pestachowicz was regarded as a hack,

524
01:15:31.820 --> 01:15:35.660
and still is regarded as a hack by many musicologists.

525
01:16:05.660 --> 01:16:06.660
and so on.

526
01:16:06.660 --> 01:16:09.660
That is qualified and can be used in both.

527
01:16:09.660 --> 01:16:14.660
Virgil Hansen virtually said that in that review that a person quoted.

528
01:16:14.660 --> 01:16:21.660
Now, just a brief review of such a quote has really shown the fascinating and complex

529
01:16:21.660 --> 01:16:27.660
ways in which he interacted with the history of modernism and the history of totalitarianism

530
01:16:27.660 --> 01:16:30.660
and I'm doing this now because I think it swung out as I'm trying to say.

531
01:16:30.660 --> 01:16:33.660
Such a quote begins as a modernist.

532
01:16:33.660 --> 01:16:41.660
and he was a wondrous thing. I mean, if his father had wanted to, he probably could have, you know, turned Sestakovich into a little Mozart.

533
01:16:41.660 --> 01:16:47.660
I mean, like so many composers, he was brilliant from the beginning. He wrote his first symphony when he was 19 years old.

534
01:16:47.660 --> 01:16:55.660
Okay, Mozart was 5 years old when he wrote his first symphony, but Sestakovich's first symphony is out of a lot better than Mozart's first symphony.

535
01:16:55.660 --> 01:17:10.660
In fact, Mozart's 26th symphony is the first symphony he writes since his first symphony, so there, both getting out of the bay.

536
01:17:10.660 --> 01:17:18.660
So 19 years old, as his graduation thesis in school, he writes his first symphony,

537
01:17:18.660 --> 01:17:25.940
Society, and it's a brilliant modernist work, a thrift, sarcastic, silicone-intimidative

538
01:17:25.940 --> 01:17:27.940
musical position, dazzling.

539
01:17:27.940 --> 01:17:33.940
And one of the things about spectacle people, Ned Daz, he earned money early in his life

540
01:17:33.940 --> 01:17:37.940
as the pianist in a China movie theater.

541
01:17:37.940 --> 01:17:43.940
And he played the kind of music he associated with China movies, because you could hear it

542
01:17:43.940 --> 01:17:45.940
in some of his musical compositions later.

543
01:17:45.940 --> 01:17:53.140
And it's fascinating to me that in some ways the music industry grew out of a clippity side of the movies.

544
01:17:53.140 --> 01:17:59.340
I've been making a lot of this right there. I was working with a great fanatic art, especially in the movies,

545
01:17:59.340 --> 01:18:04.340
and the music always has that somatic aspect to it. It's very indigenous.

546
01:18:04.340 --> 01:18:08.940
There's always a cage going on, or a bark going on, stuff like that.

547
01:18:08.940 --> 01:18:37.940
So it begins with a moderate, and we'll see worldwide fame from this first symphony. I mean, Bruno Walther, a great conductor, performed this symphony in Germany, and Tchaikovsky picked it up, Tchaikovsky recorded slides, and was his own referredee with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and, you know, he became famous with 19 rodent symphonies that were being played all around the world.

548
01:18:37.940 --> 01:19:07.300
and his early pieces, his piano pieces, first piano sonata, they were all in a kind of a monarch's mode. Moreover, he shows how artists embraced the newness of the Soviet Union, and in the 20s and early 30s, he starts writing film music for some of these movies that are celebrating the new Soviet Union, we watched excerpts of one last night,

549
01:19:07.300 --> 01:19:37.300
And your second and third symphonies are Soviet Propaganda, I mean, they actually, the half, instrumental half, have text and they celebrate one of them, I think it's the second symphony, celebrate the October Revolution, the 1905 dry run for the Baltic Revolution, and this is somewhat disputed, but the best I can tell is just because it's brought into Soviet ideology, and at so many

550
01:19:37.300 --> 01:20:07.300
And so many artists did in the 20s and so did he. It seemed so promising to them, and they were promised everything, and promised the New World, and he won't use it, celebrating it. But still kind of modernist music, sort of quirky, awkwardly, unsettling, harmonically daring, melodic, but often with a kind of ironic quality

551
01:20:07.300 --> 01:20:23.300
He always has had a potential for co-painting. If he did, what are you looking for? If he did, melodies appear in co-painting marks in his music, as if he knew they were being used ironically.

552
01:20:23.300 --> 01:20:46.300
as if he would like to, he would take a key melody, a melody that's obviously popular and used it but in a way that you know he doesn't believe in it, as if he's making fun of it, and some of these, the ballets he wrote used popular, at this time in film school, used popular music in that way.

553
01:20:46.300 --> 01:20:53.260
And so he was headed straight out, you know, on this modernist course, Mahler,

554
01:20:53.260 --> 01:20:55.420
Gustav Mahler was his favorite symphonist.

555
01:20:55.420 --> 01:21:01.020
I only hear echoes of Kurt Weill in his music, but nobody else apparently does.

556
01:21:01.020 --> 01:21:09.340
But then he writes an opera called The Mourn, based on the Mourn of such works.

557
01:21:09.340 --> 01:21:14.780
And he writes later in the 10th, this real modernist opera.

558
01:21:14.780 --> 01:21:44.780
It's a transition, it takes you to the death, to a roughened setting, it comes from a story by Nicolai Nesvold in the 19th century, and it's the story of a woman who murders this brutal tyrant of a husband she has, and some of them, you know, the music was really daring, they had sex together at one point and you could hear it in the music, and, you know, the music is a piece, the husband's being

559
01:21:44.780 --> 01:22:12.780
It was a huge success, for about a year and a half, it had hundreds of performances in Moscow and Leningrad, and then it was performed around the world, it had a, I don't know if a message or something, it had a New York premiere, and then Salerno went one night and played with it, and walked out, and that was almost the end of the festival.

560
01:22:12.780 --> 01:22:25.700
Unfortunately, he wasn't killed, but he was forced to publicly advance his music and wrote his fifth symphony as a form of redemption.

561
01:22:25.700 --> 01:22:29.220
The first symphony was one of the most magnificent things he ever wrote.

562
01:22:29.220 --> 01:22:31.500
Fifth and eighth symphony, I don't know which is better.

563
01:22:31.500 --> 01:22:33.500
Rightly the fifth is better.

564
01:22:33.500 --> 01:22:46.000
But the book was regarded as his conception of Soviet realism, that he was now writing melody that the average person could understand and appreciate.

565
01:22:46.000 --> 01:23:00.000
I do find the fifth symphony rather modernist. He would not mistake it for a 19th century piece, and he'd never mistake it for psychoskeptics, even if he'd compare it to something like Prokofiev's classical symphony,

566
01:23:00.000 --> 01:23:09.000
which is a kind of modernist cofession of the 19th century, or actually almost 18th century classical music that's almost in the style of high school.

567
01:23:09.000 --> 01:23:17.000
There's nothing like that. I mean, to me, the music of the 16th century is very beautiful, but it's still modern.

568
01:23:17.000 --> 01:23:21.000
Anyway, from then on, spectacle bounces back and forth.

569
01:23:21.000 --> 01:23:29.000
Sometimes he's forced to write Soviet propaganda music, and he had to do the score for a film about Stalin.

570
01:23:29.000 --> 01:23:41.000
I hope there's no point with something called The Song of the Forest, where he wrote an oratorio about the reformation of a landed Siberia, doesn't get any key here than that.

571
01:23:41.000 --> 01:23:52.000
At the same time, though, he was writing almost in private the solo piano and his favorite music, and he really wanted to hear, trust the calls, his greatest music, the music he wanted to write.

572
01:23:52.000 --> 01:24:02.000
This is, above all, the spring quartet. There are 15 of them. It's the greatest cycle of spring quartets since they hold them, bar none.

573
01:24:02.000 --> 01:24:17.000
I particularly recommend the 8th and the 15th. He wrote 24 playlists in two, the indication of five, and he added a modernist style on some of the greatest piano music of the 20th century.

574
01:24:17.000 --> 01:24:27.000
and we have about 12 of them and he was a very good pianist, not as great as Richter and Galay,

575
01:24:27.000 --> 01:24:31.000
on their recordings he seems to be even better, but still.

576
01:24:31.000 --> 01:24:42.000
Fortunately, one regime can see everything and supervise everything, so spectacles could operate under the radar

577
01:24:42.000 --> 01:24:49.000
and produced this vast body of brilliant chamber music which takes no confessions to anything.

578
01:24:49.000 --> 01:24:54.000
And there's, you know, it's the music you want it to write, and we have it.

579
01:24:54.000 --> 01:24:58.000
It was even recorded, you know, stuff was recorded in Soviet Union.

580
01:24:58.000 --> 01:25:01.000
It became the music for the kids.

581
01:25:01.000 --> 01:25:09.000
So, when we quickly review his career, in a way he did everything.

582
01:25:09.000 --> 01:25:21.000
Everything. He did commercial music. At least a third of the music of his that survived is film music, which he wrote because he needed money.

583
01:25:21.000 --> 01:25:33.000
During the period when his symphonies were banned, he was never able to do an opera, and so just to keep his family going, he had to write film music.

584
01:25:33.000 --> 01:25:38.360
I mean, he was the most thought-in talent in that he could just turn out music.

585
01:25:38.360 --> 01:25:41.520
I mean, he didn't sleep, and that's what happened to the film music.

586
01:25:41.520 --> 01:25:47.840
And he's a good example of a point, you know, even within the Soviet Union, there was commercial art.

587
01:25:47.840 --> 01:25:54.040
And it is true that spectacle was kind of doing this, he more or less recudiated this music.

588
01:25:54.040 --> 01:25:57.640
Nevertheless, you can see class and abundance in it.

589
01:26:27.640 --> 01:26:32.840
and you know, after reading that article, I can hear what the guy is talking about.

590
01:26:32.840 --> 01:26:37.180
And so, even the half-worth contributed to testicology's development.

591
01:26:37.180 --> 01:26:42.640
And then, again, you have the even-worth half-worth with the Soviet propaganda.

592
01:26:43.000 --> 01:26:47.000
And we've had enough writing, you can say, okay, here's an example where we talk

593
01:26:47.000 --> 01:26:50.240
for rights and commercial reasons and the music is half-worth.

594
01:26:50.560 --> 01:26:56.300
But, when you write for the state, it's even-worth, no conviction whatsoever.

595
01:26:56.300 --> 01:27:08.300
and you hear these things like the song of the Forest of the Lenin Contata or the Soft Symphony, the Lenin Symphony, I mean this stuff is completely vacuumed and empty.

596
01:27:08.300 --> 01:27:20.300
His greatest work, yeah, you can say is the private work, the chamber music, the solo piano music, some of the songs that he wrote, you know, for himself.

597
01:27:20.300 --> 01:27:28.660
and yet, you know, oddly enough, it's the market that made that profit, you know, even

598
01:27:28.660 --> 01:27:33.340
within Soviet communism, there was a degree of private enterprise, and Dostoyevsky would

599
01:27:33.340 --> 01:27:40.460
earn money by writing music for commercial films, in the sense that these were films

600
01:27:40.460 --> 01:27:45.980
for the public, that were, you know, phones were played in public in the Soviet Union.

601
01:27:45.980 --> 01:27:57.980
So, his best music is his commercial music, yet without having written that commercial music, he wouldn't have the means to write that private music that we value today.

602
01:27:57.980 --> 01:28:07.980
And, I'm guessing if we gave Mr. Boehm his choice, who was the knife to master, Stalin or the market, he would have opted for the market.

603
01:28:07.980 --> 01:28:30.980
And in any case, even, you know, here's a case of the most religious artist, I can think of, in the 20th century, who survived, and yet, in some ways, the market contributed to what he did, he could even survive the pressures of the pro-Palestinian regime.

604
01:28:30.980 --> 01:29:00.980
and here's a laugh over this at the end of the video we watched last night of Valer Grigoryev, the great Russian conductor, ended the whole story, especially when Stalin felt safe and this was a terrible thing to say, but he said it and so I can now quote Stalin made Pestikov great, that Stalin was the great challenge Pestikov faced and overcoming that challenge made him greater as a composer and it's a terrible thing to say, but I think it's right.

605
01:29:00.980 --> 01:29:08.300
and that the need to respond to that challenge deepens just as opposed to the man, deepens

606
01:29:08.300 --> 01:29:14.300
his resolve as a composer, we need to use it more profound and I will just use it as

607
01:29:14.300 --> 01:29:20.780
an example, in some ways the ideology I'm fighting all the time is the notion that above

608
01:29:20.780 --> 01:29:27.580
all what we must do is take pressure off artists and so we need to take the pressure of the

609
01:29:27.580 --> 01:29:31.580
and the Market of Artists, and that's what government support of the arts will do.

610
01:29:31.580 --> 01:29:35.580
Factually, the government support of the arts creates other pressures, but in any case,

611
01:29:35.580 --> 01:29:40.580
I would like to question the fundamental premise that artists work better when they're not under

612
01:29:40.580 --> 01:29:48.580
principle. Some possible yes, many possible yes, but the history of art suggests that it's not a universal principle,

613
01:29:48.580 --> 01:29:52.580
and many of the greatest artists have done their greatest work under the greatest pressure,

614
01:29:52.580 --> 01:29:59.580
and the History of the Arts, and the History of the Arts, and the History of the Arts,

615
01:30:22.580 --> 01:30:52.580
and Fester Cohen is almost my vivid A, there is no artist I can think of who is subject to every range of pressure, the need to earn a living and life for commercial music, the need to deal with these former works, Pirate, Navy and Human History, who have singled you out and you were on his radar screen, and the result was in many cases hack work from him, much of his artistry was wasted,

616
01:30:52.580 --> 01:31:14.580
The long-term story is that his music deepened as he later and as great as his early, high-modern music is, the late music, things like the last, the oldest about it, the last things we'll talk about, all 50, these are even greater because they're the work of a band who responded to practice.

617
01:31:14.580 --> 01:31:20.580
Did you ever make a move to leave the Soviet Union?

618
01:31:20.580 --> 01:31:26.580
It was not an option.

619
01:31:26.580 --> 01:31:31.580
I mean, it's both what I was saying, but I always thought, wow,

620
01:31:31.580 --> 01:31:35.580
every dollar from the Soviet Union is a lot of punishment.

621
01:31:35.580 --> 01:31:39.580
But it was Mother Russia.

622
01:31:39.580 --> 01:31:45.580
and even Rostropovic hated having to leave when he was exiled.

623
01:31:45.580 --> 01:31:48.580
And someone like Dr. Kovach, I mean, he had family there.

624
01:31:48.580 --> 01:31:52.580
He was told the question, if he left, what would happen to his family?

625
01:31:52.580 --> 01:31:54.580
He was carefully monitored.

626
01:31:54.580 --> 01:32:02.580
He was sometimes steady to the left, but always with the KGB miners next to him,

627
01:32:02.580 --> 01:32:04.580
watching his every move.

628
01:32:04.580 --> 01:32:34.580
and he felt that he was deeply roughed in as a composer as he wants, and he worshiped Tarkovsky and Zorsky, and for him to leave Russia would, I think he felt it would have killed him as a composer, and so I can't, I can't imagine why, I mean I'm not sure he ever had the option, in 1975, you know, despite all these various liberalizations, the Soviet Union kept

629
01:32:34.580 --> 01:32:59.580
on his art. He had two KGB binders with him and several other orientalists and followers and his jokes he would have going on long walks on Wednesdays just to make them freeze their asses off, up to the followers, but I'm not sure he had the option of leaving, but if he did, I can see why he didn't.

630
01:32:59.580 --> 01:33:06.580
and a musician cannot compose in isolation, despite all this and the style that they are.

631
01:33:06.580 --> 01:33:09.020
He knew a lot of musicians, he knew...

632
01:33:09.020 --> 01:33:15.980
Shostakovich worked very closely with Stanislav Richter, with David Oistrakh,

633
01:33:15.980 --> 01:33:19.100
with these conductors like Evgeny Rabinsky.

634
01:33:19.100 --> 01:33:23.900
He felt he was deeply rooted in the rest of musical life.

635
01:33:23.900 --> 01:33:28.340
I come to understand that he wrote these symphonies for orchestra,

636
01:33:28.340 --> 01:33:46.060
The way they play, with their cork, brass, and everything, he wasn't writing for the Philadelphia Orchestra with his stochastic sound and his smooth strings and a beautiful blend, it's really weird, I mean, when you understand how rooted he was in Russia as a composer, I don't think he could have left.

637
01:33:46.060 --> 01:34:01.060
The puppet returned and he was safe in Paris and the idiot went back in the late 40s and he's probably never to have regretted it, although Stalin made his life in his revolt.

638
01:34:01.060 --> 01:34:14.060
You know, only one of these russians has eventually gone back, you know, those brave ol' conservatives returned, when Savitsky returned, it's holy mother Russia to them.

639
01:34:14.060 --> 01:34:19.060
and so, you know, to us it's like, why would Ludwig exist at all?

640
01:34:19.060 --> 01:34:24.060
And the answer is, that's where his identity was, yes.

641
01:34:24.060 --> 01:34:28.060
Did you know that Ludwig didn't use the form he had?

642
01:34:28.060 --> 01:34:34.060
Oh, not to know, I mean, I think, I think the balance was very important,

643
01:34:34.060 --> 01:34:40.060
but there are many other reasons for his, the form his music takes,

644
01:34:40.060 --> 01:35:03.060
and the coded aspect of it is deeply rooted in Russian and then Soviet art. The Russians have lived under tyranny for so long that they have learned how to speak two things at once and give the finger in the pocket as we learned about last night in the DVD.

645
01:35:03.060 --> 01:35:11.060
So, again, I really do appreciate the point of jazz for him, but I wouldn't overestimate it.

646
01:35:12.060 --> 01:35:14.060
Any questions?

647
01:35:15.060 --> 01:35:18.060
Okay, then. We'll be back at 2.