The Theory of Money and Credit
Let's get started. This morning, we're going to talk about the power of terrorism in the
arts. This afternoon, we'll turn to the motion picture. Tonight, remember, we've got the pizza
party at 5.30 here. Eat your hearts out. Those of you watching are the computer experts. But
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.
Let me review a few things before we turn to the subject for today.
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
What I suspect is that although we may be Austrian in economics, many of us are still Marxists in culture.
That is, it's very hard not to imbibe some of the master cultural widths of our day.
And so we've all somehow been brought up hearing that the commercializing of art must be bad.
And we have these expressions like going to Hollywood or selling out.
and I confess most of my life I've been prey to these as well.
And it really does take some rethinking to understand that commerce
and culture can go together.
The example I used yesterday morning, the theory of the days of the novels,
is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about.
If you look at how novels were published in the 19th century,
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.
of Money.
No one planned it out.
We had theorized a novel, they kind of stumbled upon it, the success of pickled papers, got
it rolling.
It looked so bad from an aesthetic point of view, we see the novelists having to scramble
to meet deadlines, sometimes loading pages, even as they were being carried off to the
printer.
They're forced to make the novels longer than they wanted or shorter than they wanted because
as well as television programs today.
And in fact, yeah, the majority of maybe these 40,000 novels
that were produced were terrible, but the peak were extraordinary,
including the novels of the greatest novelist, Dickens.
Moreover, if you look at it from a Marxist perspective, you would say,
look at this exploitation.
The belaborers are the novelists.
They're creating all the value there, and yet they're not getting all the money.
The publishers are getting money, publishers maybe can get money for still working at a printing press,
but booksellers are making money off this, book distributors,
Marxists would say, and many have said in print, that the Victorian public industry exploded these novelists,
and moreover say the public is being exploited because these novels weren't any good, they were just marketed well
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
but so far as you apply all the economics to this to say these were just open market transactions, open economic exchanges
No one could put a gun to a novelist and say, write. Only government can do that to artists.
Only the Soviet Union could put a gun to just the gold in effect and say, write the music for the Stalin biography film.
And so we would say, if all this was being done voluntarily, everyone was benefiting from the transaction.
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.
Many of them eventually complained about it, but still, none of these people could have
succeeded as novelists without this huge infrastructure that the publishing industry
supplied. It's not easy to print up your own book. It's not easy to distribute it and
market them. We have proof of that, but William Blake did that. He did publish his own work.
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.
The result was Blake's biggest seller was Clubby Six Copies, who had been fallen to innocence and experience.
Many of his books only survived in one or two copies, if that's all there was to know of.
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.
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
and you can see many of them they didn't buy, how well marketed, you can't force people
to read something that's terrible, again, no guns were involved, and so we as Austiners look
at this and say, yeah, let's pay out at that, the whole system isn't planned,
it's not centrally regulated, the actual books themselves are not produced by careful planning,
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.
So, the virtues of applying Austrian economics into the culture.
Now, today, I want to turn to an interesting subject, the whole connection of totalitarianism
and the art of the 20th century, and I particularly want to talk about the interaction between
totalitarianism and modernism. It's an odd subject. It's something that people basically
The last thing anyone wants to say, people, we want that to be anything good about totalitarianism,
not from Germany or the Soviet Union, which is what our council friends are on.
And we would like to be able to say that there's some kind of infinite connection between freedom and artistic production,
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
I keep stressing, it may look as if I'm making some kind of argument that only the commercial system can produce great art.
No, all I'm trying to suggest is that the commercial system can sometimes produce great art.
This is the patronage system, and as I'm actually going to say today, this is the totalitarian system, Dan.
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.
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.
There are no conditions you can lay out and say, you have this in place, move your great
art. All you can say is that art has certain necessary conditions, certain level of economic
development and so on, and then it's fancy as to what will happen. And I find it incredible
how art was able to flourish in some cases, even under people of horrible consumerist
and that's why I have the clean system, make sure I'm not trying to make an argument that's only
under commercial systems in our floor.
I'm countering the view that is rather prevalent that under commercial conditions,
no red line is possible.
We've always seen the fakes here and Dickens grew out of commercial conditions,
so that's a sufficient reputation.
But, so let's hear how this is really difficult in some ways to answer the question of totalitarianism
and the art of totalitarianism in modernity.
And let me begin with a provocative quotation from a musicologist, a Russian musicist,
a man named Richard Cheruskin.
This is in his skeptical case book, which I've added here, Bibliography.
and he's talking about the fact that there's a graduate student who says
that he spent his academic year in 1971-72 as a famous student at the Moscow Conservatory
with certain anticipation on writing opera in the 1860s and so he built a lot of musical performances
and one of them is a skeptical which is Seventh Symphony, the famous Leningrad Symphony.
One concert I heard the Seventh Symphony performed on the Kiro Congression in the Concertatory Stable Great Hall.
I knew the work not only was the butt of Bartok's sarcasm, I love him for his, Ed Paul's ears,
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.
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,
In Bartok's last piece, he's a terrible author who incorporates a passage from Joseph Olsen's
Seventh Symphony, and he doesn't realize it. It's very clear he's tragically it. So that's
why Boehm is talking about a legal work, not only in the butt of Bartok's sarcasm, but
also as the subject of one of Virgil Thompson's earliest reviews. Now Virgil Thompson, at
At that time, it's possible it was the most famous American contolger of all time, and a famous music critic.
As far as the musical effect of Ludwig Hansen's text almost by heart, it opens with the remark that, quote,
Whether one is able to listen without knowing laundry to the seventh symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich
probably depends on a repeatedly un-musical perception.
It seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not-very-musical, and the distracted, end quote,
and then first is no doubt, and it ended with an immortal insult, quote,
that he is so deliberately diluted as matter, adopted in, by both excessive sophistication
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.
I want to say that Chuck DeCove, Chuck DeCove, who was born as a modern composer and was
celebrated with us, by the time of the 7th Symphony, he and Virgil Thompson say that he
is running from mass consumption. So Chuck DeCove had sold out and it was a case of, this
symphony is popular, it's played everywhere, it must be bad for a modern life market.
Now, Ludwig goes on with his own experience.
His variety of experience was a badge of musical sophistication where I came from.
I've watched at appropriate moments as my soldiers campaigned, hoping to escape the
lead.
But no, my friends who were at least as learned and intelligent as I, and who were
normally just as irreverent about everything things were supposed to be irreverent about,
were maverized.
These were not eight-year-olds.
There was nothing wrong with their musical perceptions
for their quick-witted musicality, I can certainly tell.
We also thought, trust me, that they valued this music,
which I have been forced to despise.
More highly than I valued any music,
and that such composers meant more to his and their society
than only composers meant to mine.
For the first time, their authenticity
and Art Form, the unbearable suspicion that the ways of listening to and thinking about music
that had been instilled in me and all my peers at home were in progress.
So there is the passage that really suggests here to fill it out that the person began to worry
that the music he had been taught in grad school, and this will be modernist music,
about the whole relation of totalitarianism to the art, and specifically to modernism.
Let me skip it out very quickly and then develop into details into a way to separate our conflicts.
I always fail to understand it myself.
That is, I'm so hesitant to say anything good about totalitarianism, but on the one hand,
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.
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,
How Many Modernist Artists Were Attracted to Factism?
Well, Orford was the most extreme and the most famous example than we ever found yesterday.
But there seems to be something in factism for artists and even for modernist artists.
And yet, this was the fastest bargain if there ever were one.
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.
You know, if you say, okay, I don't want to be dependent on the commercial market,
let the state support me in my artistic endeavors.
You're going to pay a different kind of price for that.
You'll be subject to a different kind of control.
And both the authority and the Soviet Union really do exert tremendous control over the arts.
And they're the ones who put guns to people's heads.
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
is that Hitler and Stalin skewed the victory of the modern aesthetic into the 20th century.
By attacking it, they legitimated it in ways I now come to conclusion it never would have otherwise been
legitimated. That may be my most confident defense. Okay, let's decide to review this now in detail.
On the first point, the totalitarian regimes and cases in New York, it actually follows
from there being totalitarian regimes.
That's the point, totalitarianism, the totalitarian society now comes under the purview of the regime,
under a true laissez-faire society that the government wouldn't be involved in at all.
That would be one of the many private activities that should be left to people on their own.
But totalitarian regimes want to regulate everything.
They want to have a hand in everything, and so one of the things they want to do is support the arts.
Now, I think we've seen one passage from the book, Art of Civil Rights, by Peter Adams.
He says, Kirzner was always presented as a great paper of the arts.
He was seen over the exhibitions, purchasing pictures for party buildings. He became the best
kind of the great German art exhibition, spending large sums of money at ease. From the second
exhibition in 1938, he bought no less than 202 works, over half a million marks worth.
The number of works bought by the theater was astounding. In 1941, he bought nearly 1,000
will be distributed throughout ministries and public buildings
will be labeled purported by the fear of risk-highly-guise.
And now we quote Hitler,
New age can claim to free itself from the duty to fall for art, Hitler said.
Continuing the quote,
We would lose if we did so not only the capacity for our sense of creation,
but also the capacity to understand it, to experience art.
So we would work to create a balance of education and nobles
that increase capacity for appreciation.
The great cultural achievements of humanity were at all times the highest achievements of the life of the community.
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.
Now, this is a, this is a lousy form of argument, reducting alive Hitler.
I mean, it's really unfair, but you can do this in amazing ways.
Take quotes from Salerno or Hitler and say, who said this?
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,
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.
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.
He did admit to that academy that he saved millions of lives, but unfortunately, he was not.
But one of the reasons he was so interested in the arts is he thought of himself as an artist.
And as Adam goes on to write, there were, after all, his fellow artists.
And remembering his hardships as an artist, he said, my artists shall live like princes, seriously.
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.
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.
in which he was in charge, Arno Bocca, one of the most famous sculptor in after Germany,
played only a focus on his passion.
Didn't it impact him?
Oh, that's a real test.
And in 1942, the large house was a part of a sizable studio
as the personal gift from the Fuhrer.
So, you know, this is what Pound wanted.
He wanted a modern patron of the arts,
get back to the conditions of the Renaissance, and it's been noted that it required Renaissance
tyrants and it required modern tyrants to recapture that kind of large-scale hatred from people
like Hitler and Stalin. You see it in the Soviet Union as well. It is hard for us to
accept, but the richness of the cultural life in the Soviet Union is extraordinary, especially
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.
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.
Almost all the great violinists are Russian, and the vast majority of the great pianists are Russian.
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
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.
They all suffered from it in their own ways, but the degree of patience behind the Bolshoi Ballet, the Pier of Armstrong,
the fear of regime that really put money into the arts.
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
had one point of engagement with modernism in that they all desperately wanted to be modern
and presented themselves as modernizing forces.
Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union embraced industrialism
and presented themselves as great industrial powers who were modernizing their countries,
who had to be at the forefront of technology.
and so the modernist level fare of technology leads up with the totalitarian level fare of technology.
As you see this best in Italy with a school of paintings called the Italian Futurists who start flourishing in the teens.
Many of them became fascists and supported mutual aid.
If you go to the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, you can see the actual continuity between the futuist paintings of the teens
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.
So, a lot of famous modernists flourished at least initially with Polynesians and even on the state of Massachusetts.
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.
and so forth of economic problems and it wasn't in position yet to code ECR but there's a tremendous
cultural explosion in the Soviet Union in the 20s, spearheaded by painting and people
like Malavis but also amazing developments in the theater, you know the development of
the Stanislavski method and all things that are so important to history in the 20th century
because much of the most avant-garde developments in the theater in the 20th century come out
of Russia in the 20th century.
and I can, that's based on developments that started in the art culture, that's what this theory is too.
And then the fascinating developments in literature, because Moldova, for example, interesting drama developed.
And then film, we'll be talking about it this afternoon, but I mean, film is the greatest of the modernist arts,
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.
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,
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.
We'll use the scores by Sergei Prokofiev and one of the great musical scores of the 20th century, the Alexander Detsky music.
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.
And then Eisenstein went on to do probably the greatest film cinematically, Ivan the Terrible, and then Salerno got a little nervous.
A portrait of an insane, tyrannical scoundrel, affecting the Western people.
Stalin got the message, and that was it for Eisen, the terrible, and that's where we'll get it.
So, again, you pay the price for Stalin's support, but I do, you know, it is extraordinary how much
Eisenstein was able to accomplish within his framework. You know, some of the great science
of Modern Cinema, emerged from Salerno's Soviet Union, and who would have thunk it?
But, you know, it just can't be denied.
I mean, it tells both sides of the story.
You know, before he starts getting all weak about Salerno's competitive work, you know,
he destroyed Eisenstein.
He destroyed whatever he created.
Well, this actually, and the story in Nazi Germany is much more truncated
with the Nazi rule, it's only about 12 years, the corresponding period of modern experimentation
in Germany occurred in the Weimar Republic, I mean, there's for a point of what I'm saying,
there have been fewer regimes weaker politically than the Weimar Republic and fewer regimes
stronger than the special economy of Soviet Union and that essentially both underwent a
and the period of great artistic flowering and experimentation in the 20s and 20s.
You can't make a connection really between the regime and the art.
But still, what is surprising is when you look at the not too years in Germany,
the degree of importance of the art was explored.
Now, Germany has always had and continues to have the most classical music life in the world.
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,
In the cinema, again, you have the oddity of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century,
You have the oddity of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, Marie Riefenstahl, emerging during this period.
In this case, one of the most active supporters of Hitler, Riefenstahl, an incredibly beautiful woman and an actress.
She was Hitler's favorite actress. She appeared in the German ski epics, the German equivalent of Westerns.
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,
and the film Triumph of the Will, the film of the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and Olympia,
the film of the 1936 Hitler Olympics. These films are appalling ideologically. I mean,
they are Nazi films in the deepest sense of the term. They celebrate Nazism, they celebrate
and Nazi Ideology. They have all of the Nazi races in them, the Celebration of the Alley Ring.
I cannot say a nice word about that without prefacing it. I say that. But visually, they are absolutely extraordinary.
I think everyone says visually. They are the most beautiful documentaries, most magical documentaries ever done.
They have been endlessly copied, the most famous example is that the last scene
of the first Fowler's movie is copied, Dr. Fowler's one of the great scenes,
it's fine for the will, I mean, it's just, filmmakers have absorbed the vocabulary
of those films in their blood, and, you know, like Eisenstein,
in the Ludwig style was serving the propaganda of a totalitarian regime, but with great political brilliance.
And so, again, although, as I've told and admitted, Nazi Germany, like I've told you, actually anti-modernist,
they actually contribute to the development of modernism.
and Modernism, I mean, if they produce and support nothing other than Eisenstein and Mises
style, we will have to say that totalitarianism made a contribution to the development of modernism
in the cinema. But it actually goes beyond that. If you read some of these books, I put
on a new list like Adam's Arbitrary Life. In rather odd ways, Nazi Germany contributed
Modernism, the autobahns, the famous superhighways that Hitler built. They've been copied all
over the world. Hitler built the first superhighways, and they are a critical example of modernist
architecture. Even though we tend to think of Hitler's architecture as unclassical
and anti-modernist, in some ways, and Adam's documents say, the way bridges were built
for the autobonds, the way the autobonds themselves were built,
they're almost the ulcers of 20th century modernism.
And the whole ideology model, they were built to produce money.
Now, what Hitler had in mind was the speed of moving the garbage.
But if you just look at the autobonds, and you recognize them,
because they look like they're interstates, look like models on them,
well, the road beds were built more properly, lasted better.
but they are an extraordinary expression of the modernist spirit.
And for that matter, the Nazi rallies, if you look at the way they're portrayed in science and law and reason,
they were remarkable examples of 20th century modernist art.
And the way the Nazis learned to exploit the media, they were really the first politicians
who learned to fully exploit the 20th century mid-media and especially the radio.
I mean, most people say that Hitler was not as impossible without the radio,
and his ability to communicate by radio.
As an unanswered question about the 20th century, if radio had not been a new medium,
and Socialism.
We're totalitarianism, specifically the Nazis have been able to find that it was the nudists
in the medium that made people trust it.
They've not yet learned to understand it or be critical about it.
And it's just unbelievable when you hear a Hitler speech now to think that anyone took
this seriously.
It's so melodramatic.
It's so well-done.
And yet it's partly the nudists of the medium that allowed them to get along with it.
Well, I'm going to add a little point.
and so that the Nazis were anti-modernist, but in its first sense, they were profoundly modernist.
They had to be. They had to embrace the 20th century on its new technology with the basis of their power.
And the belief between these totalitarian regimes and modernism is power.
I hate to say it, but the art of trade power.
It's easy to have modernism be talented. He's not the only one.
And in some ways, they were strapped between regimes of power.
Modernism in the arts was a vision of power, the new power of technology.
The modernists wanted to remake the world.
The great slogan of British modernism of the towns and in the moods was make it new.
It was also the slogan of Nazi Germany and also the slogan of the idiom.
All this stuff about the new man, the slogan of idiom, and the new woman.
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.
So, again, there was a kind of strange alliance between modern art and the totalitarian regime.
I mean, otherwise, it's inexorable the number of artists who gravitated either towards the Soviet Union or towards Nazi Germany.
Poets, composers, painters, sculptors, architects.
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.
and so on.
I think what I was fancying is that we make all of Berlin and when you look at the staging
of the Nazi rally, the great Nuremberg rally, the Nazis used every new technology, the airplane
search lights that Albert Speer used to create these procedures of light.
What a central image of modernism that is, if you didn't know who did it, you know, you
and I think, oh, a great personal inspiration here, this symphony of life that Albert Speer has created to celebrate in Hitler.
So, again, it's very creepy almost to understand this, but there are more links between totalitarianism and modernism.
Having said that, this is all today going to be, on the one hand, on the other hand,
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.
for the University of the Arts.
Now, actually, they, they surpassed us in that regard.
You had all these levels and levels of departments and bureaus.
Again, on paper, it would be somebody's dream.
They really care about the artist.
Look, they've got a secretary of the artist and an undersecretary of the artist,
and under, undersecretary of the artist.
One of the essays would be a, a, a fuller and, and real book.
and how to think of art as a wonderful bureaucratic thought of the organization of the art administration in Nazi Germany.
And so things were carefully supervised and carefully scrutinized and ultimately behind everything was a gun.
And together Hitler and Stalin murdered more artists than anybody.
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,
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
So that ultimately, whatever forces it helps, it cycles and Ludwig gets destroyed and stamped out.
So particularly as the regime consolidated and strengthened and was able to maintain its control over the arts, the arts flourished less and less.
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.
The Nazis gained power faster and went control faster, but most of the specific art things hurt, particularly painting and sculpture.
and when you look at it today, it's very difficult to appreciate it.
And specifically, and this is the other point that for all the links between totalitarianism and modernism,
in fact, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were specifically and explicitly anti-modernists.
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,
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.
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.
which was largely modernist art and they put it on display to humiliate it.
Now it's interesting that Hitler associated modernist art with commercial art
and specifically with Jewish archaeologists.
The great animist of his attacks on modernist art was that he saw it as a conspiracy
of international Jewish art dealers to force this horrible art on the German people.
And his speech after speech talked about this, and he would, what the Nazis did in the 30s,
they started to clone German museums of Jewish art, and Hitler would give him speeches,
Look how much of your tax money went to pay for this work by a Jewish artist, sold by a Jewish archaeologist.
This modernist project.
And, again, people point to the irony, which is that there's a wonderful catalogue,
the exhibit we created in Washington, D.C. about ten years ago.
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.
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
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,
and the next day, SABDA had an editorial called Muddell Instead of Music saying that
the stuff that's going to be used is formula. That was the negative word in Soviet criticism
that formists meant that it placed fewer artistic motives over the expression of the students
to the Western People, and the answer was Soviet rule in them, and again, for all the
antitheses between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, their artistic policies were very
similar, and again, they were both socialist reviews. Nazism is national socialism, and
and in both cases we have national policy to the arts and it's almost like the stolen realism
looks very much like the kind of painting that Hitler liked.
That is, the typical art that Stalin Hitler wanted was a good looking, young, bedded wooden,
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.
Again, realist and always upbeat, pointed away to the future.
Now, I will parapheretically say this is also identical with American art in the 1930s,
the so-called WPA art, the art produced by the American government policy in the arts.
and I, it's very uncanny, but you can see it particularly in rural, in post office this day throughout the United States
that they haven't been falling down, I mean, there's an almost worldwide style of factored star in the 1930s,
You pointed to literally in Hitler's Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, in Roosevelt's United States, and Hitler as well.
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,
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
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
of Patroning, so the, all around the world that we see a kind of reaction to modernism.
The United States as well as the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
And so, I mean, these are wrong picks, that the modernists bought into these regimes.
They thought these regimes were going to elevate them.
And I mean, now you can see in towns, while you got an example yesterday,
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.
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.
And these various dictators were brilliant in exploiting these artists.
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,
I mean, Castro supported many fine writers, including Alejo Carpenter, who made it into his cultural ambassador to France and so on.
I mean, he came into this very candy in this way of knowing how to exploit the battery of artists.
You can't net a lot of artists at a public ceremony, and he'll write anything you want about it.
And it's a very sad fact, but I'm assuming it's true.
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.
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.
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.
and the worldwide triumph of what's called the international style and art after World War II
would really give you faith to a reaction to Nazism and Soviet communism.
That is, Hitler and Stalin together killed the cause of realist representation in the arts
and for that had a real classical forms and architecture.
It's, by the way, taken a decade to recover from the negative effects.
And I do want to say, just before Hitler and Stalin did write a form of art, doesn't mean it's cool.
I mean, in a weird way, we've ended up embracing modernism, even Hitler and Stalin rejected it.
And I used to just sense this, and the more I studied it, the more I became convinced
of this incredible irony of the development and center culture that modernism triumphed completely
over traditional art and especially representational art because they were able to scar those
with the labels of Soviet legalism and Nazi kids.
Uh, let me give a specific example of it, which I just came across.
I wrote an article about Grant Wood's American Gothic, which celebrated his 50th.
You all know that painting, the man and the woman with the pitchfork in the Iowa field.
Uh, and, uh, a number of books came out on it. I wrote an essay on it.
And I was really shocked in studying the history of it.
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.
He was literally attacked for being fascist in the 40s.
And specifically, H.W. Janssen, the famous H.W. Janssen colloquial de-archets at the ancient old colleges.
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.
And Jansen said that Grant Wood was stuck to Americanism, that is nationalism, for a set of baddies of any kind.
And he went on after surveying some of Wood's writings and got himself a set of Midwestern pages, Jansen wrote,
In fact, almost every one of the ideas constituting the regional credo could be matched more verbatim
from the Writings of Nazi Experts on Art.
When I first read that, I found it was outrageous.
I've been in preparation for this seminar.
I've read a number of books on Nazi art.
There's four things in Peter Adam's book, it's so valuable,
is it reproduces art from the Nazi period
you will never, ever see anywhere.
I mean, it's just extraordinary, the number of pages,
some of them in full-challenged reproductions.
And I started looking at them, and I said, my God,
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.
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.
and you know there are paintings in here of, you know, Salerno's German farming families,
you know, who live in the land and like, how do they look like that?
I just think Frank Wood is a very good painter, not a great painter,
and I don't think he's a Nazi, a little fascist, but here's what happens,
well, American legalist paintings will be as toxic, especially because so many
of the leading art critics starting in the 40s were emigrants, often Jewish emigrants
from the food and art community. And so these paintings, I mean, I think Thomas Hart said
Benton and Grant Wood are very fine painters, Benton even better than Wood, I think, and
and American Regionalist Representational Painting, and police companies bought into it.
Time magazine, Life magazine promoted abstract expressionism because it wasn't Nazi art and it wasn't Soviet art.
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.
Therefore, socialist realism is the enemy in art.
Therefore, realism is the enemy in art.
And you get this, this mnemonic moment when life energy puts Jackson Pollock on the cover saying,
Greatest artist alive.
That's almost as if from Wittgenstein's case is that from Wittgenstein, many, many times.
But he wasn't the greatest artist alive at the time.
But, but, look at the twisted logic of this, that America had to embrace abstract expressionism
because they wanted to get away from realism and art, because realism was feared,
would not be associated with, and was solely exposed to real association.
And abstract expressionism was promoted as the international style,
that's actually what it's called, the international style, and the notion was,
And you couldn't call it Americanism, because you couldn't call it, it wasn't representing anything.
You know, you look at Grant Wood Pemping, there's an Iowa cornfield, and that's American.
You can look at a Zakoonian painting or a Jackson Pollock painting, I mean, there's nothing there.
So, and you know, this was part of the, you know, getting away from nationalism,
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
It's a very special story and, in a way, a very ironic one.
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.
Again, you can see it in architecture, you know what Spallon's architecture looks like, those, you know, the Moscow University building,
and, you know, the monumental and decorative, and, of course, lots of real statuaries associated with it.
Same in Germany. Much of the German architecture never got built, but books like the Adam's book are good,
so Hitler's plan for rebuilding Berlin after the war is new, if you would have wanted that,
as the building which is going to build this giant neoclassical dome that would have warped
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,
which was built for this and also the Kunst exhibition. It's still there. It's now the Museum of Modern Art.
Museum of Modern Art is going to build an altruistic building in Munich. There's some altruistic architectures in Munich.
from a lot of the alfalfa architects in Italy, and it was already neoclassical, you know,
glute columns, pedidins, real sculptures associated with them.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini managed to give traditional architecture a bad name,
and the triumph of Walter Gropius, Dietz Ben-Gurow, all these refugees from European factories
after the war has a certain ideological basis and a simple international style in architecture.
This renounces ordinance, which renounces recognizable fractalary, which renounces any of the new fractal canon.
You know, basically, the glass tower that we stand on will popularize.
That's, I mean there are many artistic reasons behind that.
by Taylor and Will has a fascinating link between not the architecture and postmodern architecture.
And when we think about the embrace, the embrace of classical elements and historical elements
in general, it does provide a connection now, only just to give you a hint about it.
I never even thought of that before that.
But anyway, you see then what a complex story this is of an interaction between the
and Art in Modernism in particular, and at the time there were names I'd like to talk
a little more specifically about, Stoichka Sobolec, who seems to me emblematic of so many
of the Eastern, Eastern century art that we've been talking about. He's in my opinion the
greatest composer of the 20th century. I do like Schoenberg, I do like Bartholomew,
and Stravinsky and some others.
I've stayed with our child, he's the greatest composer of the 20th century,
but really he's the greatest composer of the 19th century.
I mean, he's kind of a 19th century composer for long.
But, but, you know, if I really have to name one person,
it will be Justin Fowlidge.
And I'm born out by the market.
We finally have time to take out things in 20th century art,
magazine, the first magazine, June 2006, every year they'll have a poll, they ask their leaders
what are their favorite pieces of music and they assemble a top 300 list and then from this list
they look at which composers got how many pieces on the list and that's the cover page, the top one
and Proud for None, the Bureau of Treasure Handles. Here's a list of the top composers
in order, in sending orders. Mozart was number one, then Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms,
Edward Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Ray Vaughan Williams, Handles and Sustacone. His fives were Handles
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.
and so on. So that's, I mean, whole indications, scientific proof, I need to say how long, but
let's say now, if you looked at other things, like the skepticals, it always comes out well
in the polling, and I would say deservedly so, but I do want to point out that as Correction
said, you cannot believe how trash skepticals is in the musicological literature. I mean,
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
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,
and the world recordings of it, including Phyllis Pestachowicz himself,
James Ciceno, he was a, he was a world-class pianist.
He tied with Bartok at a, at the Piano Compos in the 40s.
That may have something to do with the, with the side co-painters in the 7th Symphony
in the Concert Op. Orchestra.
But anyway, uh, uh, Pestachowicz was regarded as a hack,
and still is regarded as a hack by many musicologists.
and so on.
That is qualified and can be used in both.
Virgil Hansen virtually said that in that review that a person quoted.
Now, just a brief review of such a quote has really shown the fascinating and complex
ways in which he interacted with the history of modernism and the history of totalitarianism
and I'm doing this now because I think it swung out as I'm trying to say.
Such a quote begins as a modernist.
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.
I mean, like so many composers, he was brilliant from the beginning. He wrote his first symphony when he was 19 years old.
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.
In fact, Mozart's 26th symphony is the first symphony he writes since his first symphony, so there, both getting out of the bay.
So 19 years old, as his graduation thesis in school, he writes his first symphony,
Society, and it's a brilliant modernist work, a thrift, sarcastic, silicone-intimidative
musical position, dazzling.
And one of the things about spectacle people, Ned Daz, he earned money early in his life
as the pianist in a China movie theater.
And he played the kind of music he associated with China movies, because you could hear it
in some of his musical compositions later.
And it's fascinating to me that in some ways the music industry grew out of a clippity side of the movies.
I've been making a lot of this right there. I was working with a great fanatic art, especially in the movies,
and the music always has that somatic aspect to it. It's very indigenous.
There's always a cage going on, or a bark going on, stuff like that.
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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.
And so he was headed straight out, you know, on this modernist course, Mahler,
Gustav Mahler was his favorite symphonist.
I only hear echoes of Kurt Weill in his music, but nobody else apparently does.
But then he writes an opera called The Mourn, based on the Mourn of such works.
And he writes later in the 10th, this real modernist opera.
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
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.
Unfortunately, he wasn't killed, but he was forced to publicly advance his music and wrote his fifth symphony as a form of redemption.
The first symphony was one of the most magnificent things he ever wrote.
Fifth and eighth symphony, I don't know which is better.
Rightly the fifth is better.
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.
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,
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.
There's nothing like that. I mean, to me, the music of the 16th century is very beautiful, but it's still modern.
Anyway, from then on, spectacle bounces back and forth.
Sometimes he's forced to write Soviet propaganda music, and he had to do the score for a film about Stalin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
and we have about 12 of them and he was a very good pianist, not as great as Richter and Galay,
on their recordings he seems to be even better, but still.
Fortunately, one regime can see everything and supervise everything, so spectacles could operate under the radar
and produced this vast body of brilliant chamber music which takes no confessions to anything.
And there's, you know, it's the music you want it to write, and we have it.
It was even recorded, you know, stuff was recorded in Soviet Union.
It became the music for the kids.
So, when we quickly review his career, in a way he did everything.
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.
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.
I mean, he was the most thought-in talent in that he could just turn out music.
I mean, he didn't sleep, and that's what happened to the film music.
And he's a good example of a point, you know, even within the Soviet Union, there was commercial art.
And it is true that spectacle was kind of doing this, he more or less recudiated this music.
Nevertheless, you can see class and abundance in it.
and you know, after reading that article, I can hear what the guy is talking about.
And so, even the half-worth contributed to testicology's development.
And then, again, you have the even-worth half-worth with the Soviet propaganda.
And we've had enough writing, you can say, okay, here's an example where we talk
for rights and commercial reasons and the music is half-worth.
But, when you write for the state, it's even-worth, no conviction whatsoever.
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.
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.
and yet, you know, oddly enough, it's the market that made that profit, you know, even
within Soviet communism, there was a degree of private enterprise, and Dostoyevsky would
earn money by writing music for commercial films, in the sense that these were films
for the public, that were, you know, phones were played in public in the Soviet Union.
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.
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.
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.
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.
and that the need to respond to that challenge deepens just as opposed to the man, deepens
his resolve as a composer, we need to use it more profound and I will just use it as
an example, in some ways the ideology I'm fighting all the time is the notion that above
all what we must do is take pressure off artists and so we need to take the pressure of the
and the Market of Artists, and that's what government support of the arts will do.
Factually, the government support of the arts creates other pressures, but in any case,
I would like to question the fundamental premise that artists work better when they're not under
principle. Some possible yes, many possible yes, but the history of art suggests that it's not a universal principle,
and many of the greatest artists have done their greatest work under the greatest pressure,
and the History of the Arts, and the History of the Arts, and the History of the Arts,
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,
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.
Did you ever make a move to leave the Soviet Union?
It was not an option.
I mean, it's both what I was saying, but I always thought, wow,
every dollar from the Soviet Union is a lot of punishment.
But it was Mother Russia.
and even Rostropovic hated having to leave when he was exiled.
And someone like Dr. Kovach, I mean, he had family there.
He was told the question, if he left, what would happen to his family?
He was carefully monitored.
He was sometimes steady to the left, but always with the KGB miners next to him,
watching his every move.
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
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.
and a musician cannot compose in isolation, despite all this and the style that they are.
He knew a lot of musicians, he knew...
Shostakovich worked very closely with Stanislav Richter, with David Oistrakh,
with these conductors like Evgeny Rabinsky.
He felt he was deeply rooted in the rest of musical life.
I come to understand that he wrote these symphonies for orchestra,
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.
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.
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.
and so, you know, to us it's like, why would Ludwig exist at all?
And the answer is, that's where his identity was, yes.
Did you know that Ludwig didn't use the form he had?
Oh, not to know, I mean, I think, I think the balance was very important,
but there are many other reasons for his, the form his music takes,
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.
So, again, I really do appreciate the point of jazz for him, but I wouldn't overestimate it.
Any questions?
Okay, then. We'll be back at 2.