WEBVTT

NOTE Totalitarianism and the Arts in the 20th Century

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.240
This morning, we're going to talk about totalitarianism in the arts.

2
00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:07.240
This afternoon, we'll turn to the motion picture.

3
00:00:07.240 --> 00:00:11.940
Tonight, remember, we've got the pizza party at 5.30 here.

4
00:00:11.940 --> 00:00:16.440
Eat your hearts out, those of you watching us on the computer network,

5
00:00:16.440 --> 00:00:18.040
though you're invited if you get here.

6
00:00:18.040 --> 00:00:25.740
And then tonight at 7, we'll show the culmination of our DVD showings,

7
00:00:25.740 --> 00:00:30.460
an episode of The Simpsons and an episode of The X-Files.

8
00:00:30.460 --> 00:00:36.580
Let me review a few things before we turn to the subject for today.

9
00:00:36.580 --> 00:00:42.980
I'm very happy to see that I'm provoking resistance in you and I'm trying to be provocative

10
00:00:42.980 --> 00:00:49.580
and I think it is interesting to see what I suspected that although we may be Austrians

11
00:00:49.580 --> 00:00:56.900
and Economics. Many of us are still Marxists in culture. That is, it's very hard not to

12
00:00:56.900 --> 00:01:04.140
imbibe some of the master cultural myths of our day. And so we've all somehow been brought

13
00:01:04.140 --> 00:01:10.460
up hearing that the commercializing of art must be bad. And we have these expressions

14
00:01:10.460 --> 00:01:16.820
like going Hollywood or selling out. And I confess, most of my life I've been preyed

15
00:01:16.820 --> 00:01:23.100
to these as well. And it really does take some rethinking to understand that

16
00:01:23.100 --> 00:01:30.940
commerce and culture can go together. The example I used yesterday morning, the

17
00:01:30.940 --> 00:01:35.020
serialization of novels, is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about.

18
00:01:35.020 --> 00:01:41.820
Namely, if you look at how novels were published in the 19th century, just from

19
00:01:41.820 --> 00:01:49.660
From a distance, it looks crazy. And indeed, the British novel publishing industry in the

20
00:01:49.660 --> 00:01:57.140
19th century is as commercial an example of culture as you could find. And it just seems

21
00:01:57.140 --> 00:02:03.780
a completely Jerry-billed system. No one planned it out. This idea of serializing novels, they

22
00:02:03.780 --> 00:02:11.260
kind of stumbled upon it. The success of Pickwick papers got it rolling. It looks so bad from

23
00:02:11.260 --> 00:02:21.260
From an aesthetic point of view, we see the novelists having to scramble to meet deadlines, sometimes writing pages, even as they were being carried off to the printer.

24
00:02:21.260 --> 00:02:29.260
They're forced to make the novels longer than they wanted or shorter than they wanted, because they're meeting a certain set number of installments.

25
00:02:29.260 --> 00:02:42.260
The public is being duped by having these things foisted upon them, these hastily written, gerry-built novels.

26
00:02:42.260 --> 00:02:58.260
If you looked at it aesthetically from our ideas of how art ought to be created, you would think this would be the worst set of cheap commercial stuff imaginable, maybe even as bad as television programs today.

27
00:02:58.260 --> 00:03:03.620
And in fact, yeah, the majority of maybe these 40,000 novels that were produced were terrible.

28
00:03:03.620 --> 00:03:10.460
But the peaks were extraordinary, including the novels of the greatest novelist in English,

29
00:03:10.460 --> 00:03:11.460
Dickens.

30
00:03:11.460 --> 00:03:16.660
Moreover, if you look at it from a Marxist perspective, you would say, look at this as

31
00:03:16.660 --> 00:03:20.660
this is exploitation.

32
00:03:20.660 --> 00:03:24.180
The laborers are the novelists.

33
00:03:24.180 --> 00:03:28.980
They're creating all the value there, and yet they're not getting all the money.

34
00:03:28.980 --> 00:03:33.220
These publishers are getting money, printers maybe can get money because they're working

35
00:03:33.220 --> 00:03:43.340
at a printing press, but booksellers are making money off this, book distributors, a Marxist

36
00:03:43.340 --> 00:03:49.820
would say, and many have said in print, that the Victorian publishing industry exploited

37
00:03:49.820 --> 00:03:56.500
These novelists and moreover would say the public was being exploited because these novels weren't any good

38
00:03:56.500 --> 00:04:01.540
They were just marketed well, and you had all these gimmicks like tie-in action figures

39
00:04:02.540 --> 00:04:08.340
And the bargain on you know the free binder you got if you bought all 20 installments and so on

40
00:04:10.540 --> 00:04:17.740
But insofar as you apply Austrian economics to this you say these were just open market transactions

41
00:04:17.740 --> 00:04:23.620
Transactions, Open Economic Exchanges. No one could put a gun to a novelist and say

42
00:04:23.620 --> 00:04:32.140
write. Only governments can do that to artists. Only in the Soviet Union could you put a gun

43
00:04:32.140 --> 00:04:38.900
to Shostakovich's head, in effect, and say write the music for the Stalin biography film.

44
00:04:38.900 --> 00:04:45.300
And so we would say if all this was being done voluntarily, everyone was benefiting

45
00:04:45.300 --> 00:04:52.500
from the Transactions. No one was simply profiting the expense of others. So in fact, yeah, these

46
00:04:52.500 --> 00:04:58.380
novelists had to work hard and do what the, to some extent, what their publishers told

47
00:04:58.380 --> 00:05:04.060
them, but that at least gave them the chance of being successful and making a lot of money

48
00:05:04.060 --> 00:05:11.460
and people voluntarily subjected themselves to this supposedly awful regime. Many of them

49
00:05:11.460 --> 00:05:17.860
eventually complained about it, but still, none of these people could have succeeded as

50
00:05:17.860 --> 00:05:23.760
novelists without this huge infrastructure that the publishing industry supplied.

51
00:05:23.760 --> 00:05:26.140
It's not easy to print up your own books.

52
00:05:26.140 --> 00:05:28.640
It's not easy to distribute it and market them.

53
00:05:28.640 --> 00:05:31.840
We have proof of that because William Blake did that.

54
00:05:31.840 --> 00:05:34.640
He did publish his own works.

55
00:05:34.640 --> 00:05:36.480
He printed them for themselves.

56
00:05:36.480 --> 00:05:40.680
He hand-colored them with the help of his wife.

57
00:05:40.680 --> 00:05:47.440
He actually advertised himself, put up posters, tried to arrange sales.

58
00:05:47.440 --> 00:05:54.920
The result was Blake's biggest seller was 26 copies of his Songs of Innocence and Experience.

59
00:05:54.920 --> 00:06:01.520
Many of his books only survive in one or two copies because that's all it ever sold.

60
00:06:01.520 --> 00:06:05.040
And so Blake is sort of our counter example.

61
00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:07.040
He couldn't stand the system.

62
00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:16.040
He hated publishers and so he decided to buck the system and his works in some ways may

63
00:06:16.040 --> 00:06:24.800
be better as a result, but still he barely survived, both economically and in terms of

64
00:06:24.800 --> 00:06:30.240
his work surviving, kind of lucky that the works weren't lost.

65
00:06:30.240 --> 00:06:39.120
So in fact, this evil, exploitative publishing industry was helping the writers, giving them

66
00:06:39.120 --> 00:06:45.000
an opportunity to spread their work, and some couldn't make a living at it, some made decent

67
00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:54.800
livings at it, some became extremely wealthy, as Dickens did, and the public got what it

68
00:06:54.800 --> 00:07:00.800
wanted as shown by the fact that they bought these books and you can see many

69
00:07:00.800 --> 00:07:06.560
of them they didn't buy no matter how well marketed you can't you can't force

70
00:07:06.560 --> 00:07:12.680
people to read something that's terrible again no guns were involved in this and

71
00:07:12.680 --> 00:07:18.480
so we as Austrians look at this and say yeah it looks chaotic to us the whole

72
00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:24.600
system is in plan it's not centrally regulated the actual books themselves

73
00:07:24.600 --> 00:07:54.600
are not produced by careful planning, there's some planning involved, but 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 again, a Marxist looking at this system would see it as crazy, but we looking at it from an Austrian perspective see how it works and it's actually an example

74
00:07:54.600 --> 00:07:58.600
and the simple of spontaneous order as we understand it.

75
00:07:58.600 --> 00:08:03.600
So, the virtues of applying Austrian economics even to culture.

76
00:08:03.600 --> 00:08:10.600
Now, today I want to turn to an interesting subject,

77
00:08:10.600 --> 00:08:14.600
the whole connection of totalitarianism and the arts of the 20th century,

78
00:08:14.600 --> 00:08:21.600
and I particularly want to talk about the interaction between totalitarianism and modernism.

79
00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:28.600
It's an odd subject. It's something that people basically don't like to discuss.

80
00:08:28.600 --> 00:08:32.600
Or if they discuss, they discuss it in the most simplistic terms.

81
00:08:32.600 --> 00:08:40.600
The last thing anyone wants to say, at least from our perspective, is anything good about totalitarianism,

82
00:08:40.600 --> 00:08:46.600
about Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, which is what I'll concentrate on.

83
00:08:46.600 --> 00:08:56.600
and we would like to be able to say that there's some kind of intimate connection between freedom and artistic production

84
00:08:56.600 --> 00:09:05.600
so that we really wish we could say there was no possibility of art in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but that's simply untrue.

85
00:09:05.600 --> 00:09:19.600
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.

86
00:09:19.600 --> 00:09:28.600
Again, I keep stressing, it may look as if I'm making some kind of argument that only the commercial system can produce great art.

87
00:09:28.600 --> 00:09:42.600
No, all I'm trying to suggest is that the commercial system can sometimes produce great art, just as the patronage system, and as I'm actually going to say today, just as the totalitarian system can.

88
00:09:42.600 --> 00:09:50.600
The human spirit is incredibly resilient. The creative spirit cannot be suppressed by anything.

89
00:09:50.600 --> 00:09:59.600
not by totalitarian dictators, not by the evil market system, not by nasty renaissance tyrannical patrons.

90
00:09:59.600 --> 00:10:02.600
Somehow art can flourish under any condition.

91
00:10:02.600 --> 00:10:11.600
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.

92
00:10:11.600 --> 00:10:16.600
There are no conditions you can lay out and say, you have this in place, you will get great art.

93
00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:22.600
All you can say is that art has certain necessary conditions, a certain level of economic development, and so on.

94
00:10:22.600 --> 00:10:25.600
And then it's chancing as to what will happen.

95
00:10:25.600 --> 00:10:36.600
And I find it incredible how art was able to flourish in some cases, even under people as horrible as Hitler and Stalin.

96
00:10:36.600 --> 00:10:47.600
And that's why I have included this to make sure I'm not trying to make an argument that only under commercial systems can art flourish.

97
00:10:47.600 --> 00:10:55.600
I am countering the view that is rather prevalent that under commercial conditions no great art is possible.

98
00:10:55.600 --> 00:11:01.600
We've already seen that Shakespeare and Dickens grew out of commercial conditions, so that's a sufficient refutation.

99
00:11:01.600 --> 00:11:12.600
But, so let's turn now to this really difficult, in some ways, tortured question of totalitarianism and the arts and totalitarianism in modernism.

100
00:11:12.600 --> 00:11:22.600
And let me begin with a provocative quotation from a musicologist of Russian music, a man named Richard Taruskin.

101
00:11:22.600 --> 00:11:27.600
This is in this Shostakovich casebook, which I've added to your bibliography.

102
00:11:27.600 --> 00:11:35.080
Geography, and he's talking about the fact that as a graduate student, he says, I spent

103
00:11:35.080 --> 00:11:40.840
the academic year 1971-72 as an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory, researching a

104
00:11:40.840 --> 00:11:45.640
dissertation on Russian opera in the 1860s.

105
00:11:45.640 --> 00:11:50.320
And so it goes to lots of musical performances, and one of them is of Shostakovich's Seventh

106
00:11:50.320 --> 00:11:53.360
Symphony, the famous Leningrad Symphony.

107
00:11:53.360 --> 00:11:59.360
In one concert, I heard the Seventh Symphony performed on the Kirok Congression in the Conservatory's fabled Great Hall.

108
00:11:59.360 --> 00:12:05.360
I knew the work not only as the butt of Bartok sarcasm, and let me pause here.

109
00:12:05.360 --> 00:12:16.360
Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony became world famous because it was treated as this great protest against the German invasion of Russia and the siege of Leningrad.

110
00:12:16.360 --> 00:12:26.360
Many modernist composers were disgusted by the praise lavished on this symphony, which they thought was a piece of trash.

111
00:12:26.360 --> 00:12:34.360
And in particular, Bela Bartok, you know, many would regard him, along with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, three greatest modernist composers.

112
00:12:34.360 --> 00:12:48.360
Baylor Bartok, who himself had fled, Hitler was living in poverty in the United States at this time and forced to listen to these radio broadcasts of the symphony and the celebration of it.

113
00:12:48.360 --> 00:12:59.360
In Bartok's last piece, his Concerto for Orchestra, he incorporates a passage from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony and he doesn't like it. It's very clear he's trashing it.

114
00:12:59.360 --> 00:13:02.400
So that's why Taruskin is talking about

115
00:13:02.400 --> 00:13:05.680
I knew the work not only as the butt of Bartok's sarcasm

116
00:13:05.680 --> 00:13:12.040
but also the subject as the object of one of Virgil Thompson's snotiest reviews

117
00:13:12.040 --> 00:13:17.920
Now Virgil Thompson at that time possibly was the most famous American composer

118
00:13:17.920 --> 00:13:23.080
and a famous music critic

119
00:13:23.080 --> 00:13:27.760
A connoisseur is a musical invective knew Thompson's text almost by heart

120
00:13:27.760 --> 00:13:29.660
It opened with a remark that, quote,

121
00:13:29.660 --> 00:13:33.100
whether one is able to listen without mind wandering

122
00:13:33.100 --> 00:13:35.760
to the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich

123
00:13:35.760 --> 00:13:39.560
probably depends on the rapidity of one's musical perceptions.

124
00:13:39.560 --> 00:13:42.300
It seems to have been written for the slow-witted,

125
00:13:42.300 --> 00:13:45.920
the not-very-musical, and the distracted, end quote.

126
00:13:45.920 --> 00:13:50.360
And then Teruskin goes on, and it ended with an immortal insult, quote,

127
00:13:50.360 --> 00:13:53.960
that he has so deliberately diluted his matter, adapted it,

128
00:13:53.960 --> 00:13:57.560
by both excessive simplification and excessive repetition

129
00:13:57.560 --> 00:14:02.920
to the comprehension of a child of eight indicates that he's willing to write down to a real

130
00:14:02.920 --> 00:14:08.240
or fictitious psychology of mass consumption in a way that may eventually disqualify him

131
00:14:08.240 --> 00:14:12.160
for consideration as a serious composer.

132
00:14:12.160 --> 00:14:18.800
I want to show you that Shostakovich, who began as a modernist composer and was celebrated

133
00:14:18.800 --> 00:14:24.280
as such by the time of the Seventh Symphony, hears Virgil Thompson saying that he's writing

134
00:14:24.280 --> 00:14:32.520
for Mass Consumption, so it is Shostakovich has sold out, and it is, it was a case of

135
00:14:32.520 --> 00:14:39.280
this symphony is popular, it's being played everywhere, it must be bad to a modernist like

136
00:14:39.280 --> 00:14:40.280
Thompson.

137
00:14:40.280 --> 00:14:45.720
Now, Tversky goes on with his own experience, since deriding the symphony was a badge of

138
00:14:45.720 --> 00:14:51.080
musical sophistication where I came from, I glanced at appropriate moments at my Soviet

139
00:14:51.080 --> 00:14:54.160
Companions hoping to exchange a wink.

140
00:14:54.160 --> 00:14:55.360
But no.

141
00:14:55.360 --> 00:15:00.720
My friends who were at least as learned and intelligent as I, and who were normally just

142
00:15:00.720 --> 00:15:07.180
as irreverent about everything students were supposed to be irreverent about, were mesmerized.

143
00:15:07.180 --> 00:15:09.320
These were not eight-year-olds.

144
00:15:09.320 --> 00:15:12.080
There was nothing wrong with their musical perceptions.

145
00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:15.040
For their quick wits and musicality, I can certainly vouch.

146
00:15:15.040 --> 00:15:22.400
The awful thought struck me that they valued this music, which I had been taught to despise,

147
00:15:22.400 --> 00:15:29.840
more highly than I valued any music, and that Shostakovich meant more to his and their society

148
00:15:29.840 --> 00:15:32.400
than any composer meant to mine.

149
00:15:32.400 --> 00:15:37.880
For the first time there occurred to me, half-formed, the unbearable suspicion that the ways of

150
00:15:37.880 --> 00:15:42.640
listening to and thinking about music that had been instilled in me and all my peers

151
00:15:42.640 --> 00:16:12.640
The very interesting passage, and it really suggests here, to fill it out, that Turysken began to worry that the music he had been taught in grad school, and this would be modernist music, he would have been taught Schoenberg, Berg and Weber, and then taught their successors and people like Boulez and Stockhausen, and told that this is music, this is great music because it's difficult, and no one plays it, and no one listens to it.

152
00:16:12.640 --> 00:16:17.640
It's great. And here he's been told, Shostakovich is a joke. He writes for eight-year-olds.

153
00:16:17.640 --> 00:16:25.640
Listen, it's on the radio. Shostakovich made the cover of Time magazine in the 1940s.

154
00:16:25.640 --> 00:16:32.640
You know, how good could he be? And he's saying, but this music speaks to these people,

155
00:16:32.640 --> 00:16:37.640
whereas the music I've been taught to like is somehow trivialized.

156
00:16:37.640 --> 00:16:43.640
Yeah, it's complicated, you can give great lectures on it, but no one would really want to listen to it.

157
00:16:43.640 --> 00:16:54.640
So, and this Shostakovich is somehow a product of this Soviet totalitarian regime, so let's bear in mind this paradox.

158
00:16:54.640 --> 00:17:06.640
And indeed, what I want to suggest is there's something deeply paradoxical about the whole relation of totalitarianism to the arts and specifically to modernism.

159
00:17:06.640 --> 00:17:13.040
since I let me sketch it out very quickly and then develop in detail since in a

160
00:17:13.040 --> 00:17:18.880
way there's such a complex argument I only barely understand it myself that is

161
00:17:18.880 --> 00:17:25.680
on the I'm so hesitant to say anything good about totalitarianism but on the

162
00:17:25.680 --> 00:17:32.360
one hand these totalitarian regimes and again I'm talking cheaply about Nazi

163
00:17:32.360 --> 00:17:40.120
Germany and the Soviet Union were patrons of the arts on levels that were really quite

164
00:17:40.120 --> 00:17:49.120
remarkable and enviable. They, in many respects, and I'll give some examples in a minute, provided

165
00:17:49.120 --> 00:17:57.640
a lot of money for cultural developments. It's one reason many artists were attracted

166
00:17:57.640 --> 00:18:27.640
to these regimes and even modern artists were attracted to the regime 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 the early 30s but even in certain respects as I'll try to spell out in Nazi Germany as strange as that sounds so it seems so odd in retrospect how many modernist artists were attracted

167
00:18:27.640 --> 00:18:35.640
Fascism, where I offered you the most extreme and most famous example, namely Ezra Pound, yesterday.

168
00:18:35.640 --> 00:18:45.640
But there seemed to be something in fascism for artists and even for modernist artists.

169
00:18:45.640 --> 00:18:50.640
And yet this was a Faustian bargain if there ever were one.

170
00:18:50.640 --> 00:19:00.640
The very few artists lived to simply profit from their associations with totalitarianism.

171
00:19:00.640 --> 00:19:05.640
And indeed, the price everyone paid for this was control.

172
00:19:05.640 --> 00:19:10.640
And it is, you know, he who pays the piper calls the tomb.

173
00:19:10.640 --> 00:19:18.640
That's in a way the lesson I've been trying to give all this time, that if people don't like working for the market,

174
00:19:18.640 --> 00:19:48.640
The alternatives really aren't that good, you know, if you say, okay, I don't want to be dependent on commercial markets, 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 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union really did exert horrendous control over the arts, and they're the ones who put guns to people's heads.

175
00:19:48.640 --> 00:19:56.400
often pulled the trigger, and again, no market has ever done that to anybody.

176
00:19:56.400 --> 00:20:03.340
And in particular, the great irony of the modernist support for fascism is both Nazi

177
00:20:03.340 --> 00:20:12.120
Germany and the Soviet Union turned out to be anti-modernist in their own aesthetic ideology.

178
00:20:12.120 --> 00:20:16.520
And I want to go into that in some detail, though as I would eventually show, the ultimate

179
00:20:16.520 --> 00:20:24.520
The irony of all this is that Hitler and Stalin assured the victory of the modernist aesthetic in the 20th century.

180
00:20:24.520 --> 00:20:32.520
By attacking it, they legitimated it in ways I've now come to the conclusion it never would have otherwise been legitimated.

181
00:20:32.520 --> 00:20:39.520
That may be my most controversial claim. Okay, let me try to review this now and go through it in detail.

182
00:20:39.520 --> 00:20:49.520
On the first point, the totalitarian regimes as patrons of the arts, it actually follows from there being totalitarian regimes.

183
00:20:49.520 --> 00:20:58.520
That's the point. Totalitarianism, the totality of society now comes under the purview of the regime.

184
00:20:58.520 --> 00:21:08.520
In a true laissez-faire society, the government wouldn't intervene at all in the arts.

185
00:21:08.520 --> 00:21:13.520
That would be one of the many private activities that should be left to people on their own.

186
00:21:13.520 --> 00:21:18.520
But totalitarian regimes want to regulate everything, they want to have a hand in everything,

187
00:21:18.520 --> 00:21:23.520
and so one of the things they want to do is support the arts.

188
00:21:23.520 --> 00:21:32.520
Now I'll just read you one passage from the book Art of the Third Reich by Peter Adam about this.

189
00:21:32.520 --> 00:21:36.520
Hitler was always presented as a great patron of the arts.

190
00:21:36.520 --> 00:21:41.800
He was seen opening exhibitions, purchasing pictures for party buildings.

191
00:21:41.800 --> 00:21:47.800
He became the best client of the great German art exhibitions, spending large sums of money at each.

192
00:21:47.800 --> 00:21:55.080
From the second exhibition in 1938, he bought no less than 202 works, over half a million marks worth.

193
00:21:55.080 --> 00:21:57.960
The number of works bought by the Fuhrer increased steadily.

194
00:21:57.960 --> 00:22:04.120
In 1941, he bought nearly 1,000, which he distributed throughout ministries and public buildings.

195
00:22:04.120 --> 00:22:10.600
The label, purchased by the Führer, was highly prized, and now he quotes Hitler,

196
00:22:10.600 --> 00:22:17.240
No age can claim to free itself from its duty to foster art, Hitler had said, continuing with a quote,

197
00:22:17.240 --> 00:22:25.160
It would lose, if it did so, not only the capacity for artistic creation, but also the capacity to understand it, to experience art.

198
00:22:25.160 --> 00:22:30.520
Through his work, the creative artist educates and ennobles the nation's capacity for appreciation.

199
00:22:30.520 --> 00:22:36.520
The great cultural achievements of humanity were at all times the highest achievements of the life of the community.

200
00:22:36.520 --> 00:22:44.520
You know, you take that out of context and it looks like the puff literature for the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

201
00:22:44.520 --> 00:22:55.520
Now, this is a lousy form of argument, reductio ad Hitler. I mean, it's really unfair, but you can do this in amazing ways.

202
00:22:55.520 --> 00:23:00.000
take quotes from Stalin or Hitler and say, who said this?

203
00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:03.520
And people say, oh, it must have been the head of the NEH said this.

204
00:23:03.520 --> 00:23:10.600
And that's unfair, but it is important to see

205
00:23:10.600 --> 00:23:14.320
that Hitler had a national policy for the arts.

206
00:23:14.320 --> 00:23:16.680
Stalin had a national policy for the arts.

207
00:23:16.680 --> 00:23:20.960
Just as I was saying, France had a national policy for the arts.

208
00:23:20.960 --> 00:23:28.120
And when people cry out for a national policy of the arts of this country or a ministry of culture of this country,

209
00:23:28.120 --> 00:23:32.560
they ought to think twice about it and realize who the real precedents are for it.

210
00:23:32.560 --> 00:23:38.320
Now, as some of you may know, Hitler was a painter, a fairly competent one.

211
00:23:38.320 --> 00:23:41.600
I've seen some of his paintings.

212
00:23:41.600 --> 00:23:43.520
He wanted to become a painter.

213
00:23:43.520 --> 00:23:48.520
applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts

214
00:23:48.520 --> 00:23:51.520
and in the worst admissions decision ever made

215
00:23:51.520 --> 00:23:54.520
by any committee he was turned down.

216
00:23:54.520 --> 00:23:56.520
If he'd been admitted to that academy

217
00:23:56.520 --> 00:24:00.520
it would have saved millions of lives.

218
00:24:00.520 --> 00:24:02.520
But unfortunately it was not.

219
00:24:02.520 --> 00:24:07.520
But one of the reasons he was so interested in the arts

220
00:24:07.520 --> 00:24:10.520
is he thought of himself as an artist.

221
00:24:10.520 --> 00:24:17.640
and as Adam goes on to write they were after all his fellow artists and remembering his

222
00:24:17.640 --> 00:24:24.960
hardships as an artist he said my artist shall live like princes, Fuersten in the German

223
00:24:24.960 --> 00:24:27.880
and the leading artist of the Reich did precisely that.

224
00:24:27.880 --> 00:24:30.320
The artists were very much Hitler's.

225
00:24:30.320 --> 00:24:34.920
The painter Zep Hiltz received a personal gift of a hundred thousand Reichmarks from Hitler

226
00:24:34.920 --> 00:24:36.520
to build himself a studio.

227
00:24:36.520 --> 00:24:44.520
Gertrude Truest, the widow of Hitler's favorite architect, received large sums annually for the decoration of her husband's buildings in which he was in charge

228
00:24:44.520 --> 00:24:50.520
Arno Brecke, the most famous sculptor in Nazi Germany, paid only a token sum in taxes

229
00:24:50.520 --> 00:24:54.520
Hitler gave tax breaks to artists, it's just grotesque

230
00:24:54.520 --> 00:25:02.520
and in 1940 he received a large private house with a park and a sizable studio as the personal gift from the Führer

231
00:25:02.520 --> 00:25:13.520
So, you know, this is what Pound wanted. He wanted a modern patriot of the arts, get back to the conditions of the Renaissance.

232
00:25:13.520 --> 00:25:26.520
You should have noticed that required Renaissance tyrants and it required modern tyrants to recapture that kind of large-scale patronage from people like Hitler and Stalin.

233
00:25:26.520 --> 00:25:43.520
I mean 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 was extraordinary, especially in areas like ballet, opera, and other forms of classical music.

234
00:25:43.520 --> 00:25:47.520
I mean, this goes back to the Tsarist Russia.

235
00:25:47.520 --> 00:25:50.520
It's not as if the Soviet Union created this.

236
00:25:50.520 --> 00:25:53.520
All these musical traditions can be traced back to the Tsarist Russia.

237
00:25:53.520 --> 00:25:57.520
But the Tsar was another form of tyrant here.

238
00:25:57.520 --> 00:26:08.520
But we have all, in classical music, the vast majority of great artists in this century, in the past century, and still to this day, are Russian.

239
00:26:08.520 --> 00:26:25.520
Almost all the great violinists are Russian, and the vast majority of the great pianists are Russian, and they were the product essentially of a system created by the Tsars and continued under the Soviet Union all the way to its demise.

240
00:26:25.520 --> 00:26:39.520
And you actually talk to some of these artists now, most of whom have left Russia, and they do speak with some regret, you know, how to leave Russia because there's not state support for the arts in Russia the way there was under communism.

241
00:26:39.520 --> 00:26:44.520
And I'm not justifying communism here, but it is counterintuitive to us.

242
00:26:44.520 --> 00:26:51.800
But, you know, any time you hear recordings of Svyatoslav Richter or Emil Gilels or David

243
00:26:51.800 --> 00:26:57.040
Oistrakh or all these great Russian artists, they were products of this system.

244
00:26:57.040 --> 00:27:01.480
They all suffered from it in their own ways.

245
00:27:01.480 --> 00:27:10.280
But the degree of patronage behind the Bolshoi Ballet, the Kirov Opera and so on, here are

246
00:27:10.280 --> 00:27:13.980
regimes that really put money into the arts.

247
00:27:13.980 --> 00:27:19.680
And a particular irony of it is that, and ironic in light of what I was saying a minute

248
00:27:19.680 --> 00:27:24.960
about the anti-modernism of these regimes, is how much they specifically supported the

249
00:27:24.960 --> 00:27:30.540
rise of modernism in ways that really seem weird to us.

250
00:27:30.540 --> 00:27:39.940
But we think of modernism as rebellious and how could it have thrived under totalitarian

251
00:27:39.940 --> 00:27:52.940
and the modernization of modern regimes, 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.

252
00:27:52.940 --> 00:28:06.940
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.

253
00:28:06.940 --> 00:28:14.940
and so the modernist love affair with technology links up with the totalitarian love affair of technology

254
00:28:14.940 --> 00:28:20.940
and actually see this best in Italy with a school of painting called the Italian Futurists

255
00:28:20.940 --> 00:28:27.940
who start flourishing in the teens. Many of them became fascists and supported Mussolini.

256
00:28:27.940 --> 00:28:32.940
If you go to the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, you can see the absolute continuity

257
00:28:32.940 --> 00:28:38.940
between the futurist paintings of the teens and the era of Mussolini art, which isn't on display in Rome.

258
00:28:38.940 --> 00:28:41.940
You won't see Hitler art displayed in Germany.

259
00:28:41.940 --> 00:28:45.940
But in Italy, they're somewhat more open to that aspect of their past.

260
00:28:45.940 --> 00:28:54.940
So a lot of famous modernists flourished, at least initially in the Soviet Union, and even, I'm going to say, in Nazi Germany.

261
00:28:54.940 --> 00:29:01.940
For example, in painting, Kazimir Malevich, one of the most important figures in modernist painting,

262
00:29:01.940 --> 00:29:08.100
This painting, one of the great developers of abstract art, and the whole school is known

263
00:29:08.100 --> 00:29:10.860
as Russian Constructivism.

264
00:29:10.860 --> 00:29:17.580
He starts in late Tsarist Russia, but he really flourished in the 20s and 30s.

265
00:29:17.580 --> 00:29:25.860
See, one of the things that the Soviet Union offered itself as, as bringing a new humanity

266
00:29:25.860 --> 00:29:34.220
into existence, that was remaking the whole world, and in the 20s, this did have an ideologically

267
00:29:34.220 --> 00:29:41.980
liberating effect on the arts, and the 20s was a great era of artistic experimentation

268
00:29:41.980 --> 00:29:49.820
in the Soviet Union, and I know I'm not supposed to say that, but it's a simple truth, in part

269
00:29:49.820 --> 00:29:54.340
because the regime had other things on its mind, it was struggling even to survive and

270
00:29:54.340 --> 00:30:00.940
dealing with all sorts of economic problems, and it wasn't in position yet to police the arts.

271
00:30:00.940 --> 00:30:07.980
But there's a tremendous cultural explosion in the Soviet Union in the 20s, spearheaded by painting and people like Malevich,

272
00:30:07.980 --> 00:30:13.380
but also amazing developments in the theater, you know, the development of the Stanislavski method,

273
00:30:13.380 --> 00:30:16.900
and all those things that are so important to the history of 20th century theater.

274
00:30:16.900 --> 00:30:23.900
Much of the most avant-garde developments of the theater in the 20th century come out of Russia in the 20s and 30s.

275
00:30:23.900 --> 00:30:29.900
Now, again, that's based in developments that started in Tsarist Russia, but that was a tyranny, too.

276
00:30:31.900 --> 00:30:39.900
And many fascinating developments in literature, Mikhail Bolgakov, for example, interesting drama developed.

277
00:30:39.900 --> 00:30:47.900
And then film. We'll be talking about it this afternoon, but I mean, film is the greatest of the modernist arts,

278
00:30:47.900 --> 00:31:17.900
and very much linked with modernism and one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century is Eisenstein and he worked in the Soviet Union and Stalin had a great interest in the film industry and Eisenstein worked very much with the support of Stalin and therefore under the watchful eyes of Stalin and you know Eisenstein is easily one of the ten most important filmmakers of the 20th century

279
00:31:17.900 --> 00:31:47.900
A man who developed an incredibly distinctive style, learned how to use the camera in ways that no one ever had before, the great master of montage, and of the close-up, and you know, obviously a great filmmaker, yet look at his films, they are in some ways cheap Soviet propaganda, Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, you know, the horde of German

280
00:31:47.900 --> 00:31:55.420
Invading German Barbarians, that must be smashed. Now, it's a great film, but if you want to

281
00:31:55.420 --> 00:32:02.420
talk about its content, it's Soviet propaganda. It's just what Stalin ordered. The music scores

282
00:32:02.420 --> 00:32:08.860
by Sergei Prokofiev, and one of the great musical scores of the 20th century, the Alexander

283
00:32:08.860 --> 00:32:16.140
Nevsky music, and together it's a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunst, you know, maybe no

284
00:32:16.140 --> 00:32:22.460
no greater meshing of musical score and film than the work that Prokofiev and Eisenstein

285
00:32:22.460 --> 00:32:25.380
did on Alexander Nevsky.

286
00:32:25.380 --> 00:32:30.780
And then Eisenstein went on to do probably his greatest film cinematically, Ivan the

287
00:32:30.780 --> 00:32:32.380
Terrible.

288
00:32:32.380 --> 00:32:40.640
And then Stalin got a little nervous, a portrait of an insane, tyrannical ruler oppressing

289
00:32:40.640 --> 00:32:42.140
the Russian people.

290
00:32:42.140 --> 00:32:45.780
Stalin got the message and that was it for Ivan the Terrible and that film was never

291
00:32:45.780 --> 00:32:58.780
So, again, you paid a price for Stalin's support, but I do want to, you know, it is extraordinary how much Eisenstein was able to accomplish within this framework.

292
00:32:58.780 --> 00:33:05.780
You know, some of the great triumphs of modern cinema emerged from Stalin's Soviet Union.

293
00:33:05.780 --> 00:33:09.780
Who would have thunk it? But, you know, it just can't be denied.

294
00:33:09.780 --> 00:33:13.260
and I mean it tells both sides of the story because you know before you start

295
00:33:13.260 --> 00:33:17.880
he had a little weepy about Stalin's aesthetic worth you know he destroyed

296
00:33:17.880 --> 00:33:26.980
Eisenstein he destroyed whatever he created now this actually the story in

297
00:33:26.980 --> 00:33:32.740
Nazi Germany is much more truncated because the Nazi rule is only about 12

298
00:33:32.740 --> 00:33:38.940
years the the corresponding period of modernist experimentation in Germany

299
00:33:38.940 --> 00:33:46.100
occurred in the Weimar Republic, and I mean, there's sort of proof of what I'm saying.

300
00:33:46.100 --> 00:33:50.860
There have been few regimes weaker politically than the Weimar Republic, and few regimes

301
00:33:50.860 --> 00:33:57.620
stronger than the Communist Soviet Union, and yet essentially both underwent a period

302
00:33:57.620 --> 00:34:01.420
of great artistic flowering and experimentation in the 20s.

303
00:34:01.420 --> 00:34:07.080
You can't make a connection really between the regime and the art.

304
00:34:07.080 --> 00:34:13.720
But still, what is surprising is when you look at the Nazi years in Germany, the degree

305
00:34:13.720 --> 00:34:16.600
of support for the arts was extraordinary.

306
00:34:16.600 --> 00:34:23.040
Germany has always had and continues to have the richest classical music life in the world,

307
00:34:23.040 --> 00:34:26.840
where other countries are lucky if they can maintain three opera houses going.

308
00:34:26.840 --> 00:34:34.560
You know, Germany has a hundred, and the number of classical concerts and operas in Germany

309
00:34:34.560 --> 00:34:39.320
during the Nazi period is quite extraordinary, recordings survive from many of them and we

310
00:34:39.320 --> 00:34:50.320
can tell the level of music making was extremely high and we were just seeing the Nazis sponsored

311
00:34:50.320 --> 00:34:57.320
all sorts of painting competitions with prizes, I mean in terms of financial support of the

312
00:34:57.320 --> 00:35:02.760
arts, on paper it looks like what everyone dreams of when they call for government support

313
00:35:02.760 --> 00:35:10.840
of the Arts, and it drew forth all sorts of entrants in the competitions and so on.

314
00:35:10.840 --> 00:35:19.000
In the cinema, again, you have the oddity of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th

315
00:35:19.000 --> 00:35:25.360
century, Lenny Riefenstahl, emerging during this period, in this case with the most active

316
00:35:25.360 --> 00:35:26.360
support of Hitler.

317
00:35:26.360 --> 00:35:32.400
Riefenstahl was an incredibly beautiful woman and an actress, and she was Hitler's favorite

318
00:35:32.400 --> 00:35:37.920
Actress, she appeared in these German ski epics, the German equivalent of Westerns,

319
00:35:37.920 --> 00:35:42.600
and she was absolutely gorgeous.

320
00:35:42.600 --> 00:35:50.000
And Hitler had a crush on her, and basically turned over the German film industry to her,

321
00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:57.100
and she made these two remarkable films, Triumph of the Will, the filming of a Nazi party rally

322
00:35:57.100 --> 00:36:04.300
in Nuremberg and Olympia, the film of the 1936 Hitler Olympics.

323
00:36:04.300 --> 00:36:08.860
These films are appalling ideologically.

324
00:36:08.860 --> 00:36:14.380
I mean, they are Nazi films in the deepest sense of the term.

325
00:36:14.380 --> 00:36:16.300
They celebrate Nazism.

326
00:36:16.300 --> 00:36:19.980
They celebrate Nazi ideology.

327
00:36:19.980 --> 00:36:26.940
They have all of the Nazi racism in them, the celebration of the Aryan race.

328
00:36:26.940 --> 00:36:33.100
I cannot say a nice word about them without prefacing it by saying that, but visually they

329
00:36:33.100 --> 00:36:35.100
are absolutely extraordinary.

330
00:36:35.100 --> 00:36:40.540
I think everyone says visually they are the most beautiful documentaries, most masterful

331
00:36:40.540 --> 00:36:43.420
documentaries ever done.

332
00:36:43.420 --> 00:36:46.100
They have been endlessly copied.

333
00:36:46.100 --> 00:36:51.820
The most famous example is that the last scene of the first Star Wars movie is copied, shot

334
00:36:51.820 --> 00:36:55.220
for shot, one of the great scenes in Triumph of the Will.

335
00:36:55.220 --> 00:37:01.220
I mean, it's just, filmmakers have absorbed the vocabulary of those films in their blood.

336
00:37:01.220 --> 00:37:14.220
And, you know, like Eisenstein, Riefenstahl was serving the propaganda of a totalitarian regime, but with great technical brilliance.

337
00:37:14.220 --> 00:37:23.220
And so, again, although, as I'll show in a minute, Nazi Germany like the Soviet Union were actually anti-modernists,

338
00:37:23.220 --> 00:37:28.120
They actually contribute to the development of modernism.

339
00:37:28.120 --> 00:37:32.820
I mean, if they produce and support nothing other than Eisenstein and Riefenstahl,

340
00:37:32.820 --> 00:37:38.920
we would have to say that totalitarian regimes made a contribution to the development of modernism in the cinema.

341
00:37:38.920 --> 00:37:40.520
But it actually goes beyond that.

342
00:37:40.520 --> 00:37:48.320
And if you read some of these books, I put on the reading list, like Adam's Art of the Third Reich.

343
00:37:48.320 --> 00:38:02.320
In rather odd ways, Nazi Germany contributed to modernism, the autobahns, the famous system of highways that Hitler built.

344
00:38:02.320 --> 00:38:12.320
They've been copied all over the world. Hitler built the first super highways, and they are a quintessential example of modernist architecture.

345
00:38:12.320 --> 00:38:42.320
Even though we tend to think of Hitler's architecture as neoclassical, anti-modernist, in some ways, and Adam's documents that the way bridges were built for the autobahns, the way the autobahns themselves were built, they're almost the essence of 20th century modernism, and the whole ideology of modernism, they were built to produce speed, now what Hitler had in mind was speed of moving his armies, but if you just look at the autobahns, I mean you recognize them because they look like our

346
00:38:42.320 --> 00:39:12.320
in the United States, which were modeled on them, though the robe beds were built more solidly, 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 Triumph of Will or any of the news footage you see, they were remarkable examples of 20th century modernist art,

347
00:39:12.320 --> 00:39:24.320
The Nazis learned to exploit the media. They were really the first politicians who learned to fully exploit the 20th century media and especially the radio.

348
00:39:24.320 --> 00:39:35.320
I mean, most people will say that Hitler would not have been possible without the radio and his ability to communicate by a radio.

349
00:39:35.320 --> 00:39:46.320
It's an unanswered question about the 20th century. If radio had not been a new medium, would totalitarianism, specifically Nazism, have been able to triumph?

350
00:39:46.320 --> 00:39:54.320
Because it was the newness of the medium that made people trust it. They had not yet learned to understand it or be cynical about it.

351
00:39:54.320 --> 00:40:02.320
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 overdone.

352
00:40:02.320 --> 00:40:06.640
and yet it's partially the newness of the medium that allowed him to get away with it.

353
00:40:06.640 --> 00:40:11.040
Well, I'm getting out of here, here's the point. Again, a minute on the show that the Nazis were anti-modernist,

354
00:40:11.040 --> 00:40:13.920
but in a certain sense they were profoundly modernist.

355
00:40:13.920 --> 00:40:20.640
They had to be, they had to embrace the 20th century and its new technology was the basis of their power.

356
00:40:20.640 --> 00:40:26.800
And indeed the link between these totalitarian regimes and modernism is power.

357
00:40:26.800 --> 00:40:29.440
I hate to say it, but the artists crave power.

358
00:40:29.440 --> 00:40:32.720
You can see that in what I showed in Pound and he's not the only one.

359
00:40:32.720 --> 00:40:36.960
And in some ways they were attracted to regimes of power.

360
00:40:36.960 --> 00:40:43.120
Modernism in the arts was a vision of power, the new power of technology.

361
00:40:43.120 --> 00:40:46.480
The modernists wanted to remake the world.

362
00:40:46.480 --> 00:40:52.800
The great slogan of British modernism under Pound and Wyndham Lewis was make it new.

363
00:40:52.800 --> 00:40:57.360
That's also the slogan of Nazi Germany and also the slogan of the Soviet Union.

364
00:40:57.360 --> 00:41:01.520
all the stuff about the new man in the Soviet Union and the new woman

365
00:41:01.520 --> 00:41:06.000
that was the intersection point between modernism

366
00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:10.360
and totalitarianism. Modernists

367
00:41:10.360 --> 00:41:15.480
had visions of how they could remake the world into something utopian

368
00:41:15.480 --> 00:41:18.760
and so did Hitler and Stalin

369
00:41:18.760 --> 00:41:22.960
so again there was a kind of strange alliance

370
00:41:22.960 --> 00:41:29.360
between modern start and the totalitarian regimes.

371
00:41:29.360 --> 00:41:38.760
I mean, otherwise it's inexplicable the number of artists who gravitated either towards the Soviet Union or towards Nazi Germany.

372
00:41:38.760 --> 00:41:52.560
Poets, composers, painters, sculptors, architects, just think of what a marvelous opportunity totalitarianism seemed to architects.

373
00:41:52.560 --> 00:42:02.560
As part of the Stalinist vision, the Hitler vision, let's tear down the old corrupt world of bourgeois Europe and rebuild it from the ground up.

374
00:42:02.560 --> 00:42:11.560
And that literally became possible under both Hitler and Stalin were very big on urban renewal.

375
00:42:11.560 --> 00:42:15.560
Hitler had a chance he was going to remake all of Berlin.

376
00:42:15.560 --> 00:42:21.560
And when you look just at the staging of a Nazi rally, these great Nuremberg rallies,

377
00:42:21.560 --> 00:42:31.560
The Nazis used every new technology, the airplane searchlights that Albert Speer used to create these cathedrals of light.

378
00:42:31.560 --> 00:42:40.560
What a central image of modernism that is. If you didn't know who did it, you know, you think, oh, a great Christo installation here.

379
00:42:40.560 --> 00:42:47.560
This symphony of light that Albert Speer has created to celebrate Hitler.

380
00:42:47.560 --> 00:42:56.460
So again, it's very creepy almost to understand this, but there was a link between totalitarianism

381
00:42:56.460 --> 00:42:57.460
and modernism.

382
00:42:57.460 --> 00:43:04.400
Now, having said that, this is all today going to be on the one hand, on the other hand,

383
00:43:04.400 --> 00:43:10.460
modernism ultimately did not flourish under either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union because

384
00:43:10.460 --> 00:43:32.460
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 American bureaucracy today for the administration of the arts.

385
00:43:32.460 --> 00:43:39.460
No, actually they surpassed us in that regard, and you had all these levels and levels of departments and bureaus.

386
00:43:39.460 --> 00:43:43.740
Again, on paper will be somebody's dream, you know, they really care about the arts.

387
00:43:43.740 --> 00:43:50.260
Look, they got a secretary of the arts and an undersecretary of the arts and an undersecretary of the arts.

388
00:43:50.260 --> 00:44:00.420
One of the essays in the Taylor and Will book, The Nazification of Art, has a wonderful bureaucratic chart

389
00:44:00.420 --> 00:44:05.220
of the organization of the arts administration in Nazi Germany.

390
00:44:05.220 --> 00:44:14.220
and so things were carefully supervised and carefully scrutinized and ultimately behind everything was a gun

391
00:44:14.220 --> 00:44:21.220
and together Hitler and Stalin murdered more artists than anybody in history

392
00:44:21.220 --> 00:44:26.220
the record in Jewish artists and particularly in Germany were sent to concentration camps

393
00:44:26.220 --> 00:44:31.220
and many of them killed a whole generation of composers

394
00:44:31.220 --> 00:44:45.220
It was basically wiped out, people like Erwin Schulhoff and Victor Klein, and their music is only now being revived and made available, thank goodness.

395
00:44:45.220 --> 00:44:52.220
But same thing in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich managed to survive, but only by an accident.

396
00:44:52.220 --> 00:44:59.220
At one point the guy who was going to arrest him was instead arrested before he could get to Shostakovich.

397
00:44:59.220 --> 00:45:22.220
But Soviet artists were sent to the gulag, so we must never forget that, that this was the price paid for this marvelous patronage of the arts that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany developed.

398
00:45:22.220 --> 00:45:34.220
so that ultimately whatever forces it helped, it stifled and mostly just destroyed and stamped out.

399
00:45:34.220 --> 00:45:46.220
So, and particularly as the regime consolidated and strengthened and was able to maintain its control over the arts, the arts flourished less and less.

400
00:45:46.220 --> 00:45:57.220
Again, it's only in the 20s in the Soviet Union when the regime is barely in place and is struggling for its life that the arts escape its scrutiny and can flourish.

401
00:45:57.220 --> 00:46:11.220
The Nazis gained power faster and were in control faster, but most of the specific arts they encouraged, particularly painting and sculpture,

402
00:46:11.220 --> 00:46:16.620
I mean, we look at it today and there's very little to appreciate in it.

403
00:46:16.620 --> 00:46:24.460
And specifically, and here's the other point, that for all the links between totalitarianism and modernism,

404
00:46:24.460 --> 00:46:34.420
in fact, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were specifically and explicitly anti-modernist.

405
00:46:34.420 --> 00:46:46.980
They were always attacking modernist art and offering in its place the very antithesis.

406
00:46:46.980 --> 00:46:54.820
So that, for example, to look at the situation in Nazi Germany,

407
00:46:54.820 --> 00:47:02.500
Hitler explicitly attacked abstract art, dada, cubism,

408
00:47:02.500 --> 00:47:13.500
or just about any of the famous modernist developments of the first 25 years of the century, Hitler explicitly attacked Hitler-like realistic art.

409
00:47:13.500 --> 00:47:22.500
His own art is realistic. You paint little landscapes and little cityscapes and portraits.

410
00:47:22.500 --> 00:47:30.500
Hitler's art looks very kitsch-like to us now. Actually, it looks like cheap commercial art to us.

411
00:47:30.500 --> 00:47:38.500
And his favorite painters from the 19th century were German realist painters like Anselm Feuerbach and Hans Mockhart.

412
00:47:38.500 --> 00:47:48.500
And he hated what he and his cohorts came to call degenerate art and art at the Kutzt.

413
00:47:48.500 --> 00:47:56.500
And there was this famous exhibition the Nazis organized in Munich in 1936 of so-called degenerate art,

414
00:47:56.500 --> 00:48:03.660
Art, which was largely modernist art and they put it on display to humiliate it.

415
00:48:03.660 --> 00:48:12.440
Now it's interesting that Hitler associated modernist art with commercial art and specifically

416
00:48:12.440 --> 00:48:15.620
with Jewish art dealers.

417
00:48:15.620 --> 00:48:26.020
The great animus of his attacks on modernist art was that he saw it as a conspiracy of

418
00:48:26.020 --> 00:48:33.020
of International Jewish Art Dealers to foist this horrible art on the German people.

419
00:48:33.020 --> 00:48:37.020
I mean, there's speech after speech talks about this.

420
00:48:37.020 --> 00:48:48.020
And he would, what the Nazis did in the 30s, they start to cleanse German museums of Jewish art.

421
00:48:48.020 --> 00:48:53.020
And Hitler would give these speeches, look how much of your tax money

422
00:48:53.020 --> 00:49:01.260
went to pay for this work by a Jewish artist, sold by a Jewish art dealer, this modernist garbage.

423
00:49:05.500 --> 00:49:16.860
Again, people have pointed to the irony, this exhibit. There's a wonderful catalog. The exhibit was recreated in Washington, D.C. about 10 years ago.

424
00:49:16.860 --> 00:49:22.540
I think I put it on this supplementary biography, this catalog of the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

425
00:49:22.540 --> 00:49:32.060
and they argue there the Nazis used dada techniques to display the Jewish art to make fun of it

426
00:49:32.060 --> 00:49:37.260
and it's really weird when you look at photos it's a well-documented exhibition

427
00:49:37.260 --> 00:49:43.900
and they would hang pictures on the wall and skew some of them and write graffiti under the art

428
00:49:43.900 --> 00:49:53.540
You know, this is Jewish art. You know, it's graffiti art. I mean, kind of really sort of hostile attacks.

429
00:49:53.540 --> 00:49:58.980
The way the Dadaists would attack traditional art, the Nazis used it to attack modernist art.

430
00:49:58.980 --> 00:50:04.380
So the posters for the exhibit are very modernist in their form.

431
00:50:04.380 --> 00:50:11.100
It's all very weird and it's a perfect example of the kind of weird intersection I'm trying to show here.

432
00:50:11.100 --> 00:50:19.580
So, when you look at Hitler's arguments, they're explicitly anti-modernist.

433
00:50:19.580 --> 00:50:25.180
He wanted realistic painting, realistic sculpture, again.

434
00:50:25.180 --> 00:50:27.100
He didn't want modernist music.

435
00:50:27.100 --> 00:50:29.340
He wanted music with melody and harmony.

436
00:50:29.340 --> 00:50:34.020
I hate to say it, but he's beginning to sound a bit like me, what I was saying yesterday,

437
00:50:34.020 --> 00:50:43.580
I think it's interesting that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, you get this attack

438
00:50:43.580 --> 00:50:49.660
on the elitism of modernism, the way it's lost touch with the German people, the Russian

439
00:50:49.660 --> 00:51:01.580
people, in the Soviet Union it took the form, the attack on Shostakovich, the 1936 one is

440
00:51:01.580 --> 00:51:16.580
was flourishing and Stalin went for performance and hated it and the next day Pravda had an editorial called Muddle Instead of Music saying that Shostakovich's music was formalist.

441
00:51:16.580 --> 00:51:23.580
That was the negative word in Soviet criticism.

442
00:51:23.580 --> 00:51:32.860
criticism, that formless meant that it placed pure artistic motives over the expression

443
00:51:32.860 --> 00:51:40.660
of the feelings of the Russian people, and the answer was Soviet realism.

444
00:51:40.660 --> 00:51:48.260
And again, for all the antitheses between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, their artistic

445
00:51:48.260 --> 00:51:57.180
policies were very similar and again they were both socialist regimes. Nazism is

446
00:51:57.180 --> 00:52:02.900
national socialism and in both cases you have national policy for the arts and

447
00:52:02.900 --> 00:52:10.420
it's almost identical. The Soviet realism looks very much like the kind of painting

448
00:52:10.420 --> 00:52:17.660
that Hitler liked. That is the the typical art that Stalin and Hitler wanted was of

449
00:52:17.660 --> 00:52:36.660
Good-looking young men and women in good physical shape, preferably stripped to the waist in both cases, working in the fields, working in a factory, everything was all about young vibrant bodies devoting themselves to the state.

450
00:52:36.660 --> 00:52:44.660
And you see it in sports in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and the celebration of calisthenics and that sort of thing.

451
00:52:44.660 --> 00:52:57.660
But there's an incredible continuity in the art. Again, realist and always upbeat, pointing the way to the future.

452
00:52:57.660 --> 00:53:05.660
Now I will parenthetically say this is also identical with American art in the 1930s,

453
00:53:05.660 --> 00:53:35.660
the so-called WPA art, the art produced by the American government policy in the arts, and it's very uncanny, but you can see it particularly in murals, in post offices scattered throughout the United States if they haven't been torn down, I mean, there's an almost worldwide style of fascist art

454
00:53:35.660 --> 00:53:45.340
in the 1930s in Mussolini's Italy, in Hitler's Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, in Roosevelt's

455
00:53:45.340 --> 00:53:48.260
United States, and elsewhere as well.

456
00:53:48.260 --> 00:53:52.660
Some ways it's a reaction to the depression, in the sense the world's falling apart, we've

457
00:53:52.660 --> 00:53:58.740
got to rebuild it, but you know, you can see it in Rockefeller Center even, the kind of

458
00:53:58.740 --> 00:54:04.140
monumental sculpture there, which in many ways is indistinguishable from the kind of

459
00:54:04.140 --> 00:54:09.460
monumental sculpture that was being built in Germany at that time, only it's our sculpture

460
00:54:09.460 --> 00:54:14.540
so we say it's nice and we don't like the Hitler sculpture but stylistically there's

461
00:54:14.540 --> 00:54:20.700
a great continuity there and it is because everybody was turning to the state in the

462
00:54:20.700 --> 00:54:26.380
1930s and saying the state was the answer to their problems and they wanted art to reflect

463
00:54:26.380 --> 00:54:32.160
that and artists were being enlisted into the service of the state whether with a gun

464
00:54:32.160 --> 00:54:51.160
in the United States, as well as the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, and

465
00:54:51.160 --> 00:54:57.680
so, I mean, it is ironic that the modernists bought into these regimes. They thought these

466
00:54:57.680 --> 00:55:06.800
These regimes were going to elevate them and you can see it across the board that modernists

467
00:55:06.800 --> 00:55:13.280
felt in totalitarian states or just in the state in general, in the new powerful national

468
00:55:13.280 --> 00:55:21.500
states of the 20th century, these war-oriented states with their industrial power linked

469
00:55:21.500 --> 00:55:26.720
up with their military power, that this was like a return to the Renaissance and the era

470
00:55:26.720 --> 00:55:33.600
and the state would give them recognition that the market never did.

471
00:55:33.600 --> 00:55:41.080
These frustrated artists, frustrated with having to kow-tow to a public, to a commercial

472
00:55:41.080 --> 00:55:46.160
public, to write or paint or whatever, with a commercial public mind, decided, oh what

473
00:55:46.160 --> 00:55:56.200
we need is state patrons and these various dictators were brilliant in exploiting these

474
00:55:56.200 --> 00:56:07.200
You know, the way Castro to this day, Latin American writers and other artists whore after Castro and present him as this great man.

475
00:56:07.200 --> 00:56:16.200
And so many of the famous Latin American authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you know, have been supporters of Castro and pals of him.

476
00:56:16.200 --> 00:56:23.200
Only Mario Fargassiosa, although it took him a while, saw through Castro and attacked him.

477
00:56:23.200 --> 00:56:35.200
I mean, Castro supported many fine writers, including Alejo Carpentier, whom he made into his cultural ambassador to France and so on.

478
00:56:35.200 --> 00:56:40.200
I mean, dictators have been very canny in this way of knowing how to exploit the vanity of artists.

479
00:56:40.200 --> 00:56:46.200
You pin a medal on an artist at a public ceremony and he'll write anything you want about him.

480
00:56:46.200 --> 00:56:50.200
And it's a very sad fact, but I'm afraid it's true.

481
00:56:50.200 --> 00:57:06.200
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.

482
00:57:06.200 --> 00:57:17.200
And again, with Hitler, it had this specific animus that so many of the modern artists had been Jewish that it all blended together as anti-Semitism and as anti-modernism.

483
00:57:17.200 --> 00:57:37.200
Now, I'm going to talk about Shostakovich in detail in a minute, but just as my last twist on this story I'm telling is, ironically, this totalitarian attack on modernism made modernism into the ideology of 20th century culture.

484
00:57:37.200 --> 00:57:45.200
Because if Hitler and Stalin hated it, it must be, in fact, good.

485
00:57:45.200 --> 00:57:52.200
And the worldwide triumph of what's called the international style and art after World War II,

486
00:57:52.200 --> 00:57:58.200
it really could be traced to a reaction to Nazism and Soviet communism.

487
00:57:58.200 --> 00:58:08.200
That is, Hitler and Stalin together killed the cause of realist representation in the arts.

488
00:58:08.200 --> 00:58:13.200
And of neoclassical forms and architecture.

489
00:58:13.200 --> 00:58:18.200
It's in a way taken us decades to recover from the negative effects.

490
00:58:18.200 --> 00:58:26.200
And I do want to say just because Hitler and Stalin didn't like a form of art doesn't mean it's good.

491
00:58:26.200 --> 00:58:54.200
I mean in a weird way we've ended up embracing modernism because Hitler and Stalin rejected this and I used to just sense this and the more I've studied it the more I've become convinced of this incredible irony of the developments in 20th century culture that modernism triumphed completely

492
00:58:54.200 --> 00:59:00.960
over traditional art and especially representational art because they were able to tar those with

493
00:59:00.960 --> 00:59:06.240
the labels of Soviet realism and Nazi kitsch.

494
00:59:06.240 --> 00:59:11.160
Let me give a specific example of it, which I just came across.

495
00:59:11.160 --> 00:59:17.560
I wrote an article about Grant Wood's American Gothic, which celebrated its 50th, you all

496
00:59:17.560 --> 00:59:23.480
know that painting, the man and the woman with the pitchfork in the Iowa field.

497
00:59:23.480 --> 00:59:53.480
And 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, that this painting, which was initially quite famous in the early thirties and became very famous in the course of the thirties, was viciously attacked for being fascist later in the forties, and specifically H.W. Jansen, the famous H.W. Jansen, who wrote, you know,

498
00:59:53.480 --> 01:00:06.400
He, our text that's used in all colleges, he was a German refugee, and in 1943 he wrote

499
01:00:06.400 --> 01:00:11.440
an article attacking American Gothic, which in some ways is, you know, it's an American

500
01:00:11.440 --> 01:00:12.720
icon now.

501
01:00:12.720 --> 01:00:17.100
You could put it on the dollar bill instead of Washington, I mean, that's become our symbol

502
01:00:17.100 --> 01:00:18.880
for the American spirit.

503
01:00:18.880 --> 01:00:27.200
And Janssen said that Grant Wood was substituting Americanism, that is nationalism, for aesthetic

504
01:00:27.200 --> 01:00:29.800
values of any kind.

505
01:00:29.800 --> 01:00:36.560
And he went on after surveying some of Wood's writings and that of some of his fellow Midwestern

506
01:00:36.560 --> 01:00:42.160
pages, Janssen wrote, in fact, almost every one of the ideas constituting the regionalist

507
01:00:42.160 --> 01:00:48.480
credo could be matched more or less verbatim from the writings of Nazi experts on art.

508
01:00:48.480 --> 01:00:54.280
When I first read it I found it was outrageous and then in preparation for this seminar I

509
01:00:54.280 --> 01:01:00.240
read a number of books on Nazi art and especially this Peter Adam book is so valuable because

510
01:01:00.240 --> 01:01:05.600
it reproduces art from the Nazi period you will never ever see anywhere.

511
01:01:05.600 --> 01:01:10.680
I mean it's just extraordinary the number of paintings, some of them in full color reproductions

512
01:01:10.680 --> 01:01:17.400
and I started looking at them and I said my god some of these look like Grant Wood paintings.

513
01:01:17.400 --> 01:01:26.960
There are paintings of the fields in the German hinterland and I suddenly said to myself,

514
01:01:26.960 --> 01:01:33.280
you know, poor Jansen, he flees Hitler, he comes over to the United States and he sees

515
01:01:33.280 --> 01:01:37.920
being celebrated the same kind of art he just saw in Germany.

516
01:01:37.920 --> 01:01:44.320
And you know, there are paintings in here of, you know, solid German farming families,

517
01:01:44.320 --> 01:01:48.720
You know, true to the land, and my God, they look like Grant Wood paintings.

518
01:01:48.720 --> 01:01:53.420
Now, I'm going to think Grant Wood is a very good painter, not a great painter, and I don't

519
01:01:53.420 --> 01:01:57.440
think he was a Nazi or a fascist.

520
01:01:57.440 --> 01:02:05.700
But here's what happened, you know, American regionalist painting was smeared as Nazi, especially

521
01:02:05.700 --> 01:02:13.200
because so many of the leading art critics starting in the 40s were emigres, often Jewish

522
01:02:13.200 --> 01:02:43.200
and the Jewish emigres from the fleeing the Nazi regime and so these painters, I mean, I think, you know, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood are very fine painters, Benton even better than Wood, I think, and deeply American painters or deeply Midwestern painters, really, because they're regionalist painters but I can see why it was very hard to look

523
01:02:43.200 --> 01:03:13.200
after World War II and Nazi, the same thing that was going on in Nazi painting and in Soviet socialist realist painting and in fact it turns out there's a whole books that have been written on this that there was kind of very carefully orchestrated campaign in favor of abstract expressionism and against American regionalist representational painting and the loose company bought into it, Time Magazine, Life Magazine,

524
01:03:13.200 --> 01:03:21.120
promoted abstract expressionism because it wasn't Nazi art and it wasn't Soviet art.

525
01:03:21.120 --> 01:03:27.480
I mean, it was a post-World War II reaction against Nazi art and then hyped in the 50s

526
01:03:27.480 --> 01:03:34.400
by the sense that now the Soviet Union was the enemy, therefore socialist realism was

527
01:03:34.400 --> 01:03:41.080
the enemy in art, therefore realism was the enemy in art, and you get this emblematic

528
01:03:41.080 --> 01:03:49.320
moment when Life magazine puts Jackson Pollock on the cover saying, greatest artist alive.

529
01:03:49.320 --> 01:03:56.920
I've almost become reconciled to his paintings after looking at them many, many times, but

530
01:03:56.920 --> 01:03:59.520
he wasn't the greatest artist alive then.

531
01:03:59.520 --> 01:04:06.840
But look at the twisted logic of this, that America had to embrace abstract expressionism

532
01:04:06.840 --> 01:04:16.740
because it had to get away from realism and art because realism was smeared with Nazi associations and with Soviet socialist realist associations.

533
01:04:16.740 --> 01:04:21.980
And abstract expressionism was promoted as the international style.

534
01:04:21.980 --> 01:04:25.800
That's actually what it was called, international style.

535
01:04:25.800 --> 01:04:34.100
And the notion was, really you could see, you couldn't call it American because you couldn't call it anything, it wasn't representing anything.

536
01:04:34.100 --> 01:04:38.540
You know, you look at a Grant Wood painting and there's an Iowa cornfield, and that's American.

537
01:04:38.540 --> 01:04:44.820
You look at a de Kooning painting or a Jackson Pollock painting, I mean, there's nothing there.

538
01:04:44.820 --> 01:04:53.500
So, and the notion this was part of, yeah, we were getting away from nationalism,

539
01:04:53.500 --> 01:04:57.300
we were getting away from fascism, we were getting away from Soviet communism

540
01:04:57.300 --> 01:05:02.140
by promoting this international modernism that had no roots in anything, frankly.

541
01:05:02.140 --> 01:05:32.140
and that's a very weird story but again I'm not making this up and there have been whole books written on this and it's fascinating to go back to the 50s and look at things like Time Magazine and Life Magazine because the loose empire really bought into this and promoted abstract expressionism as the true American art form because it wasn't nationalist or really rooted America but above all this was the area where America could claim its preeminence and start promoting

542
01:05:32.140 --> 01:05:41.140
and I'm using these American artists like Pollock and Europe embraced it and especially Germany embraced it because they wanted nothing to do with traditional art anymore.

543
01:05:41.140 --> 01:05:56.140
It really struck me 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 conflicted relation to its own cultural history after the Nazi period

544
01:05:56.140 --> 01:06:04.140
And I can see why, after the war, Germany embraced modernism with a vengeance in the arts.

545
01:06:04.140 --> 01:06:11.140
Because one thing, Hitler had attacked it, and also it was a way of getting a new beginning.

546
01:06:11.140 --> 01:06:19.140
And I can see how realist art had terrible associations in Germany after the war.

547
01:06:19.140 --> 01:06:33.140
And a lot of the impetus behind modernism in the world in general comes out of the German arts, particularly music, painting and sculpture.

548
01:06:33.140 --> 01:06:42.140
This is a very strange story and in a way a very ironic one. I have to say I think that the efforts by Hitler and Stalin to stamp out modernism

549
01:06:42.140 --> 01:06:50.140
and Modernism actually gave it a kind of cache and dominance that never had had before and I don't think it would have had otherwise.

550
01:06:50.140 --> 01:07:02.140
Again, you can see it in architecture. You know what Stalinist architecture looks like, those, you know, the Moscow University building.

551
01:07:02.140 --> 01:07:10.140
They, you know, they're monumental and decorative and, of course, lots of realist statuary associated with them.

552
01:07:10.140 --> 01:07:16.700
The same in Germany. Much of the German architecture never got built, but books like the Adams

553
01:07:16.700 --> 01:07:24.620
book are good to show Hitler's plans for rebuilding Berlin after the war, presuming he would have

554
01:07:24.620 --> 01:07:31.360
won it. That's the thing. And he was going to build this giant neoclassical dome that

555
01:07:31.360 --> 01:07:36.940
would have dwarfed either St. Peter's or the U.S. Capitol. And you can just look at some

556
01:07:36.940 --> 01:07:40.940
Some of the buildings that were built, like the House of Art in Munich, which was built

557
01:07:40.940 --> 01:07:46.500
for this Antarctic Kunst exhibition, it's still there, it's now, actually there's everything,

558
01:07:46.500 --> 01:07:51.660
it's now Museum of Modern Art. Museum of Modern Art is in this old Nazi building in Munich.

559
01:07:51.660 --> 01:07:57.340
There's some Nazi architecture that survives in Munich. There's a lot of fascist architecture

560
01:07:57.340 --> 01:08:06.580
in Italy that survives, and it was all rather neoclassical, you know, Greek columns, pediments,

561
01:08:06.580 --> 01:08:36.580
Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini managed to give traditional architecture a bad name, and the triumph of Walter Gropius, Wies van der Rohe, all these refugees from European fascism after the war has a certain ideological basis, and the so-called international style and architecture, which renounces ornament, which renounces recognizable style and architecture,

562
01:08:36.580 --> 01:08:48.580
The Statuary, which renounces any of the neoclassical canons, you know, basically the glass tower that Mise-Fandereau popularized.

563
01:08:48.580 --> 01:08:57.580
That's, I mean, there are many artistic reasons behind that, many technological reasons driving it, but there are also ideological reasons driving it.

564
01:08:57.580 --> 01:09:10.080
and its success had a lot to do with a reaction against Italian fascist, Nazi German and Soviet architecture

565
01:09:10.080 --> 01:09:18.080
and it was decades before you could put a column up in a building again and that's now post-modernism

566
01:09:18.080 --> 01:09:24.080
but people are drawing this book, The Nazification of Art by Taylor and Will

567
01:09:24.080 --> 01:09:30.880
makes fascinating links between Nazi architecture and postmodern architecture.

568
01:09:30.880 --> 01:09:38.240
And when you think about the embrace of classical elements and historical elements in general,

569
01:09:38.240 --> 01:09:44.960
it does provide a connection. I only just began to think about it. I never even thought of that before that.

570
01:09:44.960 --> 01:09:52.480
But anyway, you see then what a complex story this is of the interaction between the totalitarian regimes

571
01:09:52.480 --> 01:09:59.480
and Art and Modernism in particular, and in the time that remains, I'd like to talk a little more specifically about Shostakovich,

572
01:09:59.480 --> 01:10:10.480
who seems to me emblematic of so many of the issues in 20th century art that we've been talking about.

573
01:10:10.480 --> 01:10:18.480
He's, in my opinion, the greatest composer of the 20th century. I do like Schoenberg, I do like Bartok and Stravinsky and some others,

574
01:10:18.480 --> 01:10:28.480
I'd say Richard Strauss is 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 prolonged.

575
01:10:28.480 --> 01:10:36.480
But, you know, if I really had to name one person, it would be Shostakovich, and I'm born out by the market.

576
01:10:36.480 --> 01:10:46.480
We've finally had time to shake out things in 20th century art, 20th century is over, mercifully.

577
01:10:46.480 --> 01:10:54.480
And Shostakovich has emerged as the most popular composer of the 20th century.

578
01:10:54.480 --> 01:11:05.480
He is one of the few 20th century composers who is regularly programmed in concerts where people voluntarily come to hear his music.

579
01:11:05.480 --> 01:11:12.480
Often you're forced to hear some horrific modernist piece that's mercifully brief.

580
01:11:12.480 --> 01:11:20.480
You know, they give you a Beethoven symphony and a Wagner overture, and then you have to sit through something by Boulez, but there's nothing you can do about it.

581
01:11:20.480 --> 01:11:28.480
But you'd never come to hear the Boulez piece. But Shostakovich, you can build a program around him.

582
01:11:28.480 --> 01:11:38.480
I helped program a concert series in Charlottesville, and we have particularly Shostakovich string quartets all the time, and we really actively seek them out.

583
01:11:38.480 --> 01:12:07.480
A recent issue of classic FM magazine, a British magazine, June 2006, every year they have a poll, they ask their readers 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 Shostakovich made the top 10 list.

584
01:12:07.480 --> 01:12:10.600
He tied for 9th with Georg Friedrich Händel.

585
01:12:10.600 --> 01:12:17.880
Here's the list of the top composers in order, descending order.

586
01:12:17.880 --> 01:12:26.280
Mozart was number one, then Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Edward Elgar, Rachmaninoff,

587
01:12:26.280 --> 01:12:29.920
Ray Vaughan Williams, Händel and Shostakovich.

588
01:12:29.920 --> 01:12:32.280
He tied with Händel for 9th.

589
01:12:32.280 --> 01:12:37.360
Mozart had 24 pieces in the top 300, Händel and Shostakovich had 7 pieces.

590
01:12:37.360 --> 01:12:48.360
in the Top 300, and the highest rated Shostakovich piece, vindicating me from what I said last night, was the second piano concerto, which is his most beautiful piece of music.

591
01:12:48.360 --> 01:12:55.360
This is a British magazine, so Elgar and Vaughan Williams made the top ten, and Handel they regard as their own too.

592
01:12:55.360 --> 01:13:02.360
So it's pretty amazing, and Shostakovich is by far the most modern of those composers.

593
01:13:02.360 --> 01:13:09.360
Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Vaughan Williams, Hendoff, and Shostakovich.

594
01:13:09.360 --> 01:13:15.360
He's the one who died the latest of all of them, and the only one who could really in any sense...

595
01:13:15.360 --> 01:13:21.360
I mean, Elgar and Vaughan Williams are 20th century composers, but they're not modernists.

596
01:13:21.360 --> 01:13:27.360
So that's... I mean, total vindication, scientific proof, I need say no more.

597
01:13:27.360 --> 01:13:34.360
But no, if you looked at other things like that, Shostakovich always comes out well in the polling, and I would say deservedly so.

598
01:13:34.360 --> 01:13:44.360
But I do want to point out that, as Tariskin said, you cannot believe how trashed Shostakovich is in the musicological literature.

599
01:13:44.360 --> 01:13:50.360
I mean, I was growing up in the 50s, and I first started listening to classical music in the 50s,

600
01:13:50.360 --> 01:14:05.360
in the 1950s and some of my earliest LPs were dimly recorded, Russian LPs. I remember the Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto was one of the first LPs I bought, if you know what an LP is, youngsters.

601
01:14:05.360 --> 01:14:13.360
And I was actually tricked into buying it because it said, Sviatoslav Richter, Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, and then Shostakovich Preludes of Fuse.

602
01:14:13.360 --> 01:14:17.560
I didn't realize that Richter was only playing the preludes and fuses in some second-rate

603
01:14:17.560 --> 01:14:22.560
Russian pianist was doing the piano concerto, but I got tricked into it by the evil market

604
01:14:22.560 --> 01:14:28.280
and the result was I recognized a fabulous piece of music and I subsequently bought 12

605
01:14:28.280 --> 01:14:32.920
recordings of it, including two with Shostakovich himself playing the concerto.

606
01:14:32.920 --> 01:14:34.700
He was a world-class pianist.

607
01:14:34.700 --> 01:14:39.600
He tied with Bartok at a piano contest in the 20s.

608
01:14:39.600 --> 01:14:56.960
Shostakovich was regarded as a hack and still is regarded as a hack by many musicologists.

609
01:14:56.960 --> 01:15:03.560
Things have changed. His continuing popularity has forced people to evaluate him and people

610
01:15:03.560 --> 01:15:08.160
who are invested in Russian musicology have to do something with Shostakovich. The body

611
01:15:08.160 --> 01:15:13.160
The value of literature now on him is quite balanced, and people have come to appreciate his work.

612
01:15:13.160 --> 01:15:22.160
And the animus behind the musicologists who attack him is that he wasn't modernist enough, and he was popular.

613
01:15:22.160 --> 01:15:29.160
I mean, that did him in. I mean, the fact that people actually want to listen to his music, that disqualifies him from being a serious composer.

614
01:15:29.160 --> 01:15:36.160
Virgil Thompson virtually says that in that review that Taruskin quoted.

615
01:15:36.160 --> 01:15:47.160
Now, just a brief review of Shostakovich's career shows the fascinatingly complex ways in which he interacted with the history of modernism and the history of totalitarianism.

616
01:15:47.160 --> 01:15:55.160
And I'm doing this now because I think it sums up what I've been trying to say. Shostakovich begins as a modernist. Indeed, as a wunderkind.

617
01:15:55.160 --> 01:16:05.160
I mean, if his father had wanted to, he probably could have turned Shostakovich into a little Mozart. I mean, like so many composers, he was brilliant from the beginning.

618
01:16:05.160 --> 01:16:07.800
He wrote his first symphony when he was 19 years old.

619
01:16:07.800 --> 01:16:11.000
Okay, Mozart was 6 years old when he wrote his first symphony,

620
01:16:11.000 --> 01:16:15.720
but Shostakovich's first symphony is a hell of a lot better than Mozart's first symphony.

621
01:16:15.720 --> 01:16:21.000
In fact, Mozart's got to get to about...

622
01:16:21.000 --> 01:16:22.840
Oh, I'm going to give him 25.

623
01:16:22.840 --> 01:16:26.200
Mozart's 25th symphony is the first symphony he writes.

624
01:16:26.200 --> 01:16:30.600
It's as good as Shostakovich's first symphony, so there, both getting out of the dance.

625
01:16:30.600 --> 01:16:48.600
So at 19 years old, as his graduation thesis in school, he writes this first symphony, and it's a brilliant, modernist work, a flip, sarcastic, cynical in his treatment of the musical tradition, jazzy.

626
01:16:48.600 --> 01:16:57.600
And one of the things about Chester Goethe, he loved jazz. He earned money early in his life as the pianist in a silent movie theater.

627
01:16:57.600 --> 01:17:05.600
And he played the kind of music we associate with silent movies, because you can hear it in some of his musical compositions later.

628
01:17:05.600 --> 01:17:13.600
And it's fascinating to me that in some ways his musical experience grew out of accompanying silent movies.

629
01:17:13.600 --> 01:17:19.600
And that makes him a modernist right there. He's linking up with the great kinetic art, the 20th century of the movies.

630
01:17:19.600 --> 01:17:28.600
And his music always has that kinetic aspect to it. It's very rhythmic. There's always a chase going on or a march going on in Shostakovich's music.

631
01:17:28.600 --> 01:17:35.600
So he begins as a modernist and achieved worldwide fame from this first symphony.

632
01:17:35.600 --> 01:17:43.600
I think Bruno Walter, a great conductor, performed the symphony in Germany and Stokowski picked it up.

633
01:17:43.600 --> 01:17:49.600
Stokowski recorded it twice, once as early as the 30s with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

634
01:17:49.600 --> 01:17:57.600
And you know, Shostakovich became famous at 19, wrote a symphony that was being played all around the world.

635
01:17:57.600 --> 01:18:04.600
And his early pieces, piano pieces, first piano sonata, they're all in a kind of modernist mode.

636
01:18:04.600 --> 01:18:12.600
Modernist Mode. Moreover, he shows how artists embraced the newness of the Soviet Union.

637
01:18:12.600 --> 01:18:23.600
And in the 20s and early 30s, he starts writing film music for some of these movies that are celebrating the new Soviet Union.

638
01:18:23.600 --> 01:18:31.600
We watched an excerpt from one last night. And his second and third symphonies are Soviet propaganda.

639
01:18:31.600 --> 01:19:01.600
I mean, they actually, they're half instrumental, half have text, and they celebrate, one of them, I think it's the Second Symphony, celebrates the October Revolution, the 1905 dry run for the Bolshevik Revolution, and this is somewhat disputed, but the best I can tell is Shostakovich bought into Soviet ideology, and as so many artists did in the 20s in the Soviet Union, it seems so promising,

640
01:19:01.600 --> 01:19:06.600
to them and they were being promised everything and promised a new world and he wrote music

641
01:19:06.600 --> 01:19:08.840
celebrating it.

642
01:19:08.840 --> 01:19:19.400
But still a kind of modernist music, sort of quirky, off-putting, unsettling, harmonically

643
01:19:19.400 --> 01:19:29.820
daring, melodic, but often with a kind of ironic quality of the melodies.

644
01:19:29.820 --> 01:19:59.820
He always has had a propensity to quotation, it's as if, let me put it this way, it's as if melodies appear in quotation marks in his music, as if you know they're being used ironically, as if he would like to, he will take a cheap melody, a melody that's obviously popular and use 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

645
01:19:59.820 --> 01:20:06.320
The ballets he wrote used, at this time, in the film scores, used popular music in that way.

646
01:20:08.320 --> 01:20:12.320
And so he was headed straight on this modernist course.

647
01:20:12.320 --> 01:20:15.820
Mahler, Gustav Mahler, was his favorite symphonist.

648
01:20:15.820 --> 01:20:21.320
I hear echoes of Kurt Weill in his music, but nobody else apparently does.

649
01:20:24.820 --> 01:20:29.320
But then he writes an opera called The Nose based on the Gogol short story.

650
01:20:29.320 --> 01:20:59.320
And then he writes Lady Macbeth of Matinsk, this real modernist opera, it's a transposition of Shakespeare's Macbeth to a Russian setting, it comes from a story by Nikolai Leskov 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 have sex together at one point and you can hear it

651
01:20:59.320 --> 01:21:05.520
of Music, and you know, the music is, you know, the husband's being portrayed brutally

652
01:21:05.520 --> 01:21:10.480
in the music is brutal. It was a huge success for about a year and a half. It had hundreds

653
01:21:10.480 --> 01:21:17.760
of performances in Moscow and Leningrad, and then it was performed around the world. It

654
01:21:17.760 --> 01:21:24.920
had a, it was, I don't know if The Met did it, but it did have a New York premiere. And

655
01:21:24.920 --> 01:21:31.840
And then Stalin went one night and hated it and walked out and that was almost the end

656
01:21:31.840 --> 01:21:35.400
for Shostakovich.

657
01:21:35.400 --> 01:21:43.180
Fortunately he wasn't killed but he was forced to publicly recant his music and wrote his

658
01:21:43.180 --> 01:21:45.840
Fifth Symphony as a form of redemption.

659
01:21:45.840 --> 01:21:49.640
The Fifth Symphony is one of the most magnificent things he ever wrote.

660
01:21:49.640 --> 01:21:51.720
Fifth or eighth symphony, I don't know which is better.

661
01:21:51.720 --> 01:22:05.720
Frankly, the fifth is better. But the fifth was regarded as this concession to Soviet realism, that he was now writing melodies that the average person could understand and appreciate.

662
01:22:05.720 --> 01:22:19.720
I still find the fifth symphony rather modernist. You would not mistake it for a 19th century piece. You would never mistake it for Tchaikovsky, even if you compare it to something like Prokofiev's classical symphony,

663
01:22:19.720 --> 01:22:29.720
The Fifth Symphony, which is a kind of modernist quotation of 19th century, or actually almost 18th century classical music. It's almost in the style of Haydn.

664
01:22:29.720 --> 01:22:37.720
There's nothing like that. I mean, to me, the music of the Fifth Symphony is very beautiful, but it's still modernist.

665
01:22:37.720 --> 01:22:48.720
Anyway, from then on, Shostakovich bounces back and forth. Sometimes he's forced to write Soviet propaganda music, he had to do the score for a film about Stalin.

666
01:23:18.720 --> 01:23:36.720
of String Quartets since Beethoven's bar none, and I particularly recommend the 8th and the 15th, but he wrote 24 Preludes and Fugues in imitation of Bach, and he had it in a modernist style in some of the greatest piano music of the 20th century.

667
01:23:36.720 --> 01:24:06.720
We have about, we have recordings of him playing about 12 of them, and he was a very good pianist, not as great as, you know, Richter and Galel, and their recordings of The Presidents and Fugues are even better, but still, fortunately, no regime can see everything and supervise everything, so Shostakovich could operate under the radar and produce this vast body of brilliant changes

668
01:24:06.720 --> 01:24:36.720
and chamber music, which makes no concessions to anything, and it's the music he wanted to write, and we have it, it was even recorded, you know, stuff was recorded in the Soviet Union, things have been re-recorded since, so, when you just quickly review his career, in a way, he did everything, he did commercial music, at least a third of the music of his that survives, is from the Soviet Union,

669
01:24:36.720 --> 01:24:43.680
The film music, which he wrote because he needed money, particularly in these periods

670
01:24:43.680 --> 01:24:49.520
when his symphonies were banned and certainly he was never able to do another opera.

671
01:24:49.520 --> 01:24:53.960
And so just to keep his family going, he had to write film music.

672
01:24:53.960 --> 01:24:59.920
He was of Mozartian talents in that he could just churn out music, I mean, in his sleep.

673
01:24:59.920 --> 01:25:02.640
And that's what happens in the film music.

674
01:25:02.640 --> 01:25:06.780
And this would be an example that would point to, you know, even within the Soviet Union,

675
01:25:06.780 --> 01:25:08.480
there was commercial art.

676
01:25:08.480 --> 01:25:12.120
And it is true that Shostakovich hated doing this.

677
01:25:12.120 --> 01:25:14.640
He more or less repudiated this music.

678
01:25:14.640 --> 01:25:18.120
Nevertheless, you can see flashes of brilliance in it.

679
01:25:18.120 --> 01:25:19.560
It is hack work.

680
01:25:19.560 --> 01:25:24.320
He reuses stuff you can hear and if you go through these scores, and there's about ten

681
01:25:24.320 --> 01:25:29.320
CDs worth of his film music available, you see him recycling stuff.

682
01:25:29.320 --> 01:25:34.460
And yet, I read a really interesting article in the Shostakovich casebook which said, yeah,

683
01:25:34.460 --> 01:25:38.800
this is hack work, but here's where he's learning to write his symphonies.

684
01:25:38.800 --> 01:25:43.760
And listen to the symphonies now, and you will hear bits and pieces from the film music,

685
01:25:43.760 --> 01:25:48.680
and above all, he's developing a musical vocabulary, he's developing a musical syntax in doing

686
01:25:48.680 --> 01:25:49.680
this.

687
01:25:49.680 --> 01:25:53.080
And you know, after reading that article, I can hear what the guy's talking about.

688
01:25:53.080 --> 01:25:57.840
And so, even the hack work contributed to Shostakovich's development.

689
01:25:57.840 --> 01:26:03.220
And then, again, you have the even worse hack work, which is the Soviet propaganda.

690
01:26:03.220 --> 01:26:04.860
It was bad enough writing.

691
01:26:04.860 --> 01:26:09.260
You can say, okay, here's an example where he was forced to write for commercial reasons,

692
01:26:09.260 --> 01:26:10.900
and the music is hack work.

693
01:26:10.900 --> 01:26:14.740
But when he writes for the state, it's even worse.

694
01:26:14.740 --> 01:26:17.300
No conviction whatsoever.

695
01:26:17.300 --> 01:26:22.720
And you hear these things like the Song of the Forest or the Lennon Cantata or the Twelfth

696
01:26:22.720 --> 01:26:24.260
Symphony, the Lennon Symphony.

697
01:26:24.260 --> 01:26:30.460
I mean this stuff is completely vapid and empty his greatest work yeah you can

698
01:26:30.460 --> 01:26:36.500
say is the private work the chamber music the solo piano music some of the

699
01:26:36.500 --> 01:26:43.240
songs that he wrote that he wrote you know for himself yet it's you know it's

700
01:26:43.240 --> 01:26:49.100
the oddly enough it's the market that made that possible you know even within

701
01:26:49.100 --> 01:26:53.340
Soviet communism there was a degree of private enterprise and Shostakovich

702
01:26:53.340 --> 01:27:06.340
And he used to earn money by writing music for commercial films in the sense that these were films for the public that were shown to a paying public in the Soviet Union.

703
01:27:06.340 --> 01:27:18.340
So his best music isn't his commercial music, yet without having written that commercial music, he wouldn't have had the means to write that private music that we value today.

704
01:27:18.340 --> 01:27:28.340
And I'm guessing if we gave Shostakovich a choice, who was the nicer master, Stalin or the market, he would have opted for the market.

705
01:27:28.340 --> 01:27:39.340
And in any case, even, you know, here's a case of the most beleaguered artist I can think of in the 20th century who survived.

706
01:27:39.340 --> 01:27:46.780
And yet, in some ways, the market contributed to what he did.

707
01:27:46.780 --> 01:27:51.500
He could even survive the pressures of a totalitarian regime.

708
01:27:51.500 --> 01:27:55.940
And here, the laud, I'll end with this, at the end of the video we watched last night,

709
01:27:55.940 --> 01:28:01.020
Valery Gurgeyev, the great Russian conductor, ended the whole story of Shostakovich's Stalin

710
01:28:01.020 --> 01:28:05.660
by saying, and this is a terrible thing to say, but he said it, and so I can now quote

711
01:28:05.660 --> 01:28:09.220
him, Stalin made Shostakovich great.

712
01:28:09.220 --> 01:28:15.900
that Stalin was the great challenge Shostakovich faced and overcoming that challenge made him

713
01:28:15.900 --> 01:28:22.460
greater as a composer and that's a terrible thing to say but I think it's right and that

714
01:28:22.460 --> 01:28:28.960
the need to respond to that challenge deepened Shostakovich as a man, deepened his resolve

715
01:28:28.960 --> 01:28:35.340
as a composer, made his music more profound and I will just use as an example in some

716
01:28:35.340 --> 01:28:52.340
In some ways the ideology I'm fighting all this week 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 market off artists and that's what government support of the arts will do.

717
01:28:52.340 --> 01:29:02.340
In fact we see that 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 pressure.

718
01:29:02.340 --> 01:29:08.500
possible yes, many possible yes, but the history of art suggests that is not a universal principle

719
01:29:08.500 --> 01:29:13.220
and many of the greatest artists have done their greatest work under the greatest pressures

720
01:29:13.220 --> 01:29:19.860
whether they're the deadline of commercial publishing or even the gun of Stalin pointed

721
01:29:19.860 --> 01:29:25.540
under your head. There's something profoundly socialistic about the notion that we need to take

722
01:29:25.540 --> 01:29:31.860
pressure off our artists. It is the nanny state idea, it is the welfare state idea that what

723
01:29:31.860 --> 01:29:37.300
What people need in life is to be taken care of, and then they will flourish.

724
01:29:37.300 --> 01:29:40.740
The history of the human race suggests something very different, and the history of the arts

725
01:29:40.740 --> 01:29:42.740
suggests something very different.

726
01:29:42.740 --> 01:29:50.860
And Shostakovich is almost my exhibit A. There is no artist I can think of who has been subject

727
01:29:50.860 --> 01:29:57.820
to every range of pressure, the need to earn a living and write commercial music, the need

728
01:29:57.820 --> 01:30:03.540
to deal with the single worst tyrant maybe in human history, who had singled you out

729
01:30:03.540 --> 01:30:10.540
and you were on his radar screen. And the result was, in many cases, awkward from him.

730
01:30:10.540 --> 01:30:15.580
Much of his artistic career was wasted responding to these pressures. But the long-term story

731
01:30:15.580 --> 01:30:21.900
is that his music deepened and grew greater. And as great as his early, high modernist

732
01:30:21.900 --> 01:30:44.900
Did he ever make a move to leave the Soviet Union and Mr. Stalin?

733
01:30:51.900 --> 01:31:01.020
Exile. Exile from the Soviet Union. What a punishment. But it was Mother Russia. Even

734
01:31:01.020 --> 01:31:07.620
Russropovich hated having to leave when he was exiled. And someone like Shostakovich,

735
01:31:07.620 --> 01:31:12.240
I mean, he had family there. There was always the question, if he left, what would happen

736
01:31:12.240 --> 01:31:18.840
to his family? He was carefully monitored. He was sometimes sent to the West, but always

737
01:31:18.840 --> 01:31:28.920
is with the KGB minders next to him, watching his every move, and he felt that he was deeply

738
01:31:28.920 --> 01:31:35.460
Russian as a composer and he was, and he worshipped Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, and for him to

739
01:31:35.460 --> 01:31:43.220
leave Russia, I think he felt it would have killed him as a composer, and so again I can't

740
01:31:43.220 --> 01:31:50.880
I mean, I'm not sure he ever had the option. He died in 75, you know, despite all these

741
01:31:50.880 --> 01:31:57.220
various liberalizations. The Soviet Union kept careful tabs on his aris. Reed Sviatoslav

742
01:31:57.220 --> 01:32:03.680
Richter's memoirs, where he talks about, he had two KGB binders with him and several other

743
01:32:03.680 --> 01:32:09.160
plaincoats following him, and the jokes he would have going on long walks on wintry days

744
01:32:09.160 --> 01:32:13.520
just to make them freeze their asses off and to follow him.

745
01:32:13.520 --> 01:32:17.440
But I'm not sure he had the option of leaving,

746
01:32:17.440 --> 01:32:20.320
but if he did, I can see why he didn't.

747
01:32:20.320 --> 01:32:24.480
And a musician cannot compose in isolation

748
01:32:24.480 --> 01:32:26.600
despite our myth of the solitary artist.

749
01:32:26.600 --> 01:32:27.920
He needs other musicians.

750
01:32:27.920 --> 01:32:31.800
He needs, Shostakovich worked very closely

751
01:32:31.800 --> 01:32:35.000
with Sviatoslav Richter, with David Oistrakh,

752
01:32:36.080 --> 01:32:39.120
with these conductors like Evgeny Maravinsky.

753
01:32:39.120 --> 01:32:44.000
He felt he was deeply rooted in Russian musical life.

754
01:32:44.000 --> 01:32:48.700
I've come to understand that he wrote his symphonies for Russian orchestras, the way

755
01:32:48.700 --> 01:32:52.400
they play, with their coarse brass and everything.

756
01:32:52.400 --> 01:32:56.960
He wasn't writing for the Philadelphia Orchestra with its Tchaikovsky sound and the smooth

757
01:32:56.960 --> 01:32:59.600
strings and the beautiful blend.

758
01:32:59.600 --> 01:33:00.600
It's really weird.

759
01:33:00.600 --> 01:33:05.340
I mean, when you understand how rooted he was in Russia as a composer, I don't think

760
01:33:05.340 --> 01:33:06.340
he could have left.

761
01:33:06.340 --> 01:33:08.760
Prokofiev returned.

762
01:33:08.760 --> 01:33:17.720
I mean, he was safely in Paris and the idiot went back in the late 30s and he claimed never

763
01:33:17.720 --> 01:33:21.600
to have regretted it, though Stalin made his life miserable.

764
01:33:21.600 --> 01:33:27.560
You know, every one of these Russians has eventually gone back, you know, the great

765
01:33:27.560 --> 01:33:34.360
moment when Horowitz returned, when Stravinsky returned, it's holy mother Russia to them.

766
01:33:34.360 --> 01:33:39.560
And so, you know, to us, you say, why wouldn't he have left this hellhole?

767
01:33:39.560 --> 01:33:43.560
And the answer is, that's where his identity was.

768
01:33:43.560 --> 01:33:44.560
Yes?

769
01:33:44.560 --> 01:33:48.640
Did he distribute his music on your whole course, his love to jazz?

770
01:33:48.640 --> 01:33:49.640
Not so, no.

771
01:33:49.640 --> 01:33:59.560
I mean, I think the jazz was very important, but there are many other reasons for the form

772
01:33:59.560 --> 01:34:01.200
his music takes.

773
01:34:01.200 --> 01:34:07.600
and the coded aspect of it is deeply rooted in Russian and then Soviet art.

774
01:34:07.600 --> 01:34:13.540
I mean, Russians have lived under tyrannies for so long that they have learned how to

775
01:34:13.540 --> 01:34:20.680
speak two things at once and give the finger in the pocket, as we learned about last night

776
01:34:20.680 --> 01:34:22.920
in the DVD.

777
01:34:22.920 --> 01:34:30.040
So again, I really do appreciate the importance of jazz for him, but I wouldn't overestimate

778
01:34:30.040 --> 01:34:40.940
Any questions? Okay then, we'll be back at two.