This morning, we're going to talk about totalitarianism in the arts.
This afternoon, we'll turn to the motion picture.
Tonight, remember, we've got the pizza party at 5.30 here.
Eat your hearts out, those of you watching us on the computer network,
though you're invited if you get here.
And then tonight at 7, we'll show the culmination of our DVD showings,
an episode of The Simpsons and an episode of The X-Files.
Let me review a few things before we turn to the subject for today.
I'm very happy to see that I'm provoking resistance in you and I'm trying to be provocative
and I think it is interesting to see what I suspected that although we may be Austrians
and Economics. Many of us are still Marxists in culture. That is, it's very hard not to
imbibe some of the master cultural myths of our day. And so we've all somehow been brought
up hearing that the commercializing of art must be bad. And we have these expressions
like going Hollywood or selling out. And I confess, most of my life I've been preyed
to these as well. And it really does take some rethinking to understand that
commerce and culture can go together. The example I used yesterday morning, the
serialization of novels, is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about.
Namely, if you look at how novels were published in the 19th century, just from
From a distance, it looks crazy. And indeed, the British novel publishing industry in the
19th century is as commercial an example of culture as you could find. And it just seems
a completely Jerry-billed system. No one planned it out. This idea of serializing novels, they
kind of stumbled upon it. The success of Pickwick papers got it rolling. It looks so bad from
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.
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.
The public is being duped by having these things foisted upon them, these hastily written, gerry-built novels.
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.
And in fact, yeah, the majority of maybe these 40,000 novels that were produced were terrible.
But the peaks were extraordinary, including the novels of the greatest novelist in English,
Dickens.
Moreover, if you look at it from a Marxist perspective, you would say, look at this as
this is exploitation.
The laborers are the novelists.
They're creating all the value there, and yet they're not getting all the money.
These publishers are getting money, printers maybe can get money because they're working
at a printing press, but booksellers are making money off this, book distributors, a Marxist
would say, and many have said in print, that the Victorian publishing industry exploited
These novelists and moreover would say the public was being exploited because these novels weren't any good
They were just marketed well, and you had all these gimmicks like tie-in action figures
And the bargain on you know the free binder you got if you bought all 20 installments and so on
But insofar as you apply Austrian economics to this you say these were just open market transactions
Transactions, Open Economic Exchanges. No one could put a gun to a novelist and say
write. Only governments can do that to artists. Only in the Soviet Union could you put a gun
to Shostakovich's head, in effect, and say write the music for the Stalin biography film.
And so we would say if all this was being done voluntarily, everyone was benefiting
from the Transactions. No one was simply profiting the expense of others. So in fact, yeah, these
novelists had to work hard and do what the, to some extent, what their publishers told
them, but that at least gave them the chance of being successful and making a lot of money
and people voluntarily subjected themselves to this supposedly awful regime. Many of them
eventually complained about it, but still, none of these people could have succeeded as
novelists without this huge infrastructure that the publishing industry supplied.
It's not easy to print up your own books.
It's not easy to distribute it and market them.
We have proof of that because William Blake did that.
He did publish his own works.
He printed them for themselves.
He hand-colored them with the help of his wife.
He actually advertised himself, put up posters, tried to arrange sales.
The result was Blake's biggest seller was 26 copies of his Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Many of his books only survive in one or two copies because that's all it ever sold.
And so Blake is sort of our counter example.
He couldn't stand the system.
He hated publishers and so he decided to buck the system and his works in some ways may
be better as a result, but still he barely survived, both economically and in terms of
his work surviving, kind of lucky that the works weren't lost.
So in fact, this evil, exploitative publishing industry was helping the writers, giving them
an opportunity to spread their work, and some couldn't make a living at it, some made decent
livings at it, some became extremely wealthy, as Dickens did, and the public got what it
wanted as shown by the fact that they bought these books and you can see many
of them they didn't buy no matter how well marketed you can't you can't force
people to read something that's terrible again no guns were involved in this and
so we as Austrians look at this and say yeah it looks chaotic to us the whole
system is in plan it's not centrally regulated the actual books themselves
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
and the simple of spontaneous order as we understand it.
So, the virtues of applying Austrian economics even to culture.
Now, today I want to turn to an interesting subject,
the whole connection of totalitarianism and the arts of the 20th century,
and I particularly want to talk about the interaction between totalitarianism and modernism.
It's an odd subject. It's something that people basically don't like to discuss.
Or if they discuss, they discuss it in the most simplistic terms.
The last thing anyone wants to say, at least from our perspective, is anything good about totalitarianism,
about Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, which is what I'll concentrate on.
and we would like to be able to say that there's some kind of intimate connection between freedom and artistic production
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.
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.
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.
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.
The human spirit is incredibly resilient. The creative spirit cannot be suppressed by anything.
not by totalitarian dictators, not by the evil market system, not by nasty renaissance tyrannical patrons.
Somehow art can flourish under any condition.
Again, that's why I keep saying the great mistake of many critics is to look for the sufficient conditions of cultural production, and there are not.
There are no conditions you can lay out and say, you have this in place, you will get great art.
All you can say is that art has certain necessary conditions, a certain level of economic development, and so on.
And then it's chancing as to what will happen.
And I find it incredible how art was able to flourish in some cases, even under people as horrible as Hitler and Stalin.
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.
I am countering the view that is rather prevalent that under commercial conditions no great art is possible.
We've already seen that Shakespeare and Dickens grew out of commercial conditions, so that's a sufficient refutation.
But, so let's turn now to this really difficult, in some ways, tortured question of totalitarianism and the arts and totalitarianism in modernism.
And let me begin with a provocative quotation from a musicologist of Russian music, a man named Richard Taruskin.
This is in this Shostakovich casebook, which I've added to your bibliography.
Geography, and he's talking about the fact that as a graduate student, he says, I spent
the academic year 1971-72 as an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory, researching a
dissertation on Russian opera in the 1860s.
And so it goes to lots of musical performances, and one of them is of Shostakovich's Seventh
Symphony, the famous Leningrad Symphony.
In one concert, I heard the Seventh Symphony performed on the Kirok Congression in the Conservatory's fabled Great Hall.
I knew the work not only as the butt of Bartok sarcasm, and let me pause here.
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.
Many modernist composers were disgusted by the praise lavished on this symphony, which they thought was a piece of trash.
And in particular, Bela Bartok, you know, many would regard him, along with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, three greatest modernist composers.
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.
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.
So that's why Taruskin is talking about
I knew the work not only as the butt of Bartok's sarcasm
but also the subject as the object of one of Virgil Thompson's snotiest reviews
Now Virgil Thompson at that time possibly was the most famous American composer
and a famous music critic
A connoisseur is a musical invective knew Thompson's text almost by heart
It opened with a remark that, quote,
whether one is able to listen without mind wandering
to the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich
probably depends on the rapidity of one's musical perceptions.
It seems to have been written for the slow-witted,
the not-very-musical, and the distracted, end quote.
And then Teruskin goes on, and it ended with an immortal insult, quote,
that he has so deliberately diluted his matter, adapted it,
by both excessive simplification and excessive repetition
to the comprehension of a child of eight indicates that he's willing to write down to a real
or fictitious psychology of mass consumption in a way that may eventually disqualify him
for consideration as a serious composer.
I want to show you that Shostakovich, who began as a modernist composer and was celebrated
as such by the time of the Seventh Symphony, hears Virgil Thompson saying that he's writing
for Mass Consumption, so it is Shostakovich has sold out, and it is, it was a case of
this symphony is popular, it's being played everywhere, it must be bad to a modernist like
Thompson.
Now, Tversky goes on with his own experience, since deriding the symphony was a badge of
musical sophistication where I came from, I glanced at appropriate moments at my Soviet
Companions hoping to exchange a wink.
But no.
My friends who were at least as learned and intelligent as I, and who were normally just
as irreverent about everything students were supposed to be irreverent about, were mesmerized.
These were not eight-year-olds.
There was nothing wrong with their musical perceptions.
For their quick wits and musicality, I can certainly vouch.
The awful thought struck me that they valued this music, which I had been taught to despise,
more highly than I valued any music, and that Shostakovich meant more to his and their society
than any composer meant to mine.
For the first time there occurred to me, half-formed, the unbearable suspicion that the ways of
listening to and thinking about music that had been instilled in me and all my peers
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.
It's great. And here he's been told, Shostakovich is a joke. He writes for eight-year-olds.
Listen, it's on the radio. Shostakovich made the cover of Time magazine in the 1940s.
You know, how good could he be? And he's saying, but this music speaks to these people,
whereas the music I've been taught to like is somehow trivialized.
Yeah, it's complicated, you can give great lectures on it, but no one would really want to listen to it.
So, and this Shostakovich is somehow a product of this Soviet totalitarian regime, so let's bear in mind this paradox.
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.
since I let me sketch it out very quickly and then develop in detail since in a
way there's such a complex argument I only barely understand it myself that is
on the I'm so hesitant to say anything good about totalitarianism but on the
one hand these totalitarian regimes and again I'm talking cheaply about Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union were patrons of the arts on levels that were really quite
remarkable and enviable. They, in many respects, and I'll give some examples in a minute, provided
a lot of money for cultural developments. It's one reason many artists were attracted
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
Fascism, where I offered you the most extreme and most famous example, namely Ezra Pound, yesterday.
But there seemed to be something in fascism for artists and even for modernist artists.
And yet this was a Faustian bargain if there ever were one.
The very few artists lived to simply profit from their associations with totalitarianism.
And indeed, the price everyone paid for this was control.
And it is, you know, he who pays the piper calls the tomb.
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,
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.
often pulled the trigger, and again, no market has ever done that to anybody.
And in particular, the great irony of the modernist support for fascism is both Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union turned out to be anti-modernist in their own aesthetic ideology.
And I want to go into that in some detail, though as I would eventually show, the ultimate
The irony of all this is that Hitler and Stalin assured the victory of the modernist aesthetic in the 20th century.
By attacking it, they legitimated it in ways I've now come to the conclusion it never would have otherwise been legitimated.
That may be my most controversial claim. Okay, let me try to review this now and go through it in detail.
On the first point, the totalitarian regimes as patrons of the arts, it actually follows from there being totalitarian regimes.
That's the point. Totalitarianism, the totality of society now comes under the purview of the regime.
In a true laissez-faire society, the government wouldn't intervene at all in the arts.
That would be one of the many private activities that should be left to people on their own.
But totalitarian regimes want to regulate everything, they want to have a hand in everything,
and so one of the things they want to do is support the arts.
Now I'll just read you one passage from the book Art of the Third Reich by Peter Adam about this.
Hitler was always presented as a great patron of the arts.
He was seen opening exhibitions, purchasing pictures for party buildings.
He became the best client of the great German art exhibitions, spending large sums of money at each.
From the second exhibition in 1938, he bought no less than 202 works, over half a million marks worth.
The number of works bought by the Fuhrer increased steadily.
In 1941, he bought nearly 1,000, which he distributed throughout ministries and public buildings.
The label, purchased by the Führer, was highly prized, and now he quotes Hitler,
No age can claim to free itself from its duty to foster art, Hitler had said, continuing with a quote,
It would lose, if it did so, not only the capacity for artistic creation, but also the capacity to understand it, to experience art.
Through his work, the creative artist educates and ennobles the nation's capacity for appreciation.
The great cultural achievements of humanity were at all times the highest achievements of the life of the community.
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.
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.
take quotes from Stalin or Hitler and say, who said this?
And people say, oh, it must have been the head of the NEH said this.
And that's unfair, but it is important to see
that Hitler had a national policy for the arts.
Stalin had a national policy for the arts.
Just as I was saying, France had a national policy for the arts.
And when people cry out for a national policy of the arts of this country or a ministry of culture of this country,
they ought to think twice about it and realize who the real precedents are for it.
Now, as some of you may know, Hitler was a painter, a fairly competent one.
I've seen some of his paintings.
He wanted to become a painter.
applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts
and in the worst admissions decision ever made
by any committee he was turned down.
If he'd been admitted to that academy
it would have saved millions of lives.
But unfortunately it was not.
But one of the reasons he was so interested in the arts
is he thought of himself as an artist.
and as Adam goes on to write they were after all his fellow artists and remembering his
hardships as an artist he said my artist shall live like princes, Fuersten in the German
and the leading artist of the Reich did precisely that.
The artists were very much Hitler's.
The painter Zep Hiltz received a personal gift of a hundred thousand Reichmarks from Hitler
to build himself a studio.
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
Arno Brecke, the most famous sculptor in Nazi Germany, paid only a token sum in taxes
Hitler gave tax breaks to artists, it's just grotesque
and in 1940 he received a large private house with a park and a sizable studio as the personal gift from the Führer
So, you know, this is what Pound wanted. He wanted a modern patriot of the arts, get back to the conditions of the Renaissance.
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.
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.
I mean, this goes back to the Tsarist Russia.
It's not as if the Soviet Union created this.
All these musical traditions can be traced back to the Tsarist Russia.
But the Tsar was another form of tyrant here.
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.
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.
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.
And I'm not justifying communism here, but it is counterintuitive to us.
But, you know, any time you hear recordings of Svyatoslav Richter or Emil Gilels or David
Oistrakh or all these great Russian artists, they were products of this system.
They all suffered from it in their own ways.
But the degree of patronage behind the Bolshoi Ballet, the Kirov Opera and so on, here are
regimes that really put money into the arts.
And a particular irony of it is that, and ironic in light of what I was saying a minute
about the anti-modernism of these regimes, is how much they specifically supported the
rise of modernism in ways that really seem weird to us.
But we think of modernism as rebellious and how could it have thrived under totalitarian
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.
Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union embraced industrialism and presented themselves as great industrial powers who were modernizing their countries, who had to be at the forefront of technology.
and so the modernist love affair with technology links up with the totalitarian love affair of technology
and actually see this best in Italy with a school of painting called the Italian Futurists
who start flourishing in the teens. Many of them became fascists and supported Mussolini.
If you go to the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, you can see the absolute continuity
between the futurist paintings of the teens and the era of Mussolini art, which isn't on display in Rome.
You won't see Hitler art displayed in Germany.
But in Italy, they're somewhat more open to that aspect of their past.
So a lot of famous modernists flourished, at least initially in the Soviet Union, and even, I'm going to say, in Nazi Germany.
For example, in painting, Kazimir Malevich, one of the most important figures in modernist painting,
This painting, one of the great developers of abstract art, and the whole school is known
as Russian Constructivism.
He starts in late Tsarist Russia, but he really flourished in the 20s and 30s.
See, one of the things that the Soviet Union offered itself as, as bringing a new humanity
into existence, that was remaking the whole world, and in the 20s, this did have an ideologically
liberating effect on the arts, and the 20s was a great era of artistic experimentation
in the Soviet Union, and I know I'm not supposed to say that, but it's a simple truth, in part
because the regime had other things on its mind, it was struggling even to survive and
dealing with all sorts of economic problems, and it wasn't in position yet to police the arts.
But there's a tremendous cultural explosion in the Soviet Union in the 20s, spearheaded by painting and people like Malevich,
but also amazing developments in the theater, you know, the development of the Stanislavski method,
and all those things that are so important to the history of 20th century theater.
Much of the most avant-garde developments of the theater in the 20th century come out of Russia in the 20s and 30s.
Now, again, that's based in developments that started in Tsarist Russia, but that was a tyranny, too.
And many fascinating developments in literature, Mikhail Bolgakov, for example, interesting drama developed.
And then film. We'll be talking about it this afternoon, but I mean, film is the greatest of the modernist arts,
and 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
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
Invading German Barbarians, that must be smashed. Now, it's a great film, but if you want to
talk about its content, it's Soviet propaganda. It's just what Stalin ordered. The music scores
by Sergei Prokofiev, and one of the great musical scores of the 20th century, the Alexander
Nevsky music, and together it's a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunst, you know, maybe no
no greater meshing of musical score and film than the work that Prokofiev and Eisenstein
did on Alexander Nevsky.
And then Eisenstein went on to do probably his greatest film cinematically, Ivan the
Terrible.
And then Stalin got a little nervous, a portrait of an insane, tyrannical ruler oppressing
the Russian people.
Stalin got the message and that was it for Ivan the Terrible and that film was never
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.
You know, some of the great triumphs of modern cinema emerged from Stalin's Soviet Union.
Who would have thunk it? But, you know, it just can't be denied.
and I mean it tells both sides of the story because you know before you start
he had a little weepy about Stalin's aesthetic worth you know he destroyed
Eisenstein he destroyed whatever he created now this actually the story in
Nazi Germany is much more truncated because the Nazi rule is only about 12
years the the corresponding period of modernist experimentation in Germany
occurred in the Weimar Republic, and I mean, there's sort of proof of what I'm saying.
There have been few regimes weaker politically than the Weimar Republic, and few regimes
stronger than the Communist Soviet Union, and yet essentially both underwent a period
of great artistic flowering and experimentation in the 20s.
You can't make a connection really between the regime and the art.
But still, what is surprising is when you look at the Nazi years in Germany, the degree
of support for the arts was extraordinary.
Germany has always had and continues to have the richest classical music life in the world,
where other countries are lucky if they can maintain three opera houses going.
You know, Germany has a hundred, and the number of classical concerts and operas in Germany
during the Nazi period is quite extraordinary, recordings survive from many of them and we
can tell the level of music making was extremely high and we were just seeing the Nazis sponsored
all sorts of painting competitions with prizes, I mean in terms of financial support of the
arts, on paper it looks like what everyone dreams of when they call for government support
of the Arts, and it drew forth all sorts of entrants in the competitions and so on.
In the cinema, again, you have the oddity of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th
century, Lenny Riefenstahl, emerging during this period, in this case with the most active
support of Hitler.
Riefenstahl was an incredibly beautiful woman and an actress, and she was Hitler's favorite
Actress, she appeared in these German ski epics, the German equivalent of Westerns,
and she was absolutely gorgeous.
And Hitler had a crush on her, and basically turned over the German film industry to her,
and she made these two remarkable films, Triumph of the Will, the filming of a Nazi party rally
in Nuremberg and Olympia, the film of the 1936 Hitler Olympics.
These films are appalling ideologically.
I mean, they are Nazi films in the deepest sense of the term.
They celebrate Nazism.
They celebrate Nazi ideology.
They have all of the Nazi racism in them, the celebration of the Aryan race.
I cannot say a nice word about them without prefacing it by saying that, but visually they
are absolutely extraordinary.
I think everyone says visually they are the most beautiful documentaries, most masterful
documentaries ever done.
They have been endlessly copied.
The most famous example is that the last scene of the first Star Wars movie is copied, shot
for shot, one of the great scenes in Triumph of the Will.
I mean, it's just, filmmakers have absorbed the vocabulary of those films in their blood.
And, you know, like Eisenstein, Riefenstahl was serving the propaganda of a totalitarian regime, but with great technical brilliance.
And so, again, although, as I'll show in a minute, Nazi Germany like the Soviet Union were actually anti-modernists,
They actually contribute to the development of modernism.
I mean, if they produce and support nothing other than Eisenstein and Riefenstahl,
we would have to say that totalitarian regimes made a contribution to the development of modernism in the cinema.
But it actually goes beyond that.
And if you read some of these books, I put on the reading list, like Adam's Art of the Third Reich.
In rather odd ways, Nazi Germany contributed to modernism, the autobahns, the famous system of highways that Hitler built.
They've been copied all over the world. Hitler built the first super highways, and they are a quintessential example of modernist architecture.
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
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,
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.
I mean, most people will say that Hitler would not have been possible without the radio and his ability to communicate by a radio.
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?
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.
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.
and yet it's partially the newness of the medium that allowed him to get away with it.
Well, I'm getting out of here, here's the point. Again, a minute on the show that the Nazis were anti-modernist,
but in a certain sense they were profoundly modernist.
They had to be, they had to embrace the 20th century and its new technology was the basis of their power.
And indeed the link between these totalitarian regimes and modernism is power.
I hate to say it, but the artists crave power.
You can see that in what I showed in Pound and he's not the only one.
And in some ways they were attracted to regimes of power.
Modernism in the arts was a vision of power, the new power of technology.
The modernists wanted to remake the world.
The great slogan of British modernism under Pound and Wyndham Lewis was make it new.
That's also the slogan of Nazi Germany and also the slogan of the Soviet Union.
all the stuff about the new man in the Soviet Union and the new woman
that was the intersection point between modernism
and totalitarianism. Modernists
had visions of how they could remake the world into something utopian
and so did Hitler and Stalin
so again there was a kind of strange alliance
between modern start and the totalitarian regimes.
I mean, otherwise it's inexplicable the number of artists who gravitated either towards the Soviet Union or towards Nazi Germany.
Poets, composers, painters, sculptors, architects, just think of what a marvelous opportunity totalitarianism seemed to architects.
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.
And that literally became possible under both Hitler and Stalin were very big on urban renewal.
Hitler had a chance he was going to remake all of Berlin.
And when you look just at the staging of a Nazi rally, these great Nuremberg rallies,
The Nazis used every new technology, the airplane searchlights that Albert Speer used to create these cathedrals of light.
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.
This symphony of light that Albert Speer has created to celebrate Hitler.
So again, it's very creepy almost to understand this, but there was a link between totalitarianism
and modernism.
Now, having said that, this is all today going to be on the one hand, on the other hand,
modernism ultimately did not flourish under either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union because
The great aim of Nazi and Soviet support of art was control, and the degree of bureaucracy for the arts that the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany created is rivaled only by the American bureaucracy today for the administration of the arts.
No, actually they surpassed us in that regard, and you had all these levels and levels of departments and bureaus.
Again, on paper will be somebody's dream, you know, they really care about the arts.
Look, they got a secretary of the arts and an undersecretary of the arts and an undersecretary of the arts.
One of the essays in the Taylor and Will book, The Nazification of Art, has a wonderful bureaucratic chart
of the organization of the arts administration in Nazi Germany.
and so things were carefully supervised and carefully scrutinized and ultimately behind everything was a gun
and together Hitler and Stalin murdered more artists than anybody in history
the record in Jewish artists and particularly in Germany were sent to concentration camps
and many of them killed a whole generation of composers
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.
But same thing in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich managed to survive, but only by an accident.
At one point the guy who was going to arrest him was instead arrested before he could get to Shostakovich.
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.
so that ultimately whatever forces it helped, it stifled and mostly just destroyed and stamped out.
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.
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.
The Nazis gained power faster and were in control faster, but most of the specific arts they encouraged, particularly painting and sculpture,
I mean, we look at it today and there's very little to appreciate in it.
And specifically, and here's the other point, that for all the links between totalitarianism and modernism,
in fact, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were specifically and explicitly anti-modernist.
They were always attacking modernist art and offering in its place the very antithesis.
So that, for example, to look at the situation in Nazi Germany,
Hitler explicitly attacked abstract art, dada, cubism,
or just about any of the famous modernist developments of the first 25 years of the century, Hitler explicitly attacked Hitler-like realistic art.
His own art is realistic. You paint little landscapes and little cityscapes and portraits.
Hitler's art looks very kitsch-like to us now. Actually, it looks like cheap commercial art to us.
And his favorite painters from the 19th century were German realist painters like Anselm Feuerbach and Hans Mockhart.
And he hated what he and his cohorts came to call degenerate art and art at the Kutzt.
And there was this famous exhibition the Nazis organized in Munich in 1936 of so-called degenerate art,
Art, which was largely modernist art and they put it on display to humiliate it.
Now it's interesting that Hitler associated modernist art with commercial art and specifically
with Jewish art dealers.
The great animus of his attacks on modernist art was that he saw it as a conspiracy of
of International Jewish Art Dealers to foist this horrible art on the German people.
I mean, there's speech after speech talks about this.
And he would, what the Nazis did in the 30s, they start to cleanse German museums of Jewish art.
And Hitler would give these speeches, look how much of your tax money
went to pay for this work by a Jewish artist, sold by a Jewish art dealer, this modernist garbage.
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.
I think I put it on this supplementary biography, this catalog of the Degenerate Art Exhibition.
and they argue there the Nazis used dada techniques to display the Jewish art to make fun of it
and it's really weird when you look at photos it's a well-documented exhibition
and they would hang pictures on the wall and skew some of them and write graffiti under the art
You know, this is Jewish art. You know, it's graffiti art. I mean, kind of really sort of hostile attacks.
The way the Dadaists would attack traditional art, the Nazis used it to attack modernist art.
So the posters for the exhibit are very modernist in their form.
It's all very weird and it's a perfect example of the kind of weird intersection I'm trying to show here.
So, when you look at Hitler's arguments, they're explicitly anti-modernist.
He wanted realistic painting, realistic sculpture, again.
He didn't want modernist music.
He wanted music with melody and harmony.
I hate to say it, but he's beginning to sound a bit like me, what I was saying yesterday,
I think it's interesting that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, you get this attack
on the elitism of modernism, the way it's lost touch with the German people, the Russian
people, in the Soviet Union it took the form, the attack on Shostakovich, the 1936 one is
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.
That was the negative word in Soviet criticism.
criticism, that formless meant that it placed pure artistic motives over the expression
of the feelings of the Russian people, and the answer was Soviet realism.
And again, for all the antitheses between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, their artistic
policies were very similar and again they were both socialist regimes. Nazism is
national socialism and in both cases you have national policy for the arts and
it's almost identical. The Soviet realism looks very much like the kind of painting
that Hitler liked. That is the the typical art that Stalin and Hitler wanted was of
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.
And you see it in sports in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and the celebration of calisthenics and that sort of thing.
But there's an incredible continuity in the art. Again, realist and always upbeat, pointing the way to the future.
Now I will parenthetically say this is also identical with American art in the 1930s,
the so-called WPA art, the art produced by the American government policy in the arts, and 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
in the 1930s in Mussolini's Italy, in Hitler's Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, in Roosevelt's
United States, and elsewhere as well.
Some ways it's a reaction to the depression, in the sense the world's falling apart, we've
got to rebuild it, but you know, you can see it in Rockefeller Center even, the kind of
monumental sculpture there, which in many ways is indistinguishable from the kind of
monumental sculpture that was being built in Germany at that time, only it's our sculpture
so we say it's nice and we don't like the Hitler sculpture but stylistically there's
a great continuity there and it is because everybody was turning to the state in the
1930s and saying the state was the answer to their problems and they wanted art to reflect
that and artists were being enlisted into the service of the state whether with a gun
in the United States, as well as the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, and
so, I mean, it is ironic that the modernists bought into these regimes. They thought these
These regimes were going to elevate them and you can see it across the board that modernists
felt in totalitarian states or just in the state in general, in the new powerful national
states of the 20th century, these war-oriented states with their industrial power linked
up with their military power, that this was like a return to the Renaissance and the era
and the state would give them recognition that the market never did.
These frustrated artists, frustrated with having to kow-tow to a public, to a commercial
public, to write or paint or whatever, with a commercial public mind, decided, oh what
we need is state patrons and these various dictators were brilliant in exploiting these
You know, the way Castro to this day, Latin American writers and other artists whore after Castro and present him as this great man.
And so many of the famous Latin American authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you know, have been supporters of Castro and pals of him.
Only Mario Fargassiosa, although it took him a while, saw through Castro and attacked him.
I mean, Castro supported many fine writers, including Alejo Carpentier, whom he made into his cultural ambassador to France and so on.
I mean, dictators have been very canny in this way of knowing how to exploit the vanity of artists.
You pin a medal on an artist at a public ceremony and he'll write anything you want about him.
And it's a very sad fact, but I'm afraid it's true.
So, in fact, once people like Hitler and Stalin were fully empowered, they did everything they could to stamp out modernism, particularly in the visual arts, but in music as well.
And again, 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.
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.
Because if Hitler and Stalin hated it, it must be, in fact, good.
And the worldwide triumph of what's called the international style and art after World War II,
it really could be traced to a reaction to Nazism and Soviet communism.
That is, Hitler and Stalin together killed the cause of realist representation in the arts.
And of neoclassical forms and architecture.
It's in a way taken us decades to recover from the negative effects.
And I do want to say just because Hitler and Stalin didn't like a form of art doesn't mean it's good.
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
over traditional art and especially representational art because they were able to tar those with
the labels of Soviet realism and Nazi kitsch.
Let me give a specific example of it, which I just came across.
I wrote an article about Grant Wood's American Gothic, which celebrated its 50th, you all
know that painting, the man and the woman with the pitchfork in the Iowa field.
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,
He, our text that's used in all colleges, he was a German refugee, and in 1943 he wrote
an article attacking American Gothic, which in some ways is, you know, it's an American
icon now.
You could put it on the dollar bill instead of Washington, I mean, that's become our symbol
for the American spirit.
And Janssen said that Grant Wood was substituting Americanism, that is nationalism, for aesthetic
values of any kind.
And he went on after surveying some of Wood's writings and that of some of his fellow Midwestern
pages, Janssen wrote, in fact, almost every one of the ideas constituting the regionalist
credo could be matched more or less verbatim from the writings of Nazi experts on art.
When I first read it I found it was outrageous and then in preparation for this seminar I
read a number of books on Nazi art and especially this Peter Adam book is so valuable because
it reproduces art from the Nazi period you will never ever see anywhere.
I mean it's just extraordinary the number of paintings, some of them in full color reproductions
and I started looking at them and I said my god some of these look like Grant Wood paintings.
There are paintings of the fields in the German hinterland and I suddenly said to myself,
you know, poor Jansen, he flees Hitler, he comes over to the United States and he sees
being celebrated the same kind of art he just saw in Germany.
And you know, there are paintings in here of, you know, solid German farming families,
You know, true to the land, and my God, they look like Grant Wood paintings.
Now, I'm going to think Grant Wood is a very good painter, not a great painter, and I don't
think he was a Nazi or a fascist.
But here's what happened, you know, American regionalist painting was smeared as Nazi, especially
because so many of the leading art critics starting in the 40s were emigres, often Jewish
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
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,
promoted abstract expressionism because it wasn't Nazi art and it wasn't Soviet art.
I mean, it was a post-World War II reaction against Nazi art and then hyped in the 50s
by the sense that now the Soviet Union was the enemy, therefore socialist realism was
the enemy in art, therefore realism was the enemy in art, and you get this emblematic
moment when Life magazine puts Jackson Pollock on the cover saying, greatest artist alive.
I've almost become reconciled to his paintings after looking at them many, many times, but
he wasn't the greatest artist alive then.
But look at the twisted logic of this, that America had to embrace abstract expressionism
because it had to get away from realism and art because realism was smeared with Nazi associations and with Soviet socialist realist associations.
And abstract expressionism was promoted as the international style.
That's actually what it was called, international style.
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.
You know, you look at a Grant Wood painting and there's an Iowa cornfield, and that's American.
You look at a de Kooning painting or a Jackson Pollock painting, I mean, there's nothing there.
So, and the notion this was part of, yeah, we were getting away from nationalism,
we were getting away from fascism, we were getting away from Soviet communism
by promoting this international modernism that had no roots in anything, frankly.
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
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.
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
And I can see why, after the war, Germany embraced modernism with a vengeance in the arts.
Because one thing, Hitler had attacked it, and also it was a way of getting a new beginning.
And I can see how realist art had terrible associations in Germany after the war.
And a lot of the impetus behind modernism in the world in general comes out of the German arts, particularly music, painting and sculpture.
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
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.
Again, you can see it in architecture. You know what Stalinist architecture looks like, those, you know, the Moscow University building.
They, you know, they're monumental and decorative and, of course, lots of realist statuary associated with them.
The same in Germany. Much of the German architecture never got built, but books like the Adams
book are good to show Hitler's plans for rebuilding Berlin after the war, presuming he would have
won it. That's the thing. And he was going to build this giant neoclassical dome that
would have dwarfed either St. Peter's or the U.S. Capitol. And you can just look at some
Some of the buildings that were built, like the House of Art in Munich, which was built
for this Antarctic Kunst exhibition, it's still there, it's now, actually there's everything,
it's now Museum of Modern Art. Museum of Modern Art is in this old Nazi building in Munich.
There's some Nazi architecture that survives in Munich. There's a lot of fascist architecture
in Italy that survives, and it was all rather neoclassical, you know, Greek columns, pediments,
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,
The Statuary, which renounces any of the neoclassical canons, you know, basically the glass tower that Mise-Fandereau popularized.
That's, I mean, there are many artistic reasons behind that, many technological reasons driving it, but there are also ideological reasons driving it.
and its success had a lot to do with a reaction against Italian fascist, Nazi German and Soviet architecture
and it was decades before you could put a column up in a building again and that's now post-modernism
but people are drawing this book, The Nazification of Art by Taylor and Will
makes fascinating links between Nazi architecture and postmodern architecture.
And when you think about the embrace of classical elements and historical elements in general,
it does provide a connection. I only just began to think about it. I never even thought of that before that.
But anyway, you see then what a complex story this is of the interaction between the totalitarian regimes
and Art and Modernism in particular, and in the time that remains, I'd like to talk a little more specifically about Shostakovich,
who seems to me emblematic of so many of the issues in 20th century art that we've been talking about.
He's, in my opinion, the greatest composer of the 20th century. I do like Schoenberg, I do like Bartok and Stravinsky and some others,
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.
But, you know, if I really had to name one person, it would be Shostakovich, and I'm born out by the market.
We've finally had time to shake out things in 20th century art, 20th century is over, mercifully.
And Shostakovich has emerged as the most popular composer of the 20th century.
He is one of the few 20th century composers who is regularly programmed in concerts where people voluntarily come to hear his music.
Often you're forced to hear some horrific modernist piece that's mercifully brief.
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.
But you'd never come to hear the Boulez piece. But Shostakovich, you can build a program around him.
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.
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.
He tied for 9th with Georg Friedrich Händel.
Here's the list of the top composers in order, descending order.
Mozart was number one, then Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Edward Elgar, Rachmaninoff,
Ray Vaughan Williams, Händel and Shostakovich.
He tied with Händel for 9th.
Mozart had 24 pieces in the top 300, Händel and Shostakovich had 7 pieces.
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.
This is a British magazine, so Elgar and Vaughan Williams made the top ten, and Handel they regard as their own too.
So it's pretty amazing, and Shostakovich is by far the most modern of those composers.
Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Vaughan Williams, Hendoff, and Shostakovich.
He's the one who died the latest of all of them, and the only one who could really in any sense...
I mean, Elgar and Vaughan Williams are 20th century composers, but they're not modernists.
So that's... I mean, total vindication, scientific proof, I need say no more.
But no, if you looked at other things like that, Shostakovich always comes out well in the polling, and I would say deservedly so.
But I do want to point out that, as Tariskin said, you cannot believe how trashed Shostakovich is in the musicological literature.
I mean, I was growing up in the 50s, and I first started listening to classical music in the 50s,
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.
And I was actually tricked into buying it because it said, Sviatoslav Richter, Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, and then Shostakovich Preludes of Fuse.
I didn't realize that Richter was only playing the preludes and fuses in some second-rate
Russian pianist was doing the piano concerto, but I got tricked into it by the evil market
and the result was I recognized a fabulous piece of music and I subsequently bought 12
recordings of it, including two with Shostakovich himself playing the concerto.
He was a world-class pianist.
He tied with Bartok at a piano contest in the 20s.
Shostakovich was regarded as a hack and still is regarded as a hack by many musicologists.
Things have changed. His continuing popularity has forced people to evaluate him and people
who are invested in Russian musicology have to do something with Shostakovich. The body
The value of literature now on him is quite balanced, and people have come to appreciate his work.
And the animus behind the musicologists who attack him is that he wasn't modernist enough, and he was popular.
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.
Virgil Thompson virtually says that in that review that Taruskin quoted.
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.
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.
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.
He wrote his first symphony when he was 19 years old.
Okay, Mozart was 6 years old when he wrote his first symphony,
but Shostakovich's first symphony is a hell of a lot better than Mozart's first symphony.
In fact, Mozart's got to get to about...
Oh, I'm going to give him 25.
Mozart's 25th symphony is the first symphony he writes.
It's as good as Shostakovich's first symphony, so there, both getting out of the dance.
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.
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.
And he played the kind of music we associate with silent movies, because you can hear it in some of his musical compositions later.
And it's fascinating to me that in some ways his musical experience grew out of accompanying silent movies.
And that makes him a modernist right there. He's linking up with the great kinetic art, the 20th century of the movies.
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.
So he begins as a modernist and achieved worldwide fame from this first symphony.
I think Bruno Walter, a great conductor, performed the symphony in Germany and Stokowski picked it up.
Stokowski recorded it twice, once as early as the 30s with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
And you know, Shostakovich became famous at 19, wrote a symphony that was being played all around the world.
And his early pieces, piano pieces, first piano sonata, they're all in a kind of modernist mode.
Modernist Mode. Moreover, he shows how artists embraced the newness of the Soviet Union.
And in the 20s and early 30s, he starts writing film music for some of these movies that are celebrating the new Soviet Union.
We watched an excerpt from one last night. And his second and third symphonies are Soviet propaganda.
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,
to them and they were being promised everything and promised a new world and he wrote music
celebrating it.
But still a kind of modernist music, sort of quirky, off-putting, unsettling, harmonically
daring, melodic, but often with a kind of ironic quality of the melodies.
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
The ballets he wrote used, at this time, in the film scores, used popular music in that way.
And so he was headed straight on this modernist course.
Mahler, Gustav Mahler, was his favorite symphonist.
I hear echoes of Kurt Weill in his music, but nobody else apparently does.
But then he writes an opera called The Nose based on the Gogol short story.
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
of Music, and you know, the music is, you know, the husband's being portrayed brutally
in the music is brutal. It was a huge success for about a year and a half. It had hundreds
of performances in Moscow and Leningrad, and then it was performed around the world. It
had a, it was, I don't know if The Met did it, but it did have a New York premiere. And
And then Stalin went one night and hated it and walked out and that was almost the end
for Shostakovich.
Fortunately he wasn't killed but he was forced to publicly recant his music and wrote his
Fifth Symphony as a form of redemption.
The Fifth Symphony is one of the most magnificent things he ever wrote.
Fifth or eighth symphony, I don't know which is better.
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.
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,
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.
There's nothing like that. I mean, to me, the music of the Fifth Symphony is very beautiful, but it's still modernist.
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.
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.
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
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,
The film music, which he wrote because he needed money, particularly in these periods
when his symphonies were banned and certainly he was never able to do another opera.
And so just to keep his family going, he had to write film music.
He was of Mozartian talents in that he could just churn out music, I mean, in his sleep.
And that's what happens in the film music.
And this would be an example that would point to, you know, even within the Soviet Union,
there was commercial art.
And it is true that Shostakovich hated doing this.
He more or less repudiated this music.
Nevertheless, you can see flashes of brilliance in it.
It is hack work.
He reuses stuff you can hear and if you go through these scores, and there's about ten
CDs worth of his film music available, you see him recycling stuff.
And yet, I read a really interesting article in the Shostakovich casebook which said, yeah,
this is hack work, but here's where he's learning to write his symphonies.
And listen to the symphonies now, and you will hear bits and pieces from the film music,
and above all, he's developing a musical vocabulary, he's developing a musical syntax in doing
this.
And you know, after reading that article, I can hear what the guy's talking about.
And so, even the hack work contributed to Shostakovich's development.
And then, again, you have the even worse hack work, which is the Soviet propaganda.
It was bad enough writing.
You can say, okay, here's an example where he was forced to write for commercial reasons,
and the music is hack work.
But when he writes for the state, it's even worse.
No conviction whatsoever.
And you hear these things like the Song of the Forest or the Lennon Cantata or the Twelfth
Symphony, the Lennon Symphony.
I mean this stuff is completely vapid and empty his greatest work yeah you can
say is the private work the chamber music the solo piano music some of the
songs that he wrote that he wrote you know for himself yet it's you know it's
the oddly enough it's the market that made that possible you know even within
Soviet communism there was a degree of private enterprise and Shostakovich
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yet, in some ways, the market contributed to what he did.
He could even survive the pressures of a totalitarian regime.
And here, the laud, I'll end with this, at the end of the video we watched last night,
Valery Gurgeyev, the great Russian conductor, ended the whole story of Shostakovich's Stalin
by saying, and this is a terrible thing to say, but he said it, and so I can now quote
him, Stalin made Shostakovich great.
that Stalin was the great challenge Shostakovich faced and overcoming that challenge made him
greater as a composer and that's a terrible thing to say but I think it's right and that
the need to respond to that challenge deepened Shostakovich as a man, deepened his resolve
as a composer, made his music more profound and I will just use as an example in some
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.
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.
possible yes, many possible yes, but the history of art suggests that is not a universal principle
and many of the greatest artists have done their greatest work under the greatest pressures
whether they're the deadline of commercial publishing or even the gun of Stalin pointed
under your head. There's something profoundly socialistic about the notion that we need to take
pressure off our artists. It is the nanny state idea, it is the welfare state idea that what
What people need in life is to be taken care of, and then they will flourish.
The history of the human race suggests something very different, and the history of the arts
suggests something very different.
And Shostakovich is almost my exhibit A. There is no artist I can think of who has been subject
to every range of pressure, the need to earn a living and write commercial music, the need
to deal with the single worst tyrant maybe in human history, who had singled you out
and you were on his radar screen. And the result was, in many cases, awkward from him.
Much of his artistic career was wasted responding to these pressures. But the long-term story
is that his music deepened and grew greater. And as great as his early, high modernist
Did he ever make a move to leave the Soviet Union and Mr. Stalin?
Exile. Exile from the Soviet Union. What a punishment. But it was Mother Russia. Even
Russropovich hated having to leave when he was exiled. And someone like Shostakovich,
I mean, he had family there. There was always the question, if he left, what would happen
to his family? He was carefully monitored. He was sometimes sent to the West, but always
is with the KGB minders next to him, watching his every move, and he felt that he was deeply
Russian as a composer and he was, and he worshipped Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, and for him to
leave Russia, I think he felt it would have killed him as a composer, and so again I can't
I mean, I'm not sure he ever had the option. He died in 75, you know, despite all these
various liberalizations. The Soviet Union kept careful tabs on his aris. Reed Sviatoslav
Richter's memoirs, where he talks about, he had two KGB binders with him and several other
plaincoats following him, and the jokes he would have going on long walks on wintry days
just to make them freeze their asses off and to follow him.
But I'm not sure he had the option of leaving,
but if he did, I can see why he didn't.
And a musician cannot compose in isolation
despite our myth of the solitary artist.
He needs other musicians.
He needs, Shostakovich worked very closely
with Sviatoslav Richter, with David Oistrakh,
with these conductors like Evgeny Maravinsky.
He felt he was deeply rooted in Russian musical life.
I've come to understand that he wrote his symphonies for Russian orchestras, the way
they play, with their coarse brass and everything.
He wasn't writing for the Philadelphia Orchestra with its Tchaikovsky sound and the smooth
strings and the beautiful blend.
It's really weird.
I mean, when you understand how rooted he was in Russia as a composer, I don't think
he could have left.
Prokofiev returned.
I mean, he was safely in Paris and the idiot went back in the late 30s and he claimed never
to have regretted it, though Stalin made his life miserable.
You know, every one of these Russians has eventually gone back, you know, the great
moment when Horowitz returned, when Stravinsky returned, it's holy mother Russia to them.
And so, you know, to us, you say, why wouldn't he have left this hellhole?
And the answer is, that's where his identity was.
Yes?
Did he distribute his music on your whole course, his love to jazz?
Not so, no.
I mean, I think the jazz was very important, but there are many other reasons for the form
his music takes.
and the coded aspect of it is deeply rooted in Russian and then Soviet art.
I mean, Russians have lived under tyrannies for so long that they have learned how to
speak two things at once and give the finger in the pocket, as we learned about last night
in the DVD.
So again, I really do appreciate the importance of jazz for him, but I wouldn't overestimate
Any questions? Okay then, we'll be back at two.