Y R A I D T E R C E S N O I T A N A OF THE
BY Richard Taruskin
L
ited States n U e h t in ed sic sician train up to despise the mu s u m s u io r e t wa ike any s was brough posed in a country I I , r a W ld o C m during the ich. It was music co members, I was told, y v e e o of Shostak r and a society whos ey wished, only as th er a d th taught to fe e to think and act as nt. Music written un e e e os were not fr to do or face punishm ic, because the purp d us were force could not be good m onality of its creator e s s h such dures express the true per d creative freedom, t e o t of art was ncement of art requir sources and means. a e and the adv xperiment with new r e freedom to And this implied, in turn, that true artists were always ahead of their audiences, who would not only improve their sensibilities by keeping up with advanced art, but would always have an inspiring model of free choice and virtuous action to live up to. The cultural products of totalitarian societies provided citizens with models of obedience, not freedom. They were regressive, not progressive. They manipulated rather than liberated the thoughts and feelings of their beholders and inculcated conformism. Shostakovich, the most highly touted of Soviet composers, epitomized these deficiencies and dangers. If you are past your thirties you certainly remember this line of thinking. If you are receiving Medicare, you might remember, as I do, an earlier time and an earlier attitude affecting the music of Shostakovich. When I was attending elementary school in New York, we sang a song of his in assemblies. It was called the United Nations Hymn, and the text went like this. The sun and the stars are all ringing With song rising strong from the earth The hope of humanity singing A hymn to a new world in birth (Chorus) United Nations on the march With flags unfurled Together fight for victory A free new world. Those words were by Harold Rome, a songwriter best known for writing the show Pins and Needles, originally produced by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. We were not told about him in our assemblies, possibly because by the time we were singing his song he, along with 150 other liberal or left-leaning American arts and entertainment figures, had been listed in a publication called Red Channels, the subtitle of which identified it as a “Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.”
18 LA JOLLA MUSIC SOCIETY SUMMERFEST
Rome and Shostakovich never actually collaborated. Rome set his lyrics, under the title “United Nations on the March,” to an existing tune by Shostakovich for use in a movie called Thousands Cheer, about a circus acrobat (played by Gene Kelly) who is drafted into the army. The tune had first been used as the title song in a Soviet film from the period of the first Five-Year Plan. It was called “The Counterplan,” and extolled Leningrad factory workers who were overfulfilling their production quotas toward the construction of the first Soviet hydroelectric power station (and, of course, foiling the plots of “wreckers”). Thousands Cheer was released in 1944, which means that the United Nations in question was not the postwar international peacekeeping organization about which we were singing in school, but the old wartime alliance of Great Britain, the United States, and Soviet Russia, nations united against Germany and Japan. The song as we sang it was a sort of vestigial organ left over from a temporary partnership that had come to a bad end. By the late fifties, Shostakovich was no longer being sung by New York schoolchildren. In fact, by the end of the decade, performing any Russian music in American public schools was strongly discouraged, even music composed before the revolution. (My sister’s high school orchestra director had to cancel a performance of music from Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.) While the alliance lasted, though, Shostakovich’s stock soared in America. His Seventh Symphony’s career as an emblem of wartime pertinacity is often recalled now that the symphony is once again a frequently-performed item. Here (with a couple of interjections from me) is how it was reported at the time: Last month a little tin box, no more than five inches around, arrived in the U.S. In it were 100 feet of microfilm—the photographed score of the Seventh Symphony. It had been carried by plane from Kuibyshev [the city, now renamed Samara, to which Shostakovich had been evacuated] to Teheran, by auto from Teheran to Cairo [how was that possible??], by plane from Cairo to New York. Photographers went to work printing from the film. In ten days they reproduced four fat volumes, 252 pages in all, of orchestral score. Before the first strip of film had gone into the enlarger, three topflight U.S. conductors, all Shostakovich champions— sleek, platinum-haired Leopold Stokowski, the Cleveland Orchestra’s Artur Rodzinski, Boston’s Serge Koussevitzky—were locked in a polite battle royal for the glory of conducting the première. For a while it looked as if Koussevitzky had gained the prize. Without even waiting to see the score of the coveted Seventh Symphony, he rushed to the Am-Rus Music Corp., U.S. agent for Soviet music, nailed down the first concertperformance rights for the Western Hemisphere. Then with quiet triumph he announced that his student Berkshire Music Center Orchestra would play the Seventh Symphony on August 14. But the truth of the matter was that he had been nosed out by his 75-year-old rival, Arturo Toscanini, the old fire-&-ice Maestro himself. Toscanini would conduct the Seventh on July 19, a month before Koussevitzky.