PRAISE FOR STALIN

The winds, it seems, blew both hot and cold during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, classical music reached its apogee, regular bathing became popular once again, and electricity brought people out of the darkness. (Many people don't realize that New York, London and many other cities were illuminated by electricity as early as the 1880s.)

But then, the nineteenth century also took some giant steps backwards. During the Enlightenment of the previous century, religion was recognized as being down on all fours with superstition, but in the 1800s there came The Great Awakening which brought Christianity back in its most virulent form. Related to this was the rise of Spiritualism to the degree that seances were held even in the White House. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a simple man and a terrible writer, was completely bamboozled by various mediums and psychics.

Just as bad were the rise of pseudosciences. Convicts, soldiers and job applicants had their skulls measured by doctors of phrenology to assess their intelligence and character. Psychoanalysis tried to fit the urges of man into a sort of hydraulic model, and such arcane concepts as transference and anal retention and repression became as much a part of the modern vocabulary as table rapping and clairvoyance.

Perhaps the most artificial theory was that of communism. As with phrenology and psychoanalysis, there was nothing scientific about it; it was simply based on the speculations of one man. However, there was something appealing about each of these movements. The reason junior is a pyromaniac is due to an unresolved oedipal conflict, not that because you've sired a psychopathic fiend, and it's a comfort to know that he can be cured by a brief treatment of a mere hour a day for thirty years. Communism was even better. A classless society? A worker's paradise? Who could be against that? Where do I join?

People, particularly those who had not succumbed to religion, apparently wanted to believe in such things. As all of them are based on largely untestable hypotheses, there is no way to prove them wrong or even useless. Just as with the spiritualists, people were eager to explain away any demonstration of the inaccuracy, impracticality or outright fraud in these movements. Did communism bring famine wherever it was tried? Then the starvation was actually caused by the international banking conspiracy. Did people seldom regain their faculties through psychotherapy? Then it was due to a deeply-repressed oedipal hostility or bad transference, and they didn't want to get better.

I, however, am such an optimist, that I find some good in virtually everything. Religion has brought persecution and suffering, but it has also inspired the most beautiful music. In a previous screed, I have mentioned how Freud managed to make at least one accurate guess, and communism likewise managed to make some specific improvements in the societies in which it was tried.

Similarly, the dictators and tyrants of the twentieth century all managed to do some good on occasion. Hitler built the autobahn; Mussolini didn't actually get the trains to run on time, but he did clean-up Naples; and Stalin saved classical music in the twentieth century.

The staff down in the monitoring room here in the Classical Archives IRCAM Command Bunker have alerted me that since the beginning of this essay the disapproval monitors have been steadily climbing until they now hover at +3 in the red, so I had better gently explain myself.

Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvilli (which, our staff of translators informs me, means "full of dzhugash") in the state of Georgia—possibly in suburban Atlanta or thereabouts. Early in life he immigrated to Russia, adopted the name Stalin (which means "man of steel"), and shortly after the death of Lenin ("man of flax") he assumed complete control of the Soviet Union—all eleven time zones.

It is tired and threadbare fact, repeated to excess during the cold war, that journalism in the Soviet Union—as in China, as in Albania, as in Cuba, &c.—consisted of nothing but propaganda in service of the state. News was allowed only to the degree in which it benefitted the state, and the same is true of editorial opinion. In Stalin's time, all news and opinion had to conform to the views of Stalin, and nowhere was this more evident than in music criticism. If Stalin liked a piece, the critics waxed rhapsodic in praise of it. If Stalin was not pleased, the scribes were brutal in their criticism.

Even better was the fact that Stalin took a personal pleasure in terrorizing people, especially artists. Prokofiev recalled how the phone would ring in his apartment late at night and he would answer it to hear nothing. But Prokofiev didn't hang up because he knew who it was. It was Stalin playing cat-and-mouse with him. Finally, after the tension grew and Prokofiev's hands began trembling, the low, slurred voice of Stalin would come through the receiver. (Curiously, Sergei Prokofiev died on the same day in 1953 that his tormentor died.)

Not only Prokofiev, but all composers had to answer for their compositions. Usually, the charges against them were that the music was "too bourgeois" or "decadent." The music had to conform to a standard that "the people" would like, which of course meant something that Stalin would like.

This entire scheme of things seems perfectly awful until one realizes that that actually had a beneficial effect on music. Left to his own devices, Prokofiev was apt to follow the trends of the twentieth century and turned out some dreadful symphonies, and so did Shostakovich. This may be dismissed as merely my opinion, but there's no denying that these works are seldom performed or recorded. They may in truth be esoteric masterpieces, but no one wants to hear these works.

Under Stalin's thumb, however, both composers were intimidated into writing the music for which they are remembered. Each of the Russian works of the twentieth century that remain popular today were written to please Stalin—or else—and they are now the most celebrated works of that era. The most popular and most frequently-performed symphony of the twentieth century is the Symphony No. 5 of Shostakovich, and it was written as a "reply to just criticism." If it hadn't been for Stalin, he never would've written such a fustian masterpiece.

Now look what happened in the free atmosphere of the West. Schoenberg, Webern, and the army of serialists in academia, Elliott Carter, Stockhausen, Boulez, and a thousand names you would never recognize. I don't presume to posses the qualifications or talent to pass judgment on these men—and you will recall the expression from the American Midwest, "Opinions are like [rectums]; everybody's got one"—but it is again beyond dispute that people, even the intelligent minority of the public, simply do not want to hear the cacophony they devise. If it is presented on the radio, they will change the station. If it is performed in concert, they will not attend.

I harbor grave doubts as to the validity of such music. Serialism is now a century old, and by all rights it should sound dated and old-fashioned (and in a way it does), but it yet induces mass bruxism in audiences. I would fain admit that perhaps I am simply too dull-witted to comprehend atonal music, and there's a good chance that my good friend Ernie the bartender is too. But when the overwhelming majority of the listening public rejects atonality, it's time to concede that music took a wrong turn during the twentieth century and that, rather than being music lovers, the votaries of Stockhausen's art have more in common with Esperanto speakers or persons who write long letters using the phonetic alphabet mandated by George Bernard Shaw's will, and with adolescents who are simply looking for something radical, dude.

But experimental and atonal music came to dominate European classical music of the twentieth century so completely that the general classical audience was driven away. That there is a popular twentieth-century repertoire at all must be attributed largely to the efforts of Comrade Stalin. Had he not ridden herd on his composers, Prokofiev might have gone the way of Stravinsky and there's no doubt in my mind that Shostakovich would've become a serialist too. Instead, we now have "The Battle on the Ice" from Alexander Nevsky.

Way to go, Uncle Joe! And that's a cool subway you had built!