Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

On the 5th of January 1948 — twelve years after his abbreviated visit to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk — Stalin and his entourage were at the Bolshoi again, this time for Vano Muradeli’s The Great Friendship . The composer, who was also chairman of the Soviet Music Fund, prided himself on writing music that was melodic, patriotic and socialist-realist. His opera, commissioned to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, and lavishly produced, had already enjoyed two months of great success. Its theme was the consolidation of Communist power in the Northern Caucasus during the Civil War.

Muradeli was a Georgian who knew his history; unfortunately for him, Stalin was also a Georgian, and knew his history better. Muradeli had portrayed the Georgians and Ossetians as rising up against the Red Army; whereas Stalin — not least because he had an Ossetian mother — knew that what actually happened in 1918–20 was that the Georgians and Ossetians had joined hands with the Russian Bolsheviks to fight in defence of the Revolution. It had been the Chechens and the Ingush whose counter-revolutionary actions had hindered the forging of the Great Friendship between the many peoples of the future Soviet Union.

Muradeli had compounded this politico-historical error with an equally gross musical one. He had included in his opera a lezghinka — which, as he doubtless knew, was Stalin’s favourite dance. But instead of choosing an authentic and familiar lezghinka, thereby celebrating the folk traditions of the Caucasian people, the composer had egotistically chosen to invent his own dance ‘in the style of the lezghinka’.

Five days later, Zhdanov had called a conference of seventy composers and musicologists to discuss the continuing and corrosive influence of formalism; and a few days after this, the Central committee published its Official Decree ‘On V. Muradeli’s Opera The Great Friendship ’. The composer learnt that his music, far from being as melodic and patriotic as he had supposed, quacked and grunted with the best of them. He too was pronounced a formalist, one serving up ‘confused neuropathological combinations’ and pandering to ‘a narrow circle of experts and gourmets’. Needing to save his career, if not his skin, Muradeli came up with the best explanation he could: that he had been misled by others. He had been seduced and deceived into taking the wrong path, specifically by Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, and even more specifically by that composer’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk .

Zhdanov reminded the nation’s composers yet again that the criticisms embodied in the 1936 Pravda editorial were still valid: Music — harmonious, graceful music — was required, not Muddle. The chief culprits were named as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky and Shebalin. Their music was compared to a piercing road drill, and to the sound made by a ‘musical gas chamber’. The word Zhdanov used was dushegubka , the name for the truck the Fascists used to drive around while inside their victims were being asphyxiated by its exhaust fumes.

Peace had returned, and so the world was upside down again; Terror had returned, and insanity with it. At a special congress called by the Union of Composers, a musicologist, whose offence had been to write a naively flattering book about Dmitri Dmitrievich, pleaded in desperate mitigation that at least he had never set foot in the composer’s apartment. He called upon the composer Yuri Levitin to corroborate his statement. Levitin affirmed ‘with a clear conscience’ that the musicologist had never once breathed the contaminated air of the formalist’s dwelling.

At the congress, his Eighth Symphony was targeted, as was Prokofiev’s Sixth. Symphonies whose subject was war; symphonies which knew that war was tragic and terrible. But how little their formalist composers had understood: war was glorious and triumphant, and must be celebrated! Instead, they had indulged in ‘unhealthy individualism’ as well as ‘pessimism’. He had declined to attend the congress. He was ill. In fact, he felt suicidal. He sent his excuses. His excuses were not accepted. Indeed, the congress would remain in session until such time as the great recidivist Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was able to attend: if necessary, they would send doctors to ascertain his medical condition and cure him. ‘There is no escaping one’s destiny’ — and so he attended. He was instructed to make a public recantation. As he made his way to the platform, wondering what he might possibly say, a speech was thrust into his hand. He read it out tonelessly. He promised to follow Party directives in future and write melodic music for the People. In the middle of the official verbiage, he broke off from the text, lifted his head, looked around the hall, and said in a helpless voice, ‘It always seems to me that when I write sincerely and as I truly feel, then my music cannot be “against” the People, and that, after all, I myself am a representative … in some small way … of the People.’

He had returned from the congress in a state of collapse. He was dismissed from his professorships at both the Moscow and Leningrad conservatoires. He wondered if it would be best to fall silent. Instead, to keep his sanity, he decided to write a series of preludes and fugues, after the example of Bach. Naturally, they were at first condemned: he was told that they sinned against ‘surrounding reality’. Also, he could not forget the words — some his own, others provided for him — which had come out of his mouth in the past weeks. He had not just accepted the criticism of his work but applauded it. He had, in effect, repudiated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk . He remembered what he had once said to a fellow composer about artistic honesty and personal honesty, and how much is allotted to each of us.

Then, after a year of disgrace, he had his Second Conversation with Power. ‘The thunderclap comes from the heavens, not from a pile of dung,’ as the poet has it. He was sitting at home with Nita and the composer Levitin on the 16th of March 1949 when the telephone rang. He answered it, listened, frowned, then said to the other two,

‘Stalin is about to come on the line.’

Nita immediately ran into the next room and picked up the extension.

‘Dmitri Dmitrievich,’ the voice of Power began, ‘how are you?’

‘Thank you, Iosif Vissarionovich, everything is fine. Only, I am suffering somewhat from stomach ache.’

‘I am sorry to hear that. We shall find a doctor for you.’

‘No, thank you. I don’t need anything. I have everything I need.’

‘That is good.’ There was a pause. Then the strong Georgian tones, the voice of a million radios and tannoys, asked if he was aware of the forthcoming Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York. He said that he was.

‘And what do you think of it?’

‘I think, Iosif Vissarionovich, that peace is always better than war.’

‘Good. So you are happy to attend as one of our representatives.’

‘No, I cannot, I am afraid.’

‘You cannot ?’

‘Comrade Molotov asked me. I told him I was not well enough to attend.’

‘Then, as I say, we shall send a doctor to make you better.’

‘It is not just that. I get air-sick. I cannot fly.’

‘That will not be a problem. The doctor will prescribe you some pills.’

‘That is kind of you.’

‘So you will go?’

He paused. Part of him was conscious that the slightest wrong syllable might land him in a labour camp, while another part of him, to his surprise, was beyond fear.

‘No, I really cannot go, Iosif Vissarionovich. For another reason.’

‘Yes?’

‘I do not have a tail-suit. I cannot perform in public without a tail-suit. And I am afraid I cannot afford one.’