Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

‘This is hardly my immediate business, Dmitri Dmitrievich, but I am sure that the workshop of the administration of the Central Committee will be able to make one that is to your satisfaction.’

‘Thank you. But there is, I am afraid, another reason.’

‘Which you are also about to tell me.’

Yes, it was just conceivably possible that Stalin did not know.

‘The fact is, you see, that I am in a very difficult position. Over there, in America, my music is often played, whereas over here it is not played. They would ask me about it. So how am I to behave in such a situation?’

‘What do you mean, Dmitri Dmitrievich, that your music is not played?’

‘It is forbidden. As is the music of many of my colleagues in the Union of Composers.’

‘Forbidden? Forbidden by whom?’

‘By the State Commission for Repertoire. From the 14th of February last year. There is a long list of works which cannot be played. But the consequence, as you can imagine, Iosif Vissarionovich, is that concert managers are unwilling to programme any of my other compositions as well. And musicians are afraid to play them. So I am in effect blacklisted. As are my colleagues.’

‘And who gave such an order?’

‘It must have been one of the leading comrades.’

‘No,’ the voice of Power replied. ‘We didn’t give that order.’

He let Power consider the matter, which it did.

‘No, we didn’t give that order. It is a mistake. The mistake will be corrected. None of your works has been forbidden. They can all be freely played. This has always been the case. There will have to be an official reprimand.’

A few days later, along with other composers, he received a copy of the original banning order. Stapled to the top of it was a document recognising the decree as illegal, and reprimanding the State Commission for Repertoire for having issued it. The correction was signed, ‘Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, I. Stalin.’

And so he had gone to New York.

To his mind, rudeness and tyranny were closely connected. It had not escaped his attention that Lenin, when dictating his political will and considering possible successors, judged Stalin’s main fault to be ‘rudeness’. And in his own world, he hated to see conductors described admiringly as ‘dictators’. To be rude to an orchestral player who was doing his best was disgraceful. And these tyrants, these emperors of the baton, revelled in such terminology — as if an orchestra could only play well if whipped and derided and humiliated.

Toscanini was the worst. He had never seen the conductor in action; only knew him from records. But everything was wrong — tempi, spirit, nuance … Toscanini chopped up music like hash and then smeared a disgusting sauce all over it. This made him very angry. The ‘maestro’ had once sent him a recording of his Seventh Symphony. He had written back, pointing out the distinguished conductor’s many errors. He did not know if Toscanini had received the letter or, if so, understood it. Perhaps he had assumed it must contain only praise, because soon afterwards the glorious news reached Moscow that he, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, had been elected an honorary member of the Toscanini Society! And shortly after that, he began to receive gifts of gramophone records, all conducted by the great slave-driver. He never listened to them, of course, but piled them up as future presents. Not for friends, but for certain kinds of acquaintance, those he could tell in advance would be thrilled.

It was not just a matter of amour propre ; or one that concerned only music. Such conductors screamed and cursed at orchestras, made scenes, threatened to sack the principal clarinet for coming in late. And the orchestra, compelled to put up with it, responded by telling stories behind the conductor’s back — stories which made him out to be a ‘real character’. Then they came to believe what this emperor of the baton himself believed: that they were only playing well because they were being whipped. They huddled together in a masochistic herd, occasionally dropping an ironic remark to one another, but essentially admiring their leader for his nobility and idealism, his sense of purpose, his ability to see more widely than those who just scraped and blew behind their desks. The maestro, harsh though he might of necessity be from time to time, was a great leader who must be followed. Now, who would still deny that an orchestra was a microcosm of society?

So when such a conductor, impatient of the mere score in front of him, imagined a mistake or a defect, he would always give the polite, ritual response he had long ago perfected.

And therefore he imagined the following conversation:

Power: ‘Look, we have made the Revolution!’

Citizen Second Oboe: ‘Yes, it’s a wonderful revolution, of course. And a great improvement on what was there before. It really is a tremendous achievement. But I just wonder, from time to time … I might be completely wrong, of course, but was it absolutely necessary to shoot all those engineers, generals, scientists, musicologists? To send millions to the camps, to use slave labour and work it to death, to make everyone terrified, to extort false confessions in the name of the Revolution? To set up a system where, even at the edge of it, there are hundreds of men waiting each night to be dragged from their beds and taken to the Big House or the Lubyanka, to be tortured and made to sign their names to complete fabrications, then shot in the back of the head? I’m just wondering, you understand.’

Power: ‘Yes, yes, I see your point. I’m sure you’re right. But let’s leave it for now. We’ll make that change next time round.’

For some years, he had always made the same New Year’s toast. For three hundred and sixty-four days of the year the country would have to listen to Power’s insane daily insistence that all was for the best in the best possible of worlds, that Paradise had been created, or would be created quite soon when a few more logs had been chopped and a million more chips had flown, and a few hundred thousand more saboteurs had been shot. That happier times would come — unless they already had. And on the three hundred and sixty-fifth day, he would raise his glass, and say, in his most solemn voice: ‘Let’s drink to this — that things don’t get any better!’

Of course, Russia had known tyrants before; that was why irony was so well developed here. ‘Russia is the homeland of elephants,’ as the saying went. Russia invented everything because … well, first because it was Russia, where delusions were normal; and second, because it was now Soviet Russia, the most socially advanced nation in history, where it was natural that things were discovered first. So when the Ford Motor Company abandoned its Ford Model A, the Soviet authorities bought the entire manufacturing plant: and behold, an authentic, Soviet-designed twenty-seater bus or light truck was upon the earth! The same with tractor factories: an American production line, imported from America, assembled by American experts, suddenly producing Soviet tractors. Or you copied a Leica camera and it was born afresh as a FED, named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, and thereby all the more Soviet. Who said the age of miracles was past? And all done with words, whose transformative powers were truly revolutionary. So, for instance, French bread. Everyone used to know it as such, and had been calling it such for years. Then one day, French bread disappeared from the shops. Instead, there was ‘city bread’ — exactly the same, of course, but now the patriotic product of a Soviet city.

When truth-speaking became impossible — because it led to immediate death — it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony. Because the tyrant’s ear is rarely tuned to hear it. The previous generation — those Old Bolsheviks who had made the Revolution — hadn’t understood this, which was partly why so many of them perished. His generation had grasped it more instinctively. And so, the day after he had agreed to go to New York, he wrote the following letter: