Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

Also, he had none of the political skills required: he lacked the taste for licking rubber boots; he didn’t know when to conspire against the innocent, when to betray friends. You needed someone like Khrennikov for that job. Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov: a composer with the soul of a placeman. Khrennikov had an average ear for music, but perfect pitch when it came to power. They said he’d been hand-picked by Stalin, who had an instinct for such appointments. ‘A fisherman sees another fisherman from afar,’ as the saying goes.

Khrennikov came, appropriately enough, from a family of horse-traders. He thought it natural to take orders — as well as instructions in composition — from those with asses’ ears. He had been attacking artists with more talent and originality than him since the mid-1930s, but when Stalin installed him as First Secretary of the Union of Composers in 1948, his power became official. He led the assault on formalists and rootless cosmopolitans, using all that terminology which made the ears bleed. Careers were ruined, work suppressed, families destroyed …

But you had to admire his understanding of power; at that, he was second to none. In shops, they used to display posters exhorting people how to behave: CUSTOMER AND CLERK, BE MUTUALLY POLITE. But the clerk was always more important than the customers: there were many of them and only one of him. Similarly, there were many composers but only one First Secretary. Towards his colleagues, Khrennikov behaved like a shop clerk who had never read the posters. He made his small power absolute: he denied them this, he rewarded them thus. And like any successful placeman, he never forgot where true power lay.

One of Dmitri Dmitrievich’s former duties as professor at the Conservatoire had been to help examine the students on Marxist — Leninist ideology. He would sit with the chief examiner beneath an enormous banner which declared: ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE — V. I. LENIN. As his own understanding of political theory was not profound, he remained largely silent, until one day his superior rebuked him for non-participation. So when the next student came in and the chief examiner nodded pointedly at his junior partner, he had asked her the simplest question he could think of.

‘Tell me, whom does art belong to?’

The student looked completely baffled. Gently, he tried to help her along with a suggestion;

‘Well, what did Lenin say?’

But she was too panicked to catch the clue, and for all his inclinations of the head and rolling upwards of the eyes, she failed to locate the answer.

In his view, she had done well, and when he occasionally noticed her in the corridors or stairways of the Conservatoire, he tried to give her an encouraging smile. Though given how she had failed to pick up the heaviest of hints, perhaps she thought his smiles, like his weird eye-rolling and head-jerking, were facial tics the distinguished composer was unable to control. Yet every time he passed her, the question reverberated in his head: ‘Tell me, whom does art belong to?’

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.

A crane operator on a building site had once written a song and sent it to him. He had replied: ‘Yours is such a wonderful profession. You are building houses which are needed so badly. My advice to you would be to keep going with your useful work.’ He did so not because he believed a crane operator incapable of writing a song, but because this particular would-be composer showed as much talent as he himself would if put in the cabin of a crane and instructed to operate the levers. And he hoped that if, in the old days, an aristocrat had sent him a composition of similar worth, he would have had the fortitude to reply: ‘Your Excellency, yours is such a distinguished and exacting position, being responsible on the one hand for maintaining the dignity of the aristocracy, and on the other for looking after the welfare of those who toil on your estates. My advice to you would be to keep going with your useful work.’

Stalin loved Beethoven. That’s what Stalin said and what many musicians repeated. Stalin loved Beethoven because he was a true revolutionary, and because he was exalted, like the mountains. Stalin loved everything that was exalted, and that was why he loved Beethoven. It made his ears vomit when people told him this.

But there was a logical consequence to Stalin’s love of Beethoven. The German had lived, of course, in bourgeois, capitalist times; so his solidarity with the proletariat, and his desire to see them throw off the yoke of servitude, inevitably sprang from a pre-Revolutionary political consciousness. He had been a forerunner. But now that the longed-for Revolution had taken place, now that the most politically advanced society on earth had been built, now that Utopia, the Garden of Eden and the Promised Land had all been rolled into one, it was obvious what must logically come forth: the Red Beethoven.

Wherever this ludicrous idea had come from — perhaps, like much else, it had sprung fully-formed from the Great Leader and Helmsman’s own forehead — it was a concept which, once articulated, must find its own embodiment. Where was the Red Beethoven? And there took place a nationwide search unparalleled since Herod’s quest for the infant Jesus. Well, if Russia was the homeland of elephants, why should it not also be the homeland of the Red Beethoven?

Stalin assured them that they were all screws in the mechanism of the State. But the Red Beethoven would be a mighty cog, hard to keep hidden. Self-evidently, he must be a pure proletarian and a member of the Party. Conditions which happily ruled out Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. They pointed instead, for a while, to Alexander Davidenko, who had been one of the leaders of the RAPM. His song ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’, written to celebrate the glorious victory of the Red Army over the Chinese in 1929, had been even more popular than ‘The Song of the Counterplan’. Performed by soloists and massed choirs, by pianists, violinists and string quartets, it had stirred and cheered the land for a full decade. At one point, it seemed likely to replace all other available music.

Davidenko’s credentials were impeccable. He had taught in a Moscow orphanage; he had supervised the lyrical activities of the Shoemakers’ Union, the Union of Textile Workers, and even of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. He had written a genuine proletarian opera about the 1905 revolution. And yet, and yet … for all these qualifications, he remained stubbornly the composer of ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’. A properly melodic work, of course, and one utterly devoid of formalist tendencies. But somehow Davidenko had failed to build on that one great success and earn the title Stalin longed to bestow. Which could have been his good luck. The Red Beethoven, once crowned, might have ended up sharing the fate of the Red Napoleon. Or that of Boris Kornilov, lyricist of the Counterplan . All those much-loved words he put into ‘The Song’, and all those throats which had poured them out, couldn’t save him from being arrested in 1937, and purged, as they liked to say, in 1938.