![]() ![]() He also gave a private premiere to Party officials at which he told them it ended "on a joyous, optimistic plane." They bought it. Before its premiere, he called it "a Soviet artist's practical creative response to just criticism," or at least signed a statement containing those words. He responded eventually with his Fifth Symphony. ![]() In this atmosphere of terror, Shostakovich realized that not only his career but even his life were at stake. Stalin, who had attended and not liked the opera two days earlier, probably instigated the article. Demanded was "Socialist Realism" in music, as in sculpture and the other arts. A month later, Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, published a vicious attack on it titled "A Mess Instead of Music." "The music quacks, moans, pants, and chokes," said Pravda. His opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk premiered to great popular acclaim at the Bolshoi. In 1936, Shostakovich became "the first musician to take a blow," in the words of Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, also the wife of cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich. "If you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discontented." The U.S.S.R. "It was essential to smile," recalled Nadezhda Mandelstam. Meanwhile, like slaves in the Old South, everyone had to wear a grin. In the Soviet Union of the '30s, children informed on their parents, workers on their co-workers, and lovers on each other. The Terror was a deliberate attempt to smash conventional social relations, again to foster the new obedient Soviet Man. Even though a symphony might seem by definition apolitical, neither Stalin nor the Soviet of Composers thought so. Stalin kept his eye-all right, his ear-on music, too. In any event, by the 1930s, painting had pretty much been reduced to Socialist Realism. Or maybe Stalin, et al., simply felt that they should determine what was done in the arts as in the economy as in the political life of the country. Shostakovich came to the fore internationally in 1927, when Bruno Walter conducted his Symphony #1 in Berlin.īy the 1930s, however, the increasingly authoritarian Soviet regime felt increasingly threatened by its artists. Artists had considerable freedom in the first decade of the Soviet era. From the canvases of Kasimir Malevich to the films of Sergei Eisenstein, the new Soviet culture astonished the world. In the first rush of idealism, artists hastened to invent this culture. 1918-21), the newly dominant Communist Party declared that the new Soviet state demanded a new Soviet citizen, to be created by a new Soviet culture. "Red Cavalry" by Kazimir Malevich, 1930-1931During and after the Russian Civil War (c. In the West the longer era is often known as “the Great Terror,” the title of a famous book about it by the British historian Robert Conquest. In that period-often listed as 1936-38, but actually longer-Stalin purged the Communist Party itself of anyone whose loyalty to him he mistrusted. Shostakovich composed it during the Great Purge, surely the lowest point of Joseph's Stalin's despicable regime. ![]() "Red Cavalry" by Kazimir Malevich, 1930-1931 ![]() It does, however, offer some insight into the meaning of the most popular symphony since Mahler's: Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony #5. This little essay cannot answer that big question. When it comes to classical music, however, especially instrumental music with no libretto, no "program," what can we say? What insights might we provide about a symphony, for example? Of course, sociologists, like historians, can study Bob Dylan and his times and come up with useful insights into his lyrics, even his musical influences and styles. The sociology of music has not been the most vibrant sector within the sociology of knowledge. This notion can provide useful insights to students of law, science, religion, art, and other areas of human thinking. In the words of Karl Mannheim, a pioneer, "The principle thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought that cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured." Historians might say, we must locate a speaker within his/her own time and situation to understand him or her fully. Within sociology is an exciting field, the "sociology of knowledge." Its name is unfortunate, because it not only studies knowledge, but also error, as well as things like law, religion, and art that cannot easily be categorized "true" or "false." The sociology of knowledge, especially the subfield the “sociology of sociology,” is somewhat similar to historiography in history and epistemology in philosophy. Factory workers in 1937 vote in favor of the arrest of alleged Trotskyite spies during the Great Terror. ![]()
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