Official Culture and Cultural Repression: The Case of Dmitri Shostakovich
1984; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3332676
ISSN1543-7809
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
Resumocomposer's complete quartet cycle was performed in New York City during 1982 to ecstatic critical acclaim. In the same year Maxim Shostakovich conducted his father's Cello Concerto (with fellow emigre Mtsislav Rostropovich as soloist) before an enthusiastic audience at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk, an opera suppressed by Soviet authorities in 1932, received a major revival by the San Francisco Opera. At the same time, the cultural repression that traumatized Shostakovich's life and so often blocked his artistic expression still reigns in the Soviet Union. Cultural dissidents are harassed, nonconforming art is denied an audience, and the national theaters adhere to official diktat about proper performance and approved repertory. Despite occasional cracks in the glacial opposition of Soviet authorities to modernism and the avant-garde,' a renewed hardening of positions seems to be the most recent trend. Tikhon Khrennikov, the First Secretary of the Composers' Union, for example, continues to criticize certain younger composers for their infatuation with Western bourgeois techniques of composition that do not appeal to the broad masses of Soviet listeners. Denouncing such modernist techniques as serialism and electronic Khrennikov (who, while virtually a commissar of music, is rated as a mediocre composer at best) asserted in 1980 that a composer who turns away from contemporary reality in his art, concerning himself with the resolution of problems of secondary importance-including purely formal ones-inevitably ends up outside real life.'2 This is the
Referência(s)