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Fairclough, Pauline Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin (review)

2017; Maney Publishing; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/see.2017.0123

2222-4327

Michelle Assay,

Soviet and Russian History

REVIEWS 541 ending it with his suicide in 1974. He also figures in Jan Seidl’s illuminating exploration of the factors surrounding the decriminalization of homosexuality in Czechoslovakia in 1961. In between Ineta Lipša offers a fascinating glimpse into the surprisingly various but indicatively homophobic treatment of transgender persons in Latvia between the wars. Laine Kristberga then transports us to the Pop Art scene of the 1970s, tracing a shared queer aesthetic in Andy Warhol and his Latvian admirer Andris Grīnbergs. Recalling the difficult birth of Ukrainian queer culture, Vitaly Chernetsky attaches particular importance to the years 1991, which saw decriminalization and the publication of a groundbreaking feminist essay by Salomea Pavlychko, and 2009, when serious homophobic violence was unleashed against a queer anthology. The anthology behind Ilse Janzone’s chapter dates from 2004; but the interviews with Christian lesbians in Latvia were conducted as recently as 2015. The conclusions are sobering. As a purveyor of doctrinaire misinformation, the Church is hard to beat. Hard, but not impossible. As Cyprus has shown, the European Union can defeat even entrenched ecclesiastical homophobia. Equally, by sponsoring this handsome and important book, the EU can help open minds and broaden horizons. In the wake of Brexit, that is both an inspiring and an appalling thought. Queen Mary University of London R. M. Gillett Fairclough, Pauline. Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2016. xii + 283 pp. Tables. Biographies. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £35.00. WhatdidaSovietcitizenlistentoinatypicalconcertinMoscoworLeningrad? The answer is: it depends on when, where and at whose instigation. Unlike such totalitarian regimes as Maoist China or Khomeini’s Iran, the question as to whether so-called classical music would survive ideological agendas and repressionsalmostneverarose.Itisenoughtothinkofthelonglistofprominent Soviet performers and conductors, such as Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Evgenii Mravinskii, and their repertoire. But regardless of such evidence, is it not paradoxical that a regime that sought to discard everything bourgeois, Western and religious would retain and even promote performances of music that contained these notions par excellence? In line with recent scholarship revealing the non-linear evolution of the Soviet cultural landscape and the intersections of ‘top-down and bottom-up motivation’ (p. 9), Fairclough’s study adds vital brush-strokes to the picture of Soviet musical life under Lenin and Stalin, presenting an account of ‘the very visible nature of institutional music- SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 542 making’ and of ‘the public sphere of musical life’ (p. 8). Focusing mainly on the Leningrad and Moscow Philharmonias and the Leningrad capella, she seeks to demonstrate how ‘the first socialist regime in world history shaped its own cultural identity in musical terms: what it accepted, rejected and experimented with; what the consequences of those decisions were’ (p. 8). The phrase ‘Classics for the Masses’ has of course already been used in various contexts: from Orson Welles’s adaptations of classics for RKO Radio Pictures, through adaptations of Shakespeare for mass media, to André Kostelanetz in projects such as providing Chaikovskii’s Fifth Symphony with lyrics to produce ‘Moon Love’. In many ways, however, Fairclough goes beyond her title, since she deals not only with the canonization of the past but also with the acceptance of the present (or the recent), providing (despite some gaps in the archives) representative lists of post-1910 Western music performed in the Philharmonias. This repertoire is presented, slightly confusingly, under two different names: for 1922–29 it is ‘Western modernism’, whereas from chapter two onwards it is ‘contemporary non-Russian/Soviet music’. Any account of Soviet cultural history has to make choices regarding periodization. Fairclough’s Introduction (p. 8) acknowledges her retention of conventional boundaries (1917–32, 1932–41 and 1941–48). However, the structure of the book and its chapter headings reveal certain modifications, probably as dictated by the available material. As such, the monumental first chapter covers the period from before 1917 to 1929; chapter two concentrates more closely on the so-called ‘Cultural revolution’ from 1929–32; chapters three and four cover 1932–41 and 1937–42, respectively, (the necessity for the overlap is less than wholly convincing); and a final chapter...