Just as T S Eliot entered in as a poet like an earthquake at the turn of the 20th century around the time of the First World War; so to about the same time Stravinski shook the foundations of what was then considered art and music fashion, and entered in with a similar violence to shock the music scene.
Both artists made radical breaks with what had gone before them. This is not to say there was no strand of continuity in their works with works of the past. Eliot one can see with hindsight owed much in his early works to French symbolism and to Robert Browning’s style of buttonholing one’s attention, as if with an informal familiarity. Stravinski is sometimes catalogued as being a Neo-Classical composer; and certainly he harks back to Pergolesi and to other early Italian Classicists in an amount of his musical output.
Another, perhaps a little less illustrious, early 20th century composer, Ottorino Respeghi, might well be set beside Stravinski (both I believe wrote works for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe). Respeghi is a master of musical colours; and a composer whose best works seem to me to have been composed as refashioned items and using very early Classical compositions as their basis. New works but with a powerful flavour of something borrowed and then made anew.
Stravinski of course is up there with the greats of music. His gifts were enormous and are able to astound and leave one cold with marvelling even at this distance of over a century since many of his works saw their premieres.
There is of course that notorious piece which perhaps was meant to shock and to appal; his The Rite of Spring, and its taking a leaf from the book of brutalism which the new art and architecture of primitive power-statement was beginning to display. Stravinski’s were unquiet times. Russia was in the throes, in the first place of a World War, and thereafter of a political upheaval which led to a series of Revolutions out of which the Soviets emerged victorious, after many years bloodshed. The credo of Soviet Socialism as demonstrated in its art it produced; art for the most part State-sponsored and State-approved, allegedly a proletarian art, was often just such a monolithic brutal power-statement art, proclaiming The Dictatorship of The Proletariat – a phrase which in its ironic ambiguity rang acid in its emblazonment as justification for the Russian coup and takeover led by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin and even later followed-through by Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
Indeed the proletariat of Russia did live by dictatorship; the first Totalitarian experiment in modern times; one which sought its advancement by means of pogroms and purges calculated to enslave and murder in forced labour camps; so many, that the toll never seems able to be accurately stated; but it is generally agreed it was more than 20 million souls.
Of course Stravinski was a ‘bourgeois’, as was Diaghilev; and his lifestyle was not that of the peasant hordes of Mother Russia. He spent his creative life in Russia until this became impossible; then in Paris and thereafter in the USA. As a Russian artist he escaped the years in the northern tundra breaking rocks and building useless power plants and factories senselessly; a fate for too many whose thought was considered to challenge the granite might of The State .
Generally-speaking, I have myself found musicians as a bunch rarely to be ‘political’ animals; certainly very infrequently a Verdi pops up in the shape of a radical or revolutionary; but musicians, including composers, seem to be of that tribe most often found to be ‘hangers-on’ at royal courts or else State-sponsored ‘lackeys’ kept on strings by stipends, so as to be able to make a living by entertaining the rich and powerful. Even so, quickly became the great Russian Experiment; it turned out pretty soon pretty like the setup under the Anciente Regime; and in their own sometimes perverse ways social classes reemerged. Those who would frequent the ballet and the opera house emerged again, who were of a different ilk, a higher breed, than those who tilled the fields and manned and womaned the satanic factories.
For instance, the dream and ambition of most aspiring folk in Moscow during these years was to obtain a Party Card. A Party Card was, as it were, an ‘internal social passport’ allowing a whole new world to open up for a person who had managed to acquire one; a world of privilege and even in certain comparative ways, of luxury. The Party Card was of course the document which confirmed and endorsed you as being a Member of the Communist Party of The Soviet Union. Moscow being the seat of government meant that many hopefuls flocked there and there many aspirants sought after the much-prized Party Card. To have obtained one, they were normally only widely available in the bigger cities, and most especially in Moscow; meant that one’s housing accommodation was able to be of a better class; one’s district of abode also; and goods and services were available to you which were sparse and hard to obtain for a person without a Card. These goods and services included foods and household gadgetry; travel and jobs. Perhaps the job was the key? To get a Card one ‘had to know someone’ and had to curry favour with this someone, and to have a place or job of employment somewhere, someway connected, in even the most tenuous way, to a someone amongst the political elite.
Like all societies wherein goods and services are scarce and shortages have become commonplace; the show in The Soviet union eventually ended up working for the most part via what Brits call ‘graft’; or in other words by way of leveraging and leaning upon people and trading-in favours. Scratching backs mutually and playing the toady to power, insinuating oneself into favour and into advantageous situations; playing the social and political scene for as much as could be squeezed from it.
It’s easy to be scathing about this; but not many of us are saints or heroes; most of us just want to ‘get along’ and avoid trouble or hassle; so it’s the natural instinct to buckle under and conform under such circumstances; to do what has to be done in order to survive and/or to advance in life. It is this complicity, and its accompanying erosion of any ideals and principles one might once have had, that sense of having no option but to embroil oneself, to get one’s hands dirty and soil one’s conscience; in order to survive or to get a more secure life; this is a scenario which allows and encourages corruptions to become endemic and embeds them into a way of life. No political ideology is able to work to its best capabilities whenever ‘graft’ is a necessary requirement simply for ordinary people under pressure to be able to ‘make ends meet’ or to save oneself from having to join bread queues at empty bakers’ shops.
To be continued...
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