Stravinski and The Soviets (Part 2)
Part 1: https://steemit.com/politics/@matthew.raymer/stravinski-and-the-soviets-part-1
Scarcities coupled with ‘graft’ then, thus made the Soviet Union in a some strange ways more competitive in an economic sense, and a more unequal place to live in than is the case in many laissez faire nations of our own days, in which we are enjoying plenty to excess. Excess on a scale which in its own insidious ways has enervated the peoples of our nations and blunted their sense of the actual abrasive and fragile terms of existence.
Eventually then, Stravinski got ‘hoovered-up’ in that cyclone which carried almost every outcast of great talent to the United States during the years of the mid twentieth century. He has a star on Sunset Boulevard I believe. He is said to have mined deeply his ethnic roots in his musical compositions; and it is true that a listener can hear strange and often bewitchingly bewildering clashes and coalitions in his most well-known works. Petrushka being a good case in point; a folk tale story of some knockabout and violent events. It’s music seems sometimes to start out at you and startle; as if a sudden change of subject, but yet integral; and in its awakening jolting way a fluent and fluid continuation of what went before. Thus it’s an intensely dramatic style, drawing you up in your tracks and preventing you presuming too much.
Even the little street tune found recurring in Petrushka, which is said to have been inspired by a barrel organ or hurdygurdy player stood in the streets below Stravinski’s house window, and who came every day and drove the jolly naive melody right into his mind; even this jaunty audacious childish tune gets woven weft and woof deep into the fabric of the composition of Petrushka; and turns up here, then here, in cunning guises and as remote echoes.
There’s also as sense of energy, of the power in the music almost tumbling over itself for it to get out of the instruments it’s played on; a brawling sense of play and impish joy but a guiding and dynamic intelligence forming the architecture of the music overall. No-one but no-one is able to do this quite like Stravinski; it is his hallmark, and his signet.
All this power and dynamism combined with an arch impishness and yet with a strong solid structure, are what characterise his music and enable one to identify it by ear as being his. Then there are by contrast those smooth flows and serene slow sweeping musings which might juxtapose beside and between all kinds of jumps and inserts; one minute Stravinski has you wholly enchanted and bemused by his crafted seductive plaints; and the next a listener is bumping along as if on a peasant cart with a foaming drink in hand and a stirring song on one’s lips.
Sometimes there seems like there is nothing Stravinski cannot do with his music; it is as if he is master of tones tonalities rhythms, musical thoughts and wrinkles which one might not have dreamed could have been thought of. As I said, he can leave you stone cold with astonished marvelling.
His ballets besides Petrushka, such as Le Basier de la Fey and Pulchinella are likewise enchanting, able to steep wholly a listener in atmosphere and intrigue, and they also bear his characteristic ability to change colours, tempos, moods, and pace, all at an eyeblink, and yet never does it seem that the flow and the journey is out of place or jarring as being artistic thought or gambit.
Almost certainly his radical styles of composing music would have come into conflict with the Soviet authorities had he been unable to flee or chosen to remain in his Motherland in the second decade of 20th Century. A Russian composer like Shostakovitch, nowhere near so pointedly ‘modernist’ composer as was Stravinski, found himself in enough broils with his Soviet political masters about his art. Indeed for artists in Soviet Russia the chief decision for them was either to attempt truth to oneself and to one’s vision of life, or else to buckle-to and serve The State and so more or less ‘sell’ one’s talents in the service of a propaganda and for the sake of one’s (relative, but not always) safety and sure regular income.
Of course this is not the whole truth; only a generalisation; and perhaps there were rare artists like Bertoldt Brecht, the dramatist working in East Germany (before and) after WWII, and Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, also working in Soviet Russia itself; whose visions of life tallied sufficiently with the ‘official’ Soviet Line (although not with the reality of living life under The Politburo and The Kremlin). For the most part the case was very different though for artists, intellectuals, religious believers and many others; and for corroboration of this stark difference see the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his epic history of the activities of the Soviet Secret Police (of The Cheka, and The NKVD) and of the millions of persons wanting only freedom of thought; and who were surprised by a hammering on the door at 3 am and a peremptory arrest, interrogation and sentence to decades of forced labour imprisoned in God-forsaken camps in the most inhospitable and inaccessible places of the Soviet Empire. (“The Gulag Archipelago”, in 3 volumes).
However, as a generalisation, that artists were either toadies or persecuted in Soviet countries, it is a strong and very extensive generalisation. Few persons under their government who were perceived by The Soviets to be ‘rocking the boat’ politically were allowed by them to merely ‘get away with it’. And the term ‘politically’ here was a very very broad church and catchment
George Orwell’s famous dystopia “1984” is not so much a futuristic Cassandra-like prophesy as it is a final judgement by Orwell on the politics and oppressive behaviours happening contemporaneously in his times in The Soviet Union.
So we ought to be thankful, at least musically and artistically, that great talents like Stravinski did escape from The Soviets (and likewise later others ran from the Nazis) and flourish elsewhere in the world, producing works which act to shed glory on themselves and on their orphaned native countries (often by way of a regret for what might have been)
A friend of mine sat the Oxford University entrance examination to study history and was given amongst his questions to be answered the following:
“Freedom never flourishes where the orange blossom grows. Discuss”
Orange blossom is perhaps one of the least-likely vegetation one would expect to find thriving inside the Arctic Circle or in the wastes of the Siberian Tundras. Certainly freedom, even as we know it attenuatedly in our tunnel-vision, media-managed, consumer-led, liberal democracies, has never been the lodestar or trigpoint which marks out Mother Russia; not today, not yesterday, and manifests there at best only for some few, and at a price of their surrender of all principle.
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