Strangely enough, with most of the commentary on music as a general interest topic (educational debates, arts funding debates, studies of musicophilia, etc) there is rarely any consideration of people who just plain don’t like music. The intellectual pleasures of a Bach fugue, the lusty embrace of a Wagner opera or the manic cheerfulness of one of the Beach Boys’ odes to surfin’ and good times leave such rare and unheralded listeners unmoved. With nearly everyone seemingly in love with music in general then surely those few individuals standing apart from the toe tapping masses must be all the more remarkable and interesting?
It was thus with hope in my heart that I ventured along to the recently opened “Lenin, Stalin, Music” exhibition at the Cite de la Musique in Paris, half-remembering some quote attributed to Lenin about how he couldn’t listen to music as it got on his nerves.
Alas however, I was only half right: Lenin did indeed say such things but only because music made him feel like embracing his fellow man and such things were not to be done at that time. This experience seems oddly representative of the exhibiton in general. Surely any exhibition able to draw on sound recordings from figures like Chostakovitch, Rachmananov, Prokofyev and Stravinsky; the striking visual art/propaganda of the early Soviet Union; the films of Eisenstein; and the poetry of figures like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akmahtova must undoubtedly be capable of producing something truly provocative and groundbreaking? This exhibition runs along fairly predictable lines as it explores music and art in the Soviet Union though: the dominance of the avant garde prior to the revolution; widespread upheaval throughout the conflict with the Tsarist forces; tensions between the notion of artistic self expression and the need to boost a fragile yet radical system in the 20s; and the violent and paranoid subjugation of art to the needs of vulgar propaganda under Stalin.
Split between two levels the exhibition begins in the basement with Utopias. This section, dealing with everything prior to Stalin’s assumption of power, is far stronger as sound recordings from the renowned composers named above and vibrant work from painters like Chagall , Mallevitch, Kliment Redko and Konstantin Juon vie with costume designs from opera productions and a working model of a theremin for our attention. Although there is little here that is truly remarkable from a retrospective perspective it seems to be highly effective at giving a sense of the intellectual climate of the time as the competing tensions within the early Soviet Union played off against each other. As one ascends to the ground floor and the Social Realism section of the exhibition the difference between the pre Stalin era and the Stalin era become obvious as the needs of the governing system clearly triumph over those of the notion of artistic self expression.
Staggeringly banal yet polished films and songs praising the Stalinist socialist paradise dominate with “we love our country as our betrothed, I know no other country where man breathes so freely” being a typical chorus. Other aspects of Soviet life praised include its sporting prowess, its follore and the work of the Great Leader himself with one particularly egregious work depicting him in sepia tones and with the caption “At the Kremlin, Comrade Stalin takes care of each of us”. Later sections dealing with the second world war identify the resurgence in Russian nationalism by using footage of Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevski” and by displaying muted, conservatively executed works like Juon’s “Parade at Red Square, Moscow, 7 November 1941”.
Although the exhibition ends provocatively, contrasting propoganda photography of the Gulag with a dark, startling painting entitled “Nightclub at Dmitlag”, its major drawback is its conventional narrative. The image we get of Lenin is that of the ordinary tyrant ; responsible for widespread violence, absolutely convinced of his own righteousness but not quite in the same league as Stalin or Hitler in terms of his desire to dominate all aspects of society. The Stalin section does a good job of making this clear; painters and artists fall in and out of favour at a distressing rate and the contrast between Juon’s earlier vibrant The New Planet and his later Red Square piece is striking. However, this portrayal of Stalin doesn’t give the full picture.
Stalin certainly demanded a retreat from so called decadent art but he is not quite the philistine this exhibition implicitly makes him out to be. He recognised Mikhail Bulghakov’s talent (curiously, Bulghakov’s dazzlingly inventive novel Master and Margherita isn’t featured once in this exhibition) and also showed promise as a poet in his youth. An important aspect of Stalin’s control of the Soviet Union is thus neglected: he was undoubtedly capable of understanding the nature of the creative temperament which thus makes his artistic conservatism and manipulation seem just that little bit more cynical. Stalin clearly understood something that is sometimes forgotten in contemporary discourse; government involvement with the arts can be extremely potent in terms of moulding hearts and minds. Happy then, in this regard at least, is that rare man or woman who is unmoved by the charms of art and music.
