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In fact, he was left terrified and crushed by the ordeal. Shostakovich’s recantation is so abject and so exaggerated that it is tempting to conclude he was mocking. Equipped with the guidance of the Central Committee, I shall renew my efforts to create really good songs for collective singing.” I shall work on the musical depiction of the heroic Soviet peoples, from the correct ideological standpoint. I acknowledge the rightness of the party’s judgment. Shostakovich – who had been through the same public flagellation 12 years earlier – knew he must bite his tongue and confess: “I thank you comrade chairman … I thought I had succeeded in developing a personal idiom that adhered to the wise demands of the Soviet people … I now see I was mistaken and have underestimated my need for artistic correction. Prokofiev suffered a stroke and never recovered he died five years later, on the same day as Stalin in 1953. The guilty men were forced into a public recantation of their errors and a humiliating exhibition of self-criticism and abasement. Khrennikov reported that people “all over the USSR” had “voted unanimously” to condemn the so-called formalists and let it be known that those named in the decree were now officially regarded as little better than traitors: “Enough of these pseudo-philosophic symphonies! Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and decadence.”įor Shostakovich, undoubtedly the main target and whose satirical operas and ballets are being performed by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre at the London Coliseum this month, it was a terrifying moment. In the work of Comrade Prokofiev … natural emotion and melody has been replaced by grunting and scraping.” At the first congress of the union of composers from April 19-25 1948, Khrennikov listed those who were in the firing line: the “elitist, anti-socialist” Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky and others … “In the music of Comrade Shostakovich we find all sorts of things alien to realistic Soviet art, such as tenseness, neuroticism, escapism and repulsive pathology. They handed the task of wiping out formalism to the head of the soviet composers union, Tikhon Khrennikov. The Central Committee drew up a decree condemning composers of music that was “inimical to the people” and “formalist”. Stalin ordered his commissars to impose socialist realism in music, and to weed out those who had other ideas. His anger spread to all avant-garde music, to all music that didn’t fit his own taste for old-fashioned, accessible melodies, easily understood by the people, upbeat and celebrating the superiority of all things Soviet. The Great Leader and Teacher had heard an opera that displeased him. Then, in 1948, Stalin turned to the composers. The purges of the 1920s and 30s had destroyed the writers: Mandelstam, Babel, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Gumilyov and many others were dead, executed or by their own hand. But by the time Schnittke was established as a composer, Stalin had been dead for over a decade.)Īs Shostakovich’s satirical operas and ballets come to London, Martin Sixsmith talks to Stalin’s chief arbiter of musical life and the composer’s widow, who says he was anything but a lackey of the state (Tikhon Khrennikov, probably the most unsympathetic character in music history, persecuted Schnittke for years, preventing him from travelling abroad to performances of his own works and effectivley banning his music at home. Article by Martin Sixsmith published today in The Guardian.