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 Twentieth-Century
Music and Politics
Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds

Edited by
Pauline Fairclough
Twentieth-Century Music and Politics
 Neil Edmunds, Bath, January 2008.
Photo reproduced by kind permission of Hon-Lun Yang.
 Twentieth-Century
Music and Politics
Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds

Pauline Fairclough
University of Bristol, UK
© Pauline Fairclough and the contributors 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Pauline Fairclough has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3–1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401–3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Twentieth-century music and politics : essays in memory of Neil Edmunds.
1. Music – Political aspects – Europe – History – 20th century. 2. Music in
propaganda – Europe – History – 20th century. 3. Patriotic music – 20th century –
History and criticism. 4. Nationalism in music. 5. Music – Psychological aspects.
I. Edmunds, Neil, 1966–2008 II. Fairclough, Pauline, 1970–
306.4’842’094’0904–dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Twentieth-century music and politics : essays in memory of Neil Edmunds / edited by
Pauline Fairclough.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–4094–0026–4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978–1–4094–5508–0
(ebook) 1. Music – Political aspects – History – 20th century.
I. Fairclough, Pauline, 1970 – II. Edmunds, Neil, 1966–2008.
ML55.E36 2012
780.9’04–dc23

ISBN 9781409400264 (hbk)

ISBN 9781409455080 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781409473114 (ebk – ePUB)

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

MPG Books Group, UK.
For Nancy and Keith
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Contents

List of Figures   ix
List of Musical Examples   xi
Notes on Contributors   xiii
Foreword (Robin Milner-Gulland)   xvii
Preface and Acknowledgements   xix

Introduction   1
Pauline Fairclough

1 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler in

Great Britain and the German Democratic Republic   7
Joanna Bullivant

2 Stravinsky’s Petrushka: Modernizing the Past, Russianizing

the Future; or, How Stravinsky Learned to Be an Exile   23
Jonathan Cross

3 Détente to Cold War: Anglo-Soviet Musical Exchanges in the

Late Stalin Period   37
Pauline Fairclough

4 Front Theatre: Musical Films and the War in Nazi Cinema   57

Guido Heldt

5 ‘Those damn foreigners’: Xenophobia and British Musical Life

During the First Half of the Twentieth Century   81
Erik Levi

6 ‘An angry ape’: Some Preliminary Thoughts about Orango   97

Gerard McBurney

7 A Bridge between Two Worlds: The Founding Years of the

Warsaw Autumn Festival   117
Bogumila Mika

8 Winning Hearts and Minds? Soviet Music in the Cold War

Struggle against the West   135
Simo Mikkonen
viii Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

9 Preserving the Façade of Normal Times: Musical Life in

Belgrade under the German Occupation (1941–1944)   155
Melita Milin

10 Musical Commemorations in Post-Civil War Spain: Joaquín

Rodrigo’s Concierto Heroico   177
Eva Moreda-Rodríguez

11 The Racialization and Ghettoization of Music in the General

Government   191
Katarzyna Naliwajek

12 ‘I Only Need the Good Old Budapest’: Hungarian Cabaret in

Wartime London   211
Florian Scheding

13 Irish Nationalism, British Imperialism and the Role of Popular

Music   231
Derek B. Scott

14 Shostakovich as Film Music Theorist   249

Joan Titus

15 Diaspora, Music and Politics: Russian Musical Life in Shanghai

during the Interwar Period   261
Hon-Lun Yang

Select Bibliography   279

Index   287
 List of Figures

6.1 Boris Iofan’s winning design for the Palace of Soviets, 1932   101

13.1 Physic for Fenians, 1866. John Tenniel, Cartoons from ‘Punch’
Second Series (1862–70) (London: Bradbury, Evans, n.d.),
p. 46   236
13.2 Strangling the Monster (detail), 1881. John Tenniel, Cartoons
from ‘Punch’ 1871–1881 (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1895),
p. 133   237
13.3 Orphée aux enfers (detail), 1883. John Tenniel, Cartoons from
‘Punch’ 1882–1891 (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1895), p. 29   238
13.4 Silencing the Trumpet (detail), 1870. John Tenniel, Cartoons
from ‘Punch’ Second Series (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1901),
p. 98   239

Extracts from Shostakovich, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District © With kind
permission of Musikverlag Hans Sikorski, Hamburg.

Extracts from Shostakovich, Orango © DSCH Moscow. Reproduced by permission

of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

Image of Boris Iofan, ‘Palace of the Soviets’ © Illustrated London News/Mary

Evans Picture Library.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 List of Musical Examples

4.1 Weichsel and Warthe (March of the Germans in Poland), start

of the chorus 77

6.1 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1202–5 107

6.2 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1231–4 107
6.3 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1324–8 107
6.4 Shostakovich, Orango, Figures 41–422 108
6.5 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1861–4109
6.6 Shostakovich, Orango, bb. 1–6 109
6.7 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 42–3 110
6.8 Shostakovich, Orango, Figures 24–253 110
6.9 Musorgsky, Boris Godunov, Act I, scene 1, bb. 1–4 111
6.10 Shostakovich, Orango, Figures 30–316 111
6.11 Shostakovich, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Figures
472–4741 112
6.12 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 491–4 113
6.13 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1532–6 113
6.14 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1271–6 114
6.15 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1441–4 114
6.16 Shostakovich, Orango, Figure 1471–6 115
6.17 Musorgsky, Boris Godunov Act 4, Scene 1, Figure 471–2 115
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Notes on Contributors

Joanna Bullivant is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Music,

University of Nottingham. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford
in 2009, where she also held the posts of Lecturer in Music at Merton and University
Colleges (2008–9) and Junior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Music at Worcester
College (2009–10). Arising from her doctoral thesis on ‘Musical Modernism and
Left-wing Politics in 1930s Britain’, she has developed a particular interest in the
English Communist composer Alan Bush. At Nottingham she is engaged in research
for the first critical study of the composer in the context of modern British music,
entitled Alan Bush: Music and Politics in Modern Britain. She has published on
Alan Bush in Music & Letters, and has chapters in preparation for the forthcoming
edited volumes Red Strains: Music and Communism outside the Communist Bloc,
The Cambridge Companion to Tippett and a special edition of Eisler Studien.

Jonathan Cross is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oxford and

Student of Christ Church, Oxford. He has written widely on issues in twentieth-
century and contemporary music, including two volumes on Stravinsky. He
has also made a particular study of the music of the British composer Harrison
Birtwistle. Between 2000 and 2004 he was editor of the journal Music Analysis.
He is currently working on a new critical biography of Stravinsky.

Pauline Fairclough is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol.

Her first book, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, was published
by Ashgate in 2006, and she has published articles on Shostakovich and Soviet
music criticism. She is joint contributing editor of The Cambridge Companion to
Shostakovich (2007) and is editor of Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge: 2010).
More recently, she has published articles on the phenomenon of Western musical
culture in the Soviet Union, especially the reception and performance of Western
music in the Stalin period.

Guido Heldt is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol and author of
Das Nationale als Problem in der englischen Musik des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts:
Tondichtungen von Granville Bantock, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar,
George Butterworth, Gerald Finzi und Gustav Holst (Hamburg: 2007); in
preparation is Steps across the Border: Music and Narration in Film. He is co-
editor of Plurale. Zeitschrift für Denkversionen (with Claudia Goller and Jörg
Silbermann) and of Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung (www.filmmusik.uni-
kiel.de/beitraege.php), and has co-edited collections on German–British musical
relationships 1920–1950 and on Europe’s musical geography after 1918. He has
xiv Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

published articles on film music, English music history and music historiography,
and chapters in the Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert and The Cambridge
Companion to Twentieth-century Opera.

Erik Levi is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. Author

of the books Music in the Third Reich (London: 1994), Mozart and the Nazis (New
Haven and London: 2010) and co-editor with Florian Scheding of Music and
Displacement (Lanham, ML: 2010), he has also written numerous chapters and
articles on German music from the 1920s to the 1950s and is currently working on
a volume charting the reception of Hanns Eisler’s music in Britain. He is also an
experienced performer and writes CD reviews for BBC Music Magazine.

Gerard McBurney is a British composer, writer and broadcaster, well known

for his expertise in the field of Russian and Soviet music and for his work in the
theatre. In 2006 he was appointed artistic programming advisor to the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra and creative director of the orchestra’s acclaimed series
Beyond the Score®.

Bogumila Mika is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Music, and since 2009
also a vice-dean at the Department of Fine Arts and Music of the University of
Silesia in Cieszyn. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Silesia as a
music sociologist (1999), and habilitation as a musicologist from Jagellonian
University, Kraków (2011). She has published three books: Critical Connoisseur
or Naive Consumer: Silesian Music Audiences at the End of the Twentieth Century
(Katowice: 2000); Music as a Sign in the Context of Paradigmatic Analysis
(Lublin: 2007) and Musical Quotation in Polish Art Music of 20th Century:
Contexts, Facts, Interpretations (Kraków: 2008).

Simo Mikkonen is a research fellow in the History Department at the University of

Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published multidisciplinary research on Soviet society
and politics, including a chapter on the behind-the-scenes events surrounding the
‘Muddle instead of Music’ episode in 1936 in Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge:
2010). His first book was entitled Music and Power in the Soviet 1930s: A History
of Composers’ Bureaucracy (New York: 2009). He is currently examining Soviet
operations in the cultural cold war, as well as Soviet semi-official and informal
networks with the West.

Melita Milin is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian

Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the
first five issues of the international journal Muzikologija (2001–2005) and has
been vice-president of the newly founded Serbian musicological society since
2006. Her research is focused on twentieth-century Serbian music in the context
of contemporary musical developments in Europe. In particular, she has written
on the works of Ljubica Marić, Serbian music between the two world wars, and
 Notes on Contributors xv

contemporary Serbian art music. Her investigations include the study of influences
of dominant ideologies (national and political) on composers’ works and their
relations to aesthetical programmes and practices elsewhere in the world.

Katarzyna Naliwajek (University of Warsaw) works on Polish contemporary

music and problems of interrelationship between music and politics in the 1930s
and 1940s. She has published in Polish musicological journals (Muzyka, Przegląd
Muzykologiczny) and music reviews (Canor, Klasyka, Ruch Muzyczny). Her
Ph.D. dissertation is on the music of Constantin Regamey and she has curated an
exhibition on Regamey presented at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, at the
University of Warsaw Library and at the Polish Museum in Rapperswil. She has
also worked as a translator and has collaborated with Polish Radio, the Warsaw
Autumn Festival and Polish Audiovisual Publishers (edition of Polish Quartets
performed by the Kronos Quartet).

Eva Moreda Rodríguez completed her Ph.D. at Royal Holloway College,

University of London in 2010. She has held the McCann Research Fellowship at
the Royal Academy of Music, researching Anglo-Spanish musical exchanges from
the 1880s to the 1950s, and is now Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow at
the University of Glasgow. Existing and forthcoming publications deal with the
musical exchanges among Spain, Germany and Italy during the Second World
War, folk music and gender in the Sección Femenina, the role of music in national
reconstruction after the Spanish Civil War, and the Spanish music critic Federico
Sopeña.

Florian Scheding is Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton. His

main interest in research is music and migration, especially the displacement of
composers and the avant-garde during the Second World War, and in how looking
at music history through the lens of migration can challenge and enrich conceptions
of historiography. He has published on the composer Mátyás Seiber, film music
and composers in exile during the Second World War. He is co-editor, with Erik
Levi, of Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in
Europe and Beyond (Lanham, ML: 2010).

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology and Head of the School of

Music at the University of Leeds. He researches into music, culture and ideology,
and is the author of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room
and Parlour (Aldershot: 1989, rev. edn 2001), From the Erotic to the Demonic:
On Critical Musicology (New York: 2003), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-
century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New
York: 2008) and Musical Style and Social Meaning (Farnham: 2010). He is the
editor of Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (Oxford: 2000) and The Ashgate
Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham: 2009). He was a founder
member of the UK Critical Musicology Group in 1993, and is at the forefront in
xvi Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

identifying changes of critical perspective in the sociocultural study of music. He

is the General Editor of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series.

Joan Titus is an assistant professor in Musicology at the University of North

Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focus is cultural politics/policy and its
relationship to the musical arts, particularly in Soviet Russia, the Native American
Southwest, and most currently, North Africa. Her recent publications regard
cultural politics in the early film music of Dmitry Shostakovich, appearing
in Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge: 2010) and The Routledge Film Music
Sourcebook (New York: 2011); and waila and festivalization, appearing in
Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S./Mexico Border
(New York: 2011). Her forthcoming book addresses narratology, cultural politics
and Shostakovich, particularly in regard to his early film scores.

Hon-Lun Yang is Professor at the Department of Music, Hong Kong Baptist

University. Her research interests are cross-cultural and include: ‘Aesthetic and
Social Aspects of Emerging Utopian Musical Communities’, in International
Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41/2 (2010); ‘Performing Chineseness
Girl-Group Style: The 12 Girls Band – Traditions, Gender, Globalization and
(Inter)national Identity’, in Asian Music 41/2 (2010); ‘Power, Politics, and Musical
Commemoration: Western Musical Figures in the People’s Republic of China’, in
Music and Politics 1/2 (2007); ‘“1968” – Womanhood and Gender Roles in Model
Plays of the PRC and Movie Musicals of Hong Kong’, in Music and Protest in
1968 (Cambridge, forthcoming); ‘Curb that Enticing Tone: Music Censorship in
the PRC’, in Music and Censorship (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and
‘The Making of a National Musical Icon: Xian Xinghai and His Yellow River
Cantata’, in Music, Power, and Politics (New York: 2005). She is currently
working on a book about three contemporary Chinese composers.
 Foreword

Imagine the following scene: in 1994 a doctoral student has finally, after
several years of effort and setbacks, reached the stage of undergoing his viva
exam. His teachers wait uneasily in another room. The external examiner is an
Oxford professor; the internal, a distinguished historian of popular culture. The
dissertation (after much knocking into shape) has emerged as a 550-page monster
on an unusual, even questionable topic, the Soviet proletarian music movement.
The teachers are getting uneasy: the viva has been going on for more than two
hours – hardly a good sign. One of them can take it no longer, and tiptoes down the
corridor to where the exam is happening. Outside the door a strange sound can be
heard: three unaccompanied voices joining in lusty proletarian songs. This is what
the most formal and strained of exams has degenerated, or risen, to – a sing-song!
Neil Edmunds, of course, got his doctorate with acclaim. I know this story
is true, because I was his supervisor (and did a lot of the knocking-into-shape).
He immediately became a valued friend. This foreword is about Neil, not only
because the volume is dedicated to his memory, and because his legacy thoroughly
deserves it, but because every title in it is on a topic that would immediately have
summoned up his sympathy and interest.
Neil came to Sussex from Newport, an only child from the Welsh valleys – he
retained abiding loyalty to place and family all his life. He joined the Sussex
University School of Education, training to be a schoolteacher. After one term, he
was told he would never make it. Then he took a surprising and bold step: to opt first
for our Russian Studies MA, then for a doctorate in Soviet music. He was a historian
and hadn’t taken a degree in either music or Russian. Sussex was flexible like that
(hardly anybody I supervised for a higher degree had come through standard academic
processes: all were self-driven enthusiasts, and the better for it). His enthusiasm was
tested to the limit when Neil got a year’s scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory
through the British Council. It was at the moment of the Soviet Union’s breakdown.
Food was scarce, inflation taking off and Neil had hardly a word of conversational
Russian at that stage – to avoid starvation he could only point to the few items of
food available on the shelves or at a canteen. But the contacts he made and materials
he obtained that year made up for any hardships on the way.
After graduating, Neil had a series of temporary (one-year) appointments at
the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. Getting a permanent post
at a British university was already difficult. His tenaciousness once again paid
off; he turned out to be such a good teacher that he became indispensable. UWE
eventually made him a permanent lecturer, then senior lecturer, in history. At his
funeral his students paid touching tribute to him: he was very generous and had
time for everyone, never needing to be reminded of a name. Though in some ways
xviii Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

a solitary person, he was very sociable and a keen games player – his old UWE
football team has been renamed after him. All the more shocking was his sudden
death from multiple organ failure soon after his 42nd birthday. A bursary has been
founded at UWE in his memory by his parents.
Neil’s particular talents were interwoven with his personal qualities. He had a
natural sympathy with those disregarded by the elite and with their culture – no
doubt what led him to the ‘mass song’ of the early Soviet Union in the first place.
He was alive to the folly and sheer oddity of, say, musical propaganda; but in an
article titled ‘“Lenin is always with us”’, he can end with praise for ‘the idealism
and sheer enthusiasm instilled by Bolshevism … that can easily be overlooked in
our largely anti-Communist world’.1 Friends attest that (even if prompted!) he never
had a harsh word to say about anyone. Yet he also had an acute sense of humour:
Gerard McBurney remembers his delight in the ‘Gogolian absurdity’ of the Soviet
1920s, the preposterous things people said in committees. I recollect that we often,
predictably, talked about Shostakovich and the ‘Shostakovich industry’; Neil gently
pointed out that ‘he knew how to play the system as well as anybody’, what a public
figure he was for much of his life: Member of Parliament, recipient of countless
petitions and begging letters. I wish he had written at length on the topic.
Neil, so thoroughly a Welshman (even a Plaid Cymru voter2), was internationally
minded, with a great range of contacts, from Finland to Shanghai, which this
volume reflects. Of course, he loved music and was musically literate, with a great
store of tapes often of rare and weird performances, which as ever he was generous
in sharing. But he was firm in his belief that in music history, the music should not
be allowed to crowd out the history, to which he paid scrupulously professional
attention. This emerges (explicitly) from his long and very well documented
study of William Glock’s ‘reign’ at the BBC – impartially written, yet allowing
the simmering political tensions of the time to show through. Its publication in
2006 shows how his talent could have developed if not cut brutally short at the
beginning of 2008.3 Nonetheless, he accomplished a lot – effectively opening up
a whole new field of scholarship – and I believe that for him the academic path
he had chosen always remained a big and surprising adventure. How he spread
inspiration around is wonderfully shown by this volume.
Robin Milner-Gulland
Professor Emeritus, University of Sussex, 2012

1
Neil reworked this concluding phrase slightly for the final sentence in the published
version of this spoken paper to remove the phrase ‘largely anti-Communist world’: see
Neil Edmunds, ‘“Lenin is always with us”: Soviet Musical Propaganda and Its Composers
during the 1920s’, in Neil Edmunds, ed., Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin:
The Baton and Sickle, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, p. 119.
2
Plaid Cymru is the nationalist party of Wales.
3
See Neil Edmunds, ‘William Glock and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s
Music Policy, 1959–73.’ Contemporary British History 20/2 (June 2006), pp. 233–61.
 Preface and Acknowledgements

The original impetus for this volume came from an invitation in 2008 from two of
Neil Edmunds’s colleagues in the Department of History, Philosophy and Politics
at the University of the West of England: Dr Martin Simpson and Professor Philip
Ollerenshaw. I wish to thank them for their invitation and the opportunity to put
this book together as a memorial for Neil. I am grateful to my contributors for their
hard work, commitment and patience.
I would like to extend special thanks to Dmitri Smirnov for his generous
help with the musical examples for Gerard McBurney’s chapter and to Jessica
Talmage of Mary Evans Picture Library for help with sourcing our image of the
Palace of Soviets.
Pauline Fairclough
Bristol, 2012
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Introduction
Pauline Fairclough

When considering the role music played in the major European totalitarian regimes
of the twentieth century – principally those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
– it is music’s usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. Certainly, it may
be true that no major political movement has ever done entirely without music,
whether we think of the marching bands in the Orangemen’s parades in Northern
Ireland and Liverpool, the Soviet mass song or Nazi celebrations of Wagner and
Bruckner. Yet the very term ‘propaganda’ is difficult to define and fully quantify.
While it is easy to seize on a Soviet song of the 1930s that glorifies Stalin and
collectivization and label it ‘propaganda’, can we be so confident about applying
the same term to the music of a major mainstream composer who received political
approval in totalitarian regimes, such as Shostakovich or Richard Strauss? As a
number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship
both between art music and politicized mass culture, and between entertainment
and propaganda. Even when dealing with texts with explicit political content,
as with Derek Scott’s examination of Irish Unionist and Republican songs, the
relationship between folk song, urban popular song and commercial pop/rock
culture throws up questions of how certain musical idioms are perceived. Scott
shows that Unionist songs, for example, can be shown to utilize English or even
Scottish tunes that invite mass participation, while Nationalist songs are more
evocatively folk-oriented. Thus what appears to be manifested as a split between
religious communities is manifested musically far more in terms of ethnic identity
(‘ethnic’ in the sense of relating to either English/British or Scots/Celtic), a
phenomenon that clearly relies strongly on a contemporary ability to recognize
those identities and to respond in appropriately different ways. What constitutes
‘propaganda’ in a war between sectarian or ethnic alliances that may also be bound
up with issues of colonialism and religion is difficult to pin down to any single
meaning. In the case of music written for either high art or popular entertainment
under totalitarian rule, identifying propaganda content is an equally, if not more,
fraught process and is often not the most productive approach to adopt.
Several chapters in the volume vividly illustrate the complexities of musical
life under totalitarian regimes. In his study of four Nazi musical films, Guido
Heldt demonstrates that mass culture produced during wartime unavoidably
engages with the harsh realities of those years, whether through blatant escapism
or actual ideological collaboration. Understandably, scholarly focus relating to
Nazi Germany and occupied territories during the war has turned its gaze chiefly
towards the suppression of European cultures (as is the case with Katarzyna
2 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

Naliwajek’s chapter dealing with Polish musical culture under Hans Frank), or
the Nazification of German musical life. But the result is that we know little of
Nazi popular culture in its own right, even though this was the common diet of
German citizens for over a decade, and played a direct role in garnering support
for the regime. Only by shining a light on the everyday experiences of German
citizens during the Nazi regime can we hope to understand something of the ‘banal
reality’ of war as experienced by Germany as it, like the Allied forces, relied on
propaganda for popular support.
Bogumila Mika’s chapter on the founding of the Warsaw Autumn Festival
shows how artistic and political aims were negotiated in the network of official
debate and international reception surrounding the festival’s establishment and
early years. Though its initial impetus came from a desire to showcase modern
Polish and Soviet music to the international musical community, the Warsaw
Autumn Festival effectively smuggled in Western avant-garde under the noses
of Polish and Soviet Communist leaders and opened the floodgates for what truly
did become a ‘bridge’ event between the Eastern bloc and the rest of the world. In
analogous examples, the two chapters by Simo Mikkonen and Pauline Fairclough
addressing the politics of musical exchange between the Soviet Union and the
West deal with the role of music as a form of ‘soft power’ covering the period
between the Second World War and the early 1960s. Mikkonen argues that the
Soviets’ willingness to send artists abroad was a calculation based on the Soviet
leadership’s evaluation of the risks of high-profile defections balanced with the
advantages of displaying Soviet talent and apparent goodwill. However double-
edged this ‘goodwill’ really was, Mikkonen concludes that it was nonetheless
effective in promoting the idea of a peaceful Soviet Union abroad, as well as
initiating elements of cultural competition between East and West. Fairclough’s
chapter shows how such a cultural ‘bridge’ between the Soviet Union and
Britain was cut off in the late years of the war owing to Stalin’s withdrawal from
international cooperation and deep-rooted habits of Soviet mistrust. But she also
shows that British attempts to initiate cultural exchanges were far from innocent:
both sides were playing a very deliberate propaganda game.
Gerard McBurney’s close engagement with Shostakovich’s incomplete opera
Orango raises intriguing questions about political and personal satire at this
delicate cusp-point of Stalinist society: just before the Stalinist repressions, and
just after the First Five-Year Plan. Set in the planned, but not yet built, Palace of the
Soviets (based on the widely circulated wining design by Boris Iofan), the staging
would have been as bloated and grotesque as the building itself – which was in fact
never built because of the impracticality of its design. This alone renders Orango
a dangerously over-the-top spectacle, mocking, rather than genuflecting before,
Stalinist monumentalism. But Orango was also dangerously close to the bone in
terms of its personal satire. McBurney speculates convincingly that the character
of Orango may have been an unsubtle – and cruelly degrading – caricature of the
poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who had shot himself in 1930, just a few years before
Shostakovich and his librettists embarked on their ill-fated collaboration. If so,
 Introduction 3

completion of the opera could have been politically disastrous for its creators,
since Stalin was shortly to announce that indifference to Mayakovsky’s poetry
was a crime and his canonization in Soviet culture began from that point – aptly
described by Boris Pasternak as Mayakovsky’s ‘second death’.1
Joan Titus’s chapter on Shostakovich’s approach to film scoring critiques the
easy assumption that the composer ranked such work lower than composing in
other ‘high art’ genres. Apart from Shostakovich’s distinguished collaborations
with Grigory Kozintsev (Hamlet, 1964; King Lear, 1970), Titus is correct in
judging that this aspect of his career has been rather overlooked in the West’s
assessment of Shostakovich. Even more neglected are the composer’s writings,
partly for the same reason: it is too easy to assume that his film scores and writings
are not wholly sincere, especially those dating from later in his life, when he is
known to have developed the habit of signing documents without reading them.
Film was one of the most intensely scrutinized art genres in the Soviet Union in
Shostakovich’s lifetime, monitored to a suffocating degree by Stalin, who took a
very personal interest in it, as he himself was a film enthusiast as well as keenly
aware of its propaganda function. Though Shostakovich did sometimes tire of film
work, he composed 34 original film scores throughout his career, including some
with explicitly Soviet or ‘revolutionary’ content. It would be folly to assume such
films were scored insincerely or without artistic commitment; and Titus makes a
strong case for demonstrating Shostakovich’s deep engagement with film music’s
potential to play an integral part in film.
One clear manifestation of totalitarianism in musical culture is the active
suppression or manipulation of certain ethnic or political groups, and nowhere
was this more blatant than in Nazi-occupied nations in the late 1930s and early
1940s. Katarzyna Naliwajek gives a detailed account of Nazi-dominated musical
life in Poland under the General Government between 1939 and 1941. Under
the regime of Hans Frank, Poland saw its national culture completely crushed,
with outright bans on the performance of music by Polish and Polish-Jewish
composers, or any participation in concert life by Jewish musicians. This was part
of a concerted campaign to eradicate Polish culture completely and to effectively
transform a part of the former Poland into a German colony. Yet within the limits
of these bans, Polish musicians nevertheless continued their own culture, even
if performances were limited to private meetings and gatherings in cafés. By
examining this ‘underground’ musical life, Naliwajek highlights those aspects
of Polish musical culture that were particularly treasured as well as charting the
network of clandestine organizations who worked to maintain it.
The Nazis practised a rather different manipulation of public opinion in occupied
Serbia. During the war, the occupiers relied on a puppet Serbian administration and
offered a phoney Serbian national revival in an attempt to gain popular support

1
Cited in Patricia Blake, ‘The Two Deaths of Vladimir Mayakovsky’, in Blake, ed.,
Vladimir Mayakovsky. The Bedbug and Other Stories, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1960, p. 50.
4 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

against the groups who most threatened the regime: Communists and royalists.
In rhetoric redolent of traditional imperialism, Nazi support for Serbian culture
constantly undermined it by implying its inherent inferiority to German art at the
same time as encouraging it at the expense of the art of other ethnic groups of
the former Yugoslavia in a classic ‘divide and rule’ strategy. In this trumped-up
‘nationalism’, targeted races such as gypsies and Jews were held up as threatening
Serbian cultural identity, in a blatant attempt to foster mass feeling against those
most targeted in Nazi arrests and genocide. As the post-war inquest showed, the Nazi
occupiers and collaborationists mounted a concerted effort to give the impression
of normality in cultural life during the war, ‘as if nothing had happened’. Music
– especially popular ‘classics’ like Beethoven, Weber and Tchaikovsky – made a
convenient shopfront for normality under these complex circumstances.
Many readers will find the presence of Joaquín Rodrigo surprising in a volume
such as this. Yet what Eva Moreda Rodríguez demonstrates in her discussion of
his celebrated work Concierto Heroica is not a composer actively seeking to offer
propaganda to Franco’s regime, but rather the far more subtle and widespread
phenomenon of what could be termed passive collaboration. What Moreda
Rodríguez offers here is an alternative way of contextualizing music: not attempting
to codify its resistance or even its submission, but instead to present data relating
to the Concierto’s composition, premiere and subsequent reception. Indeed, the
key question that she raises in doing so is whether the music itself is ever the right
place to locate political meaning of any kind. Reception histories tend to offer a
diverse picture of interpretation even when examining contemporary documents;
and with the passing of time, readings evolve and may change quite dramatically.
If Rodrigo showed a ‘willingness to offer critics and the regime a work which
could be construed as a symbol’ then it is that very construal which must be of
primary interest to us, and not the composer’s intention.
Beyond the comparatively well-defined boundaries of music’s role within
totalitarian regimes lies a vast field of far more nebulous connections between music
and ‘politics’, in its very broadest sense. Since the early 1990s the term ‘identity
politics’ has been in widespread use as a way of grouping together an otherwise
bewilderingly diverse body of cultural practices. It is within this framework that
we can see composers’ relationships with their own national cultures, as well as
with the wider practices of Western art music traditions. While such reflections on
cultural ‘identity’ seem especially acute in the music of émigré composers such
as Stravinsky, they also impinge on the reception histories of specific bodies of
music within other nations as well as on assertions of national self-identity. Erik
Levi’s research into the International Society of Musicians (ISM) has uncovered
some uncomfortable facts about its political alliances. Levi reveals a split between
those figures in the British musical world who were supportive of the European
avant-garde in the 1920s and 30s and those who advocated ‘protectionist’ cultural
policies that sought to champion home-grown culture. It was those on the
protectionist wing who attacked the ‘infiltration’ of national culture by émigrés;
and in this respect their views chimed all too well with Hitler’s own policy of
 Introduction 5

ethnically ‘cleansing’ German music. Similar tensions can be discerned in British

musical writing about Soviet and other ‘leftist’ music from the 1930s right up to
the 1970s; as Joanna Bullivant shows, the BBC’s Hugh Ottaway was a staunch
supporter of Alan Bush, as indeed he was of Shostakovich, where such support
came at the expense of contemporary British composers in the 1960s and 70s.2
Three chapters in this volume address emigration specifically. Hon-Lun Yang’s
collaboration with Neil Edmunds on the Russian musical communities in 1930s
Shanghai reveals how Shanghai – a city that was notoriously cosmopolitan, even
‘European’ in its rich blend of cultures and active artistic climate – was a natural
choice for Russian musicians and composers who left their country in the wake
of the 1917 Revolution and the ensuing civil war. Although they were classed
as refugees, and thereby had a weaker legal status than the other expatriate
communities there, the Russian community was large enough for talented artists
nevertheless to occupy a privileged position within the host city. In a very different
study focusing specifically on a single composer, Jonathan Cross examines the
nature of Stravinsky’s personal and changing relationship with his native culture
in parallel with the basic materials of Western musical culture itself. As a composer
whose creative life began with private study with Rimsky-Korsakov in the
cosseted, privileged world of Silver Age Russian culture, yet who lived through
two world wars and absorbed an unparalleled breath of musical tradition and
innovation, Stravinsky’s creative career holds up a mirror to changes in relation to
his own national culture, exploited and perceived as the exotic ‘other’ in relation
to the dominant émigré cultures in which he successfully forged most of his career.
Using the Formalist-Brechtian concepts of estrangement and defamiliarization
that were in widespread circulation in the 1910s and 20s, and revived in
Prague and Paris in the 1960s, Cross takes an innovative approach to assessing
Stravinsky’s own changing relationship to Russian and Western musical traditions
as he responded to the fractured cultural landscapes of twentieth-century Europe,
Russia and America. Finally, Florian Scheding’s description of Hungarian cabaret
(and other music-related émigré activities) in London – both during and after the
war – unpacks crucial aspects of the émigré experience: political readjustment
within a new cultural framework; definitions of ‘Self and Other’, and the tangible
impact of a newly transplanted cultural community on the British art scene.
All of the chapters collected in this volume address musical life within
Europe (including Soviet Russia), or within a European émigré community. The
emphasis on musical life in Soviet Russia reflects the interests of the dedicatee of
this volume, the Soviet music historian Neil Edmunds, who died at the tragically
young age of 42 in January 2008. At the time of his death he was at work on
two projects: research into Alan Bush and a collaborative project with Hon-Lun
Yang on the Russian musical diaspora in Shanghai. Many of the contributors to
this book were his personal friends; others, whether they knew Neil or not, have

2
See also Pauline Fairclough, ‘The Old Shostakovich: Reception in the British
Press’, Music and Letters 88/2 (2007), pp. 266–96.
6 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

generously contributed to this memorial volume and helped to make it a book that
Neil himself would have loved to have been a part of. We hope that this tribute will
do some justice to the memory of an original, talented scholar and much missed
colleague and friend.
 Chapter 1
‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’?
Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler in Great Britain and
the German Democratic Republic
1

Joanna Bullivant

In 1981 Michael Tippett wrote of his fellow composer Alan Bush: ‘Alan lives in
a world of Marxist orthodoxy and certainty, while I live in a world of humanist
ambivalence and uncertainty’.2 The two had not always seen themselves as
embracing such opposite poles. They were contemporaries and friends, both with
lives spanning almost the entire century (Bush lived from 1900 to 1995, Tippett
from 1905 to 1998). Bush was an important influence on Tippett in the 1930s,
when the young Tippett was excited by Bush’s ‘adventurous’ music and both were
interested in exploring ways of linking musical and political interests.3 By the
time both were composing their first operas – Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage
(1946–52) and Bush’s Wat Tyler (1948–51) –their differences were certainly
apparent. Tippett had quickly abandoned party politics. The Midsummer Marriage
continued the project he began with A Child of Our Time, finding a means of
musical expression adequate to expressing the fractured nature of modern man and
restoring ‘wholeness’. Bush, on the other hand, maintained his political radicalism
as an ardent and lifelong Stalinist, denounced his earlier interests in modernism,
and embraced a simplified, national style prompted by the 1948 Soviet controversy
and Prague Congress.4 Begun that very year, Wat Tyler exhibits much evidence of

1
Early versions of this paper were presented at the Oxford University Graduate
Colloquia Series, the 2009 Meeting of the American Musicological Society and the 2010
‘Twentieth-century Music and Politics’ conference in Bristol. I am grateful for the many
helpful comments received. I am also grateful to Burkhard Schwalbach for his advice
on translations, to Nathaniel Lew and Samantha Bassler for reading and commenting on
versions of this paper, and to the Alan Bush Music Trust for allowing me access to archival
material.
2
Michael Tippett, ‘A Magnetic Friendship: An Attraction of Opposites’, in Ronald
Stevenson, ed., Time Remembered. Alan Bush: An 80th Birthday Symposium, Kidderminster:
Bravura, 1981, p. 9.
3
Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, London: Pimlico, 1994, p. 43.
4
See Julie Waters, ‘Proselytizing the Prague Manifesto in Britain: The
Commissioning, Conception, and Musical Language of Alan Bush’s “Nottingham”
8 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

Bush’s chosen path: it depicts a popular English uprising – the 1381 Peasants’
Revolt – and working-class hero through a score making use of folk song and
giving a prominent role to the chorus. We might speculate that the differences
apparent in the two operas, and the larger contrasting artistic visions from which
they sprung, were what Tippett had in mind when comparing himself with Bush.
Not only did they choose different musical idioms, but in Tippett’s view these
reflected different appreciations of the nature of the modern world and how this
might be addressed by an artist. This comparison is not neutral. It implies that Bush
failed to recognize – or for political reasons chose to ignore – the true complexity
of the contemporary world, and to produce music to match.
Such a view of Bush and his music as anti-modern was particularly prominent
in the reception of the first British production of Wat Tyler. Despite winning a
prize in the Arts Council opera competition held for the 1951 Festival of Britain,
the opera was not broadcast in Britain until 1956. By the time of the production
in 1974, complaints about the old-fashioned music and political message of the
work were pervasive, as was the conclusion that these qualities explained both the
neglect of the work in Britain and its apparent success in East Germany, where it
received three professional productions.
In the context of increasing scholarly engagement with definitions of
modernism and their relationship to cold war political and cultural contexts, such
judgements regarding the post-war Bush and his opera have already come under
scrutiny.5 In a study of the Glock-era BBC, the late Neil Edmunds opened up a
space for critique of Bush’s condemnation as anti-modern: he asserted that Bush
was criticized for writing ‘in a regressive idiom associated with Stalinism’ during
a period in which the BBC, influentially, rejected ‘provincialism’ and championed
the avant-garde.6 Nathaniel Lew has likewise challenged views of Wat Tyler as
propagandistic, reading the work as an apt emblem of Britain immediately after
the Second World War in its aesthetic unsuitability for the Soviet Union, its broad
appeal and its espoused intentions to reach an English audience.7

Symphony’, Music and Politics 3/1 (Winter 2009), http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/

musicandpolitics/archive/2009-1/waters.html (accessed 12 June 2010); R. Murray Schafer,
British Composers in Interview, London: Faber, 1963, p. 58; Percy M. Young, A History of
British Music, London: Benn, 1967, p. 597.
5
For a discussion of related issues in the pre-war context, see my ‘Modernism,
Politics and Individuality in 1930s Britain: The Case of Alan Bush’, Music & Letters 90/3
(Aug. 2009), pp. 432–52.
6
Neil Edmunds, ‘William Glock and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Music
Policy, 1959–73’, Contemporary British History 20/2 (June 2006), pp. 237, 249.
7
Nathaniel Lew, ‘A New and Glorious Age: Constructions of National Opera in
Britain, 1945–1951’, Ph.D. diss, University of California, Berkeley, 2001, pp. 564–5. Lew
considers the tragic ending of the work, an aspect condemned in contemporary Soviet operas,
as rendering the work unsuitable for that nation, but ideal for a nation still under capitalism.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 9

In spite of such challenges to existing views of Wat Tyler and Bush’s experiences
more widely, one almost entirely overlooked area is the opera’s radio broadcast
and three professional productions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Reflecting the repressive political regime of the GDR, its apparent success there (in
opposition to the British reception) has been overlooked or dismissed as politically
suspect and musically regressive. Yet, as this chapter shall argue, the surprisingly
nuanced GDR history may provide crucial insights. In particular, the discussion of the
opera as modern in both Britain and the GDR offers intriguing possibilities for further
consideration of Edmunds’ discussion of politically influenced responses to avant-
garde music, and of the extent to which the contrasting fates of the opera in Britain
and the GDR are reducible to a binary East–West conflict. I shall argue that, far from
presenting ‘a world of Marxist orthodoxy’, the history of Wat Tyler points towards the
complex positions of two peripheral nations in the cold war cultural conflict.

Contrasting Stories of Success

To give a brief synopsis, the opera opens with a ‘Herdsman’ and ‘Escaped Serf’
discussing the growth of rebellion as peasants, meeting secretly, sing the ‘Cutty
Wren’, a folk song believed to have originated at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt.8
In the remainder of Act I, Wat Tyler is supported by the people of Maidstone in
resisting the Poll Tax. Later, Tyler strikes the Tax Collector, Sir Thomas Bampton,
in defence of his daughter, and decides to lead the uprising. The Peasant Army
storm Maidstone Prison and free John Ball, the radical priest. In Act II, the King
and nobles debate the rebellion and decide to meet the leaders. At the meeting with
Tyler, the King agrees to the demands for freedom from serfdom but, in response to
provocation from Bampton, Tyler draws his dagger and is killed. In the final scene,
taking place shortly after Tyler’s death, the peasants again meet with the King, who
revokes his promises to end serfdom. The private grief of Tyler’s wife in this scene
is counterpoised with the final quietly stated chorus of belief in future freedom.
The English performances were hampered by difficulties. The BBC broadcast
was achieved only after an exchange of letters and repeated hearings lasting nearly
five years. The 1974 performance followed years of attempts to secure a professional
production. It was organized by a company set up by Bush’s own Workers’ Music
Association, and was hampered by financial and casting problems.9 Both critical
reactions and the several detailed assessments of the work at the BBC objected to
what was seen as the work’s regressive idiom and the naive and simplistic drama
and characterization. Leonard Isaacs at the BBC, writing in 1953, complained of

8
For a left-wing discussion of the song’s origins, see A. L. Lloyd, The Singing
Englishman: An Introduction to Folksong, London: Workers’ Music Association, 1944,
pp. 7–9.
9
For detailed information, see British Library (BL) Alan Bush Collection, MS Mus.
628–630, Correspondence relating to Wat Tyler vols 1–3.
10 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

the undistinguished and monotonous music, and the lack of individuality among
characters crudely drawn as either working-class heroes or feudal villains. 10
The many productions and favourable press reactions to the opera in the GDR
stand in marked contrast. Despite the problems of talking of ‘success’ in this
context, as shall be discussed, it is immediately notable that, according to Gerd
Rienäcker, the vast majority of new operas premiered in the GDR in the 1950s were
not performed again.11 Rienäcker names only Karl-Rudi Griesbach’s Kolumbus
and Marike Weiden, Jean Kurt Forest’s Tai Yang erwacht [Tai Yang Awakes] and
Brecht and Paul Dessau’s Die Verurteilung der Lukullus [The Condemnation of
Lucullus] as operas that enjoyed repeat performances, with parts of other operas
broadcast. In this context, the three productions over a decade and the broadcast of
a substantial portion of the opera are a striking achievement.

A Regressive Culture?

Was this popularity due to the political reasons and a regressive musical culture
in the GDR? Peter Pirie underscored this conclusion when he wrote of Bush
‘continuing a tradition established by Ethel Smyth and Joseph Holbrooke, but for
rather different reasons. Indeed, Bush’s music is much like theirs: diatonic Wagner
with a social message’.12 Certainly, GDR musical culture was heavily influenced
by the Soviet Union. As Elizabeth Janik has noted, in line with the 1948 Soviet
Central Committee Resolution and the Declaration of the Prague Congress against
musical formalism,13 the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands, SED) gradually undertook a comprehensive campaign against
formalism by the end of 1950.14 The founding conference of the Union of German
Composers and Musicologists (VDKM) in April 1951 was ‘dominated by questions
of musical formalism’. The speech on ‘Realism, the Vital Question of German
Music’ by Ernst Hermann Meyer, a member of the VDKM Secretariat, attacked
the avant-garde. Echoing the Soviet Resolution’s call to respect the ‘best traditions
of Russian and western classical music’,15 Meyer set a mandate of the VDKM to

10
Memo from Leonard Isaacs to Head of Music Programmes, BBC Written Archives
Centre, R27/556, Music Reports, 1928–1954, Buc-Bush, A., 23 Nov. 1953.
11
Gerd Rienäcker, ‘Zur Entwicklung des Opernschaffens der Deutschen
Demokratischen Republik: Bemerkungen zu einigen Tendenzen’. in Hans Alfred Brockhaus
and Konrad Niemann, eds, Sammelbände zur Musikgeschichte der DDR, vol. iv, Berlin:
Verlag Neue Musik, 1971, p. 12.
12
Peter J. Pirie, The English Musical Renaissance, London: Gollancz, 1979, p. 188.
13
For the texts of both documents, see Nicolas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 4th edn,
London: Cassell, 1972, p. 29.
14
Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in
Cold War Berlin, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005, p. 229.
15
Slonimsky, Music since 1900, p. 1360.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 11

‘encourage realistic music that emphasized musical content over empty form, that
cherished the German national musical heritage, and that was in the literal sense
Volksmusik (“music of the people”)’.16 There were also clearly particular issues
for the dramatic element of opera in line with socialist realism. David Bathrick,
writing on literature in the GDR, has spoken of the prohibition of any equivocation
of meaning or textual ambiguity in works of art: ‘Works of art that explicitly or
implicitly encouraged or enabled ambiguity were, by that very fact alone, lacking
a clearly articulated sense of Parteilichkeit [political commitment]’.17
To what extent did Bush’s opera complement this political and aesthetic
context? Certainly, the suitability of the popular subject and national idiom of
Wat Tyler was noted by the SED. Their official newspaper, Neues Deutschland,
described it as ‘an outstanding example of a realistic work, national in form and
progressive in content’.18 In dramatic terms, too, Bush wrote pertinently regarding
his operas:

At the moment in the West pathological states of mind and guilt are fashionable
subjects. … I avoid in my subjects unrelieved murky pessimism and triumphant
corruption, and aim to represent objective pictures of human life, past and present.19

In contrast, for example, to Peter Grimes, which was very likely in Bush’s mind
in this passage, in Wat Tyler (except in the two pastiche minstrel songs of Act II)
Bush’s word setting is highly syllabic, and characters interact with rigorous realism
in only singing what would be spoken – a quality contributing to the perceived
naivety of the characterization by British writers but appropriate to socialist realist
dictates.20 Where Peter Grimes’s moral complexity is, as Lew has noted, ‘a mark
of its modernity’, Bush’s opera may seem contrastingly non-modern in its realism
in comparison. Finally, Bush had personal connections to leading musical figures
of the GDR, particularly Meyer. Bush’s opera was first introduced to the GDR
when he played excerpts at the inaugural conference of the VDKM, as a result
of which he was offered first the broadcast on Berlin radio and subsequently a
full production.21 As Joy Calico notes, securing a performance of a new opera
appears to have been strongly linked to prominent membership of the VDKM, an
honour accorded to those of irreproachable politics, rather than, necessarily, the

16
Janik, Recomposing German Music, p. 237.
17
David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR, Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 16.
18
Anon., ‘Weltaufführung der Oper “Wat Tyler” in Leipzig’, Neues Deutschland 8
Sept. 1953, p. 4.
19
Alan Bush, ‘“Wat Tyler” and the Purpose of Opera’, Opera 25/6 (June 1974), p. 490.
20
Alan Bush to Doreen Jacobs, 22 June 1950, BL Alan Bush Collection, MS Mus.
452, Miscellaneous Correspondence Jan.–June 1950.
21
Alan Bush, ‘In My Eighth Decade’, in In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays,
London: Kahn & Averill, 1980, pp. 21–2.
12 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

finest composers.22 All these factors, then, firstly, point to the possible political
dimension of Bush’s patronage in the GDR.
Does this picture, however, reflect the full circumstances of either the GDR or
Wat Tyler’s history in that country? To begin with the former, an important element
of recent work – both historical and musicological – has been to examine what
is distinctive about the nation’s agendas and separate from the Soviet example:
in particular the close proximity to and relationship with West Germany, the
correspondingly complex question of national identity, and the problematic legacy
of fascism. In terms of opera, Calico has productively focused on these issues in
the early 1950s:

For the SED, opera was used to achieve a two-fold agenda: the composition of a
new Nationaloper in the GDR would preserve a unified German national culture,
and, at the same time, proclaim the GDR as the custodians of true German culture.
Such claims were intended to bolster the position of East Germany as a legitimate
nation-state at a time when most countries did not recognize it as such.23

Equally important are questions of modernity in the GDR. The historians

Katherine Pence and Paul Betts have argued that such peculiar concerns reveal
not a straightforwardly traditional or conservative society and culture in East
Germany, but a tension of tradition and modernity that may be understood as an
‘alternative modernity’.24 On the one hand, traditional and conservative features
of society and culture persisted, not least in the context of a legitimization of the
new socialist state. On the other hand, this desire to achieve legitimacy, combined
with the need to declare a radical break with the fascist past, and competition
with West Germany, was partly realized in the aim to become a leading modern
nation, both economically and culturally. While it is important to be aware of the
rhetoric with which socialist realism legitimized itself as modern and attacked
Western modernism as truly regressive, it is also necessary to consider the context
of genuine East German concerns to become a modern nation and ‘to engineer a
superior alternative to the liberal West’.25

22
Joy Haslam Calico, ‘The Politics of Opera in the German Democratic Republic,
1945–1961’, Ph.D. diss, Duke University, Durham, NC, 1999, p. 314.
23
Joy Haslam Calico, ‘“Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper”: Opera in the
Discourses of Unification and Legitimation in the German Democratic Republic’, in Celia
Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds, Music and German National Identity, Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 191.
24
Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, ‘Introduction’ in Katherine Pence and Paul Betts,
eds, Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2008, p. 11.
25
Ibid., p. 13.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 13

Wat Tyler and the Modern GDR

How might Wat Tyler be examined in the context of these specific concerns of
the GDR? One important aspect to address is the nature of Bush’s relationship
with his contacts in the GDR, which suggest connections stretching beyond their
shared communism. Meyer, Georg Knepler and Hanns Eisler were all émigrés in
Britain in the 1930s, and engaged in debate whilst in Britain over how to connect
communism with musical theory and practice.26 When they returned to the GDR,
Bush was highly valued for his ideas about building a socialist musical culture,
hearing regularly from Meyer especially about developments in musical culture.
From early on in the GDR period, during a period in which ‘there was still a sense
of hope and optimism for the success of the German socialist state’,27 leading
figures wanted to have Bush’s works performed.28 What is also significant from
this period is that Meyer, for one, perceived Bush’s music as essentially modern.
Writing in the British Marxist journal Our Time whilst still an émigré in England,
Meyer pointed to the principle of total thematic organization in Bush’s music as
his key contribution to the ‘crisis’ of contemporary music:

Bush’s theory shares with Schönberg his desire to bring order into modern
composition. Yet while adopting something of the same principle of thematic
development, Bush discards Schönberg’s a-tonalism and with it the limitations
of idiom which his twelve-tone theories impose on him.29

For Meyer at this time, this technique is part of ‘immediate and vital contributions
towards extracting modern music from its difficult position’: the significance of
Bush’s music for him was in its implications for the future of music, in terms of a
specific reading of modernity in music.
Neither Meyer’s rhetoric nor this personal history confirm that Bush’s music
was thus suited to the climate of the new GDR in the 1950s, particularly in the
reading of the focus on nationalism and national opera in the wake of 1948 as anti-
modern. Yet the reactions to the radio broadcast published in the SED’s official

26
Toby Thacker, ‘“Something Different from the Hampstead Perspective”: An
Outline of Selected Musical Transactions between Britain and the GDR’, in Stefan Berger
and Norman LaPorte, eds, The Other Germany: Perceptions and Influences in British–East
German Relations, 1945–1990, Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag, 2005, pp. 214­15.
27
Calico, ‘The Politics of Opera’, p. 50.
28
See Ernst Hermann Meyer to Alan Bush, 19 Nov. 1948, copy held in Bush Archive,
Histon; Hans Pischner [Music Director of Berliner Rundfunk] to Alan Bush, 21 May 1951,
BL Alan Bush Collection, MS Mus. 631, Wat Tyler vol. 4: DDR Performances.
29
E. Meyer, ‘Alan Bush’, Our Time 7/8 (May 1948), p. 207.
14 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

publications Musik und Gesellschaft and Neues Deutschland – both by Eberhard

Rebling – indicate that Bush’s opera was very well received.30
In contrast to Meyer, Rebling opens his account in the former journal in the
socialist realist vein, pointing to the need for opera to be national, to heal the breach
between composer and audience caused by ‘culture-destroying formalism’.31 Yet
Rebling goes on to make several surprising points. He emphasizes that Bush’s
opera is a model for German composers: ‘Important historical events in German
history like the Peasants’ War or 1848 offer rich material for the creation of a
progressive, historical-revolutionary opera. We call upon German composers to
follow the example of Alan Bush!’32 Notably, this mention of the Peasants’ War
and 1848 predates by a few months the call for composers to use these subjects in
the seminal articles ‘Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper’ in Neues Deutschland
and Musik und Gesellschaft.33 In his later article following the Leipzig premiere,
Rebling specifically described Wat Tyler as ‘this very significant work for the
development of a Nationaloper’ and ‘this outstanding example of the creation
of a realistic Nationaloper’, thus underscoring the work’s connection to this
specifically East German contemporary cultural concern.34
This prominence of East German concerns is also apparent when Rebling
discusses specific problems of historical opera. He points to the danger of archaism
in such operas: if they unite a historical musical style with an authentic historical
depiction they will fail to speak to the people in contemporary life:

It is … essential to portray time and people by means of folk music as well as

the music of the ruling classes, and yet to draw on the full range of modern vocal
and orchestral techniques, in order to identify the appropriate intonations for
the true humanness [Menschlichkeit] of the acting characters, and to express the
essential content of revolutionary ideas, so that the fighters of today may be won
over for progress and feel reaffirmed in their struggle.35

30
Dr. E. Rebling, ‘“Wat Tyler”: Zur Uraufführung der Oper des englischen
Komponisten Alan Bush’, Neues Deutschland 13 Mar. 1952, 4; E. R., ‘Die Oper “Wat
Tyler” von Alan Bush: Zur Uraufführung im Berliner Rundfunk’, Musik und Gesellschaft
2/4 (Apr. 1952), pp. 33–6.
31
E. R., ‘Die Oper “Wat Tyler”’, p. 33.
32
Ibid., p. 36.
33
Anon., ‘Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper’, Neues Deutschland 1 Nov. 1952, p. 1;
Anon., ‘Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper’, Musik und Gesellschaft 2/12 (Dec. 1952), p. 1.
34
Rebling refers to ‘dieses für die Entwicklung einer Nationaloper sehr bedeutsame
Werk’ and ‘ein hervorragendes Beispiel der Schaffung einer realistischen Nationaloper’
[‘this work, which is very significant for the development of a national opera’ and ‘an
outstanding example of the creation of a realist national opera’]. See E.R., ‘Die Oper “Wat
Tyler” von Alan Bush in Leipzig’, Musik und Gesellschaft 3/10 (Oct. 1953), p. 16.
35
E. R., ‘Die Oper “Wat Tyler”’, p. 34.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 15

Bush is praised above all in the article for achieving this ‘happy synthesis’ of
historical material and modern technique. Rebling ends his account by quoting a
statement originally made (Rebling indicates) by D. Saslawkij [Daniil Zaslavsky]
in the March 1952 edition of Sovetskaya muzïka about Beethoven:

The titans of mankind, the great renewers of science and art, shatter the
formations of society by influencing its superstructure, its entire cultural and
ideological life, whereby it turns out that they are not the exclusive property of
any of these formations. In their unmediated creative acts they also belonged to
the future, and this future is transformed into their present only in our time.36

Thus, although the explication of modernity has shifted emphasis in this reading,
Rebling, like Meyer, draws Bush’s music into a historical narrative which places
it at ‘the present stage in history’, in Meyer’s words. Moreover, this aspect, for
Rebling, is a key reason for its qualities as a model for German composers: the
opera does not merely portray the past, but forges a link between the past and future.
Like Rebling’s reference to formalism, this may be partly situated in socialist
realism and the need for art to reveal ‘the potential utopia latent in current
conditions which has not yet come into being, but should and will be created under
socialism’.37 Yet there were also peculiar implications for East Germany, which may
be explored with reference to the circumstances of the first staged performance of
the opera, which was, following an initial delay, arranged to coincide with the 1953
Leipzig Fair.38 As Katherine Pence has observed, the post-war Leipzig Fairs were
a significant means by which the GDR sought legitimation, holding a threefold
importance in this respect. Firstly, the practice of holding the fair originated in the
Middle Ages, so the event offered a valuable link with the historical and cultural
traditions of Leipzig. Secondly, they allowed the East to showcase economic and
industrial growth and recovery after the war, albeit with mixed success. Finally, the
fairs in this period cast Leipzig as ‘a “bridge” or a “mediator” between East and
West’, a miniature international community of nations.39
In this context, Rebling’s reading of the work takes on additional meaning.
His perception of the synthesis of past and future, of medieval and modern, in the
work may be associated with the claims of the Leipzig Fair to be both rooted in
tradition and an example of modernity and progress. Aspects of the reception of
the premiere support this reading. Mundanely, it provided the opportunity for overt

36
Ibid., p. 36.
37
Calico, ‘The Politics of Opera’, p. 18.
38
Bush indicated that this was arranged following the initial delay due to the illness
of one of the lead singers. Bush to R. J. F. Howgill, 19 Apr. 1955, BL Alan Bush Collection
MS Mus. 628, Correspondence relating to Wat Tyler vol. I: BBC Broadcast, 1950–57.
39
Katherine Pence, ‘“A World in Miniature”: The Leipzig Trade Fairs in the 1950s
and East German Consumer Citizenship’, in David F. Crew, ed., Consuming Germany in
the Cold War, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003, pp. 22–7.
16 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

propaganda. The German reviews lost no time in lamenting the neglect of Bush’s
opera in England, in contrast to its patronage in the GDR. Neues Deutschland
published an interview with Bush preceding the premiere in which Bush expressed
his impression of the strong economic upswing of the People’s Democracies made
evident by the Leipzig Fair, and the political significance of the participation of
more than a hundred English industrialists in the event.40 The Tägliche Rundschau,
in an article giving an overview of the new theatre season in Leipzig, noted Alan
Bush’s opera as a highpoint, and emphasized that Leipzig possessed not only
the most modern factories and machinery, but also the largest and most modern
theatre-workshop [Theaterwerkstatt] in Germany.41 Thus the very fact of Leipzig
staging an unperformed prize-winning British opera potentially gave the GDR
credibility as a promoter of culture and international cooperation. Notably
descriptions of the audience at the premiere emphasized the number of dignitaries
present from not only the GDR but also the Soviet Union, Britain and the ‘People’s
Democracies’.42 Yet the opera’s premiere had a deeper resonance for the GDR.
Some of the reviews characterize Bush as a representative of the ‘other’ England.
In the Leipzig programme, Richard Petzold wrote: ‘This neglect in official circles
is a result of Bush’s political position. Bush has for many years bravely declared
his support for the “other” England, the England of progress and the working
classes’.43 In both Petzold’s account and Ernst Krause’s in Aufbau, this intriguing
phrase seems to evoke both a musical and political ‘otherness’ with which Bush
is associated.44 When using the phrase, both writers particularly emphasized the
work of the Workers’ Music Association (of which, it was noted, Ernst Hermann
Meyer and Hanns Eisler were vice-presidents) in creating a true people’s musical
culture rooted in both the raising of working-class tastes through performances
of opera and concert works and the preservation [Pflege] of folk song. This is
interesting in view of the synthesis of folk music and ‘modern operatic techniques’
identified in Wat Tyler by Rebling. It is also significant that the phrase occurs
in Petzold’s account in the midst of a history of English music which traces its
development from a rich folk music and medieval tradition, through a decline and
focus on foreign imports and market-guided culture under capitalism, through to
the re-emergence of a tradition rooted in English choral music and folk song in the
late nineteenth century. There is a suggestion that Bush’s opera – the ‘crowning’ of
English folk music in Petzold’s words – represents the result of an undercurrent of

40
Anon., ‘Gespräch mit Alan Bush’, Neues Deutschland 6 Sept. 1953, p. 6.
41
Zierold, ‘Die Leipziger Bühnen in der neuen Spielzeit’, Tägliche Rundschau 1
Sept. 1953, p. 6.
42
R. Palme Dutt, ‘A Grand Ovation for “Wat Tyler”. British composer’s Triumph’,
Daily Worker 8 Sept. 1953; ‘Weltaufführung der Oper “Wat Tyler”’, p. 4.
43
Richard Petzold, ‘Musik in England’, Leipziger Theater: Wat Tyler [1953
production programme].
44
Ernst Krause, ‘Alan Bush und sein “Wat Tyler”’, Aufbau 11 (1953), p. 1022.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 17

English musical culture – one diverted by capitalism.45 Correspondingly, the plot

of the opera portrays a politically progressive underclass whose rebellion, although
unsuccessful, sowed a seed of revolution that will be realized in the future. It is
no coincidence that, in the opera, Bush primarily uses folk song to depict the
peasants, while the King and courtiers are the recipients of the only isolated uses
of dissonance in the piece. Moreover, Petzold surprisingly argues that the opera
may be ‘too modern’ for the average opera-goer, because the archaic sources of
his style have created an austerity that contrasts sharply with the melodic and
colouristic embellishment and ‘comfortable sound-world’ that Petzold associates
with Verdi or Puccini.46 The modernity of the opera for Petzold, then, is not just its
connection of the distant past with the socialist present, but the fact that it creates a
new style which rejects the features he identifies in late-bourgeois opera.
The possible significance of this reading in the newly created GDR may be
considered in the context of the legacy of fascism. Bathrick has noted that one
of the most important ideas in the new country was the notion that the GDR was
founded by antifascists:

Official antifascism … became an important social imaginary for the absolution

of guilt … for many living in the GDR. … as a story of genesis, the SED history
of the period 1933 to 1949 was structured to associate the heritage, if not the very
existence, of the GDR with a (vastly mythologized) working-class resistance to
fascism. For those not in the resistance … there was also a saving grace. Given
that fascism was the highest state of capitalism, and given that the elimination of
capitalist property relations … in the Soviet Zone had supposedly removed the
material and hence the political grounds for fascism, the building of socialism in
the GDR came to represent de facto a form of overcoming the past.47

If fascism was the highest realization of capitalism, and the founders of the GDR
had eradicated fascism both politically and socio-economically, Wat Tyler had the
potential to strike the keynote of the early years of the new state. The musical
and political ‘other’ England becomes the mirror of East Germany according to
the SED’s narrative. Bush, who knew the leading musicians of the GDR (Meyer,
Eisler and Georg Knepler) in exile, was the comrade-in-arms of its anti-fascist
founders. The narrative of the opera connected an oppressed yet rebellious past
with a future socialist victory. In the climate of the GDR in the early 1950s, Wat
Tyler thus offered a reading of history that enhanced its other qualifications as a
model of Nationaloper. And Bathrick’s analysis offers a further virtue of the opera
as an expression of GDR ideals. In opposition to the British reception, German
writers emphasized the ideal synthesis of individual and collective elements in

45
Prof. Dr Richard Petzold, ‘Einführung’, Alan Bush: Wat Tyler, Vollständiges
Opernbuch, Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam, 1954, p. 25.
46
Petzold, ‘Einführung’, p. 26.
47
Bathrick, The Powers of Speech, pp. 12–13.
18 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

the work. Most of the reviewers noted that, while the family scene deepened the
listener’s connection to the individual protagonists, Wat Tyler was at the same
time representative of the people. And, crucially, the death of Tyler is not the end
of the opera. Krause noted that, under harsher conditions of serfdom than before,
the people ultimately proclaim that ‘all that is great in Man still lives, and once
again shall rise!’48 In the context of a myth of working-class resistance to fascism
and capitalism, the fact that the martyred hero of the opera stands for an entire
people would seem to have particular resonance. That other German composers
were impelled to follow Bush’s lead with episodes of German history such as the
Peasants’ War or the 1848 revolutions supports the sense that the opera was seen
as the ideal expression of a nation identifying itself with an imagined history of
collective working-class resistance to imperialism and fascism.

Music and Politics

Arguably, the GDR needed Wat Tyler. Significantly, the opera was first broadcast,
and then staged, not only at a time of deep interest in the possibilities of
Nationaloper, but in the midst of two notorious controversies in this area over
Brecht and Dessau’s Die Verurteiling der Lukullus and Eisler’s proposed Johann
Faustus. Both operas engaged with the key questions facing East Germany –
national identity, the legacy of fascism, the nature of the new East German culture
– yet both were profoundly problematic in terms of their message for the narrative
the SED wished to construct.49 Moreover, according to two surveys, while the mid-
late 1950s saw a number of new operas on appropriate subjects – for example Paul
Kurzbach’s Thomas Münzer (performed June 1955) and Jean Kurt Forest’s Der
arme Konrad [Poor Konrad] (performed October 1959) – the only contemporary
operas on any subject performed in the GDR prior to Wat Tyler were the
aforementioned Lukullus opera, Karl-Rudi Griesbach’s Singspiel Johannistag and
Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus (already performed in West
Germany and actually written in 1934–5).50 None of these works – respectively
textually and musically controversial, in a lighter genre and composed before the
foundation of the GDR – had both the legitimacy in socialist realist terms and the
peculiar appeal for the GDR in the early 1950s that Wat Tyler possessed. Yet this
is not to suggest that the fate of Wat Tyler in the GDR was merely a propaganda
exercise. Rather, it was able to bear the weight of a remarkably complex set of

48
Krause, ‘Alan Bush und sein “Wat Tyler”’, pp. 1022–3.
49
On the history of Brecht and Dessau’s opera, see Joy Calico, ‘The Trial, the
Condemnation, the Cover-up: Behind the Scenes of Brecht/Dessau’s Lucullus Opera(s)’,
Cambridge Opera Journal 14/3 (2002), pp. 313–42.
50
Sigrid and Hermann Neef, Deutsche Oper im 20. Jahrhundert: DDR, 1949–1989,
Berlin: Lang, 1992, 40–41; Rienäcker, ‘Zur Entwicklung des Opernschaffens der Deutschen
Demokratischen Republik’, pp. 9–10.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 19

cultural and political circumstances, which challenge assumptions about the GDR
as anti-modern and politically regressive.
What can we learn from the GDR story in terms of pursuing a broader
understanding of Bush and his significance in considering twentieth-century
British music and politics? Taking up the ideas broached in the introduction, two
promising areas for further scrutiny are apparent.
Firstly, this case study points towards further consideration of the conceptions
of the modern that shaped the mixed fortunes of the opera in Great Britain and
the GDR. One of the most important aspects of the GDR’s response to the opera
was the construction of the work as modern at a time of national interest in
renewal, a construction based not only on idiom but on the historical narrative
presented by the composer as historical figure and the internal narrative of the
work. If, like Pence and Betts, we consider not an objective modernity but shifting
understandings of ‘modern’, it is worth also critically pursuing how such claims
operated in Britain. In particular, did they relate, as Edmunds argues, to increasing
associations between the modern and an avant-garde idiom alone? Significantly, the
opera was criticized even in the earlier period as a modern opera: the Manchester
Guardian, for example, praising the dramatic and musical coherence in spite of
its folky idiom.51 The two most positive 1950s accounts were the only ones to find
anything novel in the score. Edward J. Dent actually calls the music ‘modern’.52
Hugh Ottaway praises the ‘fascinating archaisms’, the musical characterization
and (in an echo of Petzold’s analysis) the ‘absence of romantic exaggeration’.53
The fact that the opera’s modernity was so important even in the 1950s suggests
that it may prove more productive to think not of British responses to the opera
in terms of increasing familiarity with avant-garde music, but in terms of shifting
notions of what a modern opera should be. Indeed, with this in mind, there is
another significant element of the British reception. The most intriguing phrase in
Ottaway’s review is his claim that, in the final scene of the opera, the ‘poignancy,
the real humanity’ expressed is achieved through Bush ‘clinching the tragedy in
both its individual and collective aspects’. This comment is interesting firstly in
light of the German reviewers’ praise of this element of the work. Yet it is also
significant in light of some of the later reviews. In 1974 several reviewers criticized
Bush’s idiom not only as old-fashioned or anti-modern but as impersonal.54 Such
judgements go hand in hand with criticisms of the naivety and superficiality of
plot and characters. In a 1960 review of Bush’s second opera, Men of Blackmoor,

51
W. L. W., ‘Bush’s “Wat Tyler”: A Long Awaited Opera on the Third’, Manchester
Guardian 11 Dec. 1956, p. 5.
52
Edward J. Dent, ‘Wat Tyler’, in Edward Clark, ed., Tribute to Alan Bush on His
Fiftieth Birthday, London: Workers’ Music Association, 1950, p. 51.
53
Hugh Ottaway, ‘Alan Bush’s “Wat Tyler”’, Musical Times 97/1366 (Dec. 1956),
p. 633.
54
Peter Heyworth, ‘Life with the Strausses’, Observer 23 Jun. 1974, p. 31; ‘Public and
Private: Desmond Shawe-Taylor on Bush and Strauss’, Sunday Times 23 Jun. 1974, p. 27.
20 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

Martin Cooper attacked the lack of ‘individuality’ and ‘humanity’ in the work’s
modal idiom and the ‘puppet’-like characterization, yet states that when the music
moves away from folk song it ‘gains at once in power and individuality’.55
All of this suggests that a key question is whether a work could be both English
and modern. Yet this also seems to have been bound up with the question of
‘individuality’ in the opera – in both musical idiom and the drama. I have suggested
that the character of Wat posed an appropriate modern opera subject in the context
of the GDR’s construction of recent history. In the English reception, I suggest
that this question was equally important, although the answer was less clear. In
Ottaway’s reading, the work’s English idiom was not perceived to be incompatible
with the expression of the individual, thus the tragedy was both individual and
collective. By the 1970s, in general, the accusations of impersonality of idiom
coalesced with the view that the character of Wat Tyler was simply a puppet. One
possibility for rethinking the British reception, then, lies, pace Edmunds, in taking
a closer look at how perceptions of modernity and individuality intersected with
more narrowly stylistic categories of ‘national’ or ‘modern’ in shaping responses.
Secondly, and correspondingly, this case study prompts a more nuanced
consideration of how we consider political meaning in Bush’s music, and how we
assess that meaning in the broader cold war context. Existing assumptions about
Bush’s contrasting successes in Great Britain and the GDR have, as has been
seen, perceived a polarized marginalization or fêting that was politically driven,
and which reflected the broader cold war opposition of aesthetics and belief. Not
only does my examination of the GDR question such a monolithic perspective,
but it suggests that a still more complex view may be necessary. My starting point,
dismissals of the politically motivated German ‘success’ of the opera, implied (as
has been typical) a politically neutral British audience. Yet who was present at that
1974 premiere? Bush’s correspondence reveals that, in addition to the unimpressed
critics, a large number of well-wishers and friends attended. Another portion of
the audience consisted of groups from working-class and left-wing organizations.56
Notably, some of the attendees (not left-wingers) reported an overwhelmingly
enthusiastic audience response.57 With reference to Germany, my reading of the
opera’s success has considered the official reception, saying nothing about the
putative ‘ordinary’ listener, whose responses remain obscure. Yet could it be the
case that Wat Tyler also unintentionally struck a subversive chord in East Germany,
coming so soon after the Soviet suppression of a German uprising in June 1953?
Perhaps in Britain, for those from political groups, the opera ironically scored a
‘hit’ as a socialist opera after all, while an ‘against-the-grain’ reading may have
been possible in the GDR? While such notions are extremely difficult to quantify in

55
Martin Cooper, ‘Puppets in the Cause of Realism’, Daily Telegraph 3 Dec. 1960,
p. 11.
56
See Peggie [no surname] to Alan Bush, 11 June 1974, BL Alan Bush Collection,
MS Mus. 630, Correspondence relating to Wat Tyler vol. 3: Sadler’s Wells, 1974.
57
Joseph Ward to Alan Bush, 25 June 1974, ibid.
 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? 21

the GDR case particularly, they do invite us to be critical of assumptions about the
success or failure of a work, and of the objectivity or political bias that is usually
implied. Thus when Tippett made his assertion regarding the ‘world of Marxist
orthodoxy’ inhabited by Bush, he had the measure of him – that is, to the extent that
Bush, politically and aesthetically, wore his heart on his sleeve. Whether his work
in its rich and diverse history stayed true to that line is open to question.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 2
Stravinsky’s Petrushka: Modernizing the
Past, Russianizing the Future; or, How
Stravinsky Learned to Be an Exile
Jonathan Cross

The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something

left behind for ever.1

With the triumphant premiere of his first ballet score, The Firebird, in Paris in June
1910, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky became not only the talk of the town, but of
the whole of Europe. Stravinsky was transformed overnight from young, unknown
Russian into fêted international composer. From that moment on he would remain
virtually continuously in full public light until his death in New York 60 years
later. In exile in America in the 1940s, Stravinsky was largely defined by The
Firebird, a work he conducted frequently in order to make a living at a time when
the flow of royalties from occupied Europe had virtually dried up and when his
copyright was unprotected in the United States. He would be stopped in the street
in Hollywood and he would be asked, ‘Excuse me, aren’t you the composer of The
Firebird?’ Exasperated that he was still best known for a work written in 1909,
he protested to his friend Nicolas Nabokov, fellow composer and Russian émigré,
‘You know, I’ll hire a secretary and call him Mr Firebird, and when people ask me
this I will be able to say, “Oh no, this is Mr Firebird – in person, flesh and bone.”’2
The Firebird had satisfied the desire of early Parisian audiences and critics
for the exoticized representation of Russia that they had already come to expect
of Sergey Diaghilev’s seasons of Russian art, music, opera and ballet. Even
before the premiere Diaghilev had done his best to whip up excitement around
the young Stravinsky, and the French duly fell in love with him and his dazzling
music. The success went straight to Stravinsky’s head, and friends reported
he was in raptures over the French. The mixed reception of The Firebird in St
Petersburg a few months later served only to reinforce Stravinsky’s own sense of
the distance that now seemed to have emerged between his Russian upbringing

1
Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere:
Writers on Exile, London: Faber and Faber, 1994, p. 137.
2
Nabokov quoted in Edwin Corle, Igor Stravinsky, New York: Duell, Sloan and
Pearce, 1949, p. 154.
24 Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

and his present cosmopolitan life. As he confessed much later to Robert Craft,
‘Firebird had radically altered my life, and the city [St Petersburg] I had known
only a few months before as the grandest in the world now seemed sadly small
and provincial.’3 In July he returned to the family summer home at Ustilug (in
what is now the Ukraine, close to the border with present-day Poland) in order
to bring his wife Katya and their first two children over to Paris to witness the
final performances of the run. His usual practice had been to spend the summer
months composing at Ustilug, but now he decided to stay in France and French-
speaking Switzerland. His primary objective, it would seem, was to press on with
composing his next major project, another ballet, the idea for which had come to
him in a dream (or so his ghost-writer tells us in the Autobiography). It was to be
called The Great Sacrifice, to a scenario worked out with the Russian folklorist,
anthropologist, painter and designer Nikolay Roerich, one of Diaghilev’s circle.
This work was, of course, to become the ‘pictures of pagan Russia’, The Rite
of Spring. But another work was composed between Firebird and The Rite that
provides the link between the essentially nineteenth-century Russian world of the
former and the primarily twentieth-century modernist world of the latter.
The Firebird had been a collaborative work very much in keeping with the
neo-nationalist ideals of the Mir isskustva [World of Art] movement of which
Diaghilev had been the prime mover. Indeed, it was the integrated nature of
the ballet that had so impressed the reviewers of the premiere performances:
‘the most exquisite marvel of equilibrium that we have ever imagined between
sounds, movements and forms’.4 As is well known, Stravinsky’s involvement
came relatively late on, when the project was already well established, having
been invited to replace Diaghilev’s first choice, Anatoly Lyadov. It has a relatively
conventional ballet structure in the nineteenth-century tradition. Stravinsky’s
own Russian roots can be clearly heard in a music that has absorbed Musorgsky,
Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Glazunov, among others. In its original full version, it
is an extraordinary accomplishment for one so inexperienced, showing Stravinsky
had a strong instinct for the roles that music could play in the theatre. Stephen
Walsh nonetheless remains sniffy about its achievement, echoing the claims of
Stravinsky’s first Russian critics who declared that the score lacked originality:
despite its orchestral brilliance and flair, it is ‘derivative’, ‘a hotchpotch of
kuchkist-type folk-song setting … and a few exoticisms from Rimsky-Korsakov
and Scriabin’.5 Boris Asafiev, an early, combative defender of Stravinsky from
within the Soviet Union, adopted a more positive position, proposing that in The
Firebird Stravinsky had already asserted his ‘active sovereignty over lesson and

3
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (one-volume
edition), London: Faber and Faber, 2002, p. 81.
4
Henri Ghéon, writing in the Nouvelle Revue française (1910), quoted in Stephen
Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring. Russia and France, 1882–1934, London:
Jonathan Cape, 2000, p. 143.
5
Walsh, A Creative Spring, p. 143.
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