Soviet Transformations

During the Cold War, musical performance became a battleground between capitalism and communism (Fosler-Lussier 2015; Tomoff 2015). But what exactly did being better at the piano have to do with ideological rivalry? In order to answer this question, this paper moves backward in time to the end of the 1930s, when the Soviet Union, under the auspices of the World's Fair in New York, attempted to send its first large delegation of musicians across the Atlantic. Though cancelled at the last minute and often treated by scholars as footnote, these tours, this paper argues, are key to understanding the politics of virtuosity as it would later develop during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexamined planning documents – negotiations, contracts, budgets, advertising, and programs – this paper reconstructs the tours as they would have been and recovers how each side envisioned their sense.
The paper first situates the Soviet side's vision within a larger Soviet discourse on virtuosity. Reanimating Romantic anxieties about the social role of the virtuoso in response to the political ferment of the 1930s, Soviet critics explained the success of their musicians in terms of a commitment to social justice. Whereas Western performers, operating under the logic of capitalism, alienated the mass listener through overly pathological subjectivity and dehumanized objectivity, Soviet performers, critics held, came from the people and served the people. In going to the World's Fair, Soviet performers would actualize this argument, linking technical and interpretative superiority to workers' rights and state intervention in the arts. 
While such rhetoric could play well to Depression-era leftists, other parties on the American side had their own ideas, urging the Soviets to instead embrace a depoliticized idea of fun and spectacle. The tours, in other words, both summarized concerns of the preceding decade and anticipated ways of thinking about virtuosity that would characterize the coming Cold War. In recovering this collision of agendas, then, this paper not only sheds light on an important episode in the history of Soviet-U.S. musical exchange, but also helps to construct a genealogy of virtuosity's politics, expressed between capitalism and communism.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) was no stranger to the habit of recycling his own musical themes for use in later compositions. One of the most famous examples is the "Fateful Road" theme from his film score to _Ivan the Terrible_ (1945, Op. 116) which was later transformed into the main heroic theme "Majestic in the Sunbeams" in his opera _War and Peace_ (1948, Op. 91). Prokofiev added the recycled theme to the opera under pressure to add a new central theme which would serve as the "musical image of Russia [and its] victory" against the French in the War of 1812, and by extension, the Soviet Union's recent defeat of Nazi Germany in the "Great Patriotic War." After a decade of revisions, the revised opera now featured the General Kutuzov and the Russian people as opera's main protagonists, with Prokofiev's recycled theme serving as their main heroic theme and final choral apotheosis.


While many scholars have documented the use of Russian and Soviet art music for nationalistic purposes under Stalinism (1924-1953) (Taruskin, Frolova-Walker, Morrison, Bullock), the use of Soviet classics to assert nationalism in the twenty-first century remains relatively unexplored. In this paper I demonstrate how Prokofiev's music, namely his theme "Majestic in the Sunbeams" from _War and Peace_, continues to be used for patriotic purposes in Putin's Russia. In a stirring, new arrangement, Prokofiev's setting of "Majestic in the Sunbeams" took the prominent place as the finale of the closing gala concert of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Moscow. Performed by Dmitry Ulyanov and the Bolshoy Opera Choir, the arrangement was sung against the backdrop of the Russian national flag and has accumulated tens of thousands of views on the internet. The use of this Soviet classic in 2018 demonstrates a parallel as yet unacknowledged between the political use of music under Putinism and Stalinism, and shows that a nostalgic connection to the victory of the Great Patriotic War is still powerful tool in Putin's Russia. Moreover, the use of the theme demonstrates how Prokofiev's music continues to shape––and itself be shaped by––Russian musical identity.

From the first days of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, twenty-two Leningrad cameramen filmed life in Leningrad and at the front. Their images became the basis for the 1942 Soviet documentary film Leningrad in Battle. The final version of the documentary was highly sanitized: instead of documenting the extraordinary, inhuman conditions in the besieged city, it presented a propagandistic narrative of heroic resistance meant for both local and foreign consumption. 


Dmitriy Astradantsev provided the music for the otherwise silent film by compiling excerpts from Russian classics. A near absence of contemporary Soviet music signals that the constructors of the siege narrative had no intention of engaging with the real soundscape of the city. The everyday sounds of besieged Leningrad, which ranged from deadly silence to earsplitting explosions, from the monotonous ticking of the siege metronome to cheerful operetta tunes broadcast through the one-channel radios mandatory in every Leningrad apartment, stood in stark contrast to the heroic sound-track of the film with which the authorities tried to block out reality. Like Dmitri Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony, which was turned into the sonic emblem of the siege, Leningrad in Battle served to overwrite the actual soundscape of the starving city. 


Using archival material related to the creation of Leningrad in Battle, I show the mechanism of shaping the heroic narrative about Leningrad's defense. Based on diaries written in the besieged city and Polina Barskova's and Alexis Peri's siege studies, I reconstruct the real sound of the siege, exploring how the constructed sound of Russia in war managed to cross seemingly impenetrable borders while the actual sounds of the siege remained hermetically sealed, first in the besieged city and then in survivors' memories. By showing state-imposed music for what it was-incidental music that was supposed to control the narrative of the siege-I intend to crack the heroic veneer of the official siege narrative, which turned dystrophic, half-dead people into heroic defenders of the city of Lenin.