The music of the former Soviet Union is a topic of many a heated argument: What composers were true communists; who merely pretended to be? How much of the music contains a hidden agenda? Should we always listen to Soviet music in the context of Socialist ideology? How is the truth ultimately uncovered, since it was altered in so many ways during the Soviet regime? Sources consulted while researching the topic give multiple answers to even the most straightforward questions. The notes here include some historical information, but are mostly my own conclusions and opinions on the subject.

The Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia in the 1917 October Revolution. The Bolshevik's believed in the socialist-communist ideology introduced by Karl Marx some fifty years earlier. Marx supported the rights of the working class; he thought the organization of the society should offer all people equal rights, regardless of the position or wealth they were born to. To insure this, the production and property in Russia was shared by all the people, and ownership was centralized and supervised by the Party. After the revolution, the Bolshevik Party changed it's name to the Russian Communist Party. Lenin, the leader of the revolution, became its first General Secretary.

The purpose of the simultaneous Cultural Revolution was to bring art closer to the people; therefore, art needed to be wholesome and uplifting in order to reinforce the ideals of the new government and the Party. Lenin believed that "artistic chaos can not ferment as it chooses," however, he also understood that some freedom was necessary to make the creative process possible. In the new union, musical life was relatively comfortable and free. However, this was not to last for long, as Lenin died and was succeeded by Stalin.

Stalin was elected the General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. Lenin had believed that the success of his revolution depended on the power of other, inevitable revolutions in Europe. By contrast, the foundation of Stalin's political theory rested upon complete isolation.

The "Union of Soviet Composers" was formed in 1932. It was the party-approved association of composers that supervised all musical works written in the Soviet Union. At the same time, a resolution was passed that stated "from hence on, music should have a socialist content: music is not purely aesthetic, it is also ideological." In order to support the idea of music as the tool for molding the minds of people, Maxim Gorki came up with the term "Socialist Realism." The word "Realism", here, has very little to do with actual reality. Rather, it is the modified reality of what the party believed in - the "socialist" reality. The goal of Socialist Realist art was to be uplifting, uphold the values of the Communist Party, and always end happy to encourage positive feelings in people. Anything pessimistic was considered "bourgeois degeneracy" and, therefore, hurtful for the listeners. From it's inception in 1932 until the perestroika and fall of the USSR, it was the Soviet Composers Union that decided what music followed these guidelines closely enough to be deserving of people's attention and worthy of performance.

During the Second World War, the control of music was less strict. Even some atonality was allowed, however, only when it depicted the evil enemy. The guidelines were revised thoroughly in 1948. Many composers were accused of formalism (the evil opposite of the good socialist realism) and declared non-ideological, anti-party, and dangerously cosmopolitan. A list of works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and many others was announced "unworthy of performance." Comrad Khrennikov, the General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, said, "The present musical art of Western Europe and America reflects the general morass and the spiritual abyss of the bourgeois culture." This increasingly strict control continued until 1953, when Stalin died. "Khrushchev's thaw" between 1956 and 1964 made the concept of Socialist Realism broader, and the party reinstated the repertory it had denied in 1948. The ideology was re-evaluated again in 1965 and with Brezhnev in power, stayed stagnant for the next twenty-seven years.

Any artistic life under the constrictions of the Soviet regime must have been horrifying &endash; an existence limited to one ideology and one opinion. Moreover, this concept was not constant but kept changing. In an interview with John Stratford and John Riley, Vladimir Ashkenazy sheds some light into what it was like to live in the Soviet Union

"---With the constant brainwashing of the propaganda in the Soviet Union it would have been difficult to remain sane for the sanest of people. ---you can become a schizophrenic---in the sense that you try to retain you inner world somehow and yet in public, in your daily work and relationships with other people, you have to be someone else."

All three composers in tonight's program had a unique relationship with the Communist party. Shostakovich, of course, is the most famous. His relationship with the party was complex and he lived in constant fear of being persecuted. The Party resented Schnittke because he was too famous abroad, too avant-garde, and too individualistic for his own good. Kabalevsky, on the other hand, was always conscious of the political winds and had a very successful career as a composer, educator and writer on music. Both Shostakovich and Kabalevsky were excellent concert-pianists and at some point in their career made money by playing piano for silent films. All three, in fact, composed for the cinema.

Kabalevsky began composing out of necessity. His piano students did not have enough repertory to play and he felt compelled to compose something for them. He is, indeed, best known for his educational compositions. He also published many articles on music education in the Soviet Union. He was definitely a "politically correct" composer. He gave a speech in a conference at Interlochen, in which he attacked atonal and modernist music. He spoke of the importance of contemporary music in music education, excluding the avant-garde movement altogether. He said

. "some composers- stick to the extreme, so-called vanguard positions &endash; the composers charmed by the dogmas of dodecaphonic, aleatory, pointillist and other artificial systems and theories, which are called in to substitute for the tonal basis of music, as if the latter were obsolete and dead."

This strong statement would have satisfied the Party.

The Cello Sonata was composed in 1962. The key of the piece is B-flat Major/ Minor. It could be called a modal mixture, since it is using both major and minor modes of the same key. The Socialist Realist composers liked to experiment as far as they could within the boundaries set by the party. Typically, Socialist Realist music does not abandon tonality or traditional forms, but expands them. The Cello Sonata does confirm to these rules: The forms are traditional (Sonata-Allegro, Rondo), yet very large. Kabalevsky also experiments with tone colors. The second movement is played with the mute throughout and for a time "sul ponticello" (played on the bridge). The piece ends with a marking ppppp (piano pianississississimo, VERY quietly).

The origins of the Schnittke Family are intriguing. Alfred Schnittke's father, Harry, was a German born Jew of Latvian descent and his mother, Maria, was a Volga-German, who grew up in the German part of Russia. They both spoke German, which was also Schnittke's mother tongue. Schnittke spent part of his childhood in Vienna, Austria, and later said this had an extremely important influence on his music. Perhaps as a result of his poly-cultural roots, he is, indeed, known as the creator of "polystylism".

In the beginning of his career as a composer, Schnittke was eager to make his humanitarian mark in the musical life of the Soviet Union. After graduation from the Moscow Conservatoire he became a member of the Composers Union and wrote officially accepted music such as "The Eleventh Command," an opera based on a story about the American pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and later regretted it bitterly. Another opera, "The African Ballad" finally caused the break-up between Schnittke and the Union: Schnittke refused to change his experimental musical language to confirm to the ideological plot. He remained on the blacklist of the Union until the mid-1980's.

The Composer's Union had many tools at their disposal for making life difficult for officially unaccepted composers. Schnittke was never allowed to travel abroad. The scores and invitations, which were always sent through the Union, usually got lost in the mail. He did not receive any commissions and most of his works were premiered in the provinces far from Moscow. Luckily, he made the acquaintance of some people in the movie industry. Since the Composer's Union did not evaluate film scores, composers felt more relaxed and freer to experiment when writing music for the movies. After his first film in 1962, Schnittke wrote over sixty movie scores.

The Cello Sonata was composed in 1978. In the 70's, after a decade of experimentation with explicit extra-musicality and serialism, Schnittke's compositional style changed toward a more homogenous and introverted polystylism. Polystylism is, like collage, a mixture of different styles within one piece of music. The works from this time have a hidden meaning, a "velvet-surface", that indicates a depth behind the exterior. The stylistic and formal quotations imply a connection to the early Christian traditions. The Sonata is permeated by the variations of the B-A-C-H motive, which to Bach himself signified the cross. Other stylistic elements include a macabre waltz (second mvt.), the sarabande bass ( ) and plain chant (third mvt.). The very low C-pedal in the cello part reminds me of the many ominous pedal-notes in the string quartets of Shostakovich.

Shostakovich is one of my favorite composers. His music is sincere, powerful and expressive, sometimes satirical, bleak, grotesque, humorous, and at other times, intensely unhappy. He must be one of the most controversial composers of the Twentieth century. Was he, or was he not an ideological Communist? The party attacked and publicly humiliated him twice. In 1936, the opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was declared "chaos instead of music" in the Pravda newspaper. This was the first incident in which the 1932 Policy was publicly enforced. Shostakovich was also one of the leading composers on the 1948 list of anti-revolutionary composers. As a consequence, he had to compose two kinds of music: one kind for himself, the other for the public.

The Second Piano Trio was written in 1944. Shostakovich dedicated it to the memory of his good friend of eighteen years, I.I.Sollertinsky. According to Eric Roseberry, Sollertinsky was "one of the most brilliant scholar-musicians to have emerged since the revolution." He died in February 1944, in the evacuation of the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1946, Shostakovich said of Sollertinsky:

Sollertinsky was a clear and perfect example of a humanist artist, a scholar with great understanding in the sphere of the history of arts, literature, philosophy and general history, a great music teacher and a clear thinker---.

During the Second World War, the Russians did not receive much information about the progress of the war in Europe. The Nazi genocide policy, for example, was concealed from them. Only when the Soviet army arrived at the concentration camp in Treblinka, did the public learn about the horrors of the holocaust. Furthermore, Stalin's anti-Semitism was beginning to show in the official opinion. The new term, "Rootless Cosmopolit", that had appeared in the papers, was interpreted by the people as meaning "Jew". Shostakovich protested the treatment of the Jews with the use of a Jewish melody in the fourth movement of the Second Piano Trio. He later used the same theme in his eight String Quartet. The gruesome dance, of the Second Piano Trio, has been described as portraying Jews forced to dance on their own graves by the Nazis.

Shostakovich himself and two members of the Beethoven String Quartet premiered the Second Piano Trio in 1944. After the fourth movement, the audience was openly weeping. The Jewish part had to be played again, as an encore. The piece was banned after the first performance though it was later reinstated. According to the revised official program of the Trio, it protested only the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. Its bleakness was a portrait of the enemy, a grotesque caricature of the Germans.