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1948
             
The year 1948 was one of the most dismal periods in the entire history of Russian music…
In January the Communist party leaders invited the country's leading musicians to three days of official thrashing of the so-called "formalists". The ignorant communist bigwigs accused the country's foremost composers Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofyev, Nikolai Myaskovsky and Aram Khachaturian of writing music that was not understandable enough to the people. The Communist party was trying hard to get everyone thinking along the same lines and so anything that was in any way different from the official line was immediately declared as "alien".
On February 10th the Central Committee issued a special decree lambasting Vano Muradeli's Great Friendship opera. The mediocre and eclectic composition, however, was merely a pretext for a major crackdown aimed against the members of the much-criticized group of the so-called "formalists" led by Dmitry Shostakovich...
A series of meetings were held between February 17 and 26 discussing the notorious decree. The main such gathering was in the Big Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, packed to capacity by unwilling first-year students to famed professors. Shostakovish was sitting there all alone because no one dared to sit next to the man who had fallen from grace. Each speaker, including avowed friends, tried to be as scathingly critical as he possibly could.
"They say that people in the West call his symphonies the work of a genius!" thundered composer Vladimir Zakharov, the author of pseudo-folk-based patriotic songs. "But who exactly are these people? Besides the reactionaries, bandits and imperialists, there are many ordinary people living abroad. Do you think they like these symphonies? Of course they don't; You can take my word for that!"
Composer Mariam Koval fully echoed his colleague:
"Look what a dwarf Shostakovich has made of himself amid our great victorious days! One is tempted to ask what he was really after in his Ninth Symphony replacing the image of the victorious Soviet man with that of a carefree Yank happily humming a stupid tune?!"
Shostakovich was overly self critical apparently trying to make every one believe that his whole life was one big chain of mistakes and failures. Sergei Prokofyev was equally self-lambasting just as Aram Khachaturian who admitted to allegedly having "lost contact with his people". It was not enough for the executioners, though, and they continued the thrashing during the First Congress of the Soviet Composers where the speakers spent a whole week stigmatizing what they said were 'formalists gone too far. '
Just as might have been expected, meetings were held all across the nation where workers, academics and collective farmers poured scorn on the formalist composers. Only a handful of them realized what was going or and even less had actually heard the music they were so unanimously criticizing, but, back in those days, it was the only way to go...
In August, the Committee on Arts issued a directive firing the country's best musicians teaching at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories on grounds of professional inadequacy. The young musicians could no longer study with the greats...
Meanwhile, Dmitry Shostakovich was writing his Violin Concerto. On March 12 he invited some of his friends to come over and played it on the piano because he didn't dare to show it to any of his violin-playing colleagues for fear of getting them in trouble. Playing the new work in public was a mission impossible because there was an unwritten order banning the performance of his main works. It was only in 1955 that the Violin Concerto was finally played in public...
In 1948 Tikhon Khrennikov was elected or, rather, appointed head of the Soviet Composers' Union - a post he held for a staggering 43 years always toeing the party line and stifling dissent. Since the fall of communism he has never tired of saying that not a single composer was sent out to the Gulag durig his tenure...
Another condemned "formalist: the clever and very talented composer Vissanon Shebalin, was forced to give up his rectorship of the Moscow Conservatory. He was replaced by the choirmaster Alexander Sveshnikov who for 26 long years was going out of his way stamping out anything he deemed inconsistent with the party line. Thanks to his effort, the conservatory students remained blissfully unaware of such great 20th century composers as lgor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger and others. Anyone caught listening to "unadvisable" music was immediately thrown out of the conservatory.
On April 1 they were marking the 75th birthday of Sergei Rakhmaninoff, the great Russian composer who emigrated to the West shortly after the 1917 revolution. Only recently his music and his very name were taboo, but the ban was now gone and Alexander Gauk offered the Moscow concertgoers a nice surprise conducting Rakhmaninoff's First Symphony.
The First Symphony had never been played since Rakhmaninoff burned the score following its St.Petersburg failure in 1897. Working with what had accidentally remained of the original score, Alexander Gauk breathed new life into Rakhmaninoff's music, and the second premiere made an absolutely unforgettable impression on the listeners. It was such a pity that the composer never lived to see the success of his First Symphony...
Nikolai Golovanov was appointed chief conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre . A strikingly gifted musician and a great connoisseur of Russian music, Golovanov teamed up with artistic director Leonid Baratov and set designer Fyodor Fyodorovsky, to produce Boris Godunov to music by Modest Mussorgsky, a really one-of-a-kind opera which is still being played today. The Bolshoi company has taken this modern-day classic all around the world sending appreciative audiences on their feet in Milan, London, Tokyo and New York...
During the first night performance, Boris Godunov's part was sung by Alexander Pirogov.
The Bolshoi's production of Boris Godunov won the much-coveted Stalin Prize.
The year 1948 offered no premiers worth mentioning. Russia's greatest composers had effectively been silenced and songs were now emerging as one of the best-loved musical genre there was... Happily enough, Russia has never been short of talented songwriters and, before long, the whole country was singing this lyrical song written by Yuri Milyutin...
Radio listeners across the nation were also taking heart in an equally wonderful song by Boris Mokroussov called The Lone Accordion.
Cinemagoers lined up to see Grigory Alexandrov's hilarious sitcom of mistaken identities called Springtime and set to music written by Isaak Dunayevsky. The hugely popular Lyubov Orlova appeared simultaneously as the director of the Institute of the Sun and also as an actress preparing to impersonate her in film. Beautiful, very likeable and a good dancer, Orlova was working miracles on screen and, as she always did, was singing songs, this time about spring that makes our hearts beat faster...
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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