Klepto Cinéastes and Fighting Yesterday's Cold War

Not until last Friday morning, shortly before going to my cycling class, did I remember that Peggy Noonan still existed. She churns out things for the Wall Street Journal, but somehow I’ve missed all these in my occasional glances at their website until a few days ago. One forgotten corpse just as improbably dug up another: Her latest op-ed exhumed Rex Reed, who died last week.

To me the late film critic was two things. He was, firstly, the generator of catchy blurbs printed on the VHS covers of the most execrable films you can imagine, excelling in a profession where he seemed rivaled only by Jim Svejda (whose musical acumen, thankfully, permits one to forgive him his transgressions against le cinéma). Secondly, and perhaps more relevant to my interests, Reed was the film critic who in February 2000 got caught shoplifting CDs from a Tower Records store in Manhattan. Among others, he apparently tried to boost discs of Mel Tormé’s California Suite and Peggy Lee’s Songs from Pete Kelly's Blues. (The latter was apparently so flattered that she sent Reed her entire discography. Which tempted me at the time to try my luck with some Leonard Bernstein CDs. Maybe his estate would’ve rewarded me with a free copy of one of his Mahler cycles.) At the time Reed said his episode was the product of a “senior moment.” He also criticized his treatment by Tower Records loss prevention staff, whom he likened to Beavis and Butthead, in a reference as witty as it was doomed to obscurity. (Imagine if Pauline Kael got arrested in the 1960s for stealing LP reissues of Rudy Valleé and Annette Hanshaw, then upbraided store staff with an I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster reference.)

Reed disappeared for me after that, but thanks to Noonan I discovered that he was still working right up until his death. Speaking of Lenny, Reed wrote about the Bradley Cooper biopic-cum-soap opera Maestro that it was “the closest thing to perfection” he had seen in “a very long time.” I guess that he didn’t get out much in his last years. Whatever the case, Serge Daney this guy was not.

Noonan mentioned little that was substantive about Reed in her op-ed, which soon forgot him entirely after a few paragraphs. Instead it devolved into a spirited, if quixotic lambasting of the Soviet Union, a state now defunct for nearly 40 years. Likewise, my post will also cast Reed aside, in order to give a spirited, if quixotic lambasting of Noonan, who if not defunct, has been nearly as irrelevant as the professional Kremlinologists her boss helped to make permanently unemployed.

At any rate, she brought up something that caught my attention:

State socialism has always been constrictive, heavy, static. It has trouble creating anything, it isn’t fizzy and alive. What it does is allocate. But allocators always and inevitably favor their own interests and networks. In the Soviet Union the governing class, those who held the party posts — there’s always someone in power, in every system — tended to be mediocre and hackish at best, utterly corrupt at worst. Their system didn’t work and couldn’t grow, and the geniuses were denied a stage.

It is beyond the scope of my interests to defend or criticize any economic system. (Although considering that there are armies of scribes like Noonan who are paid by the powerful to shill for their pet ideologies, I’m wondering whether musical criticism was the right choice of career to follow after all.) Her argument, nonetheless, merits some discussion.

Whatever the very real and terrible faults of the Soviet Union, it was perplexingly also about as rich in artistic creation as any Western country of its time. This was as true at its inception in 1917 as it was when the Red Banner was lowered for the final time at the Kremlin in 1991. Noonan’s observation that the mediocre tend to rule over the talented isn’t restricted to the Soviet Union. Michelangelo, who lived in post-medieval Italy half a millennium ago, wrote a sonnet on that very topic (which was later beautifully set by Shostakovich). Yet, as a brief look at the USSR Union of Composers demonstrates, even Soviet mediocrities tried to foster an atmosphere that rewarded more than just toadies.

Tikhon Khrennikov was already a respected composer by the time he established himself at the vanguard of the Zhdanovshchina of the late 1940s. In doing so, he had to walk a fine line between artistic considerations, dictates from above, and his own conscience. Khrennikov undoubtedly hectored Prokofiev into a stroke, but he also was a bulwark against the pernicious anti-Semitism of the late Stalinist period, for which he was anonymously denounced by several members of the Union of Composers. His defense wasn’t entirely successful, as the arrest of Mieczysław Weinberg in early 1953 proves. Even in that case, Khrennikov appeared to have attempted making amends by permitting Weinberg to resume work after his release, promoting his music during his “stellar years,” and vigorously lobbying the Politburo to permit a staging of the opera The Passenger.

In later years Khrennikov presided over a period of great prosperity and even a degree of artistic plurality for the Union. Shostakovich’s late music would’ve been unthinkable had it not been so. Even Khrennikov dabbled in twelve-tone play. Far from keeping its geniuses from the front ranks, he also ensured they were featured prominently, all the better to foster goodwill for Soviet culture domestically and abroad.

Not everyone was happy. Georgy Sviridov privately complained that Khrennikov’s system benefited the older and established over the young and unknown. Not that the former’s privileges were cost-free. With increased privileges came increased responsibilities, leading to the dramatic dwindling in output from Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, and Khrennikov himself, to name a few. And some of those in the latter category eventually ventured so far artistically that indeed they were marginalized, then suppressed by the Union. (Which only reinforced their taboo appeal, while it diminished the relevancy of the Union.)

During the span of its existence, the USSR Union of Composers, as well as its affiliate unions in the individual Soviet republics, fostered the careers of established figures, as well as those whose careers were still on the rise. To members it provided a wide range of support and resources that were (and still are) beyond the reach of the average Western composer in the West. Members, however, were expected to concede, especially on matters of ideology and public service. Those that didn’t — like Andrei Volkonsky and Alexander Lokshin, the latter of whom was denied professional opportunities and even the basic tools to compose — paid a steep price. For most Soviet composers, the alternatives were possibly worse. Weinberg, for example, could dedicate himself entirely to composition, without need of teaching. The Union provided work, an extensive network of retreats in picturesque regions, healthcare, and most importantly a guaranteed income. When these all vanished after the fall of the Soviet Union, composers like Weinberg, whose life was certainly cut short by the sudden withdrawal of state healthcare, suffered tremendously. Even former renegades like Denisov were left scratching their heads over whether the transition from one way of life to another had been ultimately worthwhile.

When the Soviet Union was teetering, Gorbachev petitioned the Gipper for a $4 billion loan to save his country, arguing that its collapse would prove to be worse for the world in the long run. Whether or not Gorby was right about that, it is undeniable that a dozen wars and dozens of other conflicts and skirmishes have occurred in post-Soviet countries since 1991. The most serious of them, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides, and has cost the United States alone approximately $190 billion. (That doesn’t include indirect costs borne by the average person through increases on the prices of fuels, essential food staples, overall inflation, etc., not to mention other kinds of unintended blowback.)

I suspect that Noonan, who was one of Reagan’s speechwriters, is neither aware of all that nor cares to be. Factual accuracy is certainly not a concern of hers. I don’t blame her. If my job was to produce slanted blather on demand for the Wall Street Journal, I also wouldn’t want to jeopardize an easy source of revenue. Being “mediocre and hackish at best” has its benefits.

Weinberg: Post-National Patriot

Prompted by my recent readings of Mieczysław Weinberg: Between East and West, I returned earlier this evening to his opera, The Passenger. Amidst the digital piles in one of my hard drives, there was a recording of the opera conducted by Mirga Gražintė-Tyla, issued last year by Deutsche Grammophon, that suddenly came to my recollection. (I had downloaded it, but somehow never got around to hearing it.)

As with all great operas, there are multiple layers of expression and meaning in Weinberg’s The Passenger, some intended, some not. Aside from its central theme, the traumas of the Holocaust, Weinberg’s opera also seemed to grapple with some of the frictive consequences of globalization. Not for nothing did the 20th century spawn two world wars (and a third if we count the First Cold War). Technology in the last century brought us closer together, occasionally uncomfortably so: distance sometimes really does make the heart grow fonder. Various languages overlap and sometimes interrupt each other throughout The Passenger; they reinforce not only the cultural, ideological, and national conflicts that produced the atrocities around which the opera is based, but imply still unknown, future horrors to come. It’s not so much that “we’re all in this together”, to borrow a pandemic-era mass media slogan, as it is every man for himself.

So what a surprise to be reminded that the interlingual discord in The Passenger was neither the making of Weinberg nor his librettist, Alexander Medvedev — this opera was meant to be sung in Russian. This wasn’t clear in Deutsche Grammophon’s recording; a digital-only release, it confoundingly does not include a libretto, liner notes, or even a track list. (My memory is fuzzy, but I don’t remember whether or not this subject is addressed in the booklet for Roland Kluttig’s recording.) A few key strokes on my computer eventually led me to learn that the multilingual version of the libretto was an adaptation for the 2010 performance in Bregenz.

Earlier this week, my copy of the latest issue of the DSCH Journal arrived in the mail. One of its recurring topics was the collateral damage the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has inflicted on international research into Shostakovich and 20th-century Soviet Russian music in general. Weinberg, who inhabits an even more delicate nodal point in this yawning civilizational fault line, is also one of its casualties, which is intimated in some recent trends I’ve noticed.

One of them is a noticeable attempt from some quarters to de-Russify Weinberg and his music, or to at least put some air between him and his now problematic adopted country.

David Fanning and Michelle Assay, in their foreword to the aforementioned Weinberg book, point out that the 2010 adaptation the libretto for The Passenger cut most mentions of Russian prisoners at Auschwitz “on the tenuous grounds that they reflect the pressures of Soviet cultural mores on the composer and his librettist”. (Restoration of these passages is unlikely post-2022.)

A few years before the war, Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, described Weinberg as “Polish-Jewish”, only mentioning the Soviet Union in passing as an impediment to the “full expression of his identity”, and bypassing any mention of Russia altogether. Another essay, on the Atlanta Symphony’s website, the third hit in a search for the composer, comes to an interesting conclusion:

By all accounts Weinberg was a modest and generous man, somewhat removed from the Soviet mainstream – he never joined the Communist Party — and with his heavily accented Russian destined to remain, at least in part, an émigré. Shortly before his death in 1996, dispirited by Russia's disregard for him and weakened by a long battle with Crohn's disease, Weinberg converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.

I’m not sure about his party affiliation. Rostropovich insinuated otherwise in Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, labeling Weinberg a party “insider”. (I’ll mention as an aside that his friend and colleague, Georgy Sviridov, who in Western academic discourse is often dismissed as a party hack or a third-rate oddity, was in actuality never a member of the CPSU and was, at least in private, skeptical of its ideals.) 

So if Weinberg was dispirited by how Russia treated him, then why would he convert to its church? And if the Soviet Union inhibited Weinberg personally and professionally, why did it promote his music, at least domestically? Why did he, in turn, compose quite a few works in praise of his adopted homeland, even as late as the glasnost period, not all of which appear to have been in response to official requests?

Alexander Tchaikovsky has noted that Weinberg was a lifelong “patriot” and believer in the Soviet way of life; this is confirmed in his mid-1990s interview with Manashir Yakubov. Weinberg, as it turns out, was not only a genuine Soviet artist — his second homeland was officially multi-ethnic — but also to an extent a post-national one. Polish by birth, Jewish by heritage, Russian by choice, his personal convictions and fluid trans-national identity discomfit those who prefer art that knows its place as easily commodified fodder for propaganda. “Poland is my homeland”, Weinberg once said, “but my second homeland remains Russia”. Caught between fences and international grudge matches in which he had no say, he is a man as much of our time as he was of his.

"A talent second only to Shostakovich"

Last Saturday, my copy of Mieczysław Weinberg: Between East and West arrived and it has scarcely left my grasp since.

While on my second reading of the book, I took notice of a detail that escaped my previous reading of Tommy Persson’s essay, “Meeting and Promoting Weinberg”. Namely, that in 1990 he petitioned Rudolf Barshai to conduct some of Weinberg’s music in future Gothenburg Symphony concerts. The conductor never replied.

Considering that Barshai and Weinberg had been friends back in the Soviet Union, the conductor’s slight seems especially hurtful. Or had he forgotten his old friend after all?

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how Barshai in 1984 had declared his intention to introduce Canadian audiences to Weinberg’s music. (Which he was not able to do for reasons explained in that post.)

A month after that interview with the Canadian Press, an article by Ilya Gerol, a Russian émigré turned Canadian Kremlinologist, appeared in The Province that contained Barshai’s extensive reminiscences of Soviet life. According to the byline, the article was an excerpt from a forthcoming book. If it was ever published, I’ve not been able to find it. The most extensive recollection is devoted to a composer only referred to as “N”. Although it differs in a number of details, it’s unlikely that Barshai was referring to anyone else but Weinberg. (Perhaps he obscured certain things so as to stymie potential overseas informants.) The opera at the end of Barshai’s anecdote likely corresponds to Weinberg’s Pozdravlyayem!, which had been completed in 1975, two years before Barshai emigrated to Israel.

Below is the full text of this passage:

This story’s about a Soviet composer whose talent is second only to Shostakovich. We'll call him “N”, for reasons that will be clear as the story unfolds. He's still living in Moscow.

In 1952, Stalin had started a crackdown on the Jews in the Soviet Union.

Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison the Soviet leadership. Jewish writers, musicians, and actors were said to be the agents of the CIA and world Zionism. Jews in general were said to be responsible for food shortages and everything else that was bad.

“N” was too occupied with his music to notice this. He had just completed his symphony and Shostakovich had told him that its first performance would be the musical event of the century.

Late one night in 1953, “N” was arrested by the KGB and locked up in the Lubyanka prison. All the interrogators wanted him to do was sign a confession that he was a liaison officer between the CIA, MOSSAD, and Zionists in Moscow. He did not sign, because he thought it was all a misunderstanding. He explained to his interrogators that he didn't know what the word Zionist meant. And the names CIA and MOSSAD he learned first from his interrogators.

After two weeks of sleepless nights and endless interrogation, he was put naked in a cell full of hungry rats. He was put in the cell at midnight. At six o'clock in the morning he signed the confession. For the next two months he signed confession after confession describing his participation in a plot to overthrow the Soviet government and to make the USSR a colony of the United States and Israel.

Then, suddenly, everything stopped. No more interrogations. No more visits to the prosecutor's office in the middle of the night. No more learning by heart the role he had to play at the show trial coming up soon.

When a new interrogator one day offered “N” a comfortable seat in his office, “N’s” terror was greater than ever. What else were they going to do with him? But the interrogator told “N” that all the charges against him were to be dropped and that he had to sign a document stating that all his confessions were null and void. Then he would be free to go, with the apologies of the KGB.

But “N” remembered the rats too well. “I was a liaison officer between the CIA, MOSSAD, and the Zionists”, he insisted. “I plotted to overthrow the government”.

This went on for days, until the interrogator asked “N’s” wife to help. She sent her husband a note with only two words on it: “Stalin died”.

Then he signed the paper repudiating his confessions, was freed and received the official apologies. His rights and privileges were restored. He was free to compose and his compositions could be performed in public.

But he was never the same man. He was too frightened to talk to even close friends, rarely allowed his work to be performed and categorically forbade performances outside the USSR.

“Don't tell me about audiences and fame”, he once told Barshai, “You say fame and I see rats. That’s the difference between you and me”.

Just before he left the USSR, Barshai went to see “N”, who showed him a new folk opera he had composed, based on Jewish themes. “It's a work of genius”, Barshai told “N”. “Give it to me and I will see that it is performed in the West and it will be your masterpiece. I will say that you didn't give it to me and that I smuggled it out”.

“I would rather burn it”, replied “N”. “Better that it dies with me”.

He went to the window and saw the militiamen guarding the area reserved for composers, actors, and writers. He was looking at the militiamen, but he saw rats.