As part of my current study of the Shostakovich Eighth Symphony, I’ve been delving into those pivotal years 1936 – 1945, the time of some of Shostakovich’s greatest triumphs (5th and 7th Symphonies) as well as some of his most bitter difficulties. In that capacity, I’ve finally read the full text of the infamous editorial "Muddle Instead of Music", which appeared in Pravda on January 28, 1936, shortly after Stalin had attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
The actual author of "Muddle" has never been identified beyond the shadow of a doubt. The prime candidates are Platon Kerzhentsev, a Soviet functionary and writer on the arts; David Iosevich Zaslavskii, a Pravda staffer; Andrey Andreyevich Zhdanov, Leningrad party secretary (successor to Kirov); Viktor Gorodinskii, head of the Central Committee’s music section. And there is one more candidate—Josef Stalin himself.
I’ve been intrigued by the selectivity shown in the many quotations found in the Shostakovich literature. To be sure, "Muddle" is a fairly long article, but that is to my mind little reason to refrain from quoting it in full. You really can’t get the full flavor in just a few sentences. Because the entire article is so rarely reproduced, I’d like to offer it here, as it appears in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, by M.F. Platt and David Brandenberger, published by University of Wisconsin Press.
A number of theaters have offered Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District to the culturally maturing Soviet public, presenting it as a novelty and as an artistic achievement. Overly deferential music critics have praised this opera to the skies, granting it extraordinary fame. Thus, in place of serious, professional criticism that could aid a young composer in his future work, he has heard nothing but compliments.
From the first minute of the opera, the listener is flabbergasted by an intentionally dissonant, confused stream of noise. Fragments of melody and the bare beginnings of musical phrases seem to submerge, then burst forth, then disappear again amidst crashes, scrapings and squeals. It is difficult to follow this “music” and impossible to commit it to memory.
And so it goes for practically the entire opera. Screaming takes the place of singing on stage. Whenever the composer happens to stumble upon a simple and comprehensible melody, he immediately—as if frightened by this unfortunate turn of events—plunges back into the debris of his musical muddle, which turns into a simple cacophony in places. The expressiveness demanded by listeners has been replaced by a maniacal rhythm. Musical noise is called upon to represent passion.
Yet this is not a result of the composer’s lack of talent or his inability to express simple, strong feelings in music. This is music that has been composed in an intentionally “inside-out” manner in order to have no resemblance to classical operatic music or symphonic tonality—the simple, commonly accessible language of music. This is music that has been composed in order to negate opera, just as “leftist” art in the theater generally negates simplicity, realism, the intelligibility of images and the natural intonations of words themselves. It transplants into opera and music the most flawed features of “Meyerholdism” in an exaggerated form. This is a leftist muddle in place of natural, human music. The ability of good music to captivate the masses has been sacrificed to petty bourgeois, formalist etudes in a vain attempt to achieve originality by means of cheap novelty. This is simply a nonsensical game—a game that can end very badly.
The danger of such a movement in Soviet music is clear. Leftist ugliness in music springs from the same source as leftist ugliness in painting, poetry, pedagogy and science. Petty bourgeois “innovation” leads to a break with genuine art, genuine science and genuine literature.
The composer of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District even turned to jazz for nervous, convulsive, epileptic music in order to endow his protagonists with “passion.”
At a time when our critics, music critics included, are hailing Socialist Realism, the stage has presented us with the most vulgar naturalism via Shostakovich’s opera. Everyone, both the merchants and the people, is presented in the same animalistic mode. A predatory merchant woman who has murderously clawed her way to wealth and power is presented as some kind of “victim” of bourgeois society. New meaning, which is absent from Leskov’s tale of daily life, has been foisted upon the story.
And it’s all just coarse, primitive and vulgar. The music wheezes, hoots, puffs and pants in order to depict love scenes with a maximum of naturalism. “Love” is smeared over the entire opera in the most vulgar manner. The merchant’s double bed takes center stage in the set. It is here where all “problems” are resolved. Death from poisoning and whipping are shown in this same coarsely naturalistic style on stage—virtually in front of our very eyes.
Apparently, the composer did not take the trouble to consider what the Soviet audience is looking for and expecting in music. It’s as if he intentionally encoded his music and confused all of its resonances, in order to appeal to only those aesthete formalists who have lost a healthy sense of taste. He has overlooked the demands of Soviet culture that have expunged barbarity from all aspects of Soviet life. Certain critics have called this tribute to merchant lasciviousness a satire. But there can be no serious discussion of satire here. The composer merely tried to use all the means at his disposal in order to win public sympathy for the coarse and vulgar aspirations of the merchant woman Katerina Izmailova.
Lady Macbeth enjoys success among the bourgeois public abroad. Could it be that the bourgeois public praises this opera precisely because it is so confused and absolutely apolitical? Could it be that it tickles the bourgeois audience’s perverted tastes with its convulsive, clamorous, neurasthenic music?
Our theaters have expended no small effort in order to stage Shostakovich’s opera. The actors have exhibited significant talent in overcoming the noise, clamor, and squealing of the orchestra. They have attempted to compensate for the opera’s melodic poverty. Unfortunately, this has rendered the coarsely naturalistic features of the work even more apparent. Their talented acting deserves our recognition, yet their wasted efforts deserve only our pity."
How tiresomely familiar this all is! Consider the flap about the NEA and its grants, as Jesse Helms et al. took umbrage at the works being funded and sought to eradicate the NEA altogether. (Whether the U.S. government should be involved in any arts funding is a subject for a future article.) But I’m even more struck by certain passages: "The popular masses want good songs, but they also want good instrumental compositions and good operas.", and " “Love” is smeared over the entire opera in the most vulgar manner. The merchant’s double bed takes center stage in the set. It is here where all “problems” are resolved. Death from poisoning and whipping are shown in this same coarsely naturalistic style on stage—virtually in front of our very eyes."
It reads like Pat Robertson or Jesse Helms, to be sure. But it sounds even more like the following:
Note: It has often been argued that art itself is unmoral, neither good nor bad. This is true of the THING which is music, painting, poetry, etc. But the THING is the PRODUCT of some person’s mind, and the intention of that mind was either good or bad morally when it produced the thing. Besides, the thing has its EFFECT upon those who come into contact with it. In both these ways, that is, as a product of a mind and as the cause of definite effects, it has a deep moral significance and unmistakable moral quality."
It might have been lifted directly from Pravda. But it wasn’t: this is a passage from the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930—the document that provided the justification for tintype demagogues such as Will Hays to meddle in movies and impose his bleak Presbyterian notions of virtue on a nation. If you’ve ever seen the film of Hays addressing the audience about the Code, complete with Hitler-like arm gestures and the stuffed-shirt complacency of a smug twit who has been granted unwarranted authority, then you have also seen the attitudes present in "Muddle Instead of Music."
The only significant difference was that Stalin could have Shostakovich arrested, killed, or shipped off to Siberia, and Will Hays couldn’t extend the same courtesy to the authors of, say, Baby Face. But I’ll just bet that Mr. Hays—Presbyterian deacon from a small Midwestern town, political manager for Warren Harding’s presidential campaign, head of the "Hays Office" that enforced rigid standards of ‘decency’ on American films—would have delighted in seeing naughty filmmakers and writers rounded up and carted off to some gulag archipelago deep in the northern forests. Hays was first and foremost a politician and understood that the Production Code wasn’t about censorship, per se, but about regulation, i.e., a political act designed to smooth over relations between the movie studios and church groups with their powerful lobbyists. Hayes was hired by the studios themselves, after all.
And regulation is also the message of "Muddle Instead of Music"—your art, Mr. Shostakovich, is bringing up stuff we don’t want the common people to think about. We need to keep them happy, after all—the "demands of Soviet culture that have expunged barbarity from all aspects of Soviet life." That’s Will Hays talking as well: in 1929 he opened a four-day conference to which "…the leading social, religious, civic, and educational forces" had been invited "to tell us what we can do to give you good motion pictures."
Well, we got those "good" motion pictures, didn’t we? Except that nothing really changed; euphemism replaced statement, but characters and plots remained the same. Any doubt that Rick & Ilsa’s former relationship in Paris was sexual? The Casablanca screenwriters were forbidden to make it explicit. That Sidney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon is an old queen with a taste for rough trade? Screenwriters and filmmakers became masters of indirection and suggestion; finding loopholes in the Code amounted to an industry-wide hobby.
And the Soviets? Instead of a Shostakovich remaining free to write as his talent dictated (Lady Macbeth is a clear forerunner of both Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, to my ears), they got a Shostakovich who wrote in cryptic code, a composer who became a past master at the Janus face.
For the full text of the Motion Production Code of 1930: http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html.