ARTHUR BERGER
575
On the linguistic level there was the strong but ill-conceived tendency
to equate the word "progressive" in politics and the word "progressive"
in art-a misconception, incidentally, that the
Partisan Review
group
strongly rejected. This misguided view totally ignored the likelihood that
a progressive society might demand a more derivative, backward-look–
ing art that is accessible to the masses. In Germany, for example, some
painters operating under the slogan
Neue Sachlichkeit
(New Objectivity)
shortly after the October Revolution made claims of having distorted
reality to point out social despair and a revolutionary political message.
Judith Tick, in her book
Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for
American Music,
writes of her subject's passionate activism as well as
that of her composer husband Charles Seeger's around
1930.
It
seems
that in a setting of some
ricercari
in her usual complex idiom, as Tick
relates it, "by creating such profound opposition between voice and
piano-at one point Charles Seeger claimed they need only begin and
end together-Crawford embodied class conflict into the music itself."
The debates at the politically radical arts groups were not all confined
to sophistry such as this. There was, among other things, the legitimate
issue of whether it was required to "write down" to what nowadays we
call the "dumbed-down" audience, or whether the goal was to elevate
that audience intellectually and in its tastes. But things were
to
change.
As the decade advanced it was no longer to be a matter of argument.
For worker songs, the model was to be simple traditional folk-like
accompaniments, and for orchestral music, though this was not offi–
cially spelled out, composers were to keep someone like T chaikovsky in
mind despite his personal bourgeois leanings. Even Dmitri Shostakovich
found himself in trouble. After playing for two years to enthusiastic
sold-out houses, in January
1936
his opera
Lady Macbeth of Mzensk
was the subject of a scurrilous attack in
Pravda,
the official organ of the
Soviet government. Shostakovich was scolded for his "formalism," the
severest censure that any composer could get in the USSR and one that
could mean almost anything: in this case, probably his dissonance
(indeed "cacophony"), "musical chaos," "bourgeois" vulgarity (the
salacious plot, including fornication), and so on and so on. It was also
the year of the Moscow Trials in which the government claimed there
was a conspiracy involving some fifty leading officials and it conse–
quently bore down more than ever on the personal freedom of the citi–
zenry.
It
took about two years for the ban on Shostakovich's music to
be lifted and for him to come back into favor, but he never recovered
from the sense of intimidation, of being a hunted man, that came from
the direction of authority watching over his shoulder.
