Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  If we were to focus on the idea of ‘time, embodied in sounds’ in 1937, we would inevitably have our attention taken up by three composers and three genres: Leonid Utesov, with his highly successful ‘dzhaz’ band; Isaak Dunaevskii, with his film music and popular songs, especially ‘Song of the Motherland’, which was to become the unofficial anthem of the Soviet Union; and Dmitri Shostakovich, with his Fifth Symphony.2

  Dzhaz (Utesov)

  At first glance, it seems strange that a lively debate should have taken place about jazz at the end of 1936 and between the two great show trials. Even more surprisingly, it took place in the authoritative newspapers, Izvestiia and Pravda. Leading cultural figures took part in it, and the fact that it ended when it did was the result of a direct intervention by Stalin himself. The issue at stake in this controversy was whether jazz was essentially a decadent, bourgeois phenomenon or whether such a thing as proletarian dzhaz could conceivably exist. Pravda had the final word – at least in this round. Its own pages had been filled with a passionate plea for a proletarian, Soviet dzhaz.3 The issue on which this controversy focused was anything but marginal. On the contrary, it was a highly topical subject, as can be seen from a glance at the events calendar of the Moscow newspapers. Leonid Utesov’s concerts were always completely sold out, as was his guest appearance in the Variety Theatre of the Central House of the Red Army in Moscow in July 1937. The reviewer considered that Utesov had given an impressive performance, rebutting the criticisms that it was not possible to produce an ambitious, ‘cultured’ programme of light music. He was said to have continually developed his music while others went on playing the same thing. His titles – ‘Grenada’, ‘Suliko’ and ‘Rodnaia’ – contained an entire spectrum, from the witty and the provocative to the lyrical. His ensemble was outstanding.

  Utesov himself had been an outstanding cabaret singer in the past, and he has also tried his hand at operetta, as well as studio theatre and the cinema. He has remained a noteworthy popular musician – jolly, full of life, intelligent. In variety theatre he has found a genre that suits his acting talent. Utesov’s musicians’ collective has followed the arduous path from tea-jazz to the music shop and from there to 4

  Figure 29.1 Leonid Utesov, Isaak Dunaevskii and Dmitri Shostakovich

  ‘If we were to focus on the idea of “time, embodied in sounds” in 1937, we would inevitably have our attention taken up by three composers and three genres: Leonid Utesov, with his highly successful ‘dzhaz’ band; Isaak Dunaevskii, with his film music and popular songs, especially the ‘Song of the Motherland’, which was to become the unofficial anthem of the Soviet Union; and Dmitri Shostakovich, with his Fifth Symphony.’

  the dzhaz orchestra and the full-blooded Soviet song for the masses with all its zest for life.

  That was not Utesov’s only public appearance and nor was the House of the Red Army the only venue where dzhaz was played. Dzhaz was on offer in all the large hotels and was not available just to foreigners. It was played on the bandstands in the large culture and rest parks and on public holidays – even in Red Square on 1 May or for the New Year gala in the Kremlin. There was theatre dzhaz, cinema dzhaz, extra-dzhaz and pleasure dzhaz. There were dzhaz ensembles in the provinces too, in Voronezh or Sverdlovsk. Dzhaz concerts were a feature of workingmen’s clubs and tractor factories. In Moscow dzhaz could be heard regularly in the Savoy Hotel, the National, the Olivier Garden of the Hermitage, the Metropol' Hotel and the Empire (later, the Budapest) restaurant. A correspondent of the New York Times reported in 1935:

  Figure 29.2 Performance by the dzhaz band The Jolly Cooks

  ‘Dzhaz was played on the bandstands in the large culture and rest parks and on public holidays – even in Red Square on 1 May or for the New Year gala in the Kremlin.’

  Each of the big hotels in Moscow has its own jazz band and dancing floor, presumably for the sake of foreigners and tourists. But many more Russians go there, especially on ‘Red Saturday,’ the night before their free day. Foreigners on these nights are decidedly in the minority.

  The orchestra of one Moscow hotel has an American Negro tap dancer who nightly brings down the house with dances which the Russians have never seen before ….

  Jazz music is staging a remarkable comeback in Soviet Russia after years of virtual prohibition. Visitors here looking for the grand, old Russian folk music of the balalaika and the guitar have to hunt far and wide. In cafes, restaurants and amusement parks they find orchestras playing their version of American jazz in response to popular demand.5

  Workers could listen to dzhaz and learn the foxtrot and the tango in the factory clubs. Diplomats from the US Embassy, such as George Kennan, himself an enthusiastic jazz guitarist, went to the Hotel Moskva in order to hear a famous dzhaz musician of this period – Iakov Skomorovskii. Dzhaz flourished, although there was a shortage of both sheet music and instruments – where were you supposed to find a saxophone! – and American jazz records were expensive rarities. Even so, Weintraub’s Syncopators came to Moscow and Leningrad in 1935 and Antonin Ziegler’s Jazz Revue from Prague played in the Metropol between midnight and 3 a.m., before returning to Czechoslovakia in November 1937. And, last but not least, dzhaz had its supporters in the upper echelons of power. Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence, was an admirer and patron of dzhaz and was said to be an enthusiastic dancer; the film mogul Boris Shumiatskii was a dzhaz fan, and even in the NKVD men such as Ivan Medved were avid collectors of dzhaz records.6

  Leonid Utesov came from a Jewish family in modest circumstances. In this respect he resembled Aleksandr Tsfasman, the other prominent dzhaz musician and the future conductor of AMA-Dzhaz, established in 1938. They brought their music from the south where they had been born – Utesov in Odessa and Tsfasman in Elisavetgrad – and developed their own Soviet sound. Utesov made a breathtaking career and was even said to have been ‘Russia’s richest man’.7 He was more than just a musician; he also understood what would come to be called performance art. He had worked in a circus troupe as an acrobat as well as in the provincial theatre and music hall. While abroad, he had even seen Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker. He succeeded in making the connection between American ‘negro music’ and Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian folk music. With the rip-roaring slapstick scenes of the musical film The Jolly Fellows (which premiered in December 1934), Utesov and his band became famous throughout the USSR. He was, ‘after Stalin, probably the best-known man in the Soviet Union. There was scarcely a classical artist in any field who could boast of a following equal to that of any one of Utyosov’s sidemen.’8

  Songs for the masses (Dunaevskii)

  The music for the film The Jolly Fellows was composed by Isaak Dunaevskii. Dunaevskii was born in 1900 into a relatively affluent family in eastern Ukraine, in the shtetl of Lokhvitsa in the Poltava Governate. As a boy he played Jewish folk melodies on an old clavichord. The family already owned a gramophone, and he was given a solid training in both piano and violin. He then went, via Khar'kov, where he was given a traditional education in composition, to Leningrad, where he came to know the entire spectrum of the new music theatre – music hall, film music, studio theatre, revue, variety, choirs. His biographer has summed up his life’s work as follows:

  Dunaevskii will go down in history as the founder of a typically ‘Soviet’ form of light music which takes up all previously existing models and ideas – from Russia but more often from the West – and who then moulds them into something different, a popular form of music with a characteristic ‘Soviet’ sound. A keen, critical engagement with foreign influences, the unhesitating adoption of whatever seemed good and useful, combining these elements with other traditions and enriching them with one’s own contributions and one’s own individual characteristics, framing the results in a Soviet way of thinking (at least since 1936) – these were to become the trademark of Dunaevskii’s success as a composer.9

  Figure 29.3 Newspaper advertisement for restaurants with music

&
nbsp; ‘There was theatre dzhaz, cinema dzhaz, extra-dzhaz and pleasure dzhaz. There were dzhaz ensembles in the provinces too, in Voronezh or Sverdlovsk. Dzhaz concerts were a feature of workingmen’s clubs and tractor factories.’

  His openness to outside influences and his ability to synthesize what he had learned seemed unlimited:

  In his compositions Dunaevskii displayed great creativity and musical ingenuity in blending together stylistic elements taken from the French and Austrian light music traditions (Offenbach, Strauss, Lehár and Kálmán, among others), from Russian nineteenth-century classical music (Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein and others), from the Moscow and St Petersburg urban romances of the turn of the century, from the Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish folk tradition and from revolutionary and workers’ songs. Throughout his entire career he did not hesitate to borrow on occasion from other musicians’ compositions – indeed, he admitted it openly: ‘I believe that a song must be close to whatever lives in the people. A song for the masses must stay within the bounds of what people are accustomed to hearing.’ He invented marvellously catchy, easily singable melodies, mainly cheerful and in a major key. Melancholy is fairly uncommon in his compositions, though there is a fair dose of sentimentality, which, however, never completely swamps the underlying cheerful mood.10

  He developed this line highly successfully by composing the music for around forty films, some of which achieved classical status, including The Circus, with its star Liubov Orlova and its director Grigorii Aleksandrov (1936), and then Volga-Volga (1938). The effect he had can be gauged from his fan mail, which he consciously filtered through the media to maximize his public resonance. Two young female admirers wrote to him:

  Your songs, your wonderful creations, are electrifying. When we hear your music, it makes us want to live, create and work. It makes us feel an inordinate desire to achieve something, and we feel capable of any number of heroic deeds. It is true, your songs help people build and live; they call to us and lead us like a friend. Your songs are particles of life; they are pearls from the treasure house of the Soviet people; they strengthen our faith that a bright future is close at hand … they force us to believe in our own strength and to dismiss all doubts and hesitations. Your songs feel so close to us and so familiar; they are accessible to all and touch us all with their profound sense of what is real, and with their joie de vivre. When you hear them you can’t help saying to yourself, ‘O how good life is in the land of the Soviets’.11

  Classical music (Shostakovich)

  Shostakovich was another musician unable to resist the energy and fascination of jazz. He had arranged Vincent Youmans’s ‘Tea for Two’ for symphony orchestra.12 He knew Utesov and his band and was also acquainted with Dunaevskii.13 The latter was an admirer of Shostakovich and his work, even though he had his reservations and warned against overestimating him.14

  1937 really began in music as early as the start of 1936.15 On 28 January 1936, a critique of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had appeared in Pravda under the title ‘Chaos instead of Music’. ‘In today’s Pravda an unsigned article. “Chaos instead of Music”. A demolition of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth. It spoke of its “deliberate dissonance, a confused stream of sound”. The opera is said to be “an expression of leftist confusion” … Poor Shostakovich – how will he be feeling now’, wrote Elena Bulgakova in her diary on 28 January 1936.16 Of course, the prominence of lust for life, sexual passion and violence in the music could not be expected to please the political establishment, and it was illuminating that the opera was dropped from the repertoire. Shostakovich continued to receive the advice that he should travel widely through the country in order to study the musical life of the people and to learn from it.

  Shostakovich then started work on his Fourth Symphony, which was not performed until many decades later. 1936 was a gloomy year: people close to him had been caught up in the cycle of repression – the writer Galina Serebriakova and the translator Elena Konstantinovskaia had been arrested; his elder sister’s husband, the physicist Vsevolod Frederiks, had also been arrested as a ‘member of a terrorist organization’ and had been exiled to Central Asia; his mother-in-law was arrested at the end of 1936. In June 1936 Maxim Gorky, his protector, died; an uncle of Shostakovich’s by marriage, the Old Bolshevik Maksim Kostrikin, was arrested and shot at the time of the world premiere.17 Shostakovich cancelled the performance of the Fourth Symphony and instead began work on the film music for Fridrikh Ermler’s Great Citizen, a film dealing with the murder of Kirov in Leningrad in 1934.

  In the spring of 1937 Shostakovich started work on the Fifth Symphony; he spent some weeks in a convalescent home for scientists and culture professionals in the Crimea, in a former palace in Gaspra belonging to the Countess Panina. Early in June 1937, he returned to Leningrad with three movements completed. But at the end of May his second mentor, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, marshall of the Red Army and Deputy People’s Commissar for Defence, had been arrested and shot.18

  The world premiere of the Fifth Symphony took place on 21 November 1937 in the Philharmonia in Leningrad under Evgeny Mravinskii. The Moscow premiere followed on 29 January 1938 under Aleksandr Gauk. Many listeners shed tears; at the end the public rose for an ovation that lasted half an hour. Liubov' Shaporina, the wife of a composer friend of his, wrote in her diary about the Leningrad performance: ‘everyone kept saying: that was his answer, and it was a good one.’19

  Stalin was expected to be present at the Moscow premiere, which turned out to be as great a success as the Leningrad performance. The Fifth Symphony was broadcast on the radio and soon afterwards appeared on record. Shostakovich received enthusiastic praise. Aleksei Tolstoi proposed a toast to him: ‘To the man among us who already deserves to be called a genius.’20 Of course, there were other voices who objected to the ‘physiological horrors’ and the ‘naturalistic screeching and sobbing’.21

  He himself had described his symphony in an article in Vecherniaia Moskva on 25 January 1938: The theme of my symphony is the development of personality. In this consistently lyrical work, I want to show man with all his experiences. In the Finale I attempt to resolve the tragic motifs of the earlier movements in an optimism that is full of life … If I have succeeded in putting into my music everything that I have thought and felt ever since those critical articles about me appeared in Pravda, I shall be content. The actual labour of composing this symphony was preceded by a lengthy inner preparation … The Fifth Symphony was modelled on the classical symphony in four movements. It is a typical symphonic work, and I believe that it represents a step forward compared with my earlier orchestral works … I am particularly pleased with the third movement, in which I succeeded in maintaining a certain consistent mood throughout. The movement makes use only of strings and woodwinds. The brasses pause for breath and gather their strength for the fourth movement, where they have a lot of work to do.22

  The Fifth Symphony has attracted a variety of interpretations and its meaning is in dispute to this day. Formally, it is a traditional symphony based on sonata form, manageable and tuneful. It is an attempt to translate socialist realism into an orchestral drama. The idea underlying the work – the development of personality – is evidently strongly biographical. Moods such as anxiety, hopelessness and lament seem to prevail in this work, especially in the Largo. But then, in the Finale, something extraordinary happens. The majority of commentators concentrate on the Finale, which culminates in a fanfare in which the principal theme resounds on the horns and trombones in a radiant D Major. But right from the outset a contemporary, the writer Aleksandr Fadeev, observed in his diary that this radiant major theme contained something strained, something both powerful and violent: ‘The end does not sound like a resolution (and even less like exultation or victory) but like a condemnation or as if someone is taking his revenge.’23 Musically, this effect seems to be the product of the all-pervasive marching theme and its repetition. ‘Its relatively slow tempo and the inexorably
repeated chords can be interpreted either as glorious apotheosis or as a threat.’24 And one of his biographers has said: ‘Anyone who listens carefully will feel that, precisely at the point where the climactic triumph bursts out in the Finale, in the endless repetition of empty “A”s on the violins, we become conscious of the loneliness and fear of the man who now stands in the limelight and is supposed to rejoice. This conclusion has nothing of rejoicing about it, but only of a mechanical performance.’25

  Dunaevskii’s biographer has pointed out that we must date the ‘Stalinist revolution’ in music to 1935–6. This was when a paradigm change took place, which also impinged upon popular culture and light music. Its core concepts were ‘closeness to the people’, ‘comprehensibility’, ‘suitable for the masses’. In musical terms, what musicians must aspire to is ‘a greater solemnity, the increased influence of folklore, and a more lyrical tone’.26 This can be confirmed by looking at Utesov’s change of repertoire, by the debate on the ‘evolution of dzhaz’ that was conducted between Izvestiia and Pravda, and the ‘change of key’ itself.