Eastern Europe seemed another world. And yet, as if aware of a post-war impulse for change, Andrey Zhdanov, holding high rank in the Soviet government, instituted in February 1948 a reinforcement of the cultural policy of socialist realism. Composers were called to account, and reminded of their duty to write music that put a socialist (i.e. op-timistic) spin on a ‘realism’ that was now almost a century old, and that belonged to the bourgeois culture of late Tsarism: the diatonic-symphonic language of Tchaikovsky and Borodin. ‘Formalism’—which in a Russian context embraced any projection of matters of technique, notably including innovations—was the enemy. What was stirring in the United States and Western Europe could have no parallel in the Soviet Union, nor in those neighbouring countries that had been liber-ated by Russian forces in 1945 and were coming under closer Soviet control in 1948. In Hungary, for example, a musicians’ union was es-tablished in 1949 on the Soviet model, one of its functions being to have new compositions vetted by a panel of colleagues.
Noble ideals—of placing control in the hands of composers and of checking individual imagination against informed and sympathetic collective judgment—were compromised by the falsity of having to steer by an offi cial aesthetic that was incoherent. A young composer recognizing that the musical world was changing fast but not so sure about the political one, as Ligeti was, would have to write one kind of music for the committee and another for the bottom drawer. Ligeti’s works of 1949–53, Hungary’s most viciously Stalinist period, include
The Cold War 77 several that were passed for publication, performance, and broadcast, at least one (his Romanian Concerto) whose shortcomings he acknowl-edged and even emphasized when it came up for debate,1 and several more he did not put forward. Among these last, Musica ricercata for piano (1951–53), though in no way serial, exposes just the kind of algorith-mic thinking he was to analyse a few years later in Boulez’s Structures.
The fi rst piece uses just one note (or, in Babbittian terms, pitch class), A, until another, D, is added just before the end. Succeeding move-ments are based on two, three, four notes, and so on, until all twelve are in play.
However, the distinction between imposed conformity and free thought—a distinction Ligeti underlined again and again after leaving Hungary for Western Europe in 1956—is not so clear. Many young people immediately after the war, Ligeti among them, welcomed so-cialism for its egalitarian aspirations, its state support of culture, and its antagonism to fascism. Even rule from Moscow would have to be an improvement on rule from Berlin. Ligeti’s friend and colleague György Kurtág (b. 1926) wrote a choral ‘Greeting Song to Stalin’, and Ligeti himself produced a cantata for a youth festival in 1949. At the same time, Musica ricercata is nothing like as abstract as Boulez’s music of similar date. It relishes connections with familiar ideas and folk music, as in the bristling dance of minor and major triads in the third piece of the set, shown in example 18, all very much in the spirit of Bartók, though with a playfulness that was Ligeti’s own. In carrying forward the Bartókian heritage, connecting with folk music and connecting, too, with the needs of amateurs (who are welcomed here as they are not by Structures) and the expectations of audiences, Musica ricercata was just what members of the Hungarian musicians’ union should have been looking for. Perversity and cynicism, intergenerational confl ict and fear, may all have spoiled the chances for the real socialist music that socialist realism was not.
The situation throughout the Eastern bloc was diffi cult, even at times dangerous, and its complexity probably cannot be reduced to a story of oppression and resistance, such as has gained currency around the fi gure, in particular, of Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–75). There can be no doubt that Shostakovich took Zhdanov’s criticism seriously. He put aside the violin concerto on which he had been working and turned instead to string quartets, bland cantatas, and a book of pre-ludes and fugues for piano. (Fugues, having the mandate of history, were not ‘formalist’.) It is also true that he delayed his next symphony, his Tenth, until after Stalin’s death; the work had its fi rst performance nine months later, in December 1953.
1. See Rachel Beckles Willson, Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War (Cambridge, 2007), 41.
78 Modern Music and After
However, to read this symphony as a reaction to events—even as a portrait of the deceased leader—may be too much. The work is cer-tainly a triumph of negativity, made with images of snarling, of forced movement, of empty bombast and worthless victory, but all these things can be found in the composer’s sarcastic style from long before.
He also inherited them from Mahler and from a deep vein of black humour in Russian culture. Moreover, one could interpret the sym-phony as marked by the same autodestructive urges as Boulez’s Sec-ond Sonata, without the release of fl inging out into new musical re-gions. It may have seemed to Shostakovich, as much as to Boulez, that the old tonal language was long worn out by the middle of the twen-tieth century. But, for whatever reasons of personal as well as offi cial constraint, he had no alternative.
There is a whole knot of ironies around the fact that Shostakovich’s music should have come to be prized as dissident by cultures, those of modern capitalism, whose aesthetic preferences are not so far from those of socialist realism. Of course, it may not be contradictory to ad-mire Shostakovich because he shares our love-hate relationship with the musical language that remains dominant. The political affi liations, though, are confusing. Nono was by no means alone among younger composers in Western Europe and the United States in voting decisively on the Left, and yet the music these composers produced was banned from the Soviet Union and its satellites. The disfavour was certainly reciprocated: Shostakovich was anathema to Boulez, who seems only once, in 2002, to have conducted anything by the composer. Those
Example 18 György Ligeti, Musica ricercata
The Cold War 79 who were beginning to assemble regularly at Darmstadt saw them-selves as bringing in a revolution that would be more than musical, whether its aims were social-political (Nono), spiritual (Stockhausen), or undisclosed, perhaps unknown (Boulez). From the viewpoint of the Kremlin, however, they were bourgeois individualists.
The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States may have shared that opinion. The contemporary art festival lavishly presented in Paris in 1952, involving Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Boulez among many others, was clandestinely funded by the CIA through the Con-gress for Cultural Freedom, which had been set up in 1950 in the naive but not entirely dishonourable hope of demonstrating to left-wing intellectuals in Western Europe that capitalism was as hospitable to the arts as communism. But though Darmstadt in its infancy was also a U.S. intervention, sponsored by the military authorities in their sector of immediate postwar Germany,2 offi cials appear rapidly to have washed their hands of these disputatious musicians.
This is not to say, of course, that the seeming permanence of the Cold War, and of the nuclear threat it entailed, did not hang over every-thing achieved during this period.
2. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the Cul-tural Cold War (London, 1999), 23.
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