Differences in the conception of music under Mao and Stalin.

The Chinese conception of music

In 1966, Mao Zedong decided to launch the cultural revolution in order to consolidate his power by relying on the country’s youth. The leader wants to purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of its « revisionist » elements and limit the powers of the bureaucracy. The « Red Guards », groups of young Chinese inspired by the principles of the Little Red Book, are becoming the active arm of this cultural revolution.

Intellectuals, as well as party officials, are publicly humiliated, mandarins and elites flouted, traditional Chinese cultural values and some Western values are denounced in the name of the fight against the « Four Olds » or « pinyin » in Chinese. The « cultural » aspect of this revolution is particularly concerned with eradicating traditional values. The Chinese Communist Party gave very vague indications of what it considered to be « old ». Therefore, everything that existed before 1949 was subject to destruction, including examples of century-old traditional arts.

As a result, examples of Chinese architecture were vandalized, Chinese literature and classical letters were burned, Chinese paintings were torn to pieces, antiquities were broken.  Intellectuals were targeted as embodiments of the Pinyin, and were mocked, bullied, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.

All old operas and theatre, music and film performances are banned. Theatres are closed. To replace these old buildings, eight operas and ballets were created. The best known is The Legend of the Red Lantern. The country’s new cultural life is organized around this production. Artists are murdered or mutilated: eyes gouged out for painters, broken arms for acrobats, crushed fingers for pianists.

The point under Mao was to denounce the past of China, its culture, its “bourgeois” intellectual life… and create a new world in which communism would prevail. Mao thought that if intellectual life would still be embedded in Confucianism then communist China could never thrive because challenged.

The main goal of Mao was to diffuse the ideals of communist China around the world in a universal way. As the cultural revolution started, “destalinization” of the Soviet Union had already been underway for a decade, Mao wanted to seize the opportunity for China to become a third way in the establishment of a communist world. This, for him, would go only by creating a universal language, through art et ideas, that would speak for everyone especially if it meant destroying the Chinese identity.

The Soviet conception

Born in the civil war, the communist regime advocated by Lenin arouses the enthusiasm of the masses of the people, but also of the intellectuals and artists. « Art is free. Creation is free. Man, born for creation and art, is free », proclaim then the avant-garde painters. The utopia of a new Man encourages artists to get involved in political life and disrupt society. All arts are concerned, including the most recent: the cinema, the photography, the poster… The place of art in society is redefined, Soviet artists are part of a process of experimentation and exploration of new territories. But this creativity will be supervised by the State authorities.

In the revolutionary momentum, art occupies a privileged place. It must contribute to changing society and to build the masses. Creators choose their side: some emigrate, others are committed to the ideals of the new power. They practice a revolutionary, totally political art.

In the « silver age » of Russian music, Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev embody the opposition to the romanticism and symbolism. Russian modernity is characterized by a strong national identity – Petrushka.

Lenin appoints Anatoly Lounatcharski as head of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros). As an enlightened humanist, he encourages a cultural policy that is both marked by respecting the heritage and being open to the most innovative trends. The social movements of February and October 1917 encouraged the multiplication of revolutionary hymns and melodies. The day after the abdication of the tsar, La Marseillaise is chosen by the people to sing the end of oppression. Judging the French revolution still too bourgeois, Lenin does not appreciate this song revolutionary and promotes L’Internationale, which became the new national anthem in 1918.

Entered in all political demonstrations, he regularly crowns the many mass shows. In the context of the new social order, the emphasis is on mass education, which encourages the publication of numerous educational collections.

The craze for machines and industry developed in Europe around 1922 in the works by Hindemith, Prokofiev and Les Six (Milhaud, Honegger…). The Soviet vanguard also seized it, under the influence of Lenin’s slogan: “Socialism is the power of the soviets plus the electrification of the country.”  Polovinkin and Dechevov write piano pieces entitled Elektrifikat and Rails. Mossolov composes Iron Foundry, for symphony orchestra, which since 1927 has provided him with fame and which becomes a symbol of Soviet industry. Prokofiev wrote a “constructivist” ballet from Paris for the Russian ballets, The Leap of Steel.

The construction of a strictly Soviet heroism, the exaltation of revolutionary fighters and the spread of the communist ideal to other countries (as in Glière’s 1927 ballet The Red Poppy) were the themes encouraged by the regime.

“Formalism” was declared the main enemy of Soviet art. Formalism is denounced as being the attitude of the artist which is solely based on the form and not the content. The music of Soviet composers must conform to the principles of « popularity », « melodicity » and « popularity ideological spirit ». Repression is coming down on those who do not follow not these precepts. The image conveyed is that of a conquering country, on the march and of radiant industrial and military power. Behind the scenes, composers are condemned to collaborate with the Stalinist regime or risk being crushed by terror. Stalin, like all the high dignitaries of the regime, attends regularly at Bolshoi performances. Shostakovich and Prokofiev, who returned home in 1936, will be regularly accused of formalism, while other composers, like Aram Khachaturyan will be praised by the regime.

On January 28, 1936, an article appeared in the Pravda entitled « Chaos replaces music », a violent diatribe against the opera Lady Macbeth. Stalin, accompanied by Andrei Jdanov and Mikoyan, had attended a performance of the opera at the Bolshoi and hated it. This article, unsigned, attacks the musical style of the opera, made of tintamarre, squeaks, yelps, its petty bourgeois formalism denying simplicity and socialist realism in favour of hermetism; and, finally, its crude naturalism showing on stage animal, vulgar characters. The article even goes so far as to threaten Shostakovich’s existence with this sentence full of meaning in the midst of the madness of the Stalinist purges: “We play with hermeticism, a game that could end badly”. The representations were immediately stopped. That same year, Shostakovich was officially condemned during a meeting of the Union of Soviet Composers: he officially became an enemy of the people, and few, like Sergei Prokofiev, Vissarion Shebalin and Dmitri Kabalevsky, dared to defend him.

The year 1936 is the year of the great Stalinist purges. Shostakovich is terrified but says: “And if they cut off both my hands, I will hold my pen between my teeth and continue writing music”.

The Stalinist ideal is to develop an image of society and then impose it on reality itself. The themes of patriotism, heroism, youth, folklore and enthusiasm at work, represented in official meetings, meetings, celebrations or sports competitions, dictate the content of the works. Large paintings, propaganda posters and big-screen cinema maintain the myth of an idealized present and future.

To unite the motherland threatened by fascism, Stalin awakens the founding myths of Slavic identity or Russian history: the battle of Kulikovo, Alexander Nevsky’s fight against the Teutonic knights, the unifying action of Ivan the Terrible. These subjects are covered in two historical and innovative films by Sergei Eisenstein that testify to this exceptional patriotic commitment.