Oksana Lyniv

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In 1934 Stalin issued a new decree that tightened the mesh of censorship still further around plays, ballets and instrumental music. Among those who paid the price was Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, after its initial success, vanished from circulation once it came into Pravda’s sights. Among the grounds for banning a work was «the lack of a correct ideological perspective». That is why Shostakovich, who in those years saw his best friends and colleagues disappear — not metaphorically — kept many compositions to himself. The Violin Concerto no. 1 is one of them: written in the second half of the 1940s, it came to light only in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death, performed by David Oistrakh, who is also its dedicatee. Here the writing dwells on the darker sides of feeling, the very opposite of what the regime demanded. And Shostakovich underlines the point by repeatedly «signing» it in code with his own initials, D.SCH, the literal transposition of the figure D–E flat–C–B, a musical alter ego that proudly claims the authorship of a work at last free of outside interference.

Of Polish and Saxon descent but born in Kiev, Reinhold Glière held many official positions in the Soviet Union. In the early years of the Revolution he directed the music section of the Moscow Department of Popular Education and he was chairman of the organising committee of the Union of Composers from 1938 to 1948. His work was officially recognised with various state prizes, including the title of People’s Artist, conferred on him in 1938. As a composer Glière was an heir of the Romantic tradition, which earned him official praise in 1948, when the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich was still partly obstructed by the censors. The symphonic poem The Sirens was completed in 1908 and offers proof of Glière’s highly skilful handling of the orchestra, able to create evocative impressions of the enchantresses who lured sailors with their song.

The story of The Miraculous Mandarin is set in a sordid metropolis: three criminals force a girl to lure men in, then attack and rob them once they are in the room. Death and erotic ecstasy are interwoven in this pantomime by Béla Bartók, a work we know today mainly in its ballet version, which it reached through a troubled history: Bartók began working on it at the end of the Great War, drawn by the unusual mixture of the sordid and the fairy-tale, the realistic and the dreamlike, that he found in the play written in 1916 by the dramatist Menyhért Lengyel. But Hungary’s post-war history, with its revolutionary interlude and the subsequent establishment of the Horthy regime, forced him to break off the work, which was performed only in 1926, causing a scandal even after its German première.