Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds

Pauline Fairclough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409400264
• eBook ISBN: 9781317005797
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.

Chapter 1
‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler in Great Britain and the German Democratic Republic¹

Joanna Bullivant

In 1981 Michael Tippett wrote of his fellow composer Alan Bush: ‘Alan lives in a world of Marxist orthodoxy and certainty, while I live in a world of humanist ambivalence and uncertainty’.² The two had not always seen themselves as embracing such opposite poles. They were contemporaries and friends, both with lives spanning almost the entire century (Bush lived from 1900 to 1995, Tippett from 1905 to 1998). Bush was an important influence on Tippett in the 1930s, when the young Tippett was excited by Bush’s ‘adventurous’ music and both were interested in exploring ways of linking musical and political interests.³ By the time both were composing their first operas – Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52) and Bush’s Wat Tyler (1948–51) –their differences were certainly apparent. Tippett had quickly abandoned party politics. The Midsummer Marriage continued the project he began with A Child of Our Time, finding a means of musical expression adequate to expressing the fractured nature of modern man and restoring ‘wholeness’. Bush, on the other hand, maintained his political radicalism as an ardent and lifelong Stalinist, denounced his earlier interests in modernism, and embraced a simplified, national style prompted by the 1948 Soviet controversy and Prague Congress.⁴ Begun that very year, Wat Tyler exhibits much evidence of Bush’s chosen path: it depicts a popular English uprising – the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt – and working-class hero through a score making use of folk song and giving a prominent role to the chorus. We might speculate that the differences apparent in the two operas, and the larger contrasting artistic visions from which they sprung, were what Tippett had in mind when comparing himself with Bush. Not only did they choose different musical idioms, but in Tippett’s view these reflected different appreciations of the nature of the modern world and how this might be addressed by an artist. This comparison is not neutral. It implies that Bush failed to recognize – or for political reasons chose to ignore – the true complexity of the contemporary world, and to produce music to match.

Such a view of Bush and his music as anti-modern was particularly prominent in the reception of the first British production of Wat Tyler. Despite winning a prize in the Arts Council opera competition held for the 1951 Festival of Britain, the opera was not broadcast in Britain until 1956. By the time of the production in 1974, complaints about the old-fashioned music and political message of the work were pervasive, as was the conclusion that these qualities explained both the neglect of the work in Britain and its apparent success in East Germany, where it received three professional productions.

In the context of increasing scholarly engagement with definitions of modernism and their relationship to cold war political and cultural contexts, such judgements regarding the post-war Bush and his opera have already come under scrutiny.⁵ In a study of the Glock-era BBC, the late Neil Edmunds opened up a space for critique of Bush’s condemnation as anti-modern: he asserted that Bush was criticized for writing ‘in a regressive idiom associated with Stalinism’ during a period in which the BBC, influentially, rejected ‘provincialism’ and championed the avant-garde.⁶ Nathaniel Lew has likewise challenged views of Wat Tyler as propagandistic, reading the work as an apt emblem of Britain immediately after the Second World War in its aesthetic unsuitability for the Soviet Union, its broad appeal and its espoused intentions to reach an English audience.⁷

In spite of such challenges to existing views of Wat Tyler and Bush’s experiences more widely, one almost entirely overlooked area is the opera’s radio broadcast and three professional productions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Reflecting the repressive political regime of the GDR, its apparent success there (in opposition to the British reception) has been overlooked or dismissed as politically suspect and musically regressive. Yet, as this chapter shall argue, the surprisingly nuanced GDR history may provide crucial insights. In particular, the discussion of the opera as modern in both Britain and the GDR offers intriguing possibilities for further consideration of Edmunds’ discussion of politically influenced responses to avant-garde music, and of the extent to which the contrasting fates of the opera in Britain and the GDR are reducible to a binary East–West conflict. I shall argue that, far from presenting ‘a world of Marxist orthodoxy’, the history of Wat Tyler points towards the complex positions of two peripheral nations in the cold war cultural conflict.

Contrasting Stories of Success

To give a brief synopsis, the opera opens with a ‘Herdsman’ and ‘Escaped Serf’ discussing the growth of rebellion as peasants, meeting secretly, sing the ‘Cutty Wren’, a folk song believed to have originated at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt.⁸ In the remainder of Act I, Wat Tyler is supported by the people of Maidstone in resisting the Poll Tax. Later, Tyler strikes the Tax Collector, Sir Thomas Bampton, in defence of his daughter, and decides to lead the uprising. The Peasant Army storm Maidstone Prison and free John Ball, the radical priest. In Act II, the King and nobles debate the rebellion and decide to meet the leaders. At the meeting with Tyler, the King agrees to the demands for freedom from serfdom but, in response to provocation from Bampton, Tyler draws his dagger and is killed. In the final scene, taking place shortly after Tyler’s death, the peasants again meet with the King, who revokes his promises to end serfdom. The private grief of Tyler’s wife in this scene is counterpoised with the final quietly stated chorus of belief in future freedom.

The English performances were hampered by difficulties. The BBC broadcast was achieved only after an exchange of letters and repeated hearings lasting nearly five years. The 1974 performance followed years of attempts to secure a professional production. It was organized by a company set up by Bush’s own Workers’ Music Association, and was hampered by financial and casting problems.⁹ Both critical reactions and the several detailed assessments of the work at the BBC objected to what was seen as the work’s regressive idiom and the naive and simplistic drama and characterization. Leonard Isaacs at the BBC, writing in 1953, complained of the undistinguished and monotonous music, and the lack of individuality among characters crudely drawn as either working-class heroes or feudal villains.¹⁰

The many productions and favourable press reactions to the opera in the GDR stand in marked contrast. Despite the problems of talking of ‘success’ in this context, as shall be discussed, it is immediately notable that, according to Gerd Rienäcker, the vast majority of new operas premiered in the GDR in the 1950s were not performed again.¹¹ Rienäcker names only Karl-Rudi Griesbach’s Kolumbus and Marike Weiden, Jean Kurt Forest’s Tai Yang erwacht [Tai Yang Awakes] and Brecht and Paul Dessau’s Die Verurteilung der Lukullus [The Condemnation of Lucullus] as operas that enjoyed repeat performances, with parts of other operas broadcast. In this context, the three productions over a decade and the broadcast of a substantial portion of the opera are a striking achievement.

A Regressive Culture?

Was this popularity due to the political reasons and a regressive musical culture in the GDR? Peter Pirie underscored this conclusion when he wrote of Bush ‘continuing a tradition established by Ethel Smyth and Joseph Holbrooke, but for rather different reasons. Indeed, Bush’s music is much like theirs: diatonic Wagner with a social message’.¹² Certainly, GDR musical culture was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union. As Elizabeth Janik has noted, in line with the 1948 Soviet Central Committee Resolution and the Declaration of the Prague Congress against musical formalism,¹³ the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) gradually undertook a comprehensive campaign against formalism by the end of 1950.¹⁴ The founding conference of the Union of German Composers and Musicologists (VDKM) in April 1951 was ‘dominated by questions of musical formalism’. The speech on ‘Realism, the Vital Question of German Music’ by Ernst Hermann Meyer, a member of the VDKM Secretariat, attacked the avant-garde. Echoing the Soviet Resolution’s call to respect the ‘best traditions of Russian and western classical music’,¹⁵ Meyer set a mandate of the VDKM to ‘encourage realistic music that emphasized musical content over empty form, that cherished the German national musical heritage, and that was in the literal sense Volksmusik (“music of the people”)’.¹⁶ There were also clearly particular issues for the dramatic element of opera in line with socialist realism. David Bathrick, writing on literature in the GDR, has spoken of the prohibition of any equivocation of meaning or textual ambiguity in works of art: ‘Works of art that explicitly or implicitly encouraged or enabled ambiguity were, by that very fact alone, lacking a clearly articulated sense of Parteilichkeit [political commitment]’.¹⁷

To what extent did Bush’s opera complement this political and aesthetic context? Certainly, the suitability of the popular subject and national idiom of Wat Tyler was noted by the SED. Their official newspaper, Neues Deutschland, described it as ‘an outstanding example of a realistic work, national in form and progressive in content’.¹⁸ In dramatic terms, too, Bush wrote pertinently regarding his operas:

At the moment in the West pathological states of mind and guilt are fashionable subjects. … I avoid in my subjects unrelieved murky pessimism and triumphant corruption, and aim to represent objective pictures of human life, past and present.¹⁹

In contrast, for example, to Peter Grimes, which was very likely in Bush’s mind in this passage, in Wat Tyler (except in the two pastiche minstrel songs of Act II) Bush’s word setting is highly syllabic, and characters interact with rigorous realism in only singing what would be spoken – a quality contributing to the perceived naivety of the characterization by British writers but appropriate to socialist realist dictates.²⁰ Where Peter Grimes’s moral complexity is, as Lew has noted, ‘a mark of its modernity’, Bush’s opera may seem contrastingly non-modern in its realism in comparison. Finally, Bush had personal connections to leading musical figures of the GDR, particularly Meyer. Bush’s opera was first introduced to the GDR when he played excerpts at the inaugural conference of the VDKM, as a result of which he was offered first the broadcast on Berlin radio and subsequently a full production.²¹ As Joy Calico notes, securing a performance of a new opera appears to have been strongly linked to prominent membership of the VDKM, an honour accorded to those of irreproachable politics, rather than, necessarily, the finest composers.²² All these factors, then, firstly, point to the possible political dimension of Bush’s patronage in the GDR.

Does this picture, however, refle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Musical Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘A World of Marxist Orthodoxy’? Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler in Great Britain and the German Democratic Republic
• 2 Stravinsky’s Petrushka: Modernizing the Past, Russianizing the Future; or, How Stravinsky Learned to Be an Exile
• 3 Détente to Cold War: Anglo-Soviet Musical Exchanges in the Late Stalin Period
• 4 Front Theatre: Musical Films and the War in Nazi Cinema
• 5 ‘Those damn foreigners’: Xenophobia and British Musical Life During the First Half of the Twentieth Century
• 6 ‘An angry ape’: Some Preliminary Thoughts about Orango
• 7 A Bridge between Two Worlds: The Founding Years of the Warsaw Autumn Festival
• 8 Winning Hearts and Minds? Soviet Music in the Cold War Struggle against the West
• 9 Preserving the Façade of Normal Times: Musical Life in Belgrade under the German Occupation (1941–1944)
• 10 Musical Commemorations in Post-Civil War Spain: Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto Heroico
• 11 The Racialization and Ghettoization of Music in the General Government
• 12 ‘I Only Need the Good Old Budapest’: Hungarian Cabaret in Wartime London
• 13 Irish Nationalism, British Imperialism and the Role of Popular Music
• 14 Shostakovich as Film Music Theorist
• 15 Diaspora, Music and Politics: Russian Musical Life in Shanghai during the Interwar Period
• Select Bibliography
• Index