Tony Thomas in 2009-10 pestered the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with a series of complaints about the politics of its program notes on works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The extraordinary thing is that the MSO people took his complaints seriously, conceded error and set about improving their notes. Who knows whether the MSO would handle such complaints from the peanut gallery as professionally today?
Stalin a
Call me obsessive (OK, I am) but I turned up at the Melbourne Concert Hall on June 20, 2009 to enjoy Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony (1944), and nearly blew a fuse.
The MSO’s free program notes were as if written by some hack from the Soviet era. The notes quoted Prokofiev praising the cultural freedom of Soviet artists.
Without any editorial comment from the MSO, Prokofiev in these notes swiped at the lack of ‘freedom of the human spirit’ in the US, in contrast to ‘free and happy (Soviet) man’.
A Soviet-era music bigshot called Dmitri Kabalevsky (three times a Stalin Prize-winner) was also quoted about Prokofiev helping to run a war-time composers’ commune, at which Prokofiev “encouraged the others to discuss their daily achievements in an atmosphere of mutual trust.”
(By coincidence, Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, the same day that Stalin died).
Strangely for a 2009 performance, these notes by a “Graeme Skinner” were dated 1997 (six years after the Soviet Union’s collapse).
Arriving home, I penned a letter to the MSO noting that Prokofiev had already suffered his wife Lena and two sons being held in Siberia as hostage for his good behavior, and for all I knew, his quotes could have been drafted by the NKVD for his signature at real or implied gunpoint.
“I can hardly believe MSO program notes could be so ill-informed and so keen to whitewash an era of hideous tyranny and murder in the now-unlamented Soviet Union,” I wrote.
To defeat any normal bureaucratic reaction, I posted a copy of the letter not only to the MSO managing director Trevor Green and the MSO’s publicity guy, but also to then chief conductor Oleg Caetani, who as a son of Russian conductor Igor Markevitch, doubtless knows a thing or two about Soviet musical history. (I am sure Oleg had not read those program notes).
You suppose my letter just got filed? Not so. One month later, MD Trevor Green replied: “I agree with you that Prokofiev needs to be discussed more even-handedly. Accordingly, we will commission a new note for our next performance of this work, and will, when the budget allows, commission new annotations for other Soviet-era works that may be performed in future seasons.”
Bravo, Trevor Green!
However (why is there always a ‘however’?) on May 22, 2010 I was again in the Concert Hall, this time reading the notes for Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’.
Arriving home, I penned a further letter to the MSO. The notes, I wrote, were OK, but “I was outraged by the illustration of Stalin…This is a propaganda photo/illustration from the height of the Stalin cult period.Yet the caption merely states that it is ‘Joseph Stalin’. It is NOT Joseph Stalin, who was short, with a low forehead, and a swarthy pockmarked face. The illustration shows Stalin as handsome, wise and statesmanlike, a heroic war leader, avuncular, stern but with a hint of kindness. Using such a picture without describing it as a propaganda picture is an insult to all the many millions whom that man murdered, including at least a few hundred artists, writers and doubtless composers, along with their colleagues, family and friends.
“I am sure that in illustrating, say, a program note on Richard Strauss, you would not accompany it with an illustration such as the one I attach here {a war-time Nazi portrait of the all-conquering Der Fuehrer}.
“I am sure that whoever selected the ‘heroic Stalin’ illustration did so merely from lack of sophistication and lack of historical perspective.[1] But I am surprised that someone of more maturity in a cosmopolitan city like Melbourne did not tell him/her that Stalin was a mass murderer and not a hero.”
This letter was mailed to the new MD Matthew VanBesien, guest conductor Andrew Litton and the MSO’s long-suffering PR guy.
A month later, Mr VanBesien replied, acknowledging that the choice of photograph could have been more discerning – “for which of course I apologise to you – but I am not convinced that the photograph automatically denies Stalin’s atrocities.”
VanBesien cited other music programs that had featured Jacques-Louis David’s propaganda picture of Napoleon or official photos of Czar Nicholas II. “These men were responsible for thousands – if not millions- of deaths…None of this was wiped away for me by seeing Napoleon on a horse or Nicholas II looking statesmanlike. I will of course bring this issue to the attention of the staff responsible for production of printed programs.”
So far so good. The MSO talks the talk but does it walk the walk?
Today (10 December 2011) I was in the Melbourne Town Hall reading the program notes for Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5.
Text? All fine.
Illustration? Joe Stalin. Outfit: bemedalled uniform circa 1945. Build: tall and fit. Forehead: high. Expression: noble, but caring. Complexion: to die for.
Caption: ”Propaganda portrait of Stalin.” (My emphasis)
Bravo, MSO!
Commenters on a current affairs blog got confused about my position, so I clarified as follows:
For all posters, could I please explain that my article above was not meant to be condemnatory of the MSO management. OK they stuffed up with their original pro-Soviet program notes to Prokofiev 5, but as I pointed out, instead of getting defensive about my complaint, they manfully admitted error and promised to do better next time.
On the Prokofiev Romeo & Juliet program notes, they stuffed up again using a propaganda pic of Stalin without labelling it as such.
Again they manfully apologised, and added an arguable point that it was no worse than using a propaganda pic of Napoleon.
On the program notes for Shostakovich last Saturday, I was delighted to discover that they had this time correctly labelled the pic of Stalin as a ‘Propaganda Portrait.’ Hence my ‘Bravo, MSO!’
The real point of my article is that we humble members of the public should always be assertive towards the powers-that-be when they get things wrong (for whatever reason). In this MSO case, they have been responsive and positive towards an admittedly cranky music lover, who takes anything to do with Stalin very seriously. (I have just been re-reading all volumes of the Gulag Archipelago).
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[1] One of my critics has made the reasonable point that non-propaganda pictures of Stalin are almost non-existent.
No B-S here (I hope) 