Russia's composers had spoken their apologies for their past sins of "formalism" and "bourgeois ideology," and promised they would try harder to stay in the right key. Last week, the big brass of the Soviet Composers' Union assembled at the Moscow Conservatory to hear if all the promises had been kept.
In their titles, at least, most of the 220 new works in the 1949 output were clearly in tune. Dmitri Shostakovich, who once showed signs of becoming a great composer, had turned in a new oratorio, The Song of the Forests. It glorified Stalin's reforestation plan. Sample verse (by Poet Evgeny Dolmatovsky):
"We are ordinary Soviet people, Communism is our glory and honor. If Stalin said it will be, We will answer, Leader, it is!"
One new symphonic poem, On the Other Side of the Araks, was written to celebrate the struggle of the people of southern Azerbaijan "with the Anglo-American imperialists in Iran." A Sixth Symphony, by one Janis Ivanov, had been inspired by the "difficult past and bright present" of the Latvian people (no longer harassed by political independence since their 1940 incorporation in the Soviet Union).
Before the session was over, the union would hear a new song, Glory to the Great Stalin, and an opera about the reconstruction of a collective farm.
Last week Manhattan audiences were listening to a new symphony that Russians had heard once, were not hearing any more. Leopold Stokowski. and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony performed the U.S. premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. The first movement was dark but thematically appealing, the slow movement harmonically and rhythmically as dull as dishwater. The fast finale oompah-oompahed along in Russian style until about 30 bars from the end. Only then, for about a dozen bars, did listeners hear the powerfully dissonant Prokofiev they had known in the Scythian Suite and the first violin concerto. After that the Sixth Symphony oompahed its way to an ending. In the U.S. it might be panned, but it would not be banned.