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Russia's musica, tradition is still less than a century old: the "father" of Russian music, Michael Ivanovitch Glinka, died in 1857. Yet it already boasts some of music's most famous names—such pre-Soviet romantics as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov. The younger Soviet composers are generally more gifted and expert than those of the U.S., less jaded than those of Western Europe. Western Europe's only living first-raters, Germany's Richard Strauss and Finland's Jan Sibelius, are aged men whose best work is already a generation old.
The Soviet's musical powerhouse works like a group of high-pressure advertising men, efficiently turning out a commodity of proved effectiveness. One of their main jobs is to advertise the Soviet Union and Soviet culture to the rest of the world.
How well that job has been done can be judged from the worldwide fame of Composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Cold Garrets & Warm Music. A considerable amount of immortal music has been written in cold garrets, with an empty larder in the background. Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn lived comfortable lives, but Mozart, after a life of penny-counting, was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave, and Franz Schubert sold his songs for as little as 20¢.
Nearly all the great composers have been men of intensely religious or mystical rather than materialistic temperament.
So far, Soviet Russia's bright new music, for all its brilliant streamlining, has conspicuously lacked the heartwarming, human quality — the "humanistic sympathy" so despised by Communists —that earns great symphonies and operas the love of succeeding generations. But the commissars of Glavmus, looking west ward, can well ask where better symphonies and operas are being written today.