The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

sinner might have been rehabilitated, but this did not mean that the sin itself had been expunged from the face of the earth; far from it. If the country’s most famous composer could fall into error, how pernicious must that error be, and how dangerous to others. So the sin must be named, and reiterated, and its consequences eternally warned against. In other words, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ had become a school text, and formed part of conservatoire courses in the history of music.
    Nor could the chief sinner be allowed to continue on his way unshepherded. Those skilled in theolinguistics, who had studied the wording of that Pravda editorial as closely as it deserved, would have noticed an implicit reference to film music. Stalin had expressed a great appreciation of Dmitri Dmitrievich’s soundtrack for the Maxim trilogy; while Zhdanov was known to play ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ to his wife on the piano every morning. It was the view of those at the highest level that Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was not a lost cause, and capable, if properly directed , of writing clear, realistic music. Art belonged to the People, as Lenin had decreed; and the cinema was of much greater use and value to the Soviet people than the opera. And so, Dmitri Dmitrievich now received proper direction, with the result that in 1940 he received the Red Banner of Labour as a specific reward for his film music. If he continued to tread the right path, this would surely prove the first of many such honours.
    On the 5th of January 1948 – twelve years after his abbreviated visit to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – Stalin and his entourage were at the Bolshoi again, this time for Vano Muradeli’s The Great Friendship . The composer, who was also chairman of the Soviet Music Fund, prided himself on writing music that was melodic, patriotic and socialist-realist. His opera, commissioned to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, and lavishly produced, had already enjoyed two months of great success. Its theme was the consolidation of Communist power in the Northern Caucasus during the Civil War.
    Muradeli was a Georgian who knew his history; unfortunately for him, Stalin was also a Georgian, and knew his history better. Muradeli had portrayed the Georgians and Ossetians as rising up against the Red Army; whereas Stalin – not least because he had an Ossetian mother – knew that what actually happened in 1918–20 was that the Georgians and Ossetians had joined hands with the Russian Bolsheviks to fight in defence of the Revolution. It had been the Chechens and the Ingush whose counter-revolutionary actions had hindered the forging of the Great Friendship between the many peoples of the future Soviet Union.
    Muradeli had compounded this politico-historical error with an equally gross musical one. He had included in his opera a lezghinka – which, as he doubtless knew, was Stalin’s favourite dance. But instead of choosing an authentic and familiar lezghinka, thereby celebrating the folk traditions of the Caucasian people, the composer had egotistically chosen to invent his own dance ‘in the style of the lezghinka’.
    Five days later, Zhdanov had called a conference of seventy composers and musicologists to discuss the continuing and corrosive influence of formalism; and a few days after this, the Central committee published its Official Decree ‘On V. Muradeli’s Opera The Great Friendship ’. The composer learnt that his music, far from being as melodic and patriotic as he had supposed, quacked and grunted with the best of them. He too was pronounced a formalist, one serving up ‘confused neuropathological combinations’ and pandering to ‘a narrow circle of experts and gourmets’. Needing to save his career, if not his skin, Muradeli came up with the best explanation he could: that he had been misled by others. He had been seduced and deceived into taking the wrong path, specifically by Dmitri Dmitrievich