On the morning of August 21, 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square, in Prague, completing an overnight Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Alexander Dubček, the liberal-minded leader of the Czech government, was detained and flown to Moscow. That evening, in London, the U.S.S.R. State Symphony, under the direction of Yevgeny Svetlanov, gave a concert at Royal Albert Hall, as part of the BBC Proms. Shouts of protest were heard at the outset of each work on the program. Mstislav Rostropovich, who was to leave the Soviet Union six years later, broke into tears as he played Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, a landmark of Czech music. The second half of the concert was given over to Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, a monumental oration by the living titan of Soviet composers. Noise from the audience carried over into the first bars of the work; then silence fell. Fifty minutes later, a roar of applause followed the frenzied final bars of the symphony.
Such scenes were fairly routine in classical music through most of the twentieth century, as one country or another took its turn in the role of arch-villain on the international stage. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a cultural panic of a kind that has not been seen in generations. Several performers with strong ties to Vladimir Putin—Valery Gergiev, Anna Netrebko, Denis Matsuev—have seen their careers in Europe and America evaporate. In a few isolated cases, classic Russian works have been pulled from programs. At the beginning of March, the Polish National Opera called off a staging of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” that had been scheduled for the spring. A few days later, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and his Second Symphony were dropped from a concert by the Cardiff Philharmonic—a decision that elicited worldwide mockery on social media.
No protests materialized the other night when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the direction of Ludovic Morlot, presented a mostly Russian program at Disney Hall: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos,” Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto, and the Shostakovich Tenth. Nor did the orchestra take the step of introducing the concert with a rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem, as many other ensembles have lately done. Issuing no apologies or explanations, the orchestra trusted its audience to grapple with two composers whose lives in Stalinist Russia were immensely fraught and whose relationship with whatever is meant by Russianness was complex. This seemed the right approach.
A few commentators have tried to cast the boycotting of Russian composers and musicians as so-called cancel culture run amok. The argument shows farcical ignorance of more than a century of cultural history. During the First World War, when anti-German paranoia swept across America, the Met stopped presenting not only the obvious Wagner but also Mozart, who had been a subject of the Holy Roman Empire. When the next war came, organizations took a different tack, appropriating German repertory for the war effort: Beethoven’s Fifth became a V-for-victory symbol; “The Ride of the Valkyries” was linked to Allied bombing raids. Neither strategy did the music justice, but the second is the one worth emulating: by reversing the jargon of Nazi propaganda, it restored the maddening ambiguity that is music’s natural habitat.
“How Russian is it?” is a question that could be asked of both major works on the L.A. Phil’s recent program. Prokofiev was, in fact, Ukrainian, though in an anachronistic sense. He was born in 1891, in the village of Sontsovka, presently known as Sontsivka, in eastern Ukraine. Thirty miles to the east is Donetsk, which has become the capital of the People’s Republic of Donetsk, a Russian-backed separatist entity. The local airport bears the name Donetsk Sergei Prokofiev International Airport; in 2014, it became a battlefield between Ukrainian and separatist forces, and was destroyed in the process. Although Ukrainian soldiers were eventually compelled to withdraw, their furious resistance acquired legendary status, and was commemorated in the 2017 film “Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die.” Despite Russian advances in the past month, Sontsivka appears to remain in Ukrainian hands.
Yet Prokofiev lacked local roots: his father, an estate manager, came from Moscow. Cosmopolitan in his outlook, the composer spent time in America and France after the Bolshevik Revolution. His decision to settle in Stalinist Russia, in the thirties, was based on a miscalculation that his fame would protect him from ideological pressures. Instead, he met with repeated humiliations. A case in point is the poor reception accorded to his 1940 opera, “Semyon Kotko,” which was set in Ukraine during the chaotic civil war that followed the revolutions of 1917. The ostensible agenda was to embrace Ukrainian heritage while buttressing the greater Bolshevik cause. The villains of the piece are German occupiers and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators. But, as the musicologist Nathan Seinen observes, Prokofiev failed to deliver a ringing endorsement of that socialist-realist program; his setting of Taras Shevchenko’s 1845 poem “Zapovit” (“Testament”), a classic of Ukrainian literature, carried a whiff of nationalist feeling. Seinen writes, “There was a possibility for a subtext to be read here of the oppression of Ukraine by a contemporary Russia rather than by a Western enemy.”
Lately, I have gone back to the recording of “Semyon Kotko” that Gergiev made with the Mariinsky Theatre ensemble in 1999—part of an invaluable series of Russian-opera recordings that appeared on the now defunct Philips label. In particular, I’ve been listening to the finale of Act III, which depicts the burning of a Ukrainian village. Over a relentless ostinato, a women’s chorus sings, “They plunder and burn us, / they plunder and burn. / Our Ukraine is lost, / all is lost! Oh, make a stand! Make a stand!” Needless to say, these lines assume a different cast in light of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Gergiev would undoubtedly be consternated by that interpretation. Perhaps Prokofiev would have been, too. But there is no controlling the resonances that works acquire as they move forward in time.
No political questions attend the First Piano Concerto—the insolently brilliant work of a twenty-one-year-old composer who was defining himself within and against Russian traditions. Inspired in part by Richard Strauss’s youthful anti-concerto “Burleske,” Prokofiev has fun at the expense of the grand Romantic manner, even as he deploys its devices to empower the soloist (himself, at the première, in 1912). At the end, the pianist flings down D-flat-major chords in all registers, in blatant reference to Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. A critic of the period accused Prokofiev of embodying the “modern ‘football’ generation . . . stupid, inane, and blockheaded.” Sergio Tiempo, the soloist at the L.A. Phil, showed enough flattening power to justify the athletic metaphors, though his intelligently playful style was anything but inane. What the piece ultimately has to do with Russia—Tsarist, Stalinist, Putinist—is anyone’s guess.
Prokofiev’s works always dance a little outside of time. With Shostakovich’s, we can seldom forget the circumstances under which they gestated. The Tenth Symphony was completed in the fall of 1953, seven months after Stalin’s death. (In the most heavy-handed irony in musical history, Prokofiev died on the same day as the man who tormented him.) Shostakovich had been living under a pall of fear since 1936, when Pravda published a denunciation of his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” In the symphony, he makes obsessive use of a notational cipher based on his own name—D, E-flat, C, B-natural, or D, S, C, H, in German notation—almost forcing the listener to think about his fate. Yet, as with almost everything Shostakovich wrote, the score defeats a univocal interpretation, its classical four-movement structure interlaced with political, personal, and purely musical messages.
The tone of the Tenth Symphony is set in a huge, meandering opening movement, which acquires at times a hurtling headlong energy. Shostakovich was adept at this kind of mutating structure, which had been pioneered by his gifted, erratic colleague Gavriil Popov. There follows a curt, violent Scherzo—an apotheosis of unthinking force. The orchestration mimics the movement of a mob: woodwinds racing through their upper registers in tight-ranked cadres, brass crunching forward in steel columns. I once listened to this movement while walking through a rush-hour crowd in Times Square, and felt an uncanny likeness between the feeling of the music and the feeling of the crowd—the animal power that comes from riding with the flow, the animal fear that comes from resisting it. Fittingly, though surreally, an arrangement of the Scherzo has become a showpiece for American high-school and college marching bands.
In a conventional symphonic narrative, a Scherzo would be paired with a soulful or tragic slow movement, such as Shostakovich supplied with his enormously popular Fifth Symphony. The third movement of the Tenth, marked Allegretto, wanders in a different direction. About a minute in, over a lurching three-quarter dance rhythm, piccolos and oboe pipe out the D-S-C-H motto. This is eventually joined by a solitary horn call: E-A-E-D-A. The musicologist Nelly Kravetz discovered that this second musical cipher alludes to the pianist Elmira Nazirova, with whom Shostakovich was besotted at the time. The motif also resembles the opening horn theme of “Das Lied von der Erde,” as Shostakovich pointed out in a letter to Nazirova. Just after, the brooding music of the first movement returns. Later, both motifs sound against a pileup of dissonant chords, which is like a wall through which neither can pass. The enigmatic atmosphere of this movement, with its gestures toward Austro-German tradition, undermines any attempt to frame the work as a heroic Soviet narrative.
Soviet symphonists were expected to end their works in life-affirming fashion. From his Fifth Symphony onward, Shostakovich practiced an art of equivocal triumph, and the finale of the Tenth might be his deftest feat in this line. The work seems to be scampering toward a cartoonishly festive finish when D-S-C-H is blasted out triple forte by the entire orchestra, at which point everything crashes to a halt. Soon enough, the carnival mood resumes, with D-S-C-H woven into the fabric. By the closing pages, the repetition of the motif has all the subtlety of a blinking neon sign. Swirling up-and-down flourishes in the winds and strings echo the march movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique”—itself a model of unstable exultation. For both Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky becomes an element in an intricate musical collage.
The Soviet-era musicologist Marina Sabinina once connected the coda of the Tenth to one of the darkest moments of Shostakovich’s career: his speech at a 1948 Soviet composers’ conference, at which he was obliged to confess that he had “deviated in the direction of formalism and began to speak a language incomprehensible to the people.” According to Sabinina, Shostakovich privately compared himself to a “cut-out paper doll on a string.” She relates that image to a gruesome anecdote about Gogol staring at himself in the mirror: “Completely self-absorbed, he would repeatedly call out his own name with a sense of alienation and revulsion.” Unlike many stories told about Shostakovich, this one has an authentic ring. At the same time, it doesn’t do justice to the manic exuberance of the music. At the Proms in 1968, the audience responded with visceral glee. So too did the one at Disney Hall, in the wake of a performance that, despite being a bit too straitlaced in tempo, had an obliterating impact. This is real joy, however traumatized: the joy of survival.
Dividing the repertory into national groups is convenient for musicians, scholars, and the general public alike. This mindset yields programs with titles like “From the Russian Steppes” and “French Impressions.” Yet the perpetuation of hoary national clichés obscures the complexity of each composer’s relations with domestic and foreign influences. Shostakovich had more in common with his English counterpart Benjamin Britten than with any of his Russian contemporaries. Prokofiev was closer to Ravel or Poulenc than to Shostakovich. The émigré Stravinsky became, in the end, a country unto himself. Reliance on national categories is all the more questionable at a time when Putin, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and Éric Zemmour—to name a few practicing and would-be autocrats—are reviving exceptionalist rhetoric.
Acknowledging the polyglot entanglements of the musical canon can, in fact, serve as a check on the oppressive allure of nationalist mythologies. The late Benedict Anderson, in his brilliant book “Imagined Communities,” showed how such narratives rely on the invention of ancient origins that feed the political needs of the present. Evicting Russian composers from the repertory would perversely end up reinforcing Putin’s exploitation of an older Russian culture in the name of chauvinistic conceptions of a Russky Mir (a “Russian World”). The ban on Wagner performances in Israel is similarly counterproductive: it upholds Hitler’s claim on a composer whose ideological convictions were far too confused to match any known political reality.
Proust wrote, “Every artist seems to be the citizen of an unknown homeland, one that he himself has forgotten.” Shostakovich carries that sense of a lost homeland through his work, its contours becoming visible in just a few bars of music. It may overlap with the Russia of his birth, but it also borders on the music of other lands and on the inner landscape of his imagination. As time passes, the artist’s private world merges with the worlds of its listeners. It no longer belongs to one land or one time. Which is why videos of high-school bands playing the Tenth at halftime give a giddy kind of delight: they mean that Shostakovich has escaped the nightmare of history.