The Noise of Time Read Online Free Page B

different elements of the attack as clear-headedly as possible. First, his opera’s very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before, Pravda had patriotically reported the work’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was ‘non-political and confusing’, and because it ‘tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music’.
    Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music ‘quacks and grunts and growls’; how its ‘nervous, convulsive and spasmodic’ nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with ‘shrieking’. The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the ‘effete’, who had lost all ‘wholesome taste’ for music, preferring ‘a confused stream of sound’. As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’.
    But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced ‘Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science’. In case it needed spelling out – and it always did – Leftism was contrasted with ‘real art, real science and real literature’.
    ‘Those that have ears will hear,’ he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. ‘The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.’ That was enough to take away his membership of the Union of Composers. ‘The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.’ That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.’ That was enough to take away his life.
    But still, he was young, confident in his talent, and highly successful until three days ago. And if he was no politician, either by temperament or aptitude, there were people he could turn to. So in Moscow he first addressed himself to Platon Kerzhentsev, President of the Committee for Cultural Affairs. He began by explaining the plan of response he had worked out on the train. He would write a defence of the opera, an argued rebuttal of the criticism, and submit the article to Pravda . For instance … But Kerzhentsev, civilised and courteous though he was, would not even hear him out. What they were dealing with here was not a bad review, signed by a critic whose opinion might vary according to the day of the week or the state of his digestion. This was a Pravda editorial: not some fleeting judgement which might be appealed against, but a policy statement from the highest level. Holy writ, in other words. The only possible course of action open to Dmitri Dmitrievich was to make a public apology, recant his errors, and explain that while composing his opera he had been led astray by the foolish excesses of youth. Beyond this, he should announce an intention of immersing himself forthwith in the folk music of the Soviet Union, which would help redirect him towards all that was authentic, popular and melodious. According to Kerzhentsev, this was the only way he might achieve an eventual return to favour.
    He was not a believer. But he had been baptised, and sometimes,