Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If there is one image that captures the culture of fear among musicians in Soviet times, it is Dmitri Shostakovich enthusiastically clapping while Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, is publicly condemning him in a speech. Shostakovich, so the story recalled by writer Lyubov Rudneva goes, didn\u2019t even realise he was being insulted.It\u2019s an absurd scene but one that speaks to the kind of extreme political acrobatics required to survive in an era where one false move could be fatal. \u201cThose in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell,\u201d writes Julian Barnes in The Noise of Time, his historical novel about the composer\u2019s dance with the authorities. We know about Shostakovich, but there are hundreds of others whose stories, at least in the west, have yet to be told.Many of these lesser known Soviet musicians take centre stage in Michel Krielaars\u2019 highly readable book The Sound of Utopia, in which he reconstructs the lives of 10 composers and performers and how they navigated the repressive Soviet system. Krielaars, an author and literary editor at Dutch newspaper NRC, tells these stories through a mix of first-person reporting, secondary sources and his own personal reflections, having lived in Moscow as a correspondent between 2007-12. Alexander Mosolov\u2019s \u2018Iron Foundry\u2019 was criticised for portraying \u2018only the noise of the machines\u2019 and not the \u2018spirit of the factory\u2019 There are some familiar names here (Prokofiev, Khrennikov and Weinberg), but some of the most compelling portraits are those on the less internationally recognised end of the spectrum, such as the pop singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko and wartime favourite Vadim Kozin. The book also features the pianist Maria Yudina, who you may know from the opening of Armando Iannucci\u2019s satire The Death of Stalin, and whose secret note to the dictator accusing him of betraying the nation triggers his heart attack. The scene is a fiction, but the real Yudina was a \u201csymbol of nonconformism\u201d among Soviet musicians.Krielaars\u2019 portraits of individual composers are well-constructed, self-contained stories but the book as a whole suffers from lacking an overall arc. The author\u2019s first-person intrusions often feel arbitrary and slightly random, as if inserted because they ought to be as opposed to because they are contributing to a wider narrative.He does, however, transport us into the heart of the Soviet machine through a rich mix of anecdotal and historical material. \u201cIn the Soviet Union,\u201d writes Krielaars, \u201cmusicians were revered as gods.\u201d The fact that Stalin himself was a music-lover didn\u2019t help. He supposedly insisted on listening to every new classical recording, \u201cnoting his verdict on the record sleeve: \u2018good\u2019, \u2018average\u2019, or \u2018rubbish\u2019. This last one could, in the worst-case scenario, earn you a bullet.\u201d Musicians, like writers, who Stalin described as \u201cengineers of the human soul\u201d, were believed to have immense social and moral power. If anyone strayed from the general artistic doctrine of \u201csocialist realism\u201d, decreed by Stalin in 1932, they were accused of \u201cformalism\u201d, a charge whose punishment ranged from public denunciation to decades in the gulag. The problem was that what was considered \u201cformalism\u201d, musically at least, seemed rather inconsistent. \u201cIf you see which compositions were approved and which were rejected, there\u2019s no connection to the music itself,\u201d says Jascha Nemtsov, a Russian pianist and musicologist interviewed by Krielaars. \u201cStalin\u2019s terror had absolutely no logic to it, which only augmented the fear, because nobody knew if they would be next.\u201dEven those who did their utmost to satisfy the demands of the authorities weren\u2019t safe. Take Alexander Mosolov whose work \u201cIron Foundry\u201d (nothing screams socialist realism like that title) was criticised for portraying \u201conly the noise of the machines\u201d and not the \u201cspirit of the factory\u201d. Or Vano Muradeli whose opera The Great Friendship, ostensibly an ode to Stalin\u2019s birthplace Georgia, managed to somehow enrage the dictator. Even \u201cBlue Scarf\u201d, the morale-boosting wartime number popularised by singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko (what Vera Lynn\u2019s \u201cWe\u2019ll Meet Again\u201d was for the British), was suddenly outlawed as foolish in 1946.Krielaars diligently describes the haphazardness of this system, but I wanted him to take us closer to the music; how did this turmoil manifest in the notes on the stave? Nonetheless, The Sound of Utopia is an illuminating account of how the Soviet system waged its war on musicians. One line, however, has continued to sound ominously in my ears: \u201cCompared to the three thousand writers arrested under Stalin,\u201d writes Krielaars, \u201cthe composers got off lightly.\u201dThe Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin by Michel Krielaars, translated by Jonathan Reeder Pushkin Press \u00a325, 336 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If there is one image that captures the culture of fear among musicians in Soviet times, it is Dmitri Shostakovich enthusiastically clapping while Tikhon Khrennikov, general<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":156444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-156443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156445,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156443\/revisions\/156445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}