The tribute paid in a Lied by Franz Schubert, “An die Musik” (To Music), can also be addressed to the recently deceased Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. It is one of history’s great ironies to hear Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrate the artist and lavish praise on his work. In Soviet Russia, music always had to fight a stubborn battle to defend its creative freedom and cleverly manipulate scores to speak for those oppressed by the regime. Rostropovich, an artist without borders, after initial fame, faced the worst torments of Stalinist ideology: his friendship with dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the open letter he sent in 1970 to Brezhnev protesting against restrictions on cultural freedom forced him to go into exile with his whole family to the United States, then to France.
His Russian history is matched only by that of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose tumultuous career saw alternations of acclaim and repression by the authorities in Moscow. Nevertheless, the pianist and composer managed to exploit the musical subtleties of the symphony to express his most personal opinions, far from the political conformism of the time: his second opera, which depicted the assassination presented as legitimate of a tyrant, displeased Stalin who had it condemned by the Union of Composers. The persevering Maestro reiterated in 1943 with his Eighth Symphony highlighting the tragedies suffered by the people during World War II, melodies suggesting human scenes far removed from official presentations on the exploits of the “Great Patriotic War.” Despite the risks involved, he recidivated again in 1945 with the Ninth Symphony, whose musical passages filled with “grotesque” mismatched the “grandiose” project intended to glorify the achievements of “socialist realism.” He was thus able to repay the Kremlin hierarchs who did not hesitate to pressure his son Maxime to publicly disavow him.
One could also mention the German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, the first student of Schönberg, who engaged in decidedly political music. His “Deutsche Sinfonie,” which he began composing in 1935, vigorously denounced the rise of Nazism and ominously predicted all its horrors. As such, it was to receive the name “Symphony of the concentration camps.”
Fortunately, the image of Rostropovich at the shaky border of East Berlin playing a Bach suite on a November evening in 1989 will long be remembered. Like music, freedom knows no walls, and the ear will never have eyelids.
