Throughout that summer, the city waited uneasily; its citizens aware of the rumours of invasion. But surely it would never happen? Surely the Nazi-Soviet pact would guarantee that Germany would never invade, despite all the warning signs to the contrary? And yet, on 22 June 1941, the Nazi tanks rolled into the Soviet Union, and so began what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Over the summer of 1941, Leningrad, as it was then still known, came under incessant bombardment; by September its rail connections had been severed, and for the next 900 days, it was a city under siege. Leningrad’s civilian population were reduced to starvation rations, a daily 125 grams of bread made from sawdust, and a million died, their bodies lying unburied in the streets. There were reports of cannibalism, as eating corpses provided an alternative to becoming one. The story of Leningrad’s resistance, and ultimate victory over Fascist incursion, fuelled the post-war Soviet narrative of Russian indomitability, and sustained Stalin as he continued to butcher people in quantities which made the dead of Leningrad appear insignificant. It also sustained the paranoid mythology of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, born in Leningrad in 1952, in the years following the siege. He, of all people, would surely know the horrors of assaulting a city, and indiscriminately attacking its civilian population? Yet internet searches for “siege” now bring up Mariupol alongside Leningrad; Putin’s achievement is to repeat the horrors of history.
And so to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who has, if you believe social media, been banned by the Cardiff Philharmonic. Well, as Mark Twain observed, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. “Tchaikovsky cancelled!” scream the kind of media outlets not generally at the forefront of promoting the composer of the Pathetique and Swan Lake, and who probably had to Google him first. For many, the story slots neatly into what for them is a lucrative genre of “war on woke” articles, designed to sound as though it appeals to the sensibilities of the average person in the street, who is imagined as living their lives in a constant state of vexation about the nanny state and cancel culture.
What has actually happened, is that Tchaikovsky’s popular 1812 overture has been cut from the Cardiff orchestra’s next concert programme, in response to Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. The 1812 celebrates another Russian victory, over another set of Western invaders, this time Napoleon’s underprepared armies, and their hapless, tragic assault on Moscow. It’s popular with audiences as it’s noisy and dramatic, and features cannons, which are, of course, far more exciting than trumpets, and sell lots of tickets, so in times of peace, it’s good box office. Tchaikovsky had been asked by his friend Nikolai Rubinstein to compose something suitably noisy, celebratory and above all Russian, for the 25th jubilee of Tsar Alexander II, in 1880. He was reluctant for a number of reasons, writing “it is impossible to set about music which is destined for the glorification of what…delights me not at all”. Furthermore, he had no admiration for the Alexander, “who has always been fairly antipathetic to me”. And finally, he disliked the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was under construction to commemorate the victory over the French invaders in 1812. Having grudgingly completed the piece, he later wrote to his patron Nadezhda von Meck “I wrote it with no warm feeling of love…and there will be no artistic merit in it”. Incidentally, in further demonstration of the ironies of history, a year later Alexander was dead, assassinated by home grown terrorists, whilst the Cathedral was blown up by the Bolsheviks, only to be rebuilt in the 1990s, as the Orthodox church freed itself from Soviet secularism.
The 1812, despite Tchaikovsky’s own reservations, is vivid and brilliant, evoking shivering French troops, battle, and a final victory; it includes not only cannons, but the Tsarist anthem, and the Marseillaise It’s war, made music; except that of course it isn’t; war as music is unimaginable, the music of women screaming, children crying, buildings collapsing expressible incapable of being rendered into anything any human being could sit through in concert. And surely, on this occasion, the Cardiff Philharmonic have made the right decision. They aren’t cancelling Russian composers. They’ve temporarily removed one piece of music from a concert. Does anyone seriously think that what the world needs now, and what an orchestra including a Ukrainian musician needs now, is an orchestral celebration of Russian firepower, the crash of Russian cannons, just as maternity hospitals, oncology hospitals, schools and residential apartment blocks are being systematically shelled in Ukrainian cities, and the dead are lying unburied in the streets?
I think there’s a better musical choice hiding in plain sight. As the parallels between Leningrad and Mariupol and Kharkhiv grow, more and more horribly, I think of a young Russian who served as a fireman throughout the three years of siege of his native city. He was the great composer, the heir to Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and his remarkable Seventh Symphony, The Leningrad, enacts in music of brutal and bewildering power and beauty, the horrors of invasion. The music is awful, horrible, as war music can only really be; no serious creative artist can pretend that war is anything else, or write anything of any value which celebrates oppression. Art must be the voice of resistance to authority, and must be at its most expressive in its resistance to tyranny.
It’s dangerous to assume the opinions of the dead, but I’m sure Pyotr Ilyich would have entirely understood, and applauded the decision made in Cardiff, and so should we- and so should those responsible for spreading such fake news. And so should Putin. And I recommend him to listen, urgently, to Shostakovich, preferably played by the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra. But I fear he of the dead eyes and the blank stare would understand, and feel nothing.
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