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ABSTRACT
MacCurtain addresses the role of Russian classical music in brokering popular American perceptions of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. With the launch of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, the United States entered into an unprecedented wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, a state that had long conjured up domestic American anxieties, and was only recognized by the FDR administration in 1933. Specifically, MacCurtain examines how the composition and transport of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 to the United States in 1942 bolstered domestic commitment towards the wartime alliance with Stalin. By examining and comparing the critical and popular reception of Shostakovich's work in the United States, he found that the music possessed a populist appeal to the domestic audience that was seemingly capable of transcending the rhetoric and fear that previously defined the American image of the Soviet Union.
Notes
1 ‘“United Nations song” cheered in Capital: listeners rise as Gorin sings new Shostakovich march’, New York Times, 6 July 1942, 18.
2 See the National Council of American Soviet Friendship Records (TAM. 134): Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, New York.
3 Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2003), 12.
4 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage 1983), 95.
5 Michael Barson and Steven Heller, Red Scared! The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture (San Francisco: Chronicle Books 2001), 27.
6 Nina Fedorova, The Family (Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1940), 3.
7 ‘News and notes’, English Journal, vol. 29, no. 10, 1940, 850.
8 Clifton Fadiman, ‘Books: Journals end’, New Yorker, 21 September 1940, 79.
9 Quoted in Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1980), 101.
10 Quoted in Adrian Hyde-Price, Germany and European Order: Enlarging NATO and the EU (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2000), 75.
11 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR and the Successor States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1998), 106.
12 Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996), 89.
13 Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2011), 95–100.
14 Henry Cowell, ‘Music in Soviet Russia’, Russian Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 1942, 74–9 (74).
15 Olin Downes, ‘Music and Bolshevism: Russia's mistaken attempts to subdue art to politics’, New York Times, 8 January 1933, 6.
16 Norman E. Saul, Friends or Foes? The United States and Soviet Russia, 1921–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2006), 136.
17 Aaron Copland, The New Music: 1900–1960 (New York: W. W. Norton 1968), 99.
18 Terry Wait Klefstad, ‘The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich, 1928–1946’, PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2003, 226–7.
19 Dmitri Shostakovich, ‘Stating the case for Slavonic culture’, New York Times, 21 June 1942, 28–9.
20 Klefstad, ‘The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich’, 228.
21 J. D. Parks, Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence: American-Soviet Cultural Relations, 1917–1958 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 1983), 63.
22 Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 1978), 1.
23 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press 1987), viii.
24 Ralph Parker, ‘Shostakovich, composer, explains his symphony of plain man in war’, New York Times, 9 February 1942, 17.
25 ‘Asides of the concert and opera worlds: delivering a score in microfilm from Soviet Union by air’, New York Times, 21 June 1942, X7.
26 ‘Asides of the concert and opera worlds: delivering a score in microfilm from Soviet Union by air’, New York Times, 21 June 1942, X7.
27 Christopher H. Gibbs, ‘“The phenomenon of the Seventh”: a documentary essay on Shostakovich's “war” symphony’, in Laurel E. Fay (ed.), Shostakovich and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004), 59–113 (66).
28 Tanglewood Russian War Relief Benefit program, 14 August 1942: Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, Symphony Hall, Boston, Box 2, Publicity, News Releases and Clippings, 1940–1942.
29 ‘Koussevitzky gets Shostakovich 7th’, New York Times, 16 June 1942, 27.
30 Harlow Robinson, ‘Composing for victory: classical music’, in Richard Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995), 62–76 (70).
31 Hugo Leichtentritt, Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the New American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1946), 181.
32 ‘Shostakovich in juke boxes’, Billboard, 29 April 1944, 66.
33 Hugh Ottaway, ‘Shostakovich's “fascist' theme”’, Musical Times, vol. 111, no. 1525, 1970, 274. There is considerable debate surrounding Shostakovich's intentions with regards to the jaunty nature of the symphony's ‘fascist theme’ first movement. The reader might, albeit cautiously, refer to Solomon Volkov's Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper & Row 1979).
34 Robinson, ‘Composing for victory’, 69.
35 Klefstad, ‘The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich’, 193.
36 David Gow, ‘Shostakovich's “war” symphonies’, Musical Times, vol. 105, no. 1453, 1964, 191–3 (191).
37 Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber 2006), 172.
38 ‘Footnotes on headliners: Symphony’, New York Times, 15 February 1942, E2.
39 Henry Cassidy, ‘Composer wages war with music’, Daily News (Ludington, MI), 23 February 1942, 6.
40 Henry Cassidy, ‘Composer wages war with music’, Daily News (Ludington, MI), 23 February 1942, 6.
41 ‘Music: Shostakovich and the guns’, Time, 20 July 1942, 53.
42 Olin Downes, ‘Shostakovich: place of Soviet composer whose Seventh Symphony is due here’, New York Times, 12 July 1942, X5.
43 Terry Klefstad, ‘A Soviet opera in America’, in Alexander Ivashkin and Andrew Kirkman (eds), Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2012), 207–21 (208).
44 Howard Taubman, ‘Music of Russians heard in concert’, New York Times, 30 April 1941, 22.
45 John Mason, ‘Fate of Shostakovich symphony still in doubt’, Oakland Tribune, 16 August 1942, B-9. Ernest Newman was a noted musicologist in addition to being a longtime critic with the British Sunday Times.
46 Newman, quoted in ‘Fate of Shostakovich symphony still in doubt’, Oakland Tribune, 16 August 1942, B-9. Ernest Newman was a noted musicologist in addition to being a longtime critic with the British Sunday Times.
47 Charles G. Sampas, ‘Cavalcade’, Lowell Sun, 30 July 1942, 20.
48 Carl Sandburg, ‘Take a letter to Dmitri Shostakovitch’, Sheboygan Press, 1 August 1942, 1.
49 ‘Shostakovich upheld, Koussevitzky chides critics for opinions on 7th Symphony’, New York Times, 2 August 1942, 37.
50 Gibbs, ‘“The phenomenon of the Seventh”’, 93.
51 Herbert Elwell, ‘“Leningrad siege” is given ovation’, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 16 October 1942.
52 ‘Dr Rodzinski advocates second front, at least musically’, Lowell Sun, 15 October 1942, 7.
53 ‘Dr Rodzinski advocates second front, at least musically’, Lowell Sun, 15 October 1942, 7.
54 ‘Today's radio programs: eastern war time’, Cumberland Evening Times, 1 March 1943, 12.
55 ‘U.S. honors heroic cities’, New York Times, 28 June 1944, 8.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lawrence P. MacCurtain
Lawrence P. MacCurtain, a 2011 history graduate of St Mary's College of Maryland, is interested in modern cultural history as it relates to the formation of American and European identity, interactions and perceptions. His 2010 presentation ‘A Fanfare for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression, New Deal and Second World War’ appeared in the spring 2010 edition of the Open Water political science journal. He is currently Assistant Director of Alumni Relations at St Mary's College of Maryland, and looks forward to pursuing postgraduate studies in the future. Email: [email protected]