Sergei Prokovief (1891-1953) had four composite operas before he entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 13. When Culture Commissioner Lunakharski let him leave the USSR in 1918, he said: “You are the revolutionary of music, we are the revolutionaries of life; I will not stop you.” He did not leave Russia because of enmity with the communist revolution, but because the instabilities of the civil war did not allow him to work and stick. In the days leading up to his march, Maiakovsky, an old friend, offered him his volume of poems: “The Presidents of World Poetry to the President of World Music: Prokofievi”.

Before reaching America, the Rakhmaninof was the great dominator and New York left Prokofiev’s experimental style in the background. However, he was born to be the first, and went to Paris in 1920. But there he was occupied by another Russian. Stravinski. He was the favorite son of entrepreneur Diaghilev, who controlled the scene of the city. In addition, Prokoviev (War and Peace, Angel of Fire) wrote operas inspired by the Russian novels of the time and Diaghilev noted that the opera was “fashionable”. Thus, in 1920 Prokoviev musicated three ballets for Diaghilev, but Bufoia’s small success didn’t like Stravinsky and put Parí’s “taste referees” s.La steel catwalk against him had Soviet themes and immigrants from Paris considered it “Kremlin’s propaganda”.

He lived very isolated in Paris, visiting the city with director Kouss­evitski, poet Balmont and composer Nabokov. In 1927 the Kremlin invited him to make a turn in the Soviet Union. In his diary he explained the excitement of seeing St. Petersburg again. He started living in Moscow from 1932. Luxury denotes a new life: the great apartment, the furniture imported from Paris, the freedom to go west. It did not pay attention to the Union of Composers of the USSR or was drunk to meetings. The role of the eccentric was recognized at the height of the lamp.

Lady Macbeth, from the Xostakovic Mtsensk district, was accused of being "formalist" in an article released in 1936 without a signature in Pravda. This also affected Prokofiev and the tensions that have emerged since then have been divided into three large groups by Slavoj Zizek. The works of modernist roots were accused of anti-popular formalism and bourgeois decadence. He later created the explicit policy on the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution with texts by Kantata Marx, Lenin and Stalin. He was accused of shamelessness and vulgarity. Finally, he made popular songs and told him that he was flat and without individuality. In the mouths of many, the rigidity of criticism and censorship made the Soviet creators great. The same level of demand in the planning society for the screw manufacturer and the cork official.

At that time of aesthetic contradictions he received the Stalin prize five times. The Re major sonata, considered by Figes as the most emotional, also received the highest prize of the day. The composer told violinist David Oistrakh that the first movement should have a sound “like the wind of the cemetery.” The Oistrakh himself performed this work during the funeral of Prokofiev. He died on 5 March 1953, the same day that Stalin died. There were no flowers left and they put a pine branch in the composer's coffin. It took several days until the news of his death was heard. When he died, Prokofiev was the second, lazy.

Militancy and uncertainty in the same dose

Dmitri Xostakovich (1906-1975) wrote, among others, fifteen symphonies, the most prolific symphonic composer of the twentieth century, after the Armenian Alan Hovhaness and the Soviet Miaskovski. Many symphonies are representations of political or historical facts. For example, the Third is the first of May, the Seventh is Leningrad (on what happened when the city was besieged by the Nazis), the Eleventh and the Twelfth is the year 1905 and 1917 (on the two Russian revolutions).

He smiled little. This is what Julián Barnes says in his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of memory, where he reports that sculptor Slonim worked on the body of Xostakovich. Apparently, the head of the Soviet Art Committee did not like the sculpture: “What we need is an optimistic Xostakovich.” According to the popular collection Anekdota, Xostakovich smiled in a single photo during a party visit.

Despite its character, two readings have been given around the compositions of Xostakovich. The first has exegesis along the path indicated by the author, and has its logic: the composer has never directly denounced censorship and has not wanted to leave the country – although some believe that there is no freedom to create it. Moreover, five of the seven soundtracks written between 1948 and 1953 received the Stalin prize.

Those who have a second vision will mock the former, who believe that Xostakovich was a caniche of the leaders of the USSR, but not so, who opposed totalitarianism. There is no one who does not want to turn Švejk into a war musician. Revisionists have had the obsession to read works with more explicit names in another way. It seems that the most marked works of artists situated within the progressive forces of humanity cannot say what their creators say. It would be unbearable, for example, to claim the fraternity of the international working class. In the Third Symphony that defends it, there must be some irony in the shield. The author will take some distance, it is not possible for someone to seriously think that solidarity is a weapon, let alone a claim, that the composition of a symphony cannot be imagined. Let it be the only monument to the Pozari oda sisterhood of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Exception.

That is why the figure of the hidden dissident has often leaped around Xostakovich. Through a very sophisticated code, the artist fights against the system in which he lives. Ian Macdonald called it “dissident without words”: without making statements, work for one cause may be contrary to the same cause. Thus, several experts have extended their suspicions throughout the work of Xostakovich, creating alternatives opposed to the descriptions given by the author to his works. For example, the triumphalist end of the Fifth cannot be seen as a victory: it would be a mockery of the vanity of Stalinism. Leningrad would not explain that the Nazis besieged the city for nine hundred days and starved a million people, but that the Bolsheviks took power in Rusia.El 1905 would not explain the Russian revolution, but the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

Prokofiev’s works have also been the subject of parallel readings. Among the most humorous are the saying of Figes about Peru and the wolf. History would not be a story told to children, but an allegory of the terror of the USSR. It would appear that the hunting of the wolf also meant fighting the enemies of the people in the war of the workers. In any case, before the two possible readings, Zizek has proposed a Hegelian synthesis, which could be translated into English. Xostakovich would be the embodiment of the Stalinist way of life: on the one hand, openly defend the political system and, on the other, privately indicate the distance to power. At the same time, we hear personal melancholy and collective triumphalism.

Killing the oppressor with a symphony

The musician Pavel Apostolov had spent his life behind Shostakovich. Colonel during World War II became an important member of the music section of the General Council. Švejk talked about it: “Ride on the white horse and have denied the music.” In 1948 the commission of Apostolov rejected several works of Schostakovich.

Twenty years later, before the premiere of Symphony No. 14 on the death of Schostakovich, there was a petit committee concert at the Moscow Conservatory. Before the concert, the author approached the audience. Mark Lubotski highlights his words: “Death is abominable, there is nothing else. I don’t believe in the afterlife of the grave.” Subsequently, he asked the attendees to remain as quiet as possible, as they would record the concert. The 14th work consists of poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke, among others.

Lubotski was sitting next to a composer's residence manager, a middle-aged man, a few meters from where they were sitting. In the fifth and stealthily movement of the Symphony, the servant rose up suddenly, raised his chair with a heavy blow and walked out of the room in a hurry. The administrator turned to Lubotski. "That's miserable! In 1948 he wanted to destroy Xostakovich, but he failed to do so. It has not surrendered, it has left voluntarily to spoil the recording.” He was an apostle, no doubt. What the attendees didn't know was that the destroyer had been destroyed. A month later, a heart attack killed him. Lubotski killed Apostolov for the so-called “unhappy symphony of death.”